brochures had been thrown out. That was probably it, the woman agreed. She wrote down Anna's address at Glacier anyway, promising to send it along if she found it. Anna would have been touched by the desire to please if so long on the phone finding out so little hadn't made her crabby.
An hour's work had provided her with one first name, if 'Woody' was legit and not a nickname. Maybe Woodrow. Since Woody had been in business in the same place for twenty-six years he was no fly-by-night. It had been in the back of Anna's mind that Fetterman of Fetterman's Adventure Trails and Bill McCaskil might be one and the same. Twenty-six years, changed that. She couldn't see McCaskil quietly running a business while being indicted and arrested repeatedly for fraud under a handful of other names.
McCaskil was from the Tampa area-or had been there as a teenager. He could've seen the name Fetterman on his way to work or school every day and remembered it when he needed an alias. If it wasn't for the name cropping up again by way of the owner of the abandoned truck, Anna would have chosen to believe that.
'Woody Fetterman.' Anna wended her way through the phone lines to the Tampa courthouse, records department. Yes, there was a certificate of death for a Woodrow Fetterman. He had died at age eighty-one of natural causes six weeks before.
Another possibility exhausted. Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Fetterman was not the Fetterman of Adventure Trails. He was not connected with Carolyn Van Slyke by way of divorce. According to Lester, McCaskil hadn't known her before they met at Fifty Mountain Camp.
'Damn,' Anna whispered. The truck and the trailer. The name Fetterman. McCaskil and his aliases. Another possibility entered her mind and she went back to the 10343 report. Carl G. Micou was born August 4, 1938, considerably older than McCaskil. Still, 'Micou' could he one of McCaskil's aliases. Perhaps it wasn't listed because it was unknown or not yet used at the time William McCaskil was indicted for real estate fraud.
She spent forty more minutes on the phone and eventually ended up back at the records department in Tampa. The search took longer this time but Mr. Micou's death certificate was found. He had died of congestive heart failure in April of 1995, nearly six years ago.
'His truck is still alive,' Anna said wearily.
'I beg your pardon?'
'Never mind. Thanks.' Dead men, dead ends.
Sprinkled around the edges of Joan's office was all the information that, by any wild stretch of the imagination, could pertain to the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Anna had already run to ground what little Fetterman, Fetterman and Micou had to offer. She'd verified that Lester's wife was indeed the queen of sluts. Swiveling Joan's chair slowly she let the other bits and pieces slide by: the army jacket with the topo and the file card. Anna rolled over and, without touching it, reread a copy of the card found in the pocket of what would undoubtedly be Bill McCaskil's coat. 'B amp; C' was written in a loose hand across the top. Below those initials were numbers, measurements by the look of them: 12 11/16, 17 13/16, 30 12/16. The last, 30 8/19, was underlined in heavy ink.
When they caught McCaskil, if she were around, Anna'd ask him what the numbers meant. Probably nothing. His waist size. Who knew? She examined the photocopy of the topo. It had been reduced in size till it fit on two fourteen-and-a-half-inch sheets of paper taped together. Most of the type was too tiny for eyes that had seen more than forty years. There was nothing new since she'd looked at the original, no nifty clues pencilled in the margins, no big red X where the body had been found.
Anna rotated the chair another quarter turn and glanced briefly at her notes on Rory Van Slyke. Rory's dad was an abuse victim. Rory'd gone missing for thirty-six hours. Rory'd turned up having lost a sweatshirt and gained a water bottle, probably his dead stepmother's. Anna's mind drifted and she let it. No lunch, half a bag of gummi bears, her blood sugar was sufficiently screwed up her mind might actually go someplace interesting. It didn't. It merely cast back to the night on Flattop when Joan had divvied up the scattered remnants of the bear- ravaged camp, the ones she and Anna had stuffed unceremoniously in a sack before jaunting off with Harry in search of the lost boy. It was then Anna'd noted the extraneous water bottle in the bag beside the strange stick she'd picked up just outside the camp.
Rory had denied any knowledge of that stick, Anna remembered, just as he'd denied knowing how the water bottles had proliferated. A foot long, worn smooth, of hardwood, not pine or aspen, unweathered, Anna and Joan had known it was carried in recently so when they'd found it they'd saved it. Rory said he'd never seen it. Anna hadn't thought much about it at the time. It was a stick of wood not a stick of dynamite. Now she worried it around because it fit neatly into her collection of bizarre things that didn't fit.
Anna had kept the stick. Force of habit caused her to pack it out as she would any piece of litter. Unless the house had been burglarized by beavers it was probably on the floor of Joan's spare room, where it had been dumped when she unpacked before the last foray into the wilderness.
Thinking about it, she picked up a ruler, close in length to the mystery stick, though a good deal skinnier, and began to fiddle with it. If Rory had not been lying about the stick then it had been dropped in the little meadow by someone else on or about the time they'd been camped out there. Not more than a day or two prior to their arrival. Wood, even hardwood, weathers quickly out-of-doors.
Experimentally Anna waved the ruler about, trying to ascertain the possible uses for a finished length of hardwood, several times the thickness of a ruler, packed into the backcountry. Perhaps a woodcarver, seeking his muse in the mountains, might carry in a prize piece of wood. If she remembered right, the piece she and Joan found had been battered and worn smooth with much handling. Perhaps a woodcarver who went for long periods of time between artistic inspirations.
To the detriment of the ruler's edge, she drummed it lightly against the chair arm as she thought. The minor cracking sound as she played startled her. Before and, she thought but wasn't sure, during the attack on their camp by the bear, she'd heard the crack of wood on wood. That same sound had awakened her from her troubled sleep in the rocks on the flank of Cathedral Peak. Both times she'd written it off to twigs snapping under the weight of real or imagined marauders. Whacking the chair's arm again she noted the distinct quality of the sound.
So what? So somebody was banging pieces of wood together while a bear ransacked the camp or, even less likely, while a bear thoughtfully returned Anna's water bottle to her. Did Rory hear in his dreams the crack of wood before his mother's water bottle was left beside him the night he'd been lost? Why? A signal? Nervous habit? Voodoo ritual?
'Damn,' Anna repeated to herself. All roads led to blasphemy. She put the ruler back where she'd found it.
The rest of the reports had little more information to be wrung out of them. The lab report on the blue stuff sack had yet to be returned but she expected no surprises. From her intimate and prolonged traverse across the alpine talus with its moth-bearing rocks, she had no doubt the traces on the bag were just as Joan had said: rock and moth-wing dust. The bloody traces within might be other than that of Carolyn Van Slyke, but Anna doubted it. The lab report on the peanut and biscuit fragment would probably be equally unenlightening. Most often things were precisely what they appeared to be.
Because she was there and could think of nothing better to do, she filled out a BIMS, a bear incident management systems report on the sow and two cubs she'd seen feeding in the cirque below Cathedral Peak. After she'd finished, she thumbed through BIMS submitted since she'd come to Glacier. She didn't know what she hoped for.
'Validation,' she said aloud. Since she had no hard evidence to base it on, she'd not bothered to put it into words for Harry Ruick, or even more damning, into writing on any reports, but she had an overweening sense of bear, a bear padding through the incidents in Glacier. The obvious was the tearing apart of the camp. Less so was the flesh of the victim cached out of reach of a bear. A man digging the food of and dwelling in the den of a bear. The water bottle with teethmarks of a bear.
Nothing striking presented itself. The BIMS that were totally bogus, the lavender ink describing the bear juggling the hedgehog and the report of the dancing bear, Anna set aside. The rest, including the report of the attack on their camp, painted an active but not extraordinarily so, picture of bears being bears.
Shuffling the crazies back into the pile, Anna felt a sudden sympathy with the lavender ink. Things were not necessarily untrue simply because they were unbelievable.
She had done what she could. Her ear was hot from being pressed to a phone all day. Her
