A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

  “There was no way to know. She doesn’t live with you, Ali. She watches Emily when you’re away. You don’t keep tabs on her personal life. Why would you?”

  “I should have picked up on signs, clues, that—you know, that she had issues.”

  “You probably didn’t want to get too close to her. After all, she was your employee.”

  “But she was like family to us,” I say. Just yesterday, Emily’s world was safe. I had thought it was safe: school, home, ballet, unicorns, teacher, nanny. It’s outside the circle that parents worry about—the featureless predator in the dark alley, the Peeping Tom on the corner, the child abductor at the fair. But I know from my work that so often it’s the inside circle that’s the most harmful. I know that, and still, I let it happen under my own roof.

  I can’t help but think that with Rose, it wasn’t just that I was being professional. It was also that I didn’t dig deep, didn’t ask about her parents, her murdered sister, and her life all that much because I didn’t want to let her in, let myself get too close, not because I sensed anything off about her, but because that’s who I’ve become—someone who doesn’t let people in. If I’d let Rose in—if I’d really gotten to know her, really listened to her—would I have helped prevent the death of Anne Marie? Would I now feel any less hurt than I already do?

  “I better get going.” Herman slaps the tops of his knees, like he’s giddying himself up to get on with the day. “Still lots of work to do on this.” He looks like he’s going to stand, but then he pauses on the edge of his chair like he’s waiting for me to say something. I know I should address how I’ve behaved.

  “Herman,” I say slowly.

  He waits for me to continue.

  It’s not easy for me to ask, but I swallow and slowly say it: “Do you feel like you can no longer trust me? Because of the way I’ve been acting, because of what I’ve done?”

  “I don’t know. Your instincts were right, and I get that you were in a tough position.”

  He hasn’t let me off the hook, I realize, and I’m not sure what else I can say to change that. I need to give him some time. “Thank you again for the coffee.”

  “You’re welcome,” he says. “Will you be speaking to Shackley again today?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. He said OPR will be looking into it.” I check the time and see it’s still early. “I’m going to get Emily at Kaylee’s and take her to school.”

  Herman’s mouth turns down, registering sadness. “Are you going to tell her?”

  “Not today. But, yes, eventually I’ll have to tell her that we need to hire someone else.”

  Herman breaks a smile.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Don’t know, just glad to hear you say you’ll need someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  I manage a smile back, lean over, and give him a hug. The sting of his not trusting me eases for now. “Thank you, Herman. If they don’t fire me, I’m not going anywhere. It will take more than losing my nanny for you to get me out of our office.”

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Wednesday

  AFTER A SLOW, painful walk to Officer Harris’s SUV, he helped me inside and blasted the heat. As the car began to warm, I started to shake uncontrollably under the blanket he’d given me. I tried to calm the chattering of my teeth, but they wouldn’t stop pounding against one another and making an awful prattling sound. I closed my eyes and gave in to the chattering and the pain that made its way back into every part of my body. “That chattering could be a good thing,” the officer told me. “Means you’re alive, which makes you one lucky son of a bitch.”

  And that’s what they’re all saying now in the hospital. I’ve been sleeping under layers of heated blankets, and when I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by crisp white walls, a large sunlit window, and a nurse with hazel eyes. I’m barely awake, but she clamps a monitor over my finger and takes my pulse. Then she takes my temperature and writes it in a chart and moves aside for a man in regular clothes who has moved next to me. He’s grinning. “You are one lucky man! How are you feeling?” He waits for only a second for a reply.

  I’m too tired to say anything, so I just stare at him through half-closed eyes. “Painkillers have kicked in, I see.” He smiles at me again, as if he’s a giddy kid. He’s not, though. His hair is gray by his temples and he has fine lines around his eyes and deeper ones on his forehead. “I’ll repeat this for you again later,” he says, “but I’ll tell you that we’ve got your wounds cleaned and irrigated. And for now we’re letting them drain because of possible infection. We’ve got you on a broad-spectrum antibiotic. As far as your fever, you should feel much better soon. It’s already coming down. The cultures from your wounds have been sent to the lab, and we should get the results soon. In the meantime, your CT scan came back normal, and other than several broken ribs and a torn ligament and muscle in your right leg, you’re quite good. Like I said, you’re very fortunate.” He grins again, and I think his smile is some kind of a salute to me—because I’m lucky, as he says.

  “We’ve got a team of doctors put together,” he continues. “If it’s okay with you, an orthopedic surgeon will need to repair your leg, and an ENT and a plastic surgeon are going to need to take a look at your face and your left ear. We’d like to take you to surgery as soon as your fever comes down, but we’ll discuss this in more detail when you’re ready.”

  I want to reply, but my eyelids feel thick and heavy. His voice begins to fade, and I slip back toward sleep. I feel his hand pat my arm as I begin to drift off, and I want to reach out because it feels good to be touched so lightly, so caringly, but my arm feels stuck. I hear his footsteps go to the door.

  “Wait,” I force myself to say against the possessive slumber.

  He comes back to my side.

  “McKay?”

  “Sorry?”

  “My dog?”

  “Ah yes, your lucky dog. Thank goodness you had him to keep you warm. You owe a lot to that dog.”

  Don’t I know it, I think, more than you will ever know.

  “He’s still with the officer who found you. He kept him when they put you in the chopper. He said he was fine keeping him until you told us where you wanted him to go.”

  “Ali,” I say, “Ali Paige. Can you see if she’ll take him?”

  “Sure.” He gives me a closed-lip smile. “We’ll do that.” He taps my arm again, in the same fatherly, doctorly way. I imagine I smile back before he leaves, but I’m not sure.

  I close my eyes and try to recapture the dream I woke up to in the freezing field, trying to picture only the part where my father reached his hands out to me, and I hugged his neck for dear life, held on to it to stay away from unfathomable dark depths beneath me.

  I think of the adrenaline pouring through me in that dream, and in real life, sluicing through on the mountainside, powering me down it through the biting cold. I think of the ocean’s awful strength and swimming against it, toward him, toward my father, but, more importantly, toward another human being. It seems to me that I have been climbing out of my own life all of these years in the Montana backwoods—away from the tragic event and all the loneliness and the chronic bitterness from my father that followed or, at the least, staying on the periphery of it. But now, in this deliciously warm bed, I realize I’m crawling my way back to the living, that I have the intensity of the mountain wind and the indefatigable tide within myself. I still see the doctor’s silly smile and feel his tap on my arm, even though he’s left the room. His words seem like proof of this blooming thought I have, that the will to endure is not just in the nature I traipse through each day; it’s inside of me too.

  Ali

  * * *

  Present—Wednesday

  I’M ON MY way to pick Emily up from school when my phone buzzes. I pick it up and see that it’s Monty Harris. Strange, I think. Monty Harris is with Glacier Park’s police force.


  “Officer Harris, what can I help you with?”

  “Hello, Agent Paige. Well, if you really want to know, you can help me with a dog.”

  “A dog?”

  “Yes. You up for watching Reeve Landon’s dog?”

  “McKay? You have McKay?” Oh god, why is McKay not with Reeve? I still haven’t been able to reach him, so I’ve decided after getting Emily we would take a drive out to his place to check on things. I pull over onto the side of the road.

  “Yes, chocolate Lab. Kind of obsessive. Wants me to play fetch with him nonstop.”

  “That’s him all right. What’s going on?”

  “No one told you?”

  “No, no. Harris, please, what’s happened?” My heart begins to knock, sending pulses up my throat.

  “Reeve is in the hospital. He’s okay but he’s pretty injured. A grizzly attack.”

  “What? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Agent Paige, you’re the last person I’d kid with. I mean . . .” He corrects himself as if he realizes what he’s said has been too on the money. “I mean, I wouldn’t kid you about something like that. It was up in the North Fork, but he’s okay. I found them this morning when I was asked by the county to check on his truck to see if he’d come out of the woods yet.”

  “How badly is he hurt?” I swallow. I’m nervous to hear the answer.

  “He looks worse than he is. He’s lucky he had the dog with him, to keep him from freezing. I haven’t gotten the full report, but from what I could see, he’s got some lacerations and puncture wounds. He’s able to walk—or limp, I should say. He and the dog hiked out yesterday. I found him early this morning.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes. He’s been recovering in KRMC all afternoon.” Kalispell Regional Medical Center, one of the only two hospitals in the valley. “Can I bring you the dog?”

  “I’m going to pick up my daughter now and we’ll go straight to the hospital. Why don’t you meet us there?”

  “Sure thing,” he says, and I wait for him to hang up first and watch my own screen go dull. I place the phone down on the console next to me and sit on the side of the road and look around. A skiff of snow covers everything, including each spindly branch on every tree, and it seems that the branches have gone bare overnight. The sky above is clear, and I think it’s beautiful, but that beauty pushes the stinging shock of Rose further into my heart and settles deep into my bones. Monty’s words—you’re the last person I’d kid with—snake through my mind.

  • • •

  Emily and I find Reeve’s room on the third floor, and I take that as a good sign that he’s not in the intensive care unit. We stop at the nurses’ station and ask if the person in room 318 is taking visitors, and her face breaks into a big smile, and I’m instantly relieved. “Why, yes, he’s doing quite well. Are you family?”

  The question surprises me for a second, but I’m not sure why it should. “Yes,” I say. “This is Emily. His daughter.”

  “Oh.” She smiles politely at Emily, then looks back at me. “He’s no longer feverish, and he’s been out of surgery for a bit now. You can go in.”

  “Surgery?”

  “Oh, you don’t know. Well, I guess it has been a little crazy around here. He was kind of out of it, as you can imagine, when the helicopter brought him in. We weren’t sure who to contact. Anyway, yes, surgery for some orthopedic repairs to the muscles and ligaments in his leg and a bit of reconstruction around his left ear.” She touches her own ear as if she wants to make sure hers is still intact. “Your daddy is one brave man.” She looks down at Emily.

  Emily giggles.

  “Yes sirree. One brave man.” The nurse shakes her head as if it’s too much to think about, having a surprise encounter with a grizzly. Emily continues to beam. I’m relieved that this is turning out to be less frightening for her than I anticipated. When I told her in the parking lot at school after she’d gotten strapped up in her booster seat, she’d sat motionless, her eyes wide as she stared at me. I turned to face her from the driver’s seat and explained it clearly. I must have used my work voice, because she didn’t know how to read that, so she stayed blank, waiting to gauge how I felt before committing to any emotions on her end. “So,” I said when she didn’t break into a cry, didn’t really respond at all, “we’re going to visit him now, at the hospital. He might look a little scary, but there’s nothing to be frightened of. He’ll probably have bandages on him, and do you want to know what the really cool thing is?”

  “What?”

  “We get to keep McKay while your daddy recovers.”

  “Yay!” She broke into a smile. “Kay Kay!” But it felt forced, like she provided the response she thought I wanted even though she was still trying to process things.

  I turned the car on then and drove straight to the hospital, peeking now and then at her in the mirror, staying quiet so she could have the time to think. She simply stared out her window, somber, as if she already had registered since she’d fired the gun the day before that something was different in her life, even though she didn’t know what or how to describe any of it.

  Now, before the nurse, I’m glad to see her giggle. We walk to room 318. The door is ajar, so I peek my head around and see that Reeve is lying with his eyes closed. A white bandage wraps around his head and left ear. There are also large bandages circling his arm and his upper thigh, which is elevated and has an ice machine pumping an ice bag around it. An IV snakes from his other arm.

  We slowly step closer and I reach out and touch his shoulder, trying not to startle him. He opens his eyes, and when he sees me, he smiles instantly. A tenderness shoots through my heart, and I smile back. I don’t do simple emotion all that well unless it’s anger or the raw animal love I have for Emily. So I’m surprised my heart does a little cartwheel now. His eyes are calm and still and they remind me of Emily’s. When I had her and they put her tiny body in my arms, she seemed so foreign, this alien I had carried around but was suddenly exposed to the light of day. Her eyes were placid and so calm. I had felt the cartwheel then—uncomplicated love mixed with the strangeness, with the newness of it all flooding through me.

  Reeve then looks at Emily, still smiling. “Hey, chickadee,” he says, the same thing I call her, and I wonder if he’s heard me call her that, but it doesn’t matter.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she says, her eyes large to see him so beaten up.

  “Come around to this side,” he says, and she walks around to the edge of the bed that has his good arm, leans over. He wraps her into a tight hug. “It’s so good to see you. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you too.”

  “How are you feeling?” I ask him.

  “Better,” he says. “Much better.”

  “You’ve had quite the time in the woods,” I say. “It’s really unbelievable.”

  “Yeah, everyone keeps saying how lucky I am.” His voice sounds groggy.

  “You are. Unlucky is getting accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Lucky”—I wink—“is surviving a grizzly attack after you’ve gone out into the deep woods by yourself in the fall.” I laugh.

  “That’s a good way to put it,” he says. “Actually, even though every bone in my body hurts, I feel very fortunate.” He reaches for Emily again and squeezes her.

  I’m about to go sit in the only chair in the room when an older man comes and stands in the doorway. I recognize him immediately as Reeve’s neighbor. “Mr. Wallace,” I say. “Good to see you. Come in.”

  “Ali”—he steps into the room—“I haven’t seen you in some time.” He greets Emily too, then focuses on Reeve. I step away to allow him to move closer toward him. “I knew it,” he exclaims. “I just knew it was you when I saw the red helicopter this morning. I had a bad feeling, so I waited and then called the hospital to ask. They wouldn’t give out your name but admitted when I prodded that there’d been a bear attack. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” Reeve says.r />
  “I came here anyway because I just knew. When I asked for you at the service desk, they gave me this room number. Oh my god, I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. What was it like?”

  Reeve’s eyes shift to Emily and he gives a small shrug.

  Wallace registers that he doesn’t want to go into details around her. “Okay,” he says. “Later, I want to hear about this later.”

  “You’re still here?” Reeve asks Wallace. His voice sounds crackly, as if he’s parched, but I sense there’s something in the topic I don’t understand.

  “Yep, still here,” Wallace grumbles.

  “Emily,” I say, “I saw a children’s area around the corner. Should we go ask the nurse if we can get you some coloring books? Maybe draw your daddy a unicorn?”

  She looks to Reeve, and he nods. “Give me a kiss first.” He points at his bandage near his ear.

  “Yuck,” she says. “Daddy, I can’t kiss you there.”

  “How about here, then?” He points to one of the few unbruised clear areas of his face, below his right cheekbone. She leans over and kisses him, and we leave the room for a moment to give Wallace some time with Reeve.

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Wednesday

  “SO YOU KNEW it was me?”

  “Yep, I knew.”

  “Could have been some elk hunter.”

  “I know it could, but I just had this feeling. You were up so high when I saw you, and you were heading higher. Foolish.” He shakes his head.

  I want to bring up the fish he was carrying again, but I don’t have the energy to quibble. It’s still bugging me, though, why he hasn’t gone home to see his wife, to Oregon. “I’ve earned the right to know why you haven’t gone back,” I say. “It was the only thing on my mind hobbling out of those woods,” I tease.

  Wallace laughs. “You’re relentless. Seriously, that’s what you’re thinking about while you lay here all broken up and stitched back together?”