My mom stood silently, her lips pursed.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I asked her.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said. “It’s not worth the fight.”
Not worth the fight. I remember wanting to tell the woman that she couldn’t do that, if my mother wouldn’t speak up, but I held back because she was an adult and I was a child. Not worth the fight, I repeated in my head, thinking of all the times when my mom cried in the corner after my dad had hurt her in one way or another. My aunt had told my mom to call the police one time when she saw a bruise on my mom’s arm. Not worth the fight was what she had said then too.
I promised myself I would never think that way. I for one am going to fight like hell for Reeve, for Emily, before it’s too late.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Herman says. “I’m going to say good-bye to Emily.”
“All right. Will you let her know I’m over here, and that she can keep playing for a bit?”
I watch him head over to the rope swing, his hands shoved into the pockets of his navy jacket. When he reaches the kids, they stop swinging and Herman talks to Emily, who nods her head, then looks in my direction. I wave and she smiles and waves back, then quickly performs some kind of a jump turn so she faces her new friend, pokes his shoulder, points at me, and announces, “That’s my mommy, Agent Paige,” I hear her loud, excited voice across the playground.
Lately she’s been obsessed with names, especially Reeve’s and mine—she’s been trying to understand why Reeve’s last name is different from ours. Some of the other kids in her class have the same last names as their dad, even if they’re from split homes. When she asked me why hers wasn’t Landon, I just said, “Because mine is Paige, and I’m the one whose tummy you came out of.”
I smile now and wave at the blond boy, and he waves back at me; then they go back to swinging again. Herman turns, bows his head, and strides to his car without looking my way.
I sit on the boulder watching the two kids playing. The air is moister than it was earlier in the day, and I feel like I’m alone in some cold cave. I look over my shoulder toward the Stillwater River, which runs behind the park, and notice a translucent mist drifting through the trees. To the west, the sun is already lowering and leaking orange and pink stains across the horizon. Skeletal branches that have dropped their leaves reach bony fingers toward the sunset.
The regrets begin to pour in. I think about dropping the Johnson mystery, about letting all the unanswered questions lie in the hopes that Brander and Reynolds will discover them on their own, that they will follow each and every lead thoroughly. I think about what Herman said—They’re not idiots—and I know he’s right. Of course they’ll follow all leads and probably get to all the same places I have gotten to on my own. But it’s my daughter whose happiness is at stake—how can I sit back and just hope for the best?
Relinquishing control—I was never good at that. The notion of surrender doesn’t sit well, and an edginess forces me up from the boulder I’m sitting on. My mom’s words—It’s not worth the fight—run like a ticker tape through my head. I stand beside the boulder for a moment, shoving my hands in my pockets. I kick at the wood chips, making small indentations and spraying them in all directions. I shoo the reservations away, and when my impatience gets the best of me, I walk over to Emily and say, “Hey, chickadee. Two more minutes and then we go.” I lift my chin to the colored sky in the west. “It’s getting late.”
Reeve
* * *
Present—Sunday
DAWN BREAKS WITH the bleakest of light stealing through low-hanging clouds, casting no shadows over the frost-coated ground. I poke my head out of the tent to feel how cold it is. The breeze has ceased and the air is still. I feel the bite of it on my cheeks first, and realize it’s the damp cold that’s going to go to the bone all day long. In Montana, the cold and the heat are mostly dry, so this dankness is unusual, and I think this must be what it’s like to live on the ocean in the north. I throw some pants over my long johns, another shirt and a jacket over my top, and get out of the tent and stretch. A thick white beard of fog trails down the closest rocky peak. The fire has burned down to a flaky white ash the color of Wallace’s hair.
I got as much sleep as you’d expect lying on a hard ground with a steely-muscled sixty-pound dog on top of my sleeping bag, pinning my legs into the corner of the confined polyurethane-treated nylon tent with his sturdy shoulder and long back. I check Wallace’s pup tent and see that it’s empty, which I expect. I know he planned on heading out early for a hunt and would be gone before the morning light even broke.
McKay wanders over to the side of the campsite into the woods to do his business, and I follow to do the same. I’m standing there, urinating into some dried-out bear grass stalks, when I hear elk bugling close by. I zip up my pants and decide to follow the sound, picking my way through the stunted pines with their awkward growth patterns—branches twisting and turning in odd directions because of the constant high-altitude winds and a need to reach for the sun in any direction they can find it. McKay stays by my side.
Within about thirty yards of the campsite, Wallace is easily visible in his hunting gear, an orange cap and vest. He’s pointing his rifle at a bull bugling in clear sight. The bull is too busy calling to his mates—a harem of cows whose baying chatter I can hear farther up the ridge—to notice Wallace hunched behind a boulder, still as the rock itself. I stand quietly behind a tree observing him as he watches the great beast through his scope. I’ve got my hand around McKay’s collar, but he’s too well trained to run after anything but a ball.
Great puffs of condensation plume from the elk’s wide, furred nostrils into the damp, cold air. His dark eyes are intense, not bored like they sometimes look while grazing in the fields around my cabin. He’s in rut, all juiced up for mating. His bugle, guttural and glorious, bursts against the quiet morning. For an instant, I want to shape-shift, to transform into that elk. Not because Wallace is about to kill it, but because its presence is so immense, so unapologetic as he announces himself to the mountains and the mist. If I were that elk, I think, I could effortlessly glide with powerful long limbs through the fog and the bitter air into oblivion, away from trouble, away from loneliness, no booze or drugs required.
Wallace’s rifle is propped on the top of the boulder, and he’s going to shoot. My heart pounds. I can see his finger hooked around the trigger. The elk turns, though, his white-flanked butt now facing Wallace. He’s something with his wide, massive crown of antlers lifting as he calls to his mates. I count his points and realize he’s a monarch bull, which means he has an eight-point rack with long, smooth tines and an impressive whale tail, called that because of the way the last tines of his antlers split and curve to form the shape of a whale’s tail. I see Wallace’s body slightly relax and shift position, and I’m guessing he’s waiting for the elk to rotate again so that he has a shot at his side, at his heart or other vital organs.
The bull’s ears flap and its tail flicks back and forth as he turns sideways again, giving Wallace a clear shot. Wallace’s finger is still poised on the trigger. I hold my breath for what seems like a long time. It will be quite the trophy elk for him. Finally he lifts his pointer, moves his hand, and lowers his rifle.
“You gonna keep standin’ there trying to scare away my elk?” he calls out without looking at me, letting me know that he’s aware of my presence. With explosive speed, the elk dashes off, its hoofs stomping and gouging the forest floor, his whitish tan butt bouncing through the trees like a flashing beacon. “Or you gonna say good morning?”
“I didn’t scare away anything,” I say. “You didn’t shoot when you had the chance. You scared it away.”
“They’re so stupid when they’re in rut sometimes,” he grumbles as I approach him. He brushes off his pants as he stands up. “Didn’t even know we were here.”
Yep, that’s mammals for you. I think of Anne Marie and how even as the edge brist
led up our conversation, I still wanted her. “Why didn’t you shoot?” I whisper to Wallace as if the elk were still there. The bull’s presence lingers, his hay-like ungulate scent, like the hoofy manure smell of a horse barn, still riding on the frigid morning air.
Wallace shrugs, his rifle hanging by his side. “Come on, let’s go have some coffee.”
“Why didn’t you shoot?” I press again.
“Too far up here. You want to haul a four-hundred-pound bull out of this area?”
“I don’t. Never have wanted to haul a bull out of any place, at any time.” I don’t add that I’m happy enough to haul out a tiny piece of his scat in a plastic bag. “But I get you wanting more, and I thought you wanted a bull. And he was impressive.”
He hangs his head, looking at the ground as he walks. His whiskers are so white, they seem translucent. I can hear his boots scuffing on the small rocks and the dried brush. “There’re a lot of reasons why someone might want to be up here,” he mumbles like he’s bored, but I can hear a stoicism in his voice.
“I can relate,” I say.
• • •
After breakfast—oatmeal packets and instant coffee—we each pack our gear and head our separate ways. Wallace plans on spending the day hunting closer to home, so that if he does come across another bull, it’s not too far to quarter it and pack it out. I don’t tell him what my day consists of. He already knows I’m a fanatic about my work, but right before we part ways, he looks at me and says, “So after you do your thing today, you heading home?”
I shrug. “Haven’t decided that yet. I’ll see how late it gets. I want to cover some major ground today.” But I have decided. I have no intention of heading home. Not yet anyway. I’m not ready. I imagine the detectives looking through my youth records—seeing how I was arrested twice, the first time for selling weed after getting into a fight outside a bar with some other teenager who wouldn’t pay me. The bar owner called the police to come break up our fight. I tried to run when they arrived, but the other guy had a hold of my shirt. The second time was for shoplifting beer from a convenience store while stoned out of my mind. I imagine them mulling over my past, how I shot Sam, how I have a history of uncontrollable anger.
“Because you haven’t already covered this ground before?”
“Haven’t covered the area I plan to go to today. Up around that ridge.” I point to the northeast.
He looks up at the gray sky, to the mountain parading to the north and fading into mist. “Any farther and you’ll be across the border.”
“Nah, I won’t make Canada. And as you can see”—I hit my pack, which I’ve already slumped onto my shoulders—“I’ve got plenty of gear.”
“Okay, then.” He sighs it more than says it, like he’s a concerned father. “You sure you want to head farther up this time of—”
“Look, Wallace,” I cut him off, perhaps a little too abruptly. “You don’t need to worry about me. I know what I’m doing out here. I work this job and this dog”—I motion to McKay—“by choice.”
“What about your daughter?”
I chuckle. “What? For god’s sake, you sound like I’m not coming out of here.”
He doesn’t laugh or smile back. He looks dead serious. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just be careful, then. I don’t want to be reading about you in the paper.”
“I don’t plan to be anything but careful. And you should talk,” I say, thinking about him walking around like a target with that fresh fish on him.
A long pause passes before he bends down from the waist and pets McKay on the chest where I’ve taught him to, even though it requires he lean over a little farther. I can hear his joints crack in the awkward stillness of our conversation, and I feel bad that I’ve been so insistent about it.
“It’s okay,” I start to say, “you can pet him—” but he stands and turns to go, simply waving one hand over his shoulder as he hikes out the way he came in.
McKay stays by my side and looks up at me to see if I’m going to follow him. “Good luck with that elk,” I call out to him, but he doesn’t respond, just disappears behind some trees as I watch him walk away.
Ali
* * *
Present—Sunday
ROSE SITS WITH a mug of coffee between her palms and watches me while I fix breakfast for her and Emily. I texted her earlier, asking if she was hungry, and told her that I was making pancakes from scratch, Emily’s favorite, and that she should come over.
I’m drinking coffee too, and Emily is having hot chocolate. I cringe at the thought of all the sugar she’ll have consumed before the morning is even over. I pour the batter into three conjoined circles to form a Mickey Mouse shape as Emily has requested. I happily do so, knowing that one day in the not-too-distant future I’ll make these and she’ll look at them with embarrassment and say, “Cute, Mom, but I’m a little too old for that.”
After Emily eats her pancakes, which she drowned in maple syrup in spite of my instructions not to, I tell her to go upstairs and start getting dressed, guessing that by the time I make it up there, she’ll simply be playing instead. But since it’s Sunday, that’s perfectly okay with me.
I sit down with Rose and smile. “Think she’s got enough sugar for the day?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe she needs a cinnamon roll for lunch,” she says dryly, and I chuckle. “Good thing I’m not watching her today.” She points at me. “This one’s on you.”
“I know, I know.” I hold my hands up in surrender and change the subject. “So the detective from the county that was here yesterday, he came over to talk to you?”
“Yes,” she says. “Odd. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Sorry, I didn’t have time to warn you. He’d stopped by here first, but then I had to get Emily dressed.”
“Right, he said he had spoken to you first.” She looks at me, searching, like she wants me to confirm that it was okay that she’s talked to them in spite of the contract I’d made her sign about not discussing any of our personal matters with anyone else. Obviously, talking to authorities is not the same as gossiping, so I give her a look that indicates it’s fine.
“What else did he say?”
“I was groggy because I went back to bed after I left here. You were right, I probably wasn’t really over that bug.” Dark smudges swell under the delicate skin of Rose’s eyes, and I realize she still looks tired. “I guess they were mostly asking about Reeve.”
“Yeah?”
“They wanted to know how well I know him, how often I see him, when was the last time I saw him, that kind of thing. I was kind of shocked that they were so interested in him.”
“And what did you tell them?”
She gives me that searching look again, her chin tucked in and her eyes wide as she looks up from under her lids at me. “Not much. I mean, you know, I hardly see him, except now and again to trade Emily off if you need me to or if he needs me to take her in a pinch, which rarely happens. That’s what I told him. And of course the last time I saw him was here the other night.”
“Did he ask anything else?”
“He asked if I’ve noticed anything strange or out of the ordinary about him.”
“And?”
“Well, it was the police,” she says.
“Oh, sure.” I wave a hand nonchalantly between us to put her at ease. “Actually the county, but, yeah, of course you have to tell them whatever you know.”
She nods with relief. Part of me feels bad that my insistence on privacy has made her so nervous, but another part of me is glad that she’s taken my requests seriously. Because I was serious. I have no desire for my personal life to be spread around a community in which I am one of two FBI resident agents. “And . . . ?” I encourage her to continue.
“Well, I said that Reeve is not exactly an ordinary guy, but I hadn’t noticed anything off in particular. Just that . .
.” She trails off, her gaze shifting to the front window. A shred of sun is peeking through the clouds and illuminating a patch of the yard and the strewn leaves that I’ve already told Emily we’d play in today. Well, she’ll play while I rake.
“Just that what?”
“Just that he—well, both of you—seemed frazzled or upset the other night.”
I shrug. The fact that she mentioned that means nothing. Anyone would be frazzled after a day of being sweated by the cops, but I’m not thrilled that they now know he came directly to my place after he left the county building.
“What do they think he’s done?” she asks.
I take a sip of my coffee, deciding whether to answer that, but she’s already got it figured out.
“Does it have something to do with that lady that was killed up in the North Fork?”
“Yes, it does.” I set my mug back down.
“That’s what I thought.” She looks down at her cup like she’s embarrassed for him, or actually for Emily and me.
“Did Brander tell you that?”
“He mentioned it briefly.” Her eyes are large with concern.
Her look provokes a defensiveness and protectiveness in me. “Reeve’s fine,” I say. “Absolutely fine. There’s nothing there. He just happened to be in the wrong situation. Circumstantial. The woman was doing an interview with him on his work for the U. They’re just checking all bits of information at this point, that’s all.”
“Oh,” she says. “Well, that’s good.” But she looks pensive and a little anxious, like she doesn’t quite believe me, and I wonder if my nerves are showing or if my protest is too adamant. I stand up to deal with the dishes in the sink and the messy batter-covered bowls. “I better get these done,” I say. “I need to get that kid out into the fresh air so she can run that sugar off.”
A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense Page 23