“The girls know me and they trust me.”
“They’re children.”
I put my hands in my pockets and tried to see behind Grettl, but it was too dark.
“Exactly.” I paused. “Maybe I’ve just made them my business.”
We stared at each other, neither of us willing to blink.
I pulled my hands from my pockets and crossed my arms in front of myself. “Who’s their mother?”
She squinted and then sighed, giving up the battle much more quickly than I anticipated. “All right. Come in for a minute, Beth. But I’m only inviting you because I can see you might cause trouble for my son. There’s no need. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
I followed her inside and heard faint noises from upstairs. Music played—something kids would enjoy, and I heard toys being scooted across the floor as well as being dropped on it. I didn’t hear any little-girl chatter, of course. I didn’t hear laughter or any of that strange screaming sound.
Grettl sat on the couch and nodded toward the chair. “Sit.”
I did as she instructed.
“I’m not exactly sure why the police want to talk to him, but he has done nothing wrong. I’m sure he will be home soon,” Grettl said.
“Okay.”
I waited. She knew why I was there, and she’d invited me in.
“It’s a simple story,” she said finally.
“Then why doesn’t Tex talk about it?”
Grettl frowned. “They are his girls. He loves them deeply. But he’s lived his life afraid that someone would take them from him.” She sighed again. “The girls were both adopted.”
“I see. A single man was able to adopt them? Is that why he’s concerned?” I asked.
“The girls were left here in town, at the post office, when they were about two years old. They were relinquished to the tribe by the birth mother, and she didn’t give us a specific birth date, but claimed the girls were fraternal twins.”
“Who was she? Where did she go?”
“No one knows,” Grettl said. “I was at the post office the day she brought them in. She said she was looking for a hospital but there wasn’t one close by. She said she couldn’t care for them, thought that maybe we could. She was hurt—an injury on her face—but she kept trying to hide it. She ran off before I could chase her—my priority quickly became making sure the girls were okay. The woman was long gone by the time I managed to get outside to see which way she’d gone.
“My son offered to pay for their care if a woman or a couple wanted to adopt them, but no one did. It’s a tough life out here, and many of us are poor. Tex offered to give them a home, agreed to allow our tribal leaders to visit and inspect. Time went on, and the girls just stayed. They are well taken care of. They are well loved.”
“May I ask what the state authorities did? Did they try to take them away, put them in an orphanage or foster home situation?”
“The Alaskan state authorities were never informed. We didn’t feel the need.”
My heart fell and soared at the same time. Surely, the girls’ situation hadn’t been handled appropriately. But Tex Southern had stepped up and taken care of them. They seemed healthy and happy.
“They’ve never spoken?” I asked.
“Mary spoke a little when they first arrived, but Annie didn’t. When Annie continued not to speak, Mary stopped talking, too.”
“That’s … that might have been helped,” I said.
“We’ve had them work with a speech therapist and it hasn’t helped.”
“Psychologists?”
“No.”
This wasn’t right, but maybe other solutions were worse.
“Why don’t you all just tell everyone the truth?” I asked.
Grettl frowned. “I see what you’re thinking. I see your judgment. Any time we’ve shared the truth, particularly to those outside the tribe, we’ve received the same judgment, as well as threats regarding contacting authorities. It’s best just to let everyone wonder.”
She wasn’t wrong. I didn’t mean to judge, but I was, even if it was silently and to myself. How had something like this happened? How had these girls fallen through the cracks so deeply? Where was their mother?
But I knew this sort of thing happened all the time. Maybe the details were different, the circumstances, the situations, but children fell through the cracks every day. And they weren’t always ultimately taken care of as well as Annie and Mary had been.
“Do you know anything else about their first two years?” I said.
“I don’t,” she said.
The fast pitter-patter of footfalls came from the stairs. I righted my expression so Annie and Mary wouldn’t think I was bothered.
Mary was the only one who emerged from the stairway. She held a doll and was looking at it with concern. She smiled when she looked up and saw me. She ran to me and hugged me genuinely.
“Hello,” I said as I pulled her close.
She pulled back and smiled and then took the doll to her grandmother. She pointed at the head, which was almost torn away from its neck.
“I can sew that,” Grettl said. “Why don’t you run up and get Annie to come down and say hello to our guest.”
Mary frowned and looked at Grettl. She shrugged and shook her head.
“What do you mean?” Grettl said.
Mary repeated the shrug and head shake. She tucked the doll under her shoulder and signed something.
“What?” Grettl stood and made her way around the child. Mary followed her, and then I followed behind them both.
We all jetted up the stairs and into the large children’s room.
“Annie?” Grettl said. There weren’t many places in the room to search, but she looked under the bed and behind the closet curtain. “Annie?”
Mary seemed suddenly concerned, too. She started to cry.
“Where is she?” Grettl said as she put her hands on the girl’s arms. “Where is she?”
Mary was too frightened to respond. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil and took them to Mary.
“Can you draw it?” I said.
Mary blinked at me and then took the paper and pencil. She sketched quickly, but her simple drawing was easy enough to translate.
She’d drawn a bear—but there was no doubt in my mind that the bear’s face was human.
Thirty-Six
I have never experienced anything like the relief I felt when Donner answered the phone at the police station.
“One of the girls is missing,” I said before could finish his greeting.
A brief pause was followed by “Beth?”
“Yes, yes, it’s me. Listen, Donner. I’m in Brayn. Annie, one of Tex’s girls, is missing. The best I can understand is that she and Mary were outside playing when their grandmother came over. She told them to come inside and then went back into the front room to answer the phone. Tex was calling to tell her that he’d made it to Benedict. She heard the back door open and then footsteps up to the girls’ room, so she thought both of them had come inside. But Annie hadn’t. Mary has now communicated with her grandmother, and the best we can understand is that someone with a bearskin coat or something like that took Annie. The girl might have gone willingly. Mary wasn’t too upset until we were upset, so I sense it wasn’t anything violent. It’s not possible for me to understand her sign language, but I know Annie is gone. We looked everywhere around here for her. We’ve called the tribal representatives, too, but no one is here yet. You and Gril and Tex need to get here. Tex’s house.”
“We are on our way,” Donner said without further hesitation or question.
Mary was falling apart now. Grettl and I hadn’t considered how she might respond to our panic, but it couldn’t be helped; we were distraught and having a hard time hiding it. Mary and her grandmother communicated with sign language, and they were both so upset that I couldn’t separate anger from fear from confusion.
I tried to get Grettl to tell me what Mary w
as saying, why the child thought it was okay for Annie to go with “the bear.” But Grettl only said that Mary thought the bear seemed nice.
These were not toddlers. They were young girls, but eight-year-olds would know not to go with strangers, if that’s what they’d been taught. I couldn’t know for sure, but that seemed like something Tex would teach them. Maybe it wasn’t an important lesson so deep in the Alaskan wilderness.
After the long wait for Gril, Donner, Tex, and the tribal representatives, I became convinced that the girls must have known the person wearing the bear coat. Maybe Mary could explain it all better to Tex.
With the force of a hurricane, he came through the front door. Overflowing with fear and anger, he kept it well contained—better than Grettl and I had—his fiery eyes the only things giving him away. Behind him, Gril, Donner, Viola, and a man I assumed had been acting as Tex’s tribal representative followed.
“Mom, what happened?” he said as he gathered Mary into his arms and held her tight.
Grettl relayed the story to Tex, but now she was so upset I wondered if we should call Dr. Powder, too.
“Mom, relax,” Tex said, though he wasn’t relaxed at all. “We will find her. You need to calm down.” He put his daughter down and crouched to her level. He put his hands on her arms and looked her in the eye. “Sweetheart, tell me everything. It’s going to be okay, but I need to know what happened.”
They spoke in sign language, but Tex also translated the words aloud.
“The bear” came for Annie. The girls had been talking to the bear for a week or so now. It was the bear who guided them over to Benedict after the recent mudslide. They knew the bear. They liked the bear. The bear gave them treats, played with them.
“Mary,” Tex said, righting his features after cringing over Annie and Mary’s seeming ease of going with the stranger. “It’s not a real bear, is it? It’s okay. It’s a person in a bearskin coat, right?”
For whatever reason, perhaps because a magical bear would be more believable than a person, Mary hesitated. But then she nodded.
“Good, that’s good,” Tex said. “Do you know the person under the coat?”
Without hesitation, Mary shook her head. No.
“A man or a woman?” he said.
Now Mary hesitated, but I could tell she was going to answer. We waited in breathless anticipation. I realized I hadn’t been fully breathing the whole time they’d been talking.
Mary signed. Tex spoke, “A woman. A momma.” Tex looked back over his shoulder at the rest of us. “Let’s go find them.”
Grettl, Viola, and the tribal representative stayed with Mary. Tex told his mother she would need to make sure Mary remained calm. Giving Grettl that task, or maybe trusting her with it, helped her focus. Viola was there to take care of all of them. They’d be fine. For all their sakes, though, I hoped we’d find Annie, alive and well, but if we didn’t … No, it wouldn’t do anyone any good to dwell on ifs.
Gril, Donner, Tex, and I headed out the way Tex had gone to track his daughters a few days earlier. Tex’s still-wild eyes scanned the world around us. I knew he saw things I didn’t, things I’d never see, even though I saw things differently than most people, too. When I first heard he’d tracked his girls to Benedict, it had sounded as mysterious as magic to me. As I watched him today, it still seemed unreal. In the remains of the fallen snow, he didn’t hesitate, seemed confident in the way he chose to go.
I had to work hard to keep up with him, Gril, and Donner, but I managed okay, as I remained silent. I had many questions, but Gril and Donner were quiet, letting Tex do what he needed to do with full concentration, so I followed suit.
I glanced at the time after we crossed the river and as we came upon Lane’s house. It had only taken us twenty minutes to walk to the place that would have taken ten minutes to drive to this way and at least thirty minutes to drive around the other way. The shortcut was real.
“Hey,” I said breathlessly as the back of Lane’s house loomed ahead. They all stopped and looked at me. “Gril and I have seen the man who lives here in a bearskin coat. I also thought I heard someone leaving out the back door earlier when I was here. Do you know if a woman lives here? Is Lane, by chance, married?”
“When we brought him in for questioning, he said he wasn’t,” Gril said. “He told us his wife died about six and a half years ago, in the woods. Her leg got caught in a trap and he didn’t find her until too late. She had been mauled by a bear. Her remains are buried up by the shed. He didn’t tell anyone at the time.”
I nodded, not taking the time again to ponder the gore or how, once again, the proper authorities weren’t always notified out here. “I saw the grave—but there seemed to be more than one. Did he talk about a child?”
“No,” Gril said. “I asked. I saw the gravesites, too, Beth. Lane claimed there are no children buried there, but … Jesus.” Gril raked his hand back through his hair. “Lane said their dreams of having a child were buried there. If the body we found in the shed had been hers, we would have arrested him, I would have pushed him more, but I was convinced he didn’t know the dead woman.”
“If someone is living here with him, who would it be?” I asked.
“It might just be someone else who wants to remain off the grid,” Tex said.
“Let me talk to him. Come on,” Gril said.
As we approached the back of the house and the room that still hadn’t haunted my dreams but was bound to at some point, Gril called out.
“Lane! It’s Police Chief Samuels and three others.”
Even with smoke curling up from the chimney, I thought the house might be empty, but Lane did open the door a minute or so later. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, he would be cold quickly if he stayed outside for long.
“Chief? What’s going on?” he said. His eyes moved suspiciously over Donner, Tex, and me.
“I need to ask you a couple questions,” Gril said. “Can we come in?”
Lane didn’t want to invite us in, but his better judgment won out. “All right. Come in.”
We followed him through the back door and into the work room. Thankfully, there were no animals in there. Once in the front room, Lane stood next to one of the chairs and stuffed his hands into his pockets.
The warmth inside was too much, and I took off my hat and gloves. I caught Tex’s eyes as they moved over my scar.
“Lane, have you seen a young girl walking through your property, maybe with an adult?” Gril asked.
“No,” Lane said. “Is someone lost?”
“Yes,” Gril said. He moved himself so he was in between Lane and Tex. No one could stop Tex from doing anything he wanted to do, but Gril could slow him down. I could see restraint in Tex’s eyes and the set of his shoulders. Whoever had taken his child wasn’t going to fare well. Gril knew that, too.
“A lost little girl. I’m sorry. How can I help?” Lane sounded sincere.
“I need to know something and it’s very important, Lane. We are looking for a woman who might be wearing bearskin. Do you have any knowledge of such a woman?”
At first he was going to lie, as if he’d practiced doing it. He looked at Gril. This wasn’t me, a nosy neighbor asking questions—this was the Benedict police. That still might not have been enough to get Lane to answer honestly, but there was a missing child. “Shit.” He swiped his hand through his hair. “I’ve made a promise to keep it a secret and I’m sure she has nothing to do with a missing child … I don’t live with anyone, but … yes, I believe I know who you are talking about. Chief, I would never suspect her of taking a child. Never.”
“What’s her name? Who is she?” Gril asked.
Lane shrugged. “I only know her as … Woman. She never gave me a name. She’s a white woman. I don’t know much about her, and I’m not sure who she is or was. She’s kind, gentle, not someone who would take a child,” he repeated.
“Give me more here, Lane. How do you know her?” Gril said.
> “When she first came to my house about five or six years ago, she was in bad shape, upset, and her face was burned on one side—not a recent burn; it had mostly healed. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but asked for shelter. She stayed a few nights, then left. She came back—comes back—I don’t know how many times. There’s never been a set schedule. I don’t know where she stays when she’s not here, but she does not live here.”
“You didn’t let the police know?” Gril said.
“No,” he said as if the idea hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Gril sighed. “Woman? That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“We think she took the girl,” Gril said. “I know you don’t think so, but you gotta help us. I need to know where she might have taken her. Give me your best guess, at least.”
“I don’t know,” Lane said. “I don’t have any idea where she goes when she’s not here. She doesn’t want me to know.”
None of us had a vehicle. We’d walked from Brayn. Lane walked everywhere. I couldn’t imagine his life, even as it was right there in front of my eyes.
“What did she tell you back when you first met her?” Gril asked.
“Nothing about her past. She wouldn’t tell me where she was from. Nothing. She wanted to learn how to trap, so I taught her. And then we … we became friends, I guess.” He looked pointedly at Gril. “There’s never been anything more than a friendship, like a partnership. I help her with her traps, she helps me with mine. We eat meals together sometimes. We’ve never talked much.”
“You aren’t a couple?” Gril asked.
“No, but she was at my house earlier today, and yesterday, too. I’ve seen a lot of her over this last week.” He looked at me. “You have, too. I was just trying to protect her privacy.”
“You mean her secrecy?” I said.
Lane sighed and his mouth made a straight line. “I guess so.”
“Do you think she had anything to do with the body in your shed?” Gril asked.
“I don’t,” Lane said quickly. “At first, I wondered, but when I told her a woman’s body had been found, she said she knew nothing about it. I have no doubt she was telling me the truth.”
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