A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel

by Armstrong, Kelley

  I lift my middle finger, and she laughs and says, “There is a hot tub, but it belongs to the sheriff. He catches you in it without permission?” She draws a line across her throat. “It’s a real tease, having it here. I don’t know who would have gotten it for him. Some sadist.”

  Her gaze shoots my way, and Jay laughs louder than the joke deserves. I tell him that the patient is fine—she just had an episode of delirium—and he nods and turns to her, having forgotten his question about violent criminals in Rockton.

  Thank you, Diana.

  Jay clasps the woman’s shoulder and murmurs something soothing in Danish. She leans toward him, her lips parted, enrapt. She’s in a strange place with people who don’t speak her language and now finally someone does. She listens until he’s finished, and then I expect a fresh stream of frantic Danish, but she only pauses.

  “Can you ask her name?” I say.

  His voice rises in what is obviously a question.

  “Sophie,” she says.

  “Good,” I murmur. “Can you ask her what happened to her? She was injured outside Rockton.”

  He turns to Sophie, who hangs there, patiently waiting for the next question. Yet as soon as he asks, her agitation returns, as she white-knuckles his hand, gaze locked on his, her words spilling out.

  As he listens, his brow furrows. Finally, he lifts a finger to his lips and says something calming, reassuring. Then he turns to me.

  “I think you might need to wait until she feels better,” he says. “She’s not making much sense.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  His gaze darts to the woman. “It seems to be some kind of nightmare.”

  “Even if what she’s saying is obviously confused, I might be able to get something useful from her.”

  “Okay, well, she says she was attacked by a man in the forest. A man who . . .”

  “Go on,” I say.

  “She’s saying it was some kind of wild man.”

  “There are settlers in the forest, and the occasional miner wanders through. They can seem a little . . . wild.”

  Diana snorts. “You should see the former sheriff.”

  I nod. “As much as they might want to stay clean, they can’t live up to the standards of people with twenty-four-hour access to hot showers and razors and laundromats. Then there are some who don’t care to try. Consider it human repellent. Most people out there are very private. You need to be, to live that life.”

  “Understood but . . .” He takes a deep breath. “She says it was a man with long matted hair and beard, and mud on his face. Only the mud . . .”

  He says something to her, and she shakes her head and then speaks in rapid Danish.

  “I asked if his face might have just been dirty,” Jay says. “She says no, the mud was put on intentionally, in whirls, like a pattern. He also had scars across his forehead—parallel lines that looked intentional, too.”

  “Well, we do get all kinds up here,” Diana says.

  “He was dressed in hides.”

  “Most people out there are,” I say. “They don’t have anything else.”

  “No online shopping,” Diana quips. “Even in Rockton, we don’t get much selection. Make sure whatever you brought lasts as long as possible or you’ll end up in this.” She plucks at her T-shirt and shudders.

  With this being police business, I should ask Diana to leave, but she’s doing a fine job of keeping Jay from pursuing questions I don’t want to answer.

  “Just tell me what she’s saying,” I say. “Don’t filter it. Don’t try to figure out what she actually means. That’s my job.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s fine. It’s frustrating for me not being able to speak to a witness directly, so the best thing you can do is give me unedited translations. Can she describe the man more? Coloring? Age? Size?”

  He asks, and Sophie hurries on with a stream of Danish that perks up my hopes, only to have Jay shake his head. “She says she was so focused on what he looked like—the strangeness of it—that she didn’t really notice anything more.”

  “Hmm. Well, we do have an artist in town.”

  “Comic-book artist,” Diana mutters.

  “We have an artist,” I repeat, firmer. “I can bring her if that would help.”

  Jay speaks to Sophie. She pauses, her gaze slanting my way, and then she rushes on and Jay shakes his head again.

  “She can tell you all about the mud and scars, and she seems to think that should be enough, but . . .”

  “It would be if she was talking about a man who attacked her in downtown Vancouver.”

  “Exactly. Sorry.”

  “Ask whether there were others with her. Are they hurt? Are they still out there?”

  He nods and asks, and as she answers, his frown deepens. After she stops, he pauses.

  “Jay?”

  “I . . . I think she’s really confused, and I don’t know how much good any of this will do.” He clears his throat. “Rockton is for victims, right? I’m guessing there are women here running from men. My sister . . .” Another throat-clearing as his gaze ducks to the side. “My sister died at the hands of an abusive ex-boyfriend. It didn’t matter how many times she reported him, no one listened. We did too—her family—but . . .” He shifts in discomfort. “It wasn’t enough.”

  “The system, frankly, sucks, and yes, obviously there are women here to escape what happened to your sister.”

  “Right, so what I’m saying is that I think we might be dealing with a past trauma here, one that’s returned after a head injury. If there’s any chance it involved an attack in the forest, that might be what we’re hearing here.”

  “Can you just tell me what she’s saying? Please? Unfiltered. Unedited.”

  Color touches his cheeks. “Sorry. I’m interpreting data. That’s what I do for a living. Occupational hazard. She’s saying that she and her partner were hiking in the forest, which I know you don’t allow here.”

  “Just tell me what she said, Jay.”

  I finally get the whole story, and part of me thinks I should have just cut through the bullshit and told him the truth, which he’ll probably find out soon enough. On the other hand, this gives me Sophie’s words without him making the assumptions he might if he knew she really was a hiker who’d been attacked in the woods.

  According to what he says, Sophie is indeed a tourist, one who’d come from Denmark with her partner and two friends to fulfill a lifelong dream of hiking in the Canadian north. They’d been dropped off by a bush pilot a week ago, and they’d been having the adventure they’d envisioned when she’d woken to the wild man in the forest attacking them. From there, everything is a blur. She isn’t sure how long ago the attack happened. A day? Two? Three? She only recalls running for her life through the forest, and the next thing she knew, she ended up here, in a hospital bed, back in Dawson City.

  That’s where she presumes she is: Dawson. Which could mean either her opinion of Canadian health care was extremely low or her mind is still addled enough that she hasn’t noticed she’s in a wooden building, being treated by people in T-shirts and jeans. Scandinavian medicine has a reputation for being top-tier, so maybe this primitive building is what she expects in the Canadian north. I fear, however, given her lack of questions, that she’s still feverish and mentally confused. Confused about the part where a wild man from the forest attacked them, though? No. Her description is impossible to mistake for anything else. Her hiking party was attacked by hostiles. And either she’s the only survivor, or there are people in that forest who need our help even more than she does.

  7

  I end up telling Jay that the woman isn’t from Rockton. I must. If he’s going to translate, I can’t keep pretending she’s a local and expecting useful information. I keep it to the basics. We presume she’s a tourist who seemed to have been attacked in the forest, and we’re trying to help. I assure him that we’ll handle all security issues arising from her being here
, but he dismisses that. Helping her is the important thing, and he’s happy to do that.

  * * *

  I’m in the police station. Dalton’s sitting at the lone desk and staring at a hand-drawn map. I’m perched on the desk with Storm at my feet.

  “Read it again,” Dalton says as he balls up the map and pulls over fresh paper.

  I could just hand over my notes, but this works better for him. I read Sophie’s description of the area where they camped, and each time he draws it, he adjusts the parts she leaves out. Her description is full of landmarks that I’m sure seem as clear as signposts to her, but out here, telling us she camped near two pines growing together and a huge boulder covered in black moss is like telling a city dweller that you live on a corner lot with a basketball net and a weeping willow.

  She’s given us what she remembers in terms of mountains and bodies of water, as well as the unusual landscape markers, but it’s a hodgepodge. “We camped in an old burn area near a lake with a mountain behind it.” Was the burn area north of the lake? South? How far were those mountains? Snow-topped or tree-topped? A single peak, double, triple? I’d tried to get more, but she wasn’t able to provide it.

  What Dalton’s doing now is taking the significant parts and rearranging them. Put the lake here and the burn site here and the mountain there. Does that look familiar? No? Okay, what if . . .

  One might say we should just get off our asses and go look. And whoever said that would have zero concept of the sheer scale of land we’re dealing with. This isn’t a state park with three small lakes and a single mountain peak. Even “burn site” means little. Forest fires are part of the natural cycle.

  “I need Jacob,” Dalton says finally, pushing the paper away.

  I figured he would. The problem is finding his brother. Last year, Jacob met a woman from Rockton, and that went as those things often did. Having failed to lure his brother from the forest, Dalton grumbled when Nicole managed it, but he’d been pleased. It was a lonely life, and even if nothing came of the flirtation, it portended a day when Jacob might not be alone.

  Something did come of the flirtation, and Nicole had announced she was planning to spend the winter with Jacob, joking not to give away her apartment, because she might not last a week. She’s been gone ever since.

  Having a partner means Jacob isn’t swinging by as often as he used to. We’ll need to look for him, and that’s why Dalton is trying so hard to solve the map puzzle on his own. The time we spend hunting for Jacob is time we’re not hunting for three missing hikers.

  He sets his pencil down with a snap. “Fucking tourists. They should need to pass an exam before they’re allowed out there. You have to take a test to drive a car, fly a plane, do all kinds of dangerous shit. But you can just walk into the fucking wilderness dressed in your fucking fancy clothes, without a fucking satellite phone or any fucking common sense.”

  I let him vent. This is the guy whose cardinal rule for newcomers isn’t “Don’t cause trouble” or “Pull your own weight.” It’s “Stay out of the fucking forest.”

  You want to explore the wilderness? That’s great. No, seriously, that is fantastic. We have ways for you to do that. Hunting teams and harvesting teams and fishing teams and logging teams.

  You just want to enjoy nature? We have guided hikes and boating and even spelunking.

  You know what all those things have in common? An armed guide who will take you in and bring you out and keep you safe, and if you think I’m the world’s biggest asshole for not letting you go for a walk on your own? Then I’m the world’s biggest asshole. Now go join a team or shut the fuck up.

  “These tourists aren’t our responsibility, but we need to figure out what happened,” I say. “As much as I hate to say it, rescuing potential survivors isn’t as important as identifying the perpetrators and convincing the council to help us resolve this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I really hate to say this but . . .”

  “Injured tourists help our cause.”

  We’ve been looking for the spark that will light a fire under the council’s ass and force them to admit the hostiles are a problem we must resolve. Having us attacked by hostiles last year didn’t do it. Having Maryanne tell us her story of kidnapping and brainwashing didn’t do it. Having hostiles murder a First Settlement resident last month—and their leader, Edwin, blaming Rockton for “riling them up”—didn’t do it. Maybe this finally will: tourists who could report wild people in the forest and return with law enforcement and camera crews.

  “I need to just get off my ass and go find Jacob,” Dalton says.

  “Sorry, yeah, you kinda do. And . . .” I take a deep breath.

  “I need to do it alone because you’ve got a victim in critical condition. A victim you need to keep questioning.”

  “I’m not sure she can give us any more.”

  “She’s been delirious. She might be easier to speak to later. You need to stay.”

  “While you run around the forest alone, after what happened to these people.”

  Now I’m the one venting. The hostiles have always been there, and they’ve always been dangerous, and if they’ve been worse lately, that means Dalton will be even more careful than usual, and he’s already the most cautious person I know.

  “I’ll take Storm,” he says.

  “Thank you. She’ll help you track Jacob, too.”

  “I know. I’ll pack, and you go do that other thing.” He quirks a smile. “The one I’m leaving town to avoid.”

  “Telling the council that we have a Danish tourist in our infirmary, and three more Danes—dead or alive—in the forest.”

  “You got it.” He claps a hand on my knee. “I would love to help, but like you said, I gotta get off my ass and find my brother.”

  “Pretty sure you said that.”

  “Just reading your mind. Now let’s go find Phil.”

  * * *

  We don’t need to find Phil. We’re at the station door when it flies open, clipping me in the nose. I stumble back into Storm, and Dalton catches my arm, snapping “Can you fucking knock?”

  “I believe this is a public building, Sheriff,” Phil says as he walks in. “So, no, I will not knock. I will instead apologize to Casey for opening the door too abruptly.”

  When I came to Rockton, Phil was a disembodied voice on the radio, and I formed a very vivid picture of our council liaison. Early fifties, short and balding, supercilious and prissy, a man who’d spent his career being passed over for promotions and now had to make the most of this limited source of power.

  Then he showed up here to solve a problem and turned out to be the romance-cover version of a businessman. Thirty-one. Model-handsome. Tall, fit, and trim. The kind of guy who wears glasses to be taken seriously. That doesn’t mean he isn’t fussy or supercilious or even prissy. I had the personality right. I just made the unforgivable error of stereotyping the appearance that went along with it.

  Today, Phil wears business-casual attire. Considering he’d dressed in a shirt and tie for the first few months, this is progress. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and I’d take that as a sign of progress, too . . . if not for the misbuttoned shirt and sleep-tousled hair that suggests he’s forgotten his glasses because he’s been roused from Isabel’s bed.

  “We have a problem,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, “and I’m sorry you weren’t notified. I went by your house around two this morning, but you weren’t there. I can’t inform you if you’re not where we expect you to be.”

  Actually, he was exactly where we expect him to be, but as long as he continues to pretend he isn’t sleeping with Isabel, then I’m justified in rapping on his door and moving on.

  “I . . . have a feeling we are not discussing the same urgent situation,” he says. “I also have a feeling that, after you tell me what happened at two in the morning, my situation will suddenly be far less urgent.”

  I wave for Phil to come in and sit. Dalt
on hesitates, and I tap his arm, saying, “Go find Jacob. I have this.”

  “Jacob?” Phil turns to me. “If you are leaving again, Sheriff, you need to run that past me.”

  “Never did before. Not starting now.” Dalton opens the door and motions for Storm to follow.

  “You didn’t with my predecessors, an oversight I am attempting to rectify—”

  The door closes behind Dalton and Storm. When Phil reaches for it, I deftly slide in the way.

  “It is urgent,” I say. “He’s distracted by that, not ignoring you.”

  And certainly not telling you to back the hell up because if you think he’s ever going to ask permission to leave town, you have a very overinflated opinion of your position here.

  “I merely wish he would inform me—”

  “That’s what I’m doing. Which I should have done last night. If you would just say ‘I’m staying with Isabel,’ then I could call on you at her place without risking the wrath of the woman who fills my tequila order. I’m very fond of my monthly bottle, and I don’t dare cross the dragon who provides it. Now tell me your emergency first and—”

  The door bangs open with enough force to make us both jump. In walks a woman in her late thirties, average—even pleasant—looking. It’d taken me about an hour in Rockton to discover that “pleasant” isn’t a word anyone should ever apply to Jen.

  “You two having a little celebration on my account?” she says as she stalks over. “Don’t mind if I join then. Since I’m the cause of the festivities.”

  “What are we celebrating?” I ask.

  “My departure from Rockton.”

  I frown. “You still have another month, don’t you?”

  “This is fun for you, isn’t it, Detective?” She stops close enough for me to smell coffee on her breath. “Any more jabs you want to take? Or do you need me to turn around so you can stab me properly?”

  I turn to Phil. “I’m guessing this is related to your urgent situation.”