When he opened the door to Harry Ruick’s knock Anna was taken aback at how much he’d deteriorated since she’d seen him last. The thinning gray hair stood out in bed-wrinkled strands and colorless stubble highlighted the crease and sag of his cheeks. Puffy eyes rimmed with red attested to the fact he’d spent much of the intervening time weeping. That or he suffered from allergies.
Eyes watering at the sudden exposure to light—or reality—he said absurdly, “May I help you?”
“We’d like to talk with you for a minute,” Harry said. He pulled off his straw summer Stetson and held it in front of him like a steering wheel. Anna didn’t know if he did it from respect or good manners. Either way she liked him for the gesture. Her Stetson was at home on a peg in the closet in Rocky Springs, along with her service weapon and other needful things. Today she wore the goofy-looking green NPS billed field cap. It crossed her mind to snatch it off in deference to age or grief but the rules regarding women, manners and the wearing of hats had become blurred. One never knew, anymore, what was proper.
She left it on. Beneath its polyester squeeze her hair probably looked as bad as Lester’s.
Mr. Van Slyke was baffled for a moment. Then his face cleared somewhat and he said, “Of course. Won’t you please come in? Please excuse the mess. I . . .”
The brittle safety of polite platitudes fell away and his words dried up. Sidling by ahead of Harry, Anna looked closely at him. His skin hung loose over muscles devoid of elasticity; his was the face of a man who’d had a small stroke or was in shock. Taking his hand she shook it as if they’d just been introduced. “Good to see you again,” she murmured. His skin was dry and warm. Not shock. Probably just old-fashioned depression. She shied away from a sudden memory of the weeks and months after Zach died when she’d moved in slow motion, pushing through a life grown thick and suffocating as Delta mud. But then Zach never beat her. Zach was the kind of guy who put mice out, then left the door ajar in case it got cold and they wanted back in.
Even without Carolyn’s ghost, the room would have been enough to depress Anna. As Les had warned, it was a mess. The contents of a backpack and a suitcase were disgorged over the available surfaces, along with the remains of an uneaten fast-food supper. There was a single chair of that sterile motel hybrid between kitchen straight-back and easy chair beside a round table piled with the soiled and disorganized guts of Lester’s day pack, and the bed.
Out of deference to rank, Anna left the chair for Harry. Sliding loose change and motel brochures to one side, she perched on the low dresser beside the television. Lester hadn’t turned it off when he’d answered the door. Garish colors and rude noises emanating from the set proved the only life the room had: distorted, invasive, inconsequential.
Anna composed herself to let Harry take the lead and watched the men settle, Harry, hat in hand, at the small cluttered table and Les Van Slyke on the edge of the unmade bed, his bruised and bony knees sticking out from under the battered flannel robe. She was put in mind of Rory’s image of Les as a whimpering dog. It was not a pretty picture, particularly of a boy to have of his father.
“Mr. Van Slyke—” Harry began.
“Lester, Les,” the old man begged, and the humility on his face made Anna want to deliver a swift kick to his nether regions.
“Les,” Harry amended. “We—or rather Anna here—has been talking with Rory. He suggested your relationship with your wife, Carolyn, was not as smooth as you painted it.”
Lester tweaked at his bathrobe, arranging it demurely over his knees. As soon as he let go it fell away again. He left it alone. After enough time had passed that Anna had to actively clamp a lid on herself to keep from jumping in with questions of her own, he said, “All couples have their little troubles now and again. Carolyn was quite a few years younger than I am. I suppose she got restless sometimes.”
“Did you argue?” Harry persisted.
“Most married people argue,” Lester said, making eye contact with the rug between the toes of his mangy brown carpet slippers.
“Did she ever get violent?” Harry asked.
“Carolyn did have a temper,” Lester said and, to Anna’s surprise, he smiled as if at a pleasing memory. “She was a feisty one.”
“Did she ever get violent with you?” Harry pressed patiently.
At that Lester looked mildly alarmed. His fleshless white hands skittered about over his knees like frightened cave spiders. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“Hit you, clawed you, threw things at you,” Harry explained. Ruick, like Anna, had to know Lester was playing for time, but for reasons of his own the chief ranger had chosen to give it to him.
“She’d get frustrated,” Lester admitted. “She threw things once or twice. Carolyn was a complicated woman and I’ve always been a simple man. Sometimes it was too much for her. Especially with her having that high-stress job. She needed to let off a little steam once in a while.”
Anna should have admired his loyalty but she didn’t. Domestic abuse cases occurred wherever people cohabited, whether it be in houses or tents or camper trailers. Over the years her sympathies with the abused person’s attachment to the abuser had hardened into an impatience that verged on anger. Molly had explained the psychological dynamics of the victim/victimizer relationship and, though Anna had come to accept it intellectually, viscerally it still pissed her off.
Other than the fleeting smile at his deceased wife’s “feistiness” Lester showed no emotion. Now Harry shot Anna a look, eyebrows raised, lips crimped, that suggested, at least to Anna’s mind, that Rory had been exaggerating or maybe out-and-out lying. Given Mr. Van Slyke’s equanimity she could see how Harry might think that. But he hadn’t been there, hadn’t see Rory or heard his voice as the tale unfolded. Rory might not have his facts right, but Anna would have bet the farm that he believed the things he’d said.
She believed them too. Most people, when hit with the questions Harry had put to Les, would have said, “Why do you ask?” Les showed no interest. He’d been too busy evading, minimizing, rationalizing—major tools in the building and shoring up of denial.
Harry’s eyebrows seemed to signal defeat. Anna took that as a call for backup and entered the fray.
“Mr. Van Slyke,” she began and continued, bulldozing over his protestations that she must call him “Les.” “When Harry asks about your wife hurting you, he means like the times she inflicted injuries that put you in the hospital. Your son said she broke your collarbone, burst your eardrum and once nearly cut your face in half with a kitchen stool.”
The blunt assault of words didn’t have the effect she’d been hoping for. Beneath the pasty sagging skin there was a rippling disturbance, but it could have as easily been brought on by Rory’s bizarre lies as an unmasking of the truth.
“Why would Rory say that?” he asked, bewildered. Not quite bewildered enough. His left hand scampered up his right arm and his forefinger stretched out, gently stroking the scar that bisected his face.
Seeing the gesture, Anna willfully misunderstood his question. “Rory said it because the boy loves his father, loves you and seeing you hurt broke his heart.”
That got the desired reaction. Not only are more flies caught with honey, more can be killed. Anna felt a pang of guilt for manipulating Les’s emotions. It didn’t last long.
He rubbed his eyes with both fists like a very small child. There were tears left like snail trails on his knuckles. The rounded shoulders shuddered with a convulsive sigh.
Harry had a look of annoyance on his face directed not at the weepy old man but at Anna. She huffed, a teensy puff of air from her nostrils. If he was thinking she should leap to the bed and put the feminine arms of comfort around Lester, he had another think coming. She leaned back against the mirror, made herself comfortable for the duration of the waterworks.
The chief ranger had, indeed, been expecting something of the sort. Seeing her settle in he put his hat on the top of the clutter on the table and stood. Stooping awkwardly, he patted Les’s shoulder. Words failed him. Again Anna got the flash of annoyance. She considered suggesting the classic comfort “there, there” but thought better of it.
Lester calmed down. Ruick retreated with unflattering speed back to the safety of his lonely chair.
Painfully, Les pulled himself together, or as much together as he would ever get. A handkerchief was found, eyes dried, nose blown. Water was sipped, housecoat readjusted. Then he settled himself to answer honestly.
They didn’t get anything in the way of revelations. Honesty is an individual perception. If Les had ever been able to view his situation objectively—or, more to the point, as others would view it—the ability had been lost. The need to feel okay about himself and still to stay with Carolyn had to be balanced. The only way to do that was to create a new truth, one where being a victim was acceptable, even admirable. Telling them now of his wife’s transgressions, Lester could not go outside the reality he had made for himself. “She had a temper” and “sometimes she got carried away” were the best he could do. The broken collarbone, the ruptured eardrum were accidents. She didn’t mean it. Lester had zigged when he should have zagged, etc., etc., ad nauseam. The blow from the metal kitchen stool that had scarred his face he simply slid over as if it wasn’t worth mentioning. As if it had never happened.
Of Rory, for whom the sudden tears had presumably been shed since they clearly were not for his own miserable situation, he said, “The boy shouldn’t have taken it so much to heart.
I never minded.
”
The words came to Anna’s ear not in Lester’s confused, sad voice but the desperate wail of his son when he’d said the same thing earlier in the day.
Harry gave Lester a few minutes more than Anna would have to collect himself then said, “We’re just about done here Mr. . . . Les. We understand this has got to be a rough time for you. Real rough. We’re sorry—”
For an instant Anna was afraid he would parrot the empty phrase in vogue in TV cop shows, “We’re sorry for your loss,” but he didn’t.
“—to have to put you through more questions, but in cases like this we can’t wait on good manners.”
“I understand,” Les said. He pulled the handkerchief from the pocket of his robe where he’d stuffed it and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. “Go ahead.”
“You said earlier that the army surplus jacket your wife was wearing when we found her was not hers. Do you have any idea who it belonged to?”
Les kept his face down and blew his nose again though it didn’t need it. “I guess it could have been Carolyn’s,” he said. “She was always getting new clothes. I never paid much attention.” He was lying. A husband might not notice if his wife bought a different shade of lipstick or a new blouse but if she suddenly started sporting oversized U.S. Army fatigues he’d probably sit up and take note.
Ruick nodded slowly. “I see,” he said and Anna wondered if he was seeing the same thing she was: a skittering of weasel tail vanishing down a secret hole.
“We thank you for your time.” Harry rose and reclaimed his Stetson. “We’ll talk again before you make any decisions about what to do next.”
Back in Ruick’s pickup, painted white with the standard green reflective NPS stripe down the side, as she and Ruick buckled their seat belts, Anna said: “Our suspects stink.”
“Kind of hard to picture that particular worm turning, isn’t it?”
“Rory doesn’t fit the bill much better.”
“There’s always the homicidal stranger just passing through.”
“Fortuitous accident?”
“Could be. If it is and our murderous Mr. X has moved on, we’re pretty much guaranteed a segment on
Unsolved Mysteries,
” he said sourly.
“He was lying about that army jacket,” Anna said.
“You think? I don’t notice what my wife wears, much to her annoyance.”
Anna explained her rationale.
“Good point,” he conceded. “Supposing he does know where she got the coat. To give him the benefit of the doubt, let’s say he didn’t remember yesterday and he’s figured it out since. Why not just tell us? Who’s he protecting? If the jacket was his—and Les doesn’t strike me as an army surplus kind of guy—it wouldn’t prove anything. Wives take their husband’s coat all the time. First time around he said she had a habit of ‘borrowing’ things.”
“Maybe it belongs to Rory. Maybe he thinks the two of them did get together and Rory killed her, made the coat swap at the same time he got that second water bottle,” Anna suggested. She didn’t remember ever seeing Rory in an army jacket, and given the new polypropylene microfleece nature of his backpacking wardrobe, a bulky heavy coat seemed out of character, but she couldn’t remember for sure. “I’ll ask Joan,” she said.
Not because the
coat question concerned her overmuch—Anna would have noticed if Rory had lugged a heavy army jacket into the woods—but to have something to do, she sought out Joan at the resource management office.
Joan was in a tizzy. The DNA lab at the University of Idaho had screwed up on the hair samples sent in from the bear trap they’d harvested before unpleasant adventures interrupted their research. There’d been a mix-up, Joan told her distractedly. The lab had sent back DNA results from Alaskan grizzlies, not those of the lower forty-eight. Though the same species, grizzlies in Alaska were considerably larger—thirty to fifty percent—and had enough other evolutionary and environmentally based differences that the tests could tell one from the other. Till she sorted out her bits of hair and scat, Joan was useless for any other topic of conversation.
Anna left, her departure unnoticed, and walked back to the employee housing area. Though she’d wanted to share the day’s findings and frustrations with Joan, it was reassuring that not everybody spent every waking hour thinking about who killed whom and why.