Peter brought me into the sitting room, which no longer held the sunny, happy quality I remembered, although I had to admit, from the looks of the outside, I had expected worse. There were still some throws over the sofa and some knickknacks around. Sunlight slanted between eyelet curtains in the front windows. Several school pictures of Nathan and Molly stood on the mantelpiece, and they seemed dust-free. I wondered if Peter had taken up with another woman at some point. Although the look of the place was dated, there still seemed to be a female touch to it.
“So, have you found him? Is that why you’re here?”
“We’re not sure yet, but I’d like to talk to you about that.” I was surprised at how even my voice sounded; it’s not the way I felt inside, but after years of working as a game warden and now a park officer, I was comfortable with visiting people, asking questions, and taking statements from strangers and even those from my past. No matter how emotional I felt, my voice rarely failed me.
He stared at me, inspecting me, his eyes narrowed, and I felt ashamed on too many levels to count—that I was the one who came home that night and not Nathan, that I was currently the one standing before him talking about the possibility that his son’s corpse may have been taken and buried near Essex. Peter’s kitchen windows were open, and I could hear the faint high shrieks of children playing somewhere in the neighborhood, each cry of glee sounding more like a cry for help as I stood before Nathan’s father. A dog also yipped in the distance, high-pitched and frenzied. “He didn’t disappear in Essex,” Peter said gruffly.
I felt my shoulders tense as I realized there might be some denial going on. That on some level, he did not want to know about the buried bones almost more than he did want to know.
“Can we sit, Mr. Faraway?”
He waved me to one of the chairs, and I took a seat. He slumped into the couch across from me, leaning forward, and placing his elbows on his knees. The dog had quieted down, and so had the children. The house went still, except for the hum of a fan in the kitchen.
“Mr. Faraway, I don’t mean to sound intrusive, but I’m going to need to ask you a few questions.”
He watched me with narrowed eyes, then said, “Like what?”
“Basics. Like, have you remarried?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Has Ms. Faraway?”
“No, she hasn’t either.”
“Do you still see her?”
“I do. We’re friends. She checks on me still. Sometimes she comes and cleans or tries to make the place a little cheerier. She tries to get me to garden again, and sometimes I start, but I never can get very far.” He looked out the window wistfully, then back down at his hands. He massaged one thumb knuckle with his other thumb, and I couldn’t tell if he always did that or was doing it only from nervousness now.
“Is she up to things like that—gardening and all?”
“She claims she is, but I don’t know. I guess she tries. Goes to church still, knits these blankets”—he pointed with his chin to the beige knitted throw hanging over the back of the couch beside him—“that kind of thing.” He gave a deliberate shrug like he wasn’t convinced of anything ever, not even the simple activities of his ex-wife, who still visited him. That was one of the many things that the loss of a child could do to you, I thought—take away your sense of purpose, of direction.
“What about you, Monty?” he asked. “I heard you got married. Do you have children?”
“No, no, I don’t. We . . . we didn’t make it. I’m divorced.”
Peter didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod, just looked at me with a hard stare like he already knew that was the case, that he could have predicted it, and there was absolutely nothing more to add to it.
“And Molly?” I shifted the conversation back. “I hear she’s in Kal-ispell?”
“Yeah, got married to some guy named Tom Sands, had kids. Now she’s divorced too. She runs a water delivery business. You know, supplying bottled water all over the valley for people who don’t trust their faucets. As if it’s fresher in plastic containers than out of the wells and city systems around here.”
“She still go by Sands?”
He nodded, and I pulled out my pad and wrote the name down. “Mr. Faraway, we don’t know if it’s . . .” I paused, finding it difficult to suddenly say his name. Not only had I not said it in a long time myself, saying it to his father compounded my unease.
“Nathan,” he said, slightly annoyed.
“I know. I’m sorry. Mr. Faraway, several agencies are already involved in the process of identification. The police may ask you to go in to the local police station to take a DNA sample. It’s just a quick swab inside your mouth. They simply need a close relative—a parent is best—in case they can make a match.”
Peter stared at me without saying a word, as if he could see right through me and had already catalogued the sweetest and darkest moments in my life. I fidgeted, cleared my throat, and continued on. “It doesn’t mean it’s him—”
“Nathan,” he said.
“That’s right. It doesn’t mean it’s him,” I repeated.
“No,” he said abruptly. “I know what you mean. I wasn’t getting clarification. I was telling you what his damn name is. Nathan. You can say his name. It’s not taboo to say it within these walls.”
I swallowed hard, could feel the tension in my chest and neck, like water to the overflow line. “Of course not,” I nodded. “Of course it isn’t.”
“What happened to this Essex kid? How did he die?”
“We don’t know yet.”
He looked down at his hands again, one thumb still working the lower knuckle of the other.
“Mr. Faraway?”
He looked up, his lower jaw canted to the side, as if he purposefully had it cocked that way to prevent himself from saying anything more to me because whatever he’d say wasn’t going to be nice. It made his face appear crooked. Seven years after the disappearance, when I was at college, Peter had gotten my number somehow and called me to grill me for information. Eventually he broke down sobbing. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know anything more than how we got separated—just that Nathan had stormed off into the woods by the cemetery to start walking home.
I had followed, calling out to him, watching him walk into shadowy trees in the pale moonlight. I had stumbled on a fallen tree, my foot catching the soft, rotted-out piece in its center and my heel catching underneath the log. I had to take a second to pry it out, and by the time I stood back up, I couldn’t see him. I continued to call for him, but he didn’t answer. I kept walking, searching for him, but never found him, never saw him again.
“Would you be willing to give a saliva sample if it increases the chances of us identifying this boy?”
Mr. Faraway leaned back in the couch and studied me. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Don’t you want to know if it’s him?” I shuddered at the thought of the skeleton remaining nameless when there was even a small possibility of it being Nathan.
Peter stood and walked to the door. “You can leave now. How dare you come in here and ask me that? You have no right to ask me anything. To ask anything of us.”
“I know that, sir. I know that, but I just thought for you, for Alice, for Molly, that you might want to know.”
“Then you don’t know everything, do you?”
I didn’t answer him, just put my notepad back in my pocket and walked quietly past him and out his front door as requested.
• • •
When I got to the car, I felt like hell, the full viscosity of Peter’s angry stare and his words sifting through me, burrowing into every weak spot inside me. You have no right to ask me anything. To ask anything of us.
The last thing I wanted to do was make Peter Faraway angry or make the family relive old
wounds. I started the car and drove off, thinking more deeply about the implications of identifying the bones for not just the Faraways, but for any family. I wasn’t wrong; most people did want to know. Desperately wanted to know. But perhaps not everyone. Perhaps for many, the worst part was knowing for sure that your child was dead, that even though the uncertainty eats away at you, at least you’re left with a thread of hope to constantly grab onto.
For most of my life, I thought the worst part of Nathan’s disappearance was the not knowing. The uncertainty of what had happened to him that night plagued my mind constantly. Had he been stalked by a mountain lion, the stealth hunters of the woods? Had he fallen in the river and drowned? Had he been attacked by a hungry bear that hadn’t yet gone to the high-elevation northern slopes for hibernation? Had he been abducted? Had my brother and his friends circled back to him, caught up with him? Had something gone entirely wrong that they all were sneaky enough to cover up?
There had been rumors, of course, around town. That he’d committed suicide or was taken by phantoms—it was October 31, after all—that his spirit swept through the canyon and across the fields and into town every Halloween at nightfall.
I thought about what it meant if the grave was Nathan’s. He had disappeared right outside Columbia Falls, past the river and past an area referred to as Columbia Heights, the name implying wealth and gentrification. The area was anything but that, home to an A&W Root Beer chain store, a gas station or two, a few homes, a run-down, abandoned old western hotel, and a tavern. The area led into the canyon going to Glacier Park, and the Flathead River ran nearby as it wound its way out of the canyon.
Nathan would have had to walk through the woods, to the heights, and down Highway 2 for a bit to get into his neighborhood in Columbia Falls. Had he made it to the highway and been hit by a car? Had a reckless driver decided to dispose of the body himself rather than face the consequences? Had he taken him to Essex to bury?
Or, had Nathan hitchhiked with the wrong person—some sociopath? Nathan was too smart for that. He would have known better than any kid to hop in a car with a stranger, but maybe he threw caution to the wind. I remembered that walk home in the cold: the long, eerie shadows from the trees, the silver slashes of moonlight cutting through them, my legs tired and my fingers numb and frozen. Perhaps he decided a ride was better than the biting wind. And if so, what had he thought when the car turned around and went away from the canyon toward Essex?
It’s not like these thoughts hadn’t crossed my mind before, but I had always thought it was more likely—or perhaps I’d preferred to believe—that he’d died in a more natural way. As awful and frightening as it sounds, being attacked by a hungry mountain lion and dragged somewhere no one could find him in the searches through the woods seemed somehow more understandable—because it was part of the cycle of nature—than thinking he might have been abducted by someone cruel and twisted enough to crush his skull and put him in a shallow grave.
When I turned onto Highway 2 to head back to the park, my phone started ringing. It was Lucy.
“Monty, is this a good time?”
“Good as ever,” I said. “I’ve got you on speaker while I drive, but I’ll pull over as soon as I see a turnout.”
“Want to call me back?”
“No, go ahead. There’s one coming up,” I told her.
“There are a few more things to report. First, I’ve got a better idea of how old the bones are based on further inspection and the analysis of the soil. I’m thinking they’re at least twenty to thirty years old.”
“So sometime from 1986 to 1996?”
“Yes, give or take a few years on each end. There’s no way to be exact, I’m afraid.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking that the time frame didn’t rule out that the remains belonged to Nathan. “What else?”
“The buckle has been completely cleaned. It looks like something from the late eighties or early nineties, but that alone doesn’t mean much; especially if someone has kept a buckle around for a long time. I’ve sent it back to the lab, to Gretchen, so she can show you. She’ll probably get it by tomorrow or the next day.”
“And the bones, is it possible that a hit-and-run caused the break in the temporal region?” I asked.
Lucy didn’t answer immediately, and I could tell she was mulling it over for a second. Then she said, “No, not likely at all. All the other bones show no trauma and a car would not be able to hit only one spot on the skull—it would affect more of the skull and other body parts that would show as breaks in the skeleton.
“There are usually three kinds of bone injury, and I’ll save you the lecture, but this one is perimortem, meaning it occurred at or close to the time of death. We know this because there is none of the bone remodeling that happens when an injury occurs when the victim is alive long enough for healing to occur. Also, there is no sign that the injury occurred postmortem, or after death. When an injury is perimortem, the edges of the affected area remain relatively sharp and crisp, which tells me the contusion occurred shortly before death. Most likely, it caused the death, but we don’t know that for sure.”
“Could they have been made by an animal?”
“That’s unlikely as well. There are no signs of tooth marks. Although it’s possible a bear knocked him over and he hit his head on some very strange and sharp-shaped rock or object. But then again, why would he end up buried in a grave?”
“So”—I sighed—“we don’t know for sure what the cause of death was?”
“I’m afraid not, but I’d be willing to bet it has something to do with the severe fracture of the skull. To make a depressed, cleaved skull fracture like this, this child had to have been specifically hit with a sharp, hard object in the frontal and temporal region along the transverse access. The dead always have a story to tell, Monty,” Lucy said. “And I’m afraid this person’s is not a very nice one.”
I thanked her for the call and continued to drive back to headquarters, going a little too fast on the highway. I made myself slow down, drive the speed limit, and ease my grip on the steering wheel while her words This person’s is not a very nice one rang in my head.
11
* * *
Gretchen
EVENING BEGAN TO settle when Ray and I left the yurt site on the North Fork, and a glowing orange orb sunk below the mountains by the time we reached Glacier’s headquarters in West Glacier in order to update the FBI agents. When we pulled into the parking lot, Monty arrived too. We walked with him toward the building in the soft light of the lingering dusk.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Okay, we found three sets of footprints.”
“Three?”
“That surprise you?”
“Only in that I took Minsky for a loner, figured there’d only be Chiles’s and Minsky’s prints there.”
“One set belongs to Minsky, of course. We can tell because of the sheer number of them. It’s definitely the dominant print. Several belong to Chiles, which we checked on the way out by stopping by his cabin and comparing it to the dominant print there. Thought the ol’ coot was going to shoot us, but I managed to talk him into letting us be while we did our work.”
“And the third?” Monty asked.
“We aren’t sure about it. It came from a smaller shoe, a running shoe, and could belong to a younger person, a woman or a smaller man, but it didn’t match any of the prints from the Coreys’ campsite at Fish Creek.”
“How long has he been missing now?” Ray asked Monty.
“Too long. Around thirty-three hours,” Monty growled.
I wanted to say, It’s not looking good, is it? but I resisted. I’d found it best to never be openly negative around anyone when working a case. Just give the findings.
“Agent Paige will be all over the fact that a third shoe print was at the yurt site,” Monty added.
“I’m happy to have any lead, but I’m not feeling this is the direction to go. Doesn’t fit the profile of a child abductor. Other than the fact that the family’s got money and the guy called them out of the blue before they left, and I’ll admit that is a little strange, I can’t really see how it plays. Did you get any sense of how long it’s been since someone besides us was actually at the site?”
“That’s hard to say for sure. As you know, the fire didn’t look fresh, but that doesn’t say a whole lot. It’s been warm and there are fire restrictions across the entire state. If he was up to something bad, the last thing you’d do is start a campfire and call attention to yourself.”
We walked up the stone steps to the front door and Monty paused before he opened it, as if he could read my mind and knew I wanted to ask about the bones. I could hear crickets piping up in the woods off to the sides of the building. Soft summer birdcalls and bustling sounds filled the evening, and a bat swept by us, chasing insects against the darkening sky.
“Did you call Lucy?” I asked.
“I did and she filled me in. In between all the craziness, I’ve been checking missing person reports for ten to sixteen years old for the entire Flathead County. I also just made a visit to a family to see if I could talk them into giving a saliva sample for DNA.”
I stayed silent while Monty kept his hand on the door without opening it. I knew there was a good chance that Monty’s friend from years back would be one of those names, and possibly even the family he visited. I almost wanted to ask, but didn’t. On some level, it seemed private, especially in front of Ray.
“I’ve also expanded the search to Canada, to Waterton and surrounding areas,” Monty continued as he finally opened the door for us. Glacier Park spans two counties, Flathead and Glacier, and continues into Canada, into the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. “I plan to visit the rest of the families who haven’t submitted a saliva sample to see if I can get them to do so. Hopefully it increases the chance of a match at the center.”
The Weight of Night Page 15