Anna found it much easier to imagine Bill McCaskil crouched over a kill, elbow deep in blood, than the unassuming Lester Van Slyke. McCaskil told Anna there was significant friction between Les and his wife. Merely a ploy to cast suspicion on Les by providing him with a motive for killing Carolyn?
Unaware she did so Anna shook her head. It hadn’t felt that way. McCaskil called Lester “old boy” and “poor bastard,” remarking that there was no fight left in him. That was not the portrayal of a man capable of violence. Not unless Bill McCaskil was so infernally clever and torturously subtle that he painted the picture of the quintessential worm in hopes Anna would make the leap to the idea that the worm had turned, and in a big way.
“Anna? Are you in there?”
Anna came out of her self-induced trance to see Joan peering at her from a foot away. Wrapped tight in her own thoughts, Anna hadn’t realized she’d come to a stop in the middle of the trail half a dozen yards from the food preparation area.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Joan asked.
“Sorry,” Anna apologized and followed Joan’s lead down the path.
“I’ve heard of people being in a brown study,” Joan said. “I’d just never seen anybody get locked in before.”
“My powers of concentration frighten even me,” Anna replied.
Joan laughed. “Well, concentrate on walking. We need to get back before dark. If you remember, Mr. Bear left our campsite at sixes and sevens.”
Sixes and sevens
hardly described the utter ruin of their camp. Twilight was settling toward night as they arrived. The three of them stopped on the edge of the little clearing, no one in a hurry to go into it. Overhead the sky was the sea green peculiar to mountain dusk. No shadows fell, they merely gathered beneath the trees, growing stronger as night neared.
An anxiousness as cold as the sweat of sickness balled behind Anna’s breastbone. Days busy with the search and then the body recovery, bustling with people and helicopters, had driven out the rending visceral fear she’d felt the night the grizzly had come for them. In telling and retelling, the tale had grown unreal, like a war story borrowed from someone else’s battle. It was real now.
The tents she and Joan had piled up were ragged with great tears. Fragments of cloth and clothing littered the grass. It was way too easy to believe the bear was nearby, just waiting for darkness.
“He’s moved on by now,” Joan said, as if the same fear raked her insides. “They have a huge range and he didn’t get any food reward here.”
“Maybe he wasn’t looking for food,” Anna said.
“What?”
Anna didn’t repeat her comment. It didn’t make sense even to her. It was just a remark the subconscious had smuggled past her censors to her tongue.
“There’re the new tents.” Rory pointed to two undamaged blue stuff sacks set by the boulder that dominated the green.
“Let’s get to it.” Anna forced herself to move. “We’ll feel better after we’re situated and fed.”
Tents were pitched. By common, unspoken consent the shredded remains of those they’d slept in two nights before were bundled out of sight behind the rock. The “fed” portion of Anna’s rehabilitative program had to be skipped except for what snacks they could find in their day packs. For reasons they could not fathom, when the bear team had dropped off the replacement tents, they had taken down the food from where it was cached and packed it out.
“What the hell do they think we’re supposed to eat?” Anna groused.
“Maybe they were more concerned with what might eat us,” Joan returned.
Anna decided she wasn’t all that hungry anyway. What she mostly was was tired.
Anna and Joan had shoved their personal things willy-nilly into a garbage bag the morning after the attack, when their organizational skills had been somewhat challenged. As night came on, they sat around the bag, flashlights trained upon it, like brigands dividing their spoils. Anna found herself wishing for the hissing glare of Coleman lanterns, something more substantial than a six-inch Maglight to keep the terrors of the dark at bay.
From what she could observe, Joan wasn’t doing much better and Rory was just about jumping out of his skin every time one of them shifted in their seat and made a scuffling noise that could be attributed to bears stalking. Cold was rushing in with the darkness; Anna’s muscles tensed against it. They all needed hot food.
The divvying up went on. Joan, like Mrs. Santa, disappeared head and arms into the bag and brought out the things one at a time.
Moccasins for Anna, underwear for Joan, a single sock for Rory. Sweater for Joan, Levi’s for Anna, water bottle for Rory.
Anna suddenly broke out of the Christmas rhythm and jerked her spine straight. “Goddamn motherfucking water bottle,” she growled.
The other two looked at her as if she’d gone insane.
8
Anna chose not
to explain her outburst. Under pressure she claimed chronic and fleeting Tourette’s syndrome. The questions that the wretched water bottle brought to mind were not those she wished to pursue in the dark of night ten hours’ hike from reliable backup.
Though unasked, the questions were hot and sharp in her brain and they kept her from sleep. Beside her, snuggled into her navy-blue down bag, Joan snored gently. Women snoring was a well-kept secret. Not from the world at large or husbands and lovers and roommates with ears to hear, but from the women who did it. Idly, Anna wondered if she snored. No one had ever told her she did, but then they wouldn’t, would they?
It crossed her mind to wake Joan up, make her listen to scary stories. She seriously considered doing it on the “one little cloud is lonely” and “misery loves company” schools of thought. The snoring made her relent. Joan had such a happy, childlike snore. On an occasion less fraught with evil surmisings, Anna would have found it as reliable a soporific as Piedmont’s deep and rumbling purr.
Curling herself into a ball like a corkscrewed cocoon, her soft underbelly protected from the predators, Anna gave herself over to the lonely contemplation of the goddamn motherfucking water bottle. Or, to be precise, water bottles plural. There were three. Three unusual, mail-order-only, hot-off-the-presses water bottles, all with a built-in filter, all by the same manufacturer.
Rory had one when they started their adventure. Rory had one when they found him after his thirty-six hours lost. Les had had one at Fifty Mountain. Now Rory had two. The only member of the family who did not appear to have one, who, indeed, had no water bottle at all, was Carolyn Van Slyke, the dead woman. Surely the bottles had been a family affair. Probably researched, ordered and disbursed by Carolyn herself. Lester didn’t appear to know or care much about backpacking. Rory was new to it. But Carolyn was a photographer and her hiking boots, if Anna remembered correctly, were old and much used.
Rory had not taken water with him when he fled the bear. It was here, in camp, in a garbage bag the whole time. Sometime in the day and a half Mrs. Van Slyke went missing, she’d lost her water bottle. Sometime during those same thirty-six hours Rory had acquired it, or one just like it.
Anna reached behind her, running her hand along the floor of the tent where it met with the nylon wall. Her fingers found the slick folds of plastic-wrap draped loosely around a cylinder, and she was reassured the mystery bottle was still in her possession. She’d lifted it quietly first chance she got. Not the bottle from the garbage bag, but the one Rory had been carrying when he turned up unscathed from his sojourn.
Ideally, to preserve the fingerprints, the bottle would have been put in a paper bag. Having none, Anna had improvised. When she arrived safe and sound back in West Glacier, she would turn it over to Harry Ruick so it could be dusted for fingerprints and tested for blood residue. If it did turn out to belong to Carolyn Van Slyke, Rory was going to be in an awkward position.
Cold swept down her spine from nape to nether regions as a
Psycho-
like image of a knife plunging through the thin nylon of the tent took over her consciousness: a picture of Rory, wild-eyed and hair awry, running amok in camp. Curling down more tightly, she suffered the craven wish that Joan rather than she slept on the side of the tent nearest Rory’s.
Pushing Hitchcock’s genius for evil aside, she comforted herself with thoughts of murderers. Often, in prisons it was the murderers who were chosen as trustees. Not that rare bird the serial killer, but garden-variety one-corpse-type murderers. These men and women were in reality no longer a threat to society. They had killed the person they needed to be dead and were done. Usually these were people who had killed someone they knew and, in their own minds at least, killed them for a perfectly good reason.
What perfectly good reason could Rory have for killing his stepmother? The butchery to the woman’s face, done after death, suggested a desire to annihilate Carolyn Van Slyke as a person, hatred so great that merely taking her life was not adequate to slake it.
Rory spoke as if he admired his stepmom and scorned his biological father. That fit the pattern if he was an abused child. Children have an uncanny ability to know that to survive they must please and placate the abuser. To an outsider, they appear to be genuinely attached. If Rory suffered at Carolyn’s hands and his dad failed to protect him, he might understandably hate him for it, cleave to Carolyn.
But Rory was no longer a little kid and, though not a beefy young man, he was strong and fit. Once the child was no longer a child the pattern shifted, fanned out. Any number of responses of the adult victim would be normal. Including a rage so long sublimated to the survival needs of a child that when it broke free it resulted in homicide.
The theory hung together after a fashion, but Anna was unsatisfied. Too many unanswered questions. If Rory was the murderer, how did he set up the assignation with his stepmother? If he didn’t and meeting her was simply a coincidence happening after he ran from the bear, what did he use to carve off her face? Only the exceptionally deranged—or the marvelously foresighted—slept with a cleaver secreted about their pajamas.
It is not necessary that you think so much.
Molly, in her role as psychiatrist and worried sister, had given that advice to Anna shortly after her husband died. Anna heard the words again now and resolutely cleared her mind of boys and cleavers and high-tech drinking apparatus. Into this cleared space came the gentle rhythm of Joan Rand’s snore. Anna let it lull her to sleep.
The hike down
was uneventful. They went back the way they had come, West Flattop Trail east to Fifty Mountain Camp then Flattop Trail south to the sheared-off edge of the mountain where the steep descent began. The country they traveled was beginning to look way too familiar to Anna. Walking through the common miracle of intensely green and living glacier lilies bursting joyously through exhausted black char, she found she looked mostly to the mountains rising above Flattop, and dreamed about new trails and new views. Cleveland, Merrit, Wilbur.
Wilbur,
for Christ’s sake. Mundane names for objects of such staggering beauty.
Rory was leading the way. Anna had made him point man on the flimsy pretext that it would be good for his orienteering skills—as if a blind three-year-old could get lost on the clear tracks of Glacier’s main trails. He complied. Joan looked her questions but never asked them. The answer would have been that Anna just didn’t feel comfortable with Rory at her back. She wanted the lad where she could keep an eye on him until a few wrinkles were ironed out.
None of the three of them said more than a dozen words the entire trip, not even when they stopped and ate their meager lunches. Anna’d had too many words in her mouth over the past three days and was glad to be rid of the taste of them. Joan seemed lost in her own thoughts. From the expression on her face in unguarded moments, none of them were particularly jolly. Rory was silent as well but for what reasons, Anna could not fathom. He knew his stepmother, whom—if he did not kill—he presumably liked, was probably dead. Yet he did not grieve or fret in any of the ways Anna had come to expect. Perhaps he was in classic and total denial, but she didn’t think so. That would require a veneer of high spirits. He appeared simply to be a man with a complex issue that drew his energies inward as he worked through the ramifications. Whatever it was it didn’t seem to frighten or sadden him and it didn’t slow his pace, so Anna was happy.
Harry Ruick and Lester Van Slyke waited for them at Packers Roost, the staging area near Going to the Sun Road. Harry had loftier things to attend to than playing taxi driver, so Anna knew Carolyn Van Slyke was really truly dead. Lester had identified the body. Now the hard news would be brought home to Rory.
Knowing what was coming, she maneuvered herself from the rear of the pack to Harry Ruick’s left. She wanted to see Rory’s face when he found for certain-sure his stepmother had been slain. So far, the emotions the probability had elicited from him—at least publicly—had been out of balance.
Clearing her mind and draping herself with what empathic tendencies she could muster, Anna watched. Lester Van Slyke was the first to speak.
“Son,” he said, “Rory—” His voice broke and he stopped.
On an infant’s face, every feeling is clearly manifest, as visible and identifiable as wind patterns on water. Rory was old enough to have developed the mask humans build to hide their emotions. The blueprint of the mask had probably been in place by the time he was seven years old. By the time he was thirty it would be complete, a false face that he himself might not be able to penetrate. At eighteen there were still thin places in the veneer. Anna watched emotions flow beneath the unfinished mask as one might watch a mime act through rain glass.
For the briefest of instants there was a flicker of light, a candle quickly extinguished behind his eyes. Before thought or memory came to quench that flame, Rory had been genuinely glad to see his father.