'Why didn't you ask for help?' Years of motherhood and carrying pain for children ached in Joan's voice.
'You'd've said no,' Geoffrey answered. 'Everybody would have said no.'
Neither Anna nor Joan was naive-or dishonest-enough to argue with him. The bear belonged to somebody else. Geoffrey was a kid. He would have been blown off on several accounts.
'That bear's my property,' McCaskil felt bound to pipe up. Reassured by the company of others, safe from the bear and, in a strange way, safe within his bonds from the responsibility for decision or action, William McCaskil was recovering his equilibrium. Anna liked him better mute and cowering.
'Can't have pets where you'll be living for the next fifty years,' she said.
Anna guessed the bear really did belong to William McCaskil if it was legally obtained as a cub. The brochure had listed the owners of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as George and Suzanne Fetterman. McCaskil had been born to a woman named Suzanne. Anna's bet was Fetterman was Suzanne's second husband, McCaskil's stepfather. Hence the use of Fetterman as an alias. He'd have been grown when Geoffrey was young but evidently visited Mom often enough to torment a little boy and a little bear. McCaskil must have inherited Adventure Trails when old man Fetterman died.
The thought process rippled quickly through Anna's mind. It could be verified easily enough. At present she chose not to speak of it. She didn't wish to give William McCaskil the right of anything.
'Mr. McCaskil was going to sell Balthazar,' Geoffrey said.
'I found a home for him, a nice ranch in British Columbia where he would roam free,' McCaskil said virtuously.
'Boone and Crockett,' Anna snapped. 'Balthazar would have been shot as a wild bear by some slob hunter for a trophy. What were they offering? A hundred thousand? Two? That must've seemed a fortune to a small-time fraud like you. Or could you get more because Balthazar would stand and roar on cue, add to the drama? Even charge and attack without any real risk to the hunter. You're ason-of-a-bitch, McCaskil. Be nice and shut up or you will be shot trying to escape.' As a rule, Anna refrained from abusing prisoners in her custody. The venom she poured out on McCaskil was tied directly into the loss and outrage she felt looking across the flashlight at the quiet miracle eating a red ball cap and thinking of him destroyed for the sake of a little entertainment and bragging rights.
'Mr. McCaskil told me that's what he was going to do,' Geoffrey said. 'He said I could visit Balthazar's head after it was on somebody's wall. He said that to me. That's when I took Balthazar. I wrote you from the road,' he told Joan. 'I've got a laptop and a cell phone back where my stuff's at.'
'Does the bear-Balthazar-do whatever you say?' Rory spoke for the first time. Anna covered her mouth to hide her smile. The envy was heavy in Rory's voice. What boy, what person of any age or gender, wouldn't want a twelve-hundred-pound omnivore as friend and backup?
'Pretty much,' Geoffrey said. 'My dad was Mr. Fetterman's animal curator. They got Balthazar when he was really tiny and I was about ten. We grew up together and I helped Dad train him and we'd do shows together. People liked seeing us, a bear and a little boy. After Dad died, Mr. Fetterman kept me on. I lived in his wife's old sewing room-Mrs. Fetterman had been dead a year or so before Dad went. I took over with Balthazar. He's a trained bear but he's not a pet,' he warned and Anna noted he shot her as severe a glance as he did Rory. 'He's a wild animal. They've got their own rules and you can't go around breaking them. Balthazar can't be scared or hurt or teased. He doesn't understand it. That's why he hates Mr. McCaskil so much. When he smells him he knows something bad is happening and he goes back to bear rules to save himself.'
'Fucking menace,' McCaskil growled. Balthazar growled back and McCaskil shut up. 'How do you tell him what to do?' Rory asked. 'Lots of ways. He responds to a few verbal commands.
He'll sit down and play dead to whistles. Some tricks he taught himself and just does them for fun when he's happy. He likes to juggle-kind of play catch really-with pinecones. Sometimes he just starts in to dance even when there's no music.'
'I guess I'll pay closer attention to bizarre bear management reports in the future,' Joan said, and Anna laughed.
Geoffrey went on, 'For the show, Dad taught him to growl and stand tall and charge by different numbers of raps on pieces of wood. He picked the wood because the noise was natural and it would seem more real.'
'We found one of your clacking sticks,' Anna said. 'After the night you and Balthazar tore up our camp.'
Geoffrey looked away, fixing his eyes on the flashlight between them. 'I'm sorry about that. I just wanted you to leave. Balthazar got into some kind of trap thing. A tree with wire around. It took me fifteen minutes to get him to leave. He'd got hold of a little thing that smelled like cherry candy up in the little tree and wouldn't stop playing with it, I figured it was one of those traps you'd told me about that day we met. I was afraid you'd find out somehow.'
'Ah,' Joan said. 'And here I blamed the last team for hanging the love scent too low. Who could know?' She smiled.
Geoffrey continued with his story, 'I was trying to teach Balthazar to dig lilies around there. We'd tried other places but there were other bears and they scared him. I thought if we did that-you know, to your camp-you'd be scared away.'
Joan reached out. She must have thought better of touching Geoffrey because her hand stopped partway. 'You can't scare away researchers by letting them know there's a subject in the neighborhood,' she said.
'I didn't know that then.'
Joan boiled more water. More hot drinks were made. Out of a sense of duty, Anna made a cup of cocoa for McCaskil. When they'd settled again, she said to Geoffrey Micou, 'Why don't you tell us about Balthazar killing that woman?'
Rory gasped audibly. McCaskil laughed. 'They're going to shoot that killer bear,' he said. 'He'd've been better off with me. Maybe he'd've run off and lived.' Geoffrey covered his face with both hands, a gesture both theatrical and genuine.
'Anna!' Joan scolded her for insensitivity. To Rory she said, 'Are you okay with this?'
Anna had forgotten the dead woman was Rory's stepmother. Guilt nudged her but curiosity was stronger and she didn't withdraw the request.
'I'm okay with it,' Rory said. Joan looked at him hard trying to see past strange shadows and high school bravado. Apparently she was satisfied.
'The woman who died was Rory's stepmother,' she explained to Geoffrey.
The hands over the boy's face crawled up into his hair to become fists, strands of brown spiking out between the fingers. Whatever Micou felt floated to the surface where it could be easily seen by anyone with eyes. Perhaps growing up brother to a bear had denied him humanity's greatest defensive weapon: the lie.
'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.' The words squeezed out through a throat full of tears.
'It's okay,' the older boy said. 'I've got my dad.'
Fleetingly Anna wished Lester Van Slyke had been there to hear Rory say that. Not that Lester deserved it. Realistically it would probably not be long before he compromised his son's respect with another selfassassinating relationship.
'Go on,' Anna said.
'Go ahead with your story,' Joan repeated, with more gentleness and better results.
'Balthazar and me had done your camp to scare you away. I knew you'd gone off,' he said to Rory. 'When Balthazar smashed your tent it rolled like a tumbleweed and we knew you weren't in it. That's why I let him play with it. We wouldn't have hurt anybody. Anyway, afterward we were both wired and shaky and ran back to the trail. I thought we should get a ways away before we hid out. We couldn't be anywhere there were people when it got light. Hide out till you guys left and we could come back for the lilies.
'The lady was coming down the trail just as it was getting light and I dove for cover and started whistling for Balthazar but he was up tall and sniffing and growling like she was some big scary something. He's used to people. I've only see him do that when-'
