you were hurting but she was there. She kept things going, moving, like she'd got things moving after your wife died. She was hard and she was angry but she was alive. You were alive. At least a little. And now she's gone and you're tired. Too tired almost to breathe.' Les had not moved since she'd begun speaking but tears filled his eyes. They spilled down over his cheeks, divided and divided again as they dripped into the creases time and worry had cut into his face. Bleak as it was, it was a sign of life, and Anna pressed on not knowing whether the experiment would prove cathartic or would break the last weight-bearing wall in his poor old brain. Practicing without a license,Anna thought. She kept her voice low, monotonous, as hypnotic as she dared make it without sounding theatrical. She didn't want him to think for a while, just hear and follow.
'Without her, things have gotten in such a mess. You don't know how to make things right. You've never known how to make things right, not since your first wife died. At least Carolyn made things real. She made things happen, didn't she?' Anna hazarded a gentle question.
Les nodded. Satisfied, she went on, spinning an inner landscape for him, wondering as she went how she was going to get where she was headed.
'Now you're tired and you're scared. You're afraid of what you've done-'
Les's hands, till then hanging like dead leaves between his knees, twitched. Anna'd got it wrong and the jar threatened to wake him.
'-you're afraid of what you've done to Rory,' she amended. The twitch stopped. Rory then. Anna followed that. 'All those years, Rory loving his stepmom and not you. How could you know he knew? The beatings you took were for him, weren't they?' Anna asked, suddenly knowing that in Les's mind this was true. 'You took them to keep the marriage together, because Rory needed a mom, because you couldn't bear to see him lose her a second time.'
The tears fell harder. Les nodded again and weak mewling noises made their way out from a deep well of emotion Anna suspected was liberally salted with neurosis in the form of martyrdom, joy of victimhood, selfaggrandizement, and other smarmy and seductive feelings.
Desperately she rifled through her brain. For whatever sick reasons, Les let Carolyn beat on him. To live with himself he convinced himself he did it for his son. Now he'd convinced himself he was staying in Glacier because he was scared, not for himself, but for his son. Did that mean Les thought Rory killed Carolyn, and by remaining, Les might be able to 'do something' along the lines of impeding the investigation or tampering with evidence? Or that he killed her himself and, by lousing up the investigation, could salvage himself-a dad-for Rory?
Anna couldn't guess which and she dared not remain silent. If the tears were any indication, Les was believing her, hearing her speak as if she knew the innermost secrets of his mind, as if she were in some way his own voice. A wrong guess now and she'd break the spell.
She came from another direction, feeling her way carefully. 'You knew Carolyn was gone that night,' Anna said. 'You knew she'd left the tent.'
'I knew,' Les mumbled, 'but I didn't think anything of it. She used to leave at night. She…'
'She'd go out,' Anna affirmed.
'She'd meet men,' Les said.
The light dawned. 'She met men,' Anna said. 'She took things from them didn't she? She borrowedbits of their clothes, things you'd find so you'd know. Like she borrowed the army coat she was wearing.'
'She did it to hurt me,' Les said. 'I never let on, but it hurt. It hurt a lot.' More tears.
'That's why you pretended you didn't know where the coat came from? You thought she'd been with Bill McCaskil? Had she known him before? Met him anywhere? An internet chatroom? A courtroom? A conference? Anything?'
'No. I don't think so.'
'She just meets him around the campfire and hops in the sack with him?' Anna said skeptically.
'You didn't know her. It didn't take long. It didn't matter who. She'd go off with bellboys when we stayed at hotels. Or the bartender. When I was in the hospital she got to my orderly. A boy no older than Rory is now. I didn't want Rory to know. The coat and all. I didn't want Rory to know.'
One mystery solved: why Carolyn had McCaskil's coat on and why Les was so peculiar on the subject. None of that factored into why Les stayed on, unless he wanted vengeance on McCaskil and, after the bellboys and bartenders and orderlies, why bother?
'You think Rory saw McCaskil and his stepmother together and killed her for it,' Anna said, her voice sudden and harsh.
Les jerked as if she'd slapped him then covered his face with both hands. 'Yes,' he managed.
'Well, that's a crock,' Anna said sympathetically.
'It is?' A thread of hope cut through the molasses of tears in Les's throat.
Maybe it wasn't. Scared by the bear, maybe Rory had run home to stepmomma, found her in the arms of the latest blunt instrument she'd chosen to beat her husband with, followed, chased or lured her a few miles from camp and killed her. It was the best scenario she'd come up with yet. It even explained why McCaskil would run. Even if he was innocent, who'd believe him when he'd been having sex with the deceased under her husband's nose? It happened every day, and in the usual run of things all three parties survived. But juries liked moral payback. A man with as many brushes with the law as Bill McCaskil would know that.
Anna kept these thoughts to herself. Lester Van Slyke had convinced her of one thing, he didn't kill his wife. If he could be made to believe Rory wasn't suspected either, maybe he'd go home or to a motel. Anywhere would be better than plopped down confusing what was already a sufficiently mind-numbing investigation.
'Rory's going to be okay,' Anna said because that's what one says. 'Youdon't have to stay here anymore. Tomorrow you'll go down with me.'
'Okay,' Les said, docile, empty.
Anna sighed. Of course the old guy would ride Ponce unless she wanted to be all day on the trail. She'd have to walk. Even pretending to be compassionate had consequences.
Tired as she was, Anna did not sleep well. Her nerves were sufficiently raw that the chance scraping of her wedding ring against the plastic zipper of her sleeping bag was enough to bring her to a sitting position, heart pounding. She was continuing to suffer an alien and disquieting need to flee from nature and hide out behind four strong walls, concrete sidewalks and tended lawns.
The previous night's tears and sleep had revived Les Van Slyke. He was, if not quite his old self, at least mobile. They were on the trail before sunrise and, thanks to Lester's radio, there was a truck and horse trailer waiting for them at Packer's Roost when they hiked out around noon.
Harry Ruick was in meetings till three-thirty. Anna celebrated this reprieve in Joan's house bathing, anointing herself with perfume, putting on clothing unsuited to rugged terrain and otherwise armoring herself against the wild things with the mundane soothing pastimes once called indulgence but, in the nineties, renamed 'self-care.'
If Ruick noticed that she looked or smelled better than when last they'd met, he was too much a professional to comment. Seated in a relatively comfortable chair in his office, the afternoon sun painting a warm square across her knees, Anna reported. She told him of the army cutworm moth excavation made not by claws but by a spade, of the den, the rock, the gunshot. She told him of the cave swept clean but for the wax on the ledge and the peanut half, the dime and dog biscuit fragment overlooked in the dust. She kept till last the part about the water bottle punctured by pointed teeth that had been left for her. Law enforcement officers do not like fairy stories, head investigators do not like underlings with overactive imaginations or a penchant for the romantic.
It crossed Anna's mind to withhold the incident entirely as irrelevant and damaging to her credibility. The decision to include it came only when she remembered a similar incident had happened before. Maybe had happened before.
'Remember Rory and the water bottle nonsense?' she asked. 'He's since changed his story, but originally he said he lay down to sleep without one and woke with one beside him.'
