“No sense letting a little thing like murder spoil your vacation plans,” Ruick said cynically.
The Van Slykes’ decision to remain in Glacier had its upside from a law enforcement point of view. Though they might have their suspicions, there was no evidence on which to hold Les or his son. In park crimes, there was always the added difficulty of perpetrators and witnesses dispersing to faraway places before the investigation could be completed.
“What do they mean us to do with the body?” Anna asked. “Leave it at the morgue in Flathead County till it’s time to go home?”
“Sort of. Les has that all worked out. Soon as the autopsy’s done he wants it cremated locally. He’ll pick up the ashes after his camping trip.”
“No funeral, memorial service, nothing?”
“Apparently not. He seemed to be genuinely grieving for his wife. He teared up a few times, if that means anything. More than that, though, he seemed angry at her.”
“That’s natural enough,” Anna said, remembering her sister’s lectures when she’d turned angry at her husband, Zach, after he’d died. Abandonment was as universal a fear as fear of falling. Fear had a way of turning inward. In women it usually manifested itself as depression, in men, anger.
“Nah. Not like that,” Harry said dismissively. “I’m no shrink but this felt different. There was an element of spite in it. Like old Lester might kick his wife’s corpse a good one if he thought nobody was looking.”
“Rory intimated his folks were not experiencing unremitting wedded bliss, but he declined to elaborate,” Anna said.
“Les didn’t say anything outright against the missus and, like I said, he managed a few tears. What set me off was the way he was ordering up the cremation of the corpse. Sort of slam-bang and take that.”
“Do you think he killed he?”
“He’s got no alibi, of course. Things happen in the wee hours, and unless you sleep with somebody, you’re not going to have anybody to vouch for your whereabouts. He’s got some real mixed feelings about her being dead, that’s for sure. But no, I don’t think he killed her. If he did he’d be playing the grief card a little harder. And he’d probably want to get the hell out of here, post haste.”
“Unless there was something here that needed doing,” Anna said slowly. “Maybe something Carolyn stood in the way of.”
They mulled that over for a time but came up with nothing. What could an old man and a boy want in the Glacier wilderness? There was no gold, no silver, no oil or natural gas, no buried Aztec treasure that anybody knew of. Glacier lilies had been dug up and spirited away but they were worthless, financially speaking.
Thinking of the lilies, Anna told Harry of Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. Harry wrote down the name.
“No way to trace him without numbers,” he said. “Social security, driver’s license, date of birth—but I’ll see if anybody with those names filed a backcountry permit.”
“I don’t know if he’s even old enough to have a driver’s license,” Anna said. “But while you’re at it, check for a Bill or William McCaskil. He was camped at Fifty Mountain when the Van Slykes were. He lied about how well he knew Carolyn.”
Ruick wrote “McCaskil, William” on his legal pad. “What else?” he asked.
Anna couldn’t think of anything.
Ruick stared out the window, tapping his pen absentmindedly, top then tip, like a tiny baton.
The clock on his desk said it was quarter till five. The day had slipped away. Indoors, cooped up with people, Anna had missed it. Afternoon light, strong and colorless, the sun high with summer, striped the parking lot with the shadows of the surrounding pines. A fantasy of a hammock and a good book teased up in Anna’s brain. Unthinkingly, she yawned, her jaw cracking at maximum distention.
Harry looked at her and laughed. “Tomorrow is soon enough. I expect we’ve all earned an early night.”
10
The sound of
claws came in the night. At first Anna thought she was camped in the high country and fought the claustrophobic blindness of an enclosed tent. Slowly it came to her that she was fighting the covers on the bed in Joan’s guest room. The window to the left of the bed was open, only a thin screen between her and the out-of-doors.
Panic opened Anna’s eyes and, by the faint light of the few street lamps that polluted the night in the housing area, she saw a great shaggy hulk. As she watched, it blanked the light, took it like a black hole, then perforated it with the shine of ragged teeth.
Open-mouthed, she couldn’t scream. Not a sound came out. Her arms and legs lay heavy as deadwood on the mattress. The teeth slipped through the screen, a faint tearing noise, then a paw, clattering claws so long they struck the sill, came through the wire. Still Anna was paralyzed, a poison, a weight in her limbs.
With a tremendous effort she fought to move. The resulting jerk woke her, freed her from the nightmare. For half a minute she lay in the bed reassuring herself that now, really, this time, she was awake, not merely dreaming she was, safe from the black quicksand of her subconscious.
Then the sound of claws was repeated and the nightmare began again. This time Anna could move. Quick as a cat she was out of the bed, mother-naked, back against the wall beside the window. Her heart pounded and she felt half crazy but she knew she’d heard it: scratching.
Joan had inherited the house with curtains. She must have. Anna could not believe a member of the female gender would purposely choose those that hung to either side of the window.
Snaking her hand between the oversized geometric-patterned drapes and the wall, Anna eased the curtain out far enough to afford her an oblique view of the screen. Time passed, measured by the beat of her heart: a minute, two, maybe three. Nightmare cleared from her eyes and she noted the faint silver sheen of distant light reflecting off the fine mesh, the darker shadow from the overhanging eve. Across the street at an angle, she could see the garage of one house and the front entrance of another. All was still. No monsters.
Adrenaline subsided. Cold sank into her bare skin, worse where buttocks and shoulder blades touched the plaster of the wall, but she did not return to bed. Waiting was an art form. Seldom had she gone wrong with waiting, watching another minute. Another five minutes.
Scratch. Scratch. A claw, a single claw, the sere black forefinger of a crone, crept up from beneath the sill and raked at the screen.
Soundlessly, Anna backed away from the curtain. Crossing the bedroom in three strides, she snatched up shorts and shirt. In the hall she pulled them on. Her boots were by the front door near her day pack. She stepped into them and jerked the laces tight.
Joan lived like a pacifist. The only weapon that presented itself in the shadow-filled living room was a three-legged footstool beside the Barcalounger where Anna’d left her day pack. She tipped it clear of the remote control and a
Reader’s Digest
and hefted it in her right hand. Heavy hardwood, well made; it would suffice.
Moving quickly, she let herself out the kitchen door at the back of the house and ran quietly around the garage, her boots nearly soundless on the lush summer grass. Bobbing like a duck for a June bug, she peeked around the corner then ducked back.
A shape was crouched beneath her bedroom window. Given the real and imagined beasts that had haunted her nights, she forgot for a moment who took honors for the most dangerous species, and was comforted by its human contours.
Whoever scratched at her screen had his back to her. Carrying the stool up against her shoulder, ready for defensive or offensive use, Anna stepped from behind the corner of the garage and moved slowly across the concrete driveway.
Scratch. The crone’s finger was a stick the croucher pushed up to scrape the wires. The croucher wore a dark coat but his pale hair caught the light. Anna moved up close behind him. Fear at bay, she was rather enjoying the game.
Leaning down, mouth near the intruder’s ear, she whispered, “Rory, what are you doing?” The result was most satisfying. Rory Van Slyke clamped both hands over his mouth. His twig went flying and he collapsed in a heap, his back against the wall of the house, his eyes huge above his hands.
The only thing missing was noise. Rory had not made a sound. Not a squeak or a grunt. Somewhere along the line he’d learned not to cry out. Anna wondered why.
She swung down the stool she’d been brandishing and sat on it. “What are you doing?” she repeated, this time in an normal voice.
“Shh,” Rory hushed her. “I was trying to get your attention,” he whispered.
“Why didn’t you knock on the door?” Anna whispered back. Library rules: it’s hard to speak normally when one’s conversational partner is whispering.
“I didn’t want to wake Joan,” Rory replied. He sat up. “Can we go someplace? For a walk maybe?”
Sleep had been pretty much ruined for an hour or so, at least till the adrenaline had time to be reabsorbed. “Sure,” Anna said. “Let me get a jacket.”
“No. Take mine,” Rory said, slipping out of a dark fleece coat. “I don’t want to wake Joan,” he said again.
Anna took the coat. It was soft and oversized and already nicely warmed up. “Lead on, Macduff,” she said. Rory looked blank. “Where do we go?”
“Oh. Just anywhere.” Beneath the fleece he wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt with “Mariners” stenciled across the chest. Shoving his hands into his jeans pockets, he walked across the grass to the street. Anna fell in step beside him. Briefly, she wondered just how big a fool she was being, lured out alone at night by a young man who was on a short list of murder suspects. For reasons she was not quite sure of, her alarms weren’t going off. Maybe Joan’s goodness was wearing off on her. Maybe she was getting old and sloppy, losing her edge.
Whatever it was, Anna felt no fear for her physical self, and a burning curiosity to find out what was on the boy’s mind. For the length of a city block, till they came to a fork in the road, Rory said nothing. The houses they passed were dark and sleeping. Anna liked being out at night. It had been awhile since she’d moved like a ghost among the living, thinking her thoughts while they dreamed theirs. In the Mississippi woods the nights were too dark for wandering.
At the fork, Rory stopped for a second as if the decision of which way to go momentarily overcame him, then went on again, straight, toward headquarters and the main road. Tall trees lined either side of the lane, drawing curtains of impenetrable black alongside. Overhead the night was clear. Stars and a quarter moon gave enough light to see by. Anna was pleased to walk without flashlights. In true darkness they were invaluable. In anything less they only served to narrow vision down to where it was a distraction instead of a guide.
“So what happens now?” Rory said after a while.
“How so?” There’d been a lot of blood under the bridge in the past few days. He could be asking about any number of things. A natural reticence made her not want to spout forth unnecessary information.
“About the . . . you know . . . the death,” Rory said.
Anna looked at him in the weak light from the moon. If he’d shed any tears for this stepmother he’d done it in private. His eyes were dry but she noticed he did not say Carolyn’s name or call her “my stepmom.” Regardless of where his emotions lay, it was natural that he would want to distance himself from the incident.
“There will be an investigation,” she said carefully. “Chief Ranger Ruick will be heading that up. He’ll try and find out who did it and bring them to justice.” She realized she sounded prim and simplistic, but at the moment, she wasn’t sure what else to say, wasn’t sure what it was Rory wanted.
“You got suspects already?” Rory asked. They’d reached the road that led past the headquarters parking lot toward the maintenance yard. Rory turned down it. Anna hesitated. This way took them toward the machine sheds, garages, storage barns and, if they went far enough, the resource management building. They were moving away from the housing area where a shout would be heard and, because this was a national park, responded to.
In the end, she followed him. Time enough to turn around. She wanted to know where he was heading metaphorically if not geographically. “Nobody special, if that’s what you mean,” Anna hedged. “This wasn’t exactly your smoking-gun sort of situation.”
“On television they always suspect the husband,” he said. “Do you guys suspect Les?”
Rory seemed oblivious to the fact that he, too, might be a suspect. Maybe he thought being incommunicado for a day and a half in his bedroom slippers was an ironclad alibi. Or maybe he was more cunning than Anna gave him credit for. Maybe he wanted them to suspect Les and that’s what this little nocturne was playing up to.
“He’s a suspect,” Anna said because Rory already knew it was true. “Why? Do you think your dad killed your stepmom, that Les killed Carolyn?” She purposely used titles and names, wanting to bring it home, make it personal, to see what Rory would do.
A twitch? Too dark to tell. “Maybe I did it. Ever think of that?” he asked.
“Those were my very thoughts not more than a minute ago. Did you?”
“Dad didn’t.”
They’d reached the maintenance yard. Rory stopped by the gasoline pumps and turned toward her. “I don’t think you ought to go poking around. Dad’s not healthy. Can’t you see that? He’s old and his heart’s not good. He’s got high blood pressure. He can’t handle this kind of stuff. Leave him alone.”
This, then, was the crux of the matter. Anna looked around at the deserted maintenance yard, the rows of blank garage doors facing in on a paved rectangle, the hulks of machinery dead with the night, and rather wished she’d insisted they turn back earlier. Rory, several feet away, was studying her as intently as she studied her surroundings. His sandy hair gleamed in the soft light but the rough cascade of bangs, in need of trimming, threw his eyes into deep shadow.
“It’s cold,” Anna said. “Let’s keep walking.” And talking. Though emotionally taxing and often spiritually dangerous, talking was not a physically damaging sport. Anna wanted to keep him right on doing it until they got back into a more populated locale.