“A scratched shoulder and a cracked rib. The doctor said I didn’t even need to stay overnight. Really, I’m O.K., Uncle Jack.”
“Thank God for that! When you coming home, son? We’re all anxious to see you and hear about your adventure. Didn’t give you much of a homecoming last time; we’ll make up for that this time!”
‘Oh, goodie,’ I thought. Then I realized I had never really considered what I’d do at the end of the summer. I’d been so focused on getting away from it all I’d neglected to plan my return trip. In my heart I knew I didn’t want to go back to it all. I wanted Morgan. But she was gone, and now I didn’t know what I wanted. A gentle cough in the earpiece reminded me that Uncle Jack was waiting for an answer. I stalled for time.
“Ah…maybe in a couple of weeks. I want to let the rib stitch a bit and we’ve got a lot of moose meat down at the butcher shop. It won’t be ready for another week, at least.” That was all I could think of to say.
“Good,” Uncle Jack answered. “I’ve always fancied moose meat. Make sure to bring me a few steaks when you come home.”
I promised I would and tried to ring off, but Uncle Jack had more to say.
“By the way, “I’ve, ah, taken on some live-in help. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Live in help?” I asked. “As in a housekeeper?”
“No,” he said, slowly. “More in the line of a personal assistant, doing research for my book and proof-reading my material – that sort of thing. But she does keep the place clean.”
I could see where this was heading. “Uncle Jack,” I asked, “have you found a suitable place to set up all your office equipment yet?”
“Actually, no. Afraid my whole publishing operation is still in the master suite.”
“Including staff?”
“Uh…yes,” he admitted sheepishly. “Staff included.”
‘So,’ I thought, ‘now it’s Uncle Jack, his insufferable dog, his personal assistant, Casey, and his two girlfriends, and any of Uncle Jack’s chums that happened by.’
My head was throbbing again. Five minutes talking to Uncle Jack could do that. I groaned aloud. Uncle Jack heard it over the line.
“Gus, are you sure you’re O.K.? Haywood’s message intimated you’d been under a lot of – stress – while you were back in there alone.”
He left that hanging. So did I. I didn’t know how much Haywood had told him, but I wasn’t going to lead with my chin. If he had more to say, I’d give him a chance to say it.
“Gus? You still there?”
“I’m still here.”
Uncle Jack realized he’d pushed it too far.
He knew me well enough to know I wasn’t talking. He withdrew.
“Well, glad to hear you’re O.K. The house is fine. Casey’s fellow students moved out at the end of the summer. Another moved in; she’s a redhead, and a real sweetheart. You’ll like her.”
‘Redhead!’ I came instantly awake. “Redhead? What’s her name? How tall is she?”
“Tall? How the hell…? Wait a minute.”
I heard Uncle Jack yelling something to Casey. Then he came back on the line.
“Her name is Kelly; she’s about five foot two. But, Gus, are you sure you’re O.K.?”
I let out a sigh of relief, and leaned my head against the wall. I realized I was sweating. I assured Uncle Jack I was O.K. and we hung up.
Great. All I needed, at this point, was Sylvia and Uncle Jack worrying about me. I had several things to work out in my mind and I didn’t want any help from Europe or the Lower Forty-eight. I slammed my coffee cup down on the table. I’d kill that fucking Haywood.
I stood there a minute thinking about everything that had happened in the past three days. Then I sagged back into the chair. Haywood wasn’t the problem. I was. And Morgan was; and the McCaslins were; and that goddamned three toed bear. Haywood had jokingly observed that everything I put a bullet or a dick in seemed to disappear. It wasn’t funny. That pretty much summed it up.
‘What a mess,’ I thought.
I heard Haywood shutting down the computer and knew I wasn’t ready to talk yet. I got up and went downstairs to the guest bathroom and took a long, hot shower. It helped.
Back upstairs, showered, shaved and dressed in clean clothes, the world was a better place. Haywood had cleaned up the mess from the night before and had opened another window to help air the place out. He was loading the dishwasher when I came from my toilet.
“Well,” he said, “you look like you might live, after all.”
I managed a smile. “Yeah, I just needed to wash away the cobwebs.”
There was still a little coffee in the pot. He split it between our two cups and handed me mine.
“Who was that on the phone?”
I sipped my coffee. “Uncle Jack,” I said, glowering at him over the lip of my mug.
He looked sheepish. “Oh, yeah. Forgot to tell you. I sent him a message after I dropped you off at the hospital. That was before I knew how bad you were hurt.”
I studied him. He was my best friend. Whatever he had done had been done with my welfare in mind. I smiled at him and his face relaxed into an apologetic grin.
I laughed a little, and shook my head. “Haywood, Case has you pegged. You are a caution. You knew the exact extent of my injuries; you put me back together. What, exactly, did you write to Uncle Jack?”
He looked a little shame faced. “You can read the message. It’s in my Sent Folder.”
“Just give me the gist.”
He went over and sat down at the table.
“Basically, I told him a big ass bear jumped you in the bush, and that you blew his fat ass away. I also told him you were in the hospital and I expected you home today. I wanted to give you an extra day to heal before talking to him.”
“Was there anything, between the lines, that might have suggested to him that I had gone a little crazy back there?”
He pursed his lips and considered that for a minute. “I suppose he might have read that between the lines. I think I may have listed cabin fever as one of your possible medical problems.”
“Ah. Cabin fever…as in went stark raving mad due to loneliness?”
He frowned. I could see he was serious. He stared down at his big hands, laying flat on the table, each side of his coffee cup.
“Something like that. But I wrote that before Hard Case and I went back in; before I knew the bear had vanished. Up until then you were the only one who’d seen things that disappeared. Try to understand. The woman and the McCaslins – I never saw them. I thought they had been just, well, figments of your imagination. I really thought maybe you had gone round the bend.”
I sat down across the table from him. “And now?”
He shook his head miserably. “Now, I just don’t know. I saw the bear. I saw it and I touched it. It…was…real. It was there. I got its blood on my hands and its hairs stuck to the blood. They were not figments of my imagination. When Hard Case and I got back in there and found the bear gone, I couldn’t believe it. I thought Hard Case was going to think we were both crazy. You know, mass hysteria, or something like that. But, I knew I wasn’t crazy!”
He looked up at me, caught my mood, and let out a high-pitched, maniacal cackle. He pounded the table, crossed his eyes, and howled.
“I…AM…NOT…FUCKING…MAD!!!”
It was good to laugh. I was afraid we would go mad if we didn’t maintain our sense of humor. It was one of those situations where you had to laugh to keep from crying.
Haywood sobered a little and went on. “Anyway, you get the idea. After the thing with the bear I started thinking maybe you hadn’t gone off your nut. Maybe there was something weird going on back there. Then, last night, the story Hard Case told…”
He looked off into space for a while. I sat quietly sipping my coffee. At length, Haywood shook his head, and went on.
“I’ve been thinking all morning of what his story means. It means the woman, and the bear, and the brothers were real – in 1959. You didn’t imagine them. They were real, once upon a time. It’s like something out of The Twilight Zone”
I waited for him to go on. He saw it the same way I did. I was hoping he’d have an answer. But, he didn’t. Neither of us understood what, exactly, had happened, but it was comforting to know that he knew what I knew; the woman and the bear and the brothers had been, at one time, real flesh and blood. They were not figments of my imagination.
The room was getting cold and the stale air of the night before had, for the most part, freshened. I left Haywood sitting at the table while I went over and closed the windows. Then I wandered into the kitchen to make some toast for my breakfast. There were still four strips of bacon in the pan so I turned on the flame to warm them. I leaned against the counter top and waited for my toast to pop.
“So, how did Hard Case react? Out at The Varmitage, I mean.”
Haywood pushed back from the table and stretched his legs out in front of him and folded his hands in his lap.
“That’s the funny thing,” he said. “I thought sure he would think I was nuts. But he didn’t. He took it seriously and he told me, on the way back to Fairbanks, that the abnormal was quite normal out there. About every other case he’d ever worked in the bush had some – supernatural or paranormal – aspect to it. He said the Athabascans believed the spirit world existed side by side with the physical world and the two often merged. He told me that there were a hundred legends about a mystic bear spirit, and the indigenous tribes believed in them every bit as much as we believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He wouldn’t have even taken much interest in a disappearing bear if I hadn’t told him about the woman, and you thinking you killed somebody. Then he became intrigued.”
My toast popped, and I made myself a bacon sandwich and took it over to the table. I sat down and began eating.
“Well, considering the physical evidence from the scene of the crime, I did shoot somebody. I shot Roy. Don’t ask me how it happened, but they were my bismuth shot pellets found in his dead body.
They didn’t even have bismuth shot in 1959.”
He nodded his head slowly. “I know. It’s hard to argue with physical evidence.”
He reached across the table, dragged the fat file folder to him and pulled off the rubber band that held it closed.
“Be interesting to see what that sketch of the wad looks like.” He started leafing through the pages, talking as he did.
“Those three claw marks I stitched up in your hide are physical evidence too. So, now you have a tangible link tying you to the bear. You’ve also got the bismuth connecting you to the body of Roy McCarver. But, you’ve nothing to prove that Morgan was real. That’s what’s eating you isn’t it?”
Haywood had hit the nail on the head. That was exactly what had been troubling me. I really didn’t care if the bear was real, or the McCaslins brothers either. I wanted something solid – something tangible that proved, beyond any doubt, that Morgan had been real. But I had nothing but my memory of her.
“Right on, Haywood,” I answered truthfully. “That’s what’s eating me.”
***
Haywood had taken the truck and gone into the clinic that afternoon to see how Sally was progressing with the computer upgrade. I was still a bit stiff and sore, and had decided to stay at the house. I wanted to catch a little nap, and scan the files Case had left us. Haywood had already found the sketch of the wad and it took me only a glance to confirm it was, indeed, a Remington Power Piston. I hadn’t expected anything else.
I spent some time reading over the missing persons case. I wanted to learn as much as I could about Katherine Morgan. There wasn’t a lot of background on her, but there was more than I had known. The file described her as white female, fair complexion with freckling on face and forearms; height, 5’11”, weight 125 lbs., naturally red hair, thirty-three years of age, DOB 11-17-36. Nothing new there except her birthday.
The personal history data disclosed that she had been born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father was a diplomat and her mother was a music teacher. She had traveled extensively in Europe with her parents, and had lived two years in Brussels and two years in London. She had studied English Literature at Washington State University, but had not earned a degree. She had worked for a law firm in San Francisco for four years before moving to Seattle where she hired on with Albright, Baker, Morrison & Kemp. She was a legal secretary and worked primarily for two of the senior partners. She was known to be an avid sportswoman, enjoying skiing, sailing, hiking and fishing. She was considered to be an expert fly-fisherman, and was known to tie her own…
“Her own flies!” I shouted aloud.
I jumped out of the chair and ran down the stairs and into the garage. The overhead door had no windows and it was dark. I found the wall switch and snapped it on. The fluorescent light blinked and sputtered to life as I dove into the stack of bags and boxes Haywood had brought back from The Varmitage. I rummaged through the river bags looking for my fly tying kit. No, no – he wouldn’t have packed it in a bag. I started opening boxes. ‘Shit! Nothing.’ I took a deep breath and thought to myself, ‘Calm down!’
I tried to imagine where he would have packed it. ‘Did he pack it? Damn! He might have left it all at the cabin!’
I dashed back up the stairs and snatched the phone off its hook, dialed the number of Haywood’s clinic, and then suffered, impatiently tapping my foot, through six interminable rings. Finally, Sally answered and began her canned greeting.
“Good Aft…”
I cut her off. “Sally! This is Gus. I need to talk to Haywood. It’s urgent.”
Sally dealt with emergencies on a daily basis; she was completely unflappable.
“Hi Gus. Welcome back, heard a bear got you. Hang on the line a minute; I’ll see if I can find Dr. Jennings.” I heard a mechanical click and then I was listening to soft, soothing, elevator music.
A minute went by and then Sally came back on the line. “Sorry Gus, Dr. Jennings left about ten minutes ago. Don’t know where he was headed – maybe home.”