“Yuck,” Anna said aloud and sat up. The sun had moved two fingers toward the west. There were several hours of daylight left but they’d want to start for their camp soon. Buck, bless his long-legged energy, had volunteered to walk the six miles round-trip to Anna and Joan’s camp on the far side of the mountain top and bring back boots and socks for Rory.
Despite the very real possibility that the dead woman was his stepmother, Rory had refused to ride down in the helicopter with his dad and Harry Ruick. There’d been no small effort to convince him. Anna had bowed out and left it to Ruick. Again Rory had persevered and they’d flown without him.
Given her recent unsavory thoughts about the lad, Anna was sorry Ruick hadn’t been a little more heavy-handed.
Having spoiled her solitude by inviting thoughts of others there, she decided to rejoin the human race even if she did so as a half-alien interloper. Her timing was good. As she was lacing up her boots she heard Joan’s voice calling her name.
“Over here,” Anna hollered.
A scrambling sound, then Joan appeared around the side of a boulder. Since Rory’d been found, Joan’s looks had improved. The sight of the boy unharmed had eased two days’ weariness from her face and eyes.
“Hey. There you are.” She sounded positively chipper. Uncharitably, Anna resented it.
“Here I am,” she confirmed.
Joan plopped comfortably down on the rock beside her. “You look a wee bit on the grouchy side,” she said cheerfully.
“Grouchy doesn’t even begin to touch it. I’ve been thinking,” Anna explained.
“Oooh. Not good.”
“Why did Rory have his water bottle with him?”
“What—” Joan looked baffled, then as her quick mind rapidly put together the pieces, crestfallen. Chipper good cheer burst like a birthday balloon. “Oh, Anna, no . . .”
“You’ve got to admit it’s a little out of whack considering the story he gave us.”
“It makes no sense,” Joan said. “Surely he’d’ve put on his boots if he knew he was going . . . somewhere.”
“Not if he didn’t want to leave tracks. It wasn’t that far.” Anna remembered something then and added it to the soup. “He could cover a lot of country. He’s a long-distance runner. He told me. He runs barefoot.”
“I don’t believe it,” Joan said firmly.
“Neither do I, but you’ve got to admit it warrants looking at.”
Joan sighed. “This is why I went into zoology,” she said. “Animals have no hidden agendas.” After that they were quiet for a while. So long that Anna began to suffer that uncomfortable feeling that comes when one suspects one has committed an awful social gaffe but can’t figure out what it is.
“You know,” Joan said finally. “You are in danger of going over to the dark side, Anna. You need a lot more of rainbows and roses and whiskers on kittens in the daily fare. I think you’ve been given to me for some serious lightening up. I’ve got you for two more weeks.”
“God, that’s not long enough,” Anna said seriously.
Joan laughed, a noise so filled with that rare essence, gay abandon, that Anna laughed too, and felt sincerely lightened.
“Change in venue,” Joan said when they’d subsided. “Turns out Rory is to go down. We’re all to go down for a day. Harry needs us for reports, interviews and whatnot over both the search and the other. It’s too late for us to head out today and ain’t nobody sending an expensive helicopter for such as we. So we hike back to camp and pack out tomorrow. Harry also said, and I quote: ‘Tell Anna she can nose around the campers at Fifty Mountain if she wants.’”
Tacit approval for her to investigate but with no official standing and no NPS backing. Ruick was a clever fellow. If Anna discovered anything useful, all to the good. If she screwed up, she was of little more importance than a civilian. Unless she screwed up big-time and ended up in civil court. Then they were both in deep trouble. Anna allowed herself to be warmed by the knowledge that the chief ranger counted on her not to screw up.
“Do you know if the campers have been interviewed?” Anna asked. She had been on her rock for quite some time, since before the helicopter carried off Lester Van Slyke.
“I think so. I know Harry talked briefly to everybody and told them they’ll need to stop by headquarters before they leave the park in case any new questions come up or there’s paperwork to be done.”
“There’s always paperwork,” Anna said. “Always.”
She followed Joan
back up to camp. They had about ninety minutes to kill before Buck returned with Rory’s boots. Anna decided to take up Ruick’s invitation to “nose around.”
Already the will-o’-the-wisp population of Fifty Mountain had undergone so much change, interviews were largely a waste of time. Rory had been missing a night, a day, and a night. During that day the body had been discovered. It was not till the following day that they’d found Carolyn Van Slyke was missing. Campers seldom stayed in one place that long. Assuming the faceless woman had been killed the night Rory ran from the bear, as the condition of the corpse suggested, two mornings had come and gone. Mornings during which early-rising campers folded their tents and moved on and new people hiked in to take their places. Witnesses, alibis, the usual round of queries brought on by homicide, scarcely applied.
Anna wandered from site to site. Only three groups that had been there the night Mrs. Van Slyke went AWOL remained. The compliment she’d inferred from Ruick’s suggestion began to lose its luster. Because of unique circumstances, nosing around was a bit of a fool’s errand. Still, she persevered. She had nothing better to do and she’d become accustomed to the dead ends in law enforcement. One simply followed them to their natural conclusion, checked them off the list and went on to the next. Without a good lead to follow, most investigative work boiled down to necessary tedium. Doing it out-of-doors in one of the most beautiful places on earth was a definite perk.
One by one, Anna spoke with those who had been there the night the potential Mrs. Van Slyke was probably killed. Three Canadian college girls could tell Anna nothing. Persons not young and not beautiful were of no interest to them. A couple in their late fifties from Michigan had noticed Carolyn at the food preparation area. They thought she was married to someone other than Lester. That or the wife’s description of Lester was kind to the point of absurdity. She’d given him hair and four extra inches in height. They described Carolyn as a vivacious woman with a loud voice and laugh. There was little else they could recall.
The wife kindly pointed out the man they’d mistaken for Mrs. Van Slyke’s husband. He was the only person Anna had yet to talk with who had been at Fifty Mountain on the night in question. His tent was pitched in the site farthest from the food area. Like every site, it had a stunning view through the teeth of rotting snags to the glacier-sheared plain that was Flattop Mountain. When Anna saw him, he was sitting on a tarp, his back against the charred bark of a pine that had survived the fire. Two years later it still struggled, half black, half green, like a scarred and wounded woman, looks and strength gone but heart still determined.
The man beneath this valiant tree wasn’t doing quite as well. Like Lester, his backcountry duds and gear were suspiciously new and he wriggled like a man whose backside has known only leather car seats and barstools. Though the sun was setting and the temperature had dropped considerably, he wore only a thin T-shirt and hugged his knees for warmth. Hovering around fifty, he sported rich reddish-brown hair that was still thick. Not a trace of gray showed anywhere. Anna suspected he owed more to Grecian Formula than good genes. She could see how the Michigan couple might have mistaken him for Mr. Van Slyke. Even dead, Carolyn looked more of a match for this man than the stooped, pale, prematurely aged Lester.
“Hey, sorry to bother you,” Anna said, stopping on the perimeter of an invisible circle around his camp. Anna would no more barge into someone’s campsite than she would enter a house without knocking.
“Hi.” He slapped at a mosquito. He made no effort to rise. Neither a backwoodsman nor a gentleman.
“I’m Anna Pigeon,” Anna identified herself. “I’m a park ranger. We’re asking questions of the folks who were camped here the night that woman went missing.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I came here to get away from people. I’ve stayed pretty much to myself.” He delivered this piece of information to a place halfway between his eyes and Anna’s knees, punctuating his words with slaps at mosquitoes.
“You want to get a coat or something?” Anna asked. It wasn’t so much that she hated to see a fellow human being suffering as that she wanted his full attention.
She got it.
“A coat?” He met her eyes with sudden suspicion. “Why?”
Anna shrugged. Maybe vanity made him prickly about his outerwear.
“It’s getting cold. Looks like the mosquitoes are eating you up. I thought you’d be more comfortable.”
He relaxed. “No. I’m fine. You want to sit down? Pull up a chair.” He laughed, the hollow angry sound of a man annoyed Glacier National Park didn’t see fit to furnish their campsites. “These mosquitoes are awful. I thought you weren’t supposed to have mosquitoes up here. God’s country and all that.”
“I’ve got some mosquito repellent in my pack you can use,” Anna offered as she folded herself neatly on the packed ground near his tarpaulin.
He took the insect repellent readily enough and smeared it on his face and arms. “Bill McCaskil,” he introduced himself as he handed it back. Sans bugs he was more personable. Anna got down to the business of interviewing.
“Did you meet a Mrs. Van Slyke around camp at all?” she asked.
“No, like I said, I keep to myself.”
Anna waited. His answer had come too fast. Sure enough, pressured by silence, he amended it.
“Carolyn Van Slyke? Was she the blond lady, kind of beefy around the hips? I might have talked to her a couple of times.”
Anna’d figured that. The other couple had mistakenly assumed Carolyn was married to Bill McCaskil. The only reason strangers would assume that is because they saw the two of them together. It occurred to Anna that she’d only referred to the deceased—or at the very least, the missing—woman as “Mrs. Van Slyke.” McCaskil had called her Carolyn. The two of them had been on a first-name basis. Not necessarily telling. Campgrounds were informal places.
“Did you eat together, hike together, anything like that?” Anna asked.
McCaskil shot her a sharp look. “We may have eaten at the same time, I guess. There’s only that one place to do it.” He didn’t like being questioned. Maybe he hated to get involved. Maybe he just didn’t like being messed with. Still, there was something about him that set Anna’s teeth on edge. She watched for a moment trying to put her finger on what it was.
He was good-looking enough. The determinedly reddish hair had a natural wave to it. A lean face and strong hooked nose over a well-shaped mouth lent him strength. The effect was marred but not ruined by acne scarring on his cheeks and chin. His body was attractive: tall and lean and gym-buffed. The kind of fit that doesn’t look fit for much but modeling clothes.
Thinking that, it came to her why she felt a wrongness. He didn’t want to be here. Didn’t like the wilderness. Didn’t like camping. His repeated desire to get away from people didn’t ring true under the circumstances. He struck her as the sort who, if wanting solitude, would go to the clubs on an off night when the crowds were thinned. So why was he on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?
Anna decided on the direct approach: “So why did you decide to come on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?”
For most visitors this was not a trick question. It was one they were dying to answer in great effusive gusts. McCaskil acted as if she’d asked for the solution to a complex algebraic problem.
“Why does anybody decide to go anywhere?” he countered finally.
Anna went on to ask the questions she’d come to ask but unsurprisingly Bill hadn’t noticed when or where Carolyn Van Slyke was at any given time. The one piece of information he did throw out was that Mr. and Mrs. Van Slyke’s marriage wasn’t made in heaven.
“You wouldn’t believe the way she talked to that old boy,” was how he put it.
“Did they fight?” Anna asked.
“Not fight. I don’t think there’s any fight left in that man if there was any to begin with.”
“What then?”
“She was a carper. Carped on him all the time. Snide little comments about his paunch, his bald head. He couldn’t do anything right. The poor bastard. A woman talked that way to me would get a fat lip. Not that boy: ‘yes dear, no dear.’” Bill laughed, showing big white teeth, the two front incisors turned in toward each other giving him a jagged animal bite. The laughter was derisive and aimed, it seemed to Anna, not at Mrs. Van Slyke but at the poor bastard who’d married her.
Leaving his camp,
threading her way down the footpath past the other sites, Anna resisted the urge to break into a run. Bill McCaskil had a dark indrawn tension about him that made her uneasy. A mean streak, if his response to Lester’s humiliation was any indication.
She stopped again at the camp where the midwestern couple was staying. The woman, as domestic as you please, was neatly hanging socks from a tent rope.
“One more thing,” Anna said, feeling so much like Columbo she was immediately self-conscious.
“Yes?” the woman said politely.
“Do you remember why you thought the blond woman was married to the tall man camped back up there?”
The woman paused a moment, a sock held before her in two hands. “It’s just that they were always together, I suppose. Not holding hands or huggy-kissy but just together. Here and there. I do remember seeing the little man, her husband I guess he is, but not so much with her.”
“Thanks.” Anna went on her way. McCaskil had a closer relationship to Carolyn Van Slyke than he had admitted. Why not say so? There were no laws against socializing in the backcountry. If he knew she’d been murdered, it would make sense. No one wants his vacation taken over by the tedious machinery of law enforcement. In the wilderness, no neighbors, coworkers, political opponents or extended family to focus on, there was a definite lack of much in the way of suspects. Because he was there and an unsavory type, Anna filtered McCaskil through her mind. Had he known Carolyn before, followed her or met her here at her invitation? Was he, so obviously uncomfortable away from the amenities of civilization, merely here on a hunting trip and Carolyn was unfortunate enough to be the game?