'Yeah. Well. At least she didn't let anybody beat on her.'
That pretty much summed it up. Rory'd gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he'd been ashamed of. A child's natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. Anna had to wonder how far it had gone.
'Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?' she asked sympathetically.
'Sometimes,' Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. 'How could anyone not? He'd get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you've even kicked them. Then you wantto kick them.'
Anna understood the phenomenon. 'Ever do it? Ever kick them?'
'Hit Dad?' He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. Anna guessed that on so many occasions over so many years Rory had wanted to strike out against the humiliation he felt in the person of his father, that he was either making sure he'd never actually done it or he was counting the number of strikes. Anna dearly hoped it was the former. To be beaten by one's own child must be a torment only Shakespeare and God could comprehend.
At length Rory spoke. 'I wanted to,' he admitted. 'But I never did. Mom-my real mom-wouldn't have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so… so pathetic. It made me sick.'
Rory looked sick. Anna felt sick. They sat in sick, wretched silence for a while, the ghosts of Rory's childhood twining about them.
Anna fought off the hopeless lethargy they exuded and asked, 'Did you ever fight back for him?'
Rory'd been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at Anna's question and the lines of his face firmed up. 'You mean did I kill Carolyn?' he asked without seeming much to care whether Anna thought him a murderer or not.
'More or less,' Anna admitted. 'I didn't,' he said simply. 'I was just plain lost.' Anna couldn't tell if he was telling the truth or not. He'd closed his eyes again, gone away to someplace inside his head and she could read nothing but distance and weariness on his face.
'I believe you,' she said. If he was telling the truth, her lie couldn't hurt. If he wasn't, it might put him off his guard. 'Is this why you were blackmailing me?' she asked. 'So I wouldn't find out your dad was beaten?'
Rory nodded wordlessly. 'Is that bullshit over?' 'It's over,' he said. 'It sucked, Rory. Really sucked.' 'I know.' 'I've got to go.' She levered herself up from the porch floor. 'You gonna talk to Dad?' Rory asked without opening his eyes. 'I thought I would.' 'If Dad killed her I hope you never can prove it.' Anna didn't say anything. Had it not been for the butchery, she might have shared the sentiment. The act of cutting away Carolyn's face was anger gone so insane its perpetrator had best be caught and removed from society.
Sudden light-headedness reminded Anna she'd not eaten since the night before, and she set off on foot to walk the half-mile to Joan's house. Expecting to spend the day in the resource management office, she'd not thought to ask Harry for the use of a vehicle. After food, transportation was next on her list.
Rarely did Anna find it a burden to walk instead of ride. This afternoon was no exception. The mere act of putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward completely on one's own will and strength, gave life a sense of purpose and control. And there was that adage about regular movement of the legs that stimulated orderly progression in the brain.
Houses, trees, cars, gopher holes and thimbleberry bushes flowed by externally. Internally Anna pondered borrowed shame-Rory's for his dad-abandonment, fear, self-worth, violence, childhood trauma, family roles: scapegoat, victim, hero, mascot. The bits and pieces of codependency theory that she'd picked up from listening to her sister, Molly, had a place in the shattered family dynamics that Rory had grown up in the midst of.
His natural mother had abandoned him via death when he was five. According to Rory's account, Les had abandoned him over the next two years via depression. Then Carolyn came on the scene and the neuroses and psychoses really started to roll.
That sort of thing didn't make people into murderers. But it was bound to help. The circumstances of Rory's thirty-six hours missing had, at first, seemed to make his murdering Carolyn remote to the point of ludicrousness. Taken with this new information, Anna was seeing it in a new light. Rory is traumatized by the attack of the bear slashing at a person-Joan-for whom he cares, and threatening, indirectly since the bear did not see or approach him, his own safety. Rory runs, panicked. Then, quite by accident, he meets another frightening figure, Carolyn, who for much of his life played the same role as the grizzly. Under the influence of fear, opportunism and post-traumatic-stress disorder, Rory strikes out, kills her.
That was as far as Anna could spin her tale of Rory Van Slyke's mental gyrations. Hiding the body-sure, anybody who didn't want to get caught would do that. The same went for stashing the cameras and taking the exposed film if pictures had been snapped by the victim. Slicing off face-steaks and carting them away were something else again.
Joan wasn't home and Anna was disappointed. Not only did she want to lighten her load of slime by sharing it with her friend, but after the exposing of a wound Rory'd kept resolutely bandaged for so long, Anna figured he'd need a shoulder to cry on. Since her own were too bony and prickly for wailing-wall duty, she'd hoped Joan would volunteer to check on the boy.
Joan's office number got Anna through to voice mail. The tale was too convoluted to deal with electronically and she hung up without leaving a message.
The refrigerator grudgingly offered up a piece of cheese the mold could easily be cut off of and a handful of miniature peeled carrots in a sandwich bag. Having rid the cheese of alien life forms, Anna shoved the lot into a piece of pita bread and ate as she walked back toward park headquarters.
Harry was out. His secretary, Maryanne, was out. It was lunchtime and everyone but the receptionist had gone elsewhere. Effectively stopped for the moment, Anna dumped herself in Maryanne's swivel chair outside the chief ranger's office to wait on her betters.
Snoopy was not how Anna chose to characterize herself. She much preferred the term 'inquisitive' or, at worst, 'impatient.' Working on other people's timetables, waiting docilely until they were ready to feed her items of information, seemed a waste of time and good spirits. This theory went a long way toward happily blinding her to such crimes as trespass and invasion of privacy.
While she waited she sifted through the papers on Maryanne's desk, careful not to disarrange anything overmuch. Considering herself absolutely justified, still Anna chose not to get caught. Copies of the 10- 343s and 10-344s-case incident reports and criminal incident reports- were stacked to one side of the computer. Harry Ruick was a hands-on sort of guy and had the park's reports come across his desk, even at the rarified level of management to which he had risen.
Leafing through them Anna got a dim sum of the crimes du jour in Glacier National Park. Taking her time, she read of littering, campfires out of bounds, a horse trailer towed up by Polebridge Ranger Station, two fire rings recently rehabilitated in the northwestern quadrant of Flattop Mountain, petty thievery in the campground, food improperly stored. She'd been in law enforcement too many years not to sweat the small stuff. Felons were consistently caught because they were speeding, loitering, littering and parking in front of fire hydrants. Except in the movies, criminals could usually be counted on to be careless. There was a logic to it. Who, if willing to commit robbery or murder or mayhem, would have any qualms about driving with a taillight out?
From the incidents, she moved on to the crimes. Nothing leapt off the pages at her. It was pretty standard stuff: driving under the influence, smoking dope in the campgrounds. One stolen car, one statutory rape- both allegedly committed by concessions workers in West Glacier.
The only report of any interest-and that only because she'd heard it mentioned on the radio a couple of times- was the abandoned horse trailer found on the northside. She flipped back till she found it and read through it again. Parked off the road, its location obscured imperfectly by brush dragged over the tracks, was a 1974 Ford pickup truck, blue, with Florida plates. No insurance or registration papers inside. Attached to it was an old horse trailer, no plates, gutted and used to haul something other than a horse. Drug dogs were brought in. No hits.
