Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  Moments after this phenomenon began, rage roared up inside him, so strong it spun Rory around and brought his unprotected fists hard against the wood of the house, a fire out of control.

  The porch was wide enough; Anna moved discreetly out of the way until the violence burned itself out. So vehement was his outburst, she knew it couldn't be sustained for long.

  The pounding stopped. His knuckles weren't raw or bleeding. Even in extremity he'd chosen not to harm himself. A good sign. The constricted sobs subsided, leaving his face red and dry with unspent tears. At length he turned from the side of the house and looked at her, eyes empty after the storm.

  "So," Anna said. "Am I to take it she'd been beating on him for a while?"

  Rory collapsed. Back against the wood he slid down till his butt was on the porch and his knees poked up as high as his shoulders. The rough siding rucked his T-shirt up under his armpits but he seemed not to notice.

  Anna sat down opposite him, her shoulders against the railing, her feet folded under her. After the weeping and wailing, the soft sounds of the park settled around them like a blessing. Needles in a great old lodgepole pine stirred and whispered overhead. From somewhere nearby came the purposeful skritching sounds of a squirrel squirreling away winter supplies. Into this Rory heaved a great sigh, blowing out unnamed mental toxins.

  "Why don't you tell me about it?" Anna asked kindly.

  Rory shot her a look as if her kindness was out of character. Anna was stung. She was always kind to animals and had been known to be kind to humans on those rare occasions when they deserved it.

  "What's there to tell?" He looked past Anna, over the rail to the whispering pine boughs. By his tone she guessed he was shooting for blase. He only managed deep weariness.

  His question was one Anna couldn't answer so she sat quietly enjoying the sun on her face and arms. Ephemeral warmth with an underlying hint of cruelty, the northern sun touched with cleansing power. In Mississippi, in summer, the sun struck like a blow. Only idiots and Yankees stood anywhere but in the patches of shade provided by the gracious old oaks and pines. Anna'd missed the scalpel touch of sunlight at higher elevations.

  Rory sighed again then began to give up the shame he'd been carrying in secret for his father for so many years. "I don't know why it started. Mom—my real mom—died when I was little and it was just me and Dad for a while. That was okay, I guess. I don't remember much, really. Just a lot of quiet and a lot of TV. A lot of TV. I remember I thought it was pretty cool that I could stay up late watching television with Dad when my friends had to go to bed at eight."

  Dad. He'd used the word twice. Now that Carolyn was dead, Les had been given back his title. Anna took that as a good omen for the future.

  "Carolyn came along maybe two years later. Dad met her at a party at Boeing. Or maybe it was somewhere else. I really don't know. I don't care. God." Rory stopped a minute, breathing out whatever memories had derailed his narrative.

  Anna sat quietly, hoping none of the boys in the dorm would come rocketing out and wreck the chemistry of the moment. She had a hunch if Rory stopped talking now, he might never start again.

  "Mostly I remember how much fun she was. It was like we'd been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized. I guess Dad and I hadn't got out much since Mom died. I sort of remember I used to do things after school—you know, kid things like Little League or whatever. But sometime after Mom, I'd sort of stopped, I think. Dad worked late a lot. I guess there was nobody to take me places and pick me up or something.

  "Then Carolyn shows up and we're doing things again. Lots of stuff: water parks and fairs and circuses and hockey games. She was always laughing, teasing Dad. She did everything for us. She'd cook and she cleaned the house. I remember that, though I couldn't have been much more than seven or eight. I came home from school one day and the house was bigger, lighter. The curtains were open. Dad's piles of newspapers and magazines were gone. My clothes were hung up and my bed was made. Like when Mom was alive.

  "She was at our house all the time. Dad didn't work late much anymore.

  "They got married pretty soon after that. They hadn't known each other six months. I know that for sure. Later Carolyn was always saying things like, 'I must've been out of my head marrying you when I'd only known you five months. Five fucking months. God. By month six I knew I'd made one hell of a mistake, that's for sure.'"

  Rory probably related the words verbatim. As he said them his face curled into a sneering mask and his voice was charged with such contempt Anna winced. That particular scene had evidently been burned into his brain.

  "That was later though. I guess I remember her teasing got mean and she got really jealous—had to know where Dad was all the time and went into a fit if he was like two minutes late home from work. She'd driven it and timed herself so she knew exactly how long it took. She got real picky about the house. It had to be just so. And dinner was at six-fifteen every night and don't be late or else. If Dad didn't say the right compliments about the food she'd go off on him.

  "They started having huge fights. Not the big ones in front of me. Always after I went to bed. My room was upstairs and way at the back of the house but I could still hear them. Not words, just shouting. Crashes. Crying. In the morning sometimes things would be broken. I was older by this time, I must've been twelve because I remember Mrs. Dent, my sixth-grade teacher, sending me to a counselor because I kept falling asleep in class. The counselor was okay but sort of fixated on drugs, like I was a junkie. I didn't tell him anything."

  Rory looked at Anna. It was the first time he'd dragged his eyes from visions of the past. "I thought it was Dad," he said clearly. "I thought Dad was beating Carolyn. They tell us about that stuff in school and you see movies about it on TV all the time. I didn't even know it could be the other way around. I mean, Dad was stronger than she was. Why didn't he stop her?"

  The question was pushed out with such intensity Anna could tell he'd been living with it for a long time. Now, with childlike insistence, he was waiting for her to answer it, and she couldn't.

  "Did you ever ask him?" she said instead.

  Rory was disappointed. He slumped back against the wall and his gaze slipped away again to other times. "Once," he replied. "He said she didn't mean it. He said she was high-strung. He said it was hard for her to be married to an older man. He said he could be pretty aggravating sometimes." Rory was silent for a minute and Anna thought he'd finished. But he wasn't. In a voice constricted with rage and shame he said, "Then he told me he didn't mind. He was in the hospital when he said it. Carolyn had hit him in the face with this metal stool she kept in the kitchen to reach high shelves. The underside of the seat was real sharp. She nearly cut half his face off. You can still see the scar." Anna had seen it—the thin white line that marked off a semicircle of Lester's face. They'd been looking for a motive for the slicing off of Carolyn's brow, cheek and half her nose. This certainly fit the bill. For both father and son.

  "Did she ever hit you?" Anna asked.

  "Not really. She started to get after me once when I was thirteen or fourteen. I was in the backyard hitting a ball into the fence and something set her off. She came out and headed for me. It scared me so bad I raised the bat. I think I'd have used it too. By then I'd pretty much figured out why Dad was always bruised or limping—she'd already put him in the hospital twice, once for a broken collarbone and the other time for a ruptured eardrum, I think—anyway, her coming at me like that was scary. When she saw I meant to fight she just stopped. Then she laughed and said, 'That's right, Rory, don't take any shit. Not from anybody.'"

  "She never knocked you around when you were little? Slapped you, shook you, anything like that?"

  "Just Dad," Rory said.

  In a sick sort of way it made sense. Carolyn wasn't into child abuse, just the abuse of men. At fourteen Rory had been becoming a man.

  Maybe in Carolyn's world there were only two kinds of men: those who
m you beat and those who beat you.

  "You seemed to get along with her well enough," Anna said mildly.

  "Yeah. Well. At least she didn't let anybody beat on her."

  That pretty much summed it up. Rory'd gotten lost between a stepmother he feared and a father he'd been ashamed of. A child's natural survival instincts kicked in and he aligned himself with the stronger caregiver, learned from her to scorn his father. Anna had to wonder how far it had gone.

  "Ever get so frustrated with Les you wanted to smack him upside the head yourself?" she asked sympathetically.

  "Sometimes," Rory admitted. Anger animated his voice as he elaborated. "How could anyone not? He'd get like those little yippy dogs that squeal and tuck their tails between their legs before you've even kicked them. Then you want to kick them."

  Anna understood the phenomenon. "Ever do it? Ever kick them?"

  "Hit Dad?" He thought about what, on the surface, was a simple question for a long time. Too long to be fabricating a lie. Anna guessed that on so many occasions over so many years Rory had wanted to strike out against the humiliation he felt in the person of his father, that he was either making sure he'd never actually done it or he was counting the number of strikes. Anna dearly hoped it was the former. To be beaten by one's own child must be a torment only Shakespeare and God could comprehend.

  At length Rory spoke. "I wanted to," he admitted. "But I never did. Mom—my real mom—wouldn't have liked it. I wanted Dad to fight back. At least I did at first. Sometimes I was glad when Carolyn hurt him. He was so ... so pathetic. It made me sick."

  Rory looked sick. Anna felt sick. They sat in sick, wretched silence for a while, the ghosts of Rory's childhood twining about them.

  Anna fought off the hopeless lethargy they exuded and asked, "Did you ever fight back for him?"

  Rory'd been sitting, head back against the wood siding, eyes closed. The sun touched the down on his cheeks, lighting the fine golden hairs, giving him an ethereal, unfinished look. He opened his eyes at Anna's question and the lines of his face firmed up. "You mean did I kill Carolyn?" he asked without seeming much to care whether Anna thought him a murderer or not.

  "More or less," Anna admitted.

  "I didn't," he said simply. "I was just plain lost."

  Anna couldn't tell if he was telling the truth or not. He'd closed his eyes again, gone away to someplace inside his head and she could read nothing but distance and weariness on his face.

  "I believe you," she said. If he was telling the truth, her lie couldn't hurt. If he wasn't, it might put him off his guard. "Is this why you were blackmailing me?" she asked. "So I wouldn't find out your dad was beaten?"

  Rory nodded wordlessly.

  "Is that bullshit over?"

  "It's over," he said.

  "It sucked, Rory. Really sucked."

  "I know."

  "I've got to go." She levered herself up from the porch floor.

  "You gonna talk to Dad?" Rory asked without opening his eyes.

  "I thought I would."

  "If Dad killed her I hope you never can prove it."

  Anna didn't say anything. Had it not been for the butchery, she might have shared the sentiment. The act of cutting away Carolyn's face was anger gone so insane its perpetrator had best be caught and removed from society.

  Sudden light-headedness reminded Anna she'd not eaten since the night before, and she set off on foot to walk the half-mile to Joan's house. Expecting to spend the day in the resource management office, she'd not thought to ask Harry for the use of a vehicle. After food, transportation was next on her list.

  Rarely did Anna find it a burden to walk instead of ride. This afternoon was no exception. The mere act of putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward completely on one's own will and strength, gave life a sense of purpose and control. And there was that adage about regular movement of the legs that stimulated orderly progression in the brain.

  Houses, trees, cars, gopher holes and thimbleberry bushes flowed by externally. Internally Anna pondered borrowed shame—Rory's for his dad—abandonment, fear, self-worth, violence, childhood trauma, family roles: scapegoat, victim, hero, mascot. The bits and pieces of codependency theory that she'd picked up from listening to her sister, Molly, had a place in the shattered family dynamics that Rory had grown up in the midst of.

  His natural mother had abandoned him via death when he was five. According to Rory's account, Les had abandoned him over the next two years via depression. Then Carolyn came on the scene and the neuroses and psychoses really started to roll.

  That sort of thing didn't make people into murderers. But it was bound to help. The circumstances of Rory's thirty-six hours missing had, at first, seemed to make his murdering Carolyn remote to the point of ludicrousness. Taken with this new information, Anna was seeing it in a new light. Rory is traumatized by the attack of the bear slashing at a person—Joan—for whom he cares, and threatening, indirectly since the bear did not see or approach him, his own safety. Rory runs, panicked. Then, quite by accident, he meets another frightening figure, Carolyn, who for much of his life played the same role as the grizzly. Under the influence of fear, opportunism and post-traumatic-stress disorder, Rory strikes out, kills her.

  That was as far as Anna could spin her tale of Rory Van Slyke's mental gyrations. Hiding the body—sure, anybody who didn't want to get caught would do that. The same went for stashing the cameras and taking the exposed film if pictures had been snapped by the victim. Slicing off face-steaks and carting them away were something else again.

  Joan wasn't home and Anna was disappointed. Not only did she want to lighten her load of slime by sharing it with her friend, but after the exposing of a wound Rory'd kept resolutely bandaged for so long, Anna figured he'd need a shoulder to cry on. Since her own were too bony and prickly for wailing-wall duty, she'd hoped Joan would volunteer to check on the boy.

  Joan's office number got Anna through to voice mail. The tale was too convoluted to deal with electronically and she hung up without leaving a message.

  The refrigerator grudgingly offered up a piece of cheese the mold could easily be cut off of and a handful of miniature peeled carrots in a sandwich bag. Having rid the cheese of alien life forms, Anna shoved the lot into a piece of pita bread and ate as she walked back toward park headquarters.

  Harry was out. His secretary, Maryanne, was out. It was lunchtime and everyone but the receptionist had gone elsewhere. Effectively stopped for the moment, Anna dumped herself in Maryanne's swivel chair outside the chief ranger's office to wait on her betters.

  Snoopy was not how Anna chose to characterize herself. She much preferred the term "inquisitive" or, at worst, "impatient." Working on other people's timetables, waiting docilely until they were ready to feed her items of information, seemed a waste of time and good spirits. This theory went a long way toward happily blinding her to such crimes as trespass and invasion of privacy.

  While she waited she sifted through the papers on Maryanne's desk, careful not to disarrange anything overmuch. Considering herself absolutely justified, still Anna chose not to get caught. Copies of the 10-343s and 10-344s—case incident reports and criminal incident reports—were stacked to one side of the computer. Harry Ruick was a hands-on sort of guy and had the park's reports come across his desk, even at the rarified level of management to which he had risen.

  Leafing through them Anna got a dim sum of the crimes du jour in Glacier National Park. Taking her time, she read of littering, campfires out of bounds, a horse trailer towed up by Polebridge Ranger Station, two fire rings recently rehabilitated in the northwestern quadrant of Flattop Mountain, petty thievery in the campground, food improperly stored. She'd been in law enforcement too many years not to sweat the small stuff. Felons were consistently caught because they were speeding, loitering, littering and parking in front of fire hydrants. Except in the movies, criminals could usually be counted on to be careless. There was a logic to it. Who, if willing t
o commit robbery or murder or mayhem, would have any qualms about driving with a taillight out?

  From the incidents, she moved on to the crimes. Nothing leapt off the pages at her. It was pretty standard stuff: driving under the influence, smoking dope in the campgrounds. One stolen car, one statutory rape— both allegedly committed by concessions workers in West Glacier.

  The only report of any interest—and that only because she'd heard it mentioned on the radio a couple of times—was the abandoned horse trailer found on the northside. She flipped back till she found it and read through it again. Parked off the road, its location obscured imperfectly by brush dragged over the tracks, was a 1974 Ford pickup truck, blue, with Florida plates. No insurance or registration papers inside. Attached to it was an old horse trailer, no plates, gutted and used to haul something other than a horse. Drug dogs were brought in. No hits. The truck was registered to a Carl G. Micou of Tampa, Florida. The plates were run: no wants, no warrants. An address was found for Mr. Micou but the phone number given had been disconnected, no new number listed. The old number had been traced to a business, Fetterman's Adventure Trails on Highway 41 outside Tampa. Fetterman's had closed its doors about the time the phone was disconnected.

  Odd but not pertinent. Anna put the report back where she'd found it and looked around for something else with which to pass the time. Maryanne's computer was only mildly tempting. Anna was convinced that computers, like horses, could smell fear and turn on the operator when mishandled.

  A manila folder marked "C. Van Slyke" offered itself up from the "Out" basket. Within were Harry's notes from the Les Van Slyke interview, of which Anna had already been given a copy. The transcription from the tape of her interview with Rory was there, she noted, and was struck by Maryanne's efficiency. The remaining papers were new to Anna. The secretary had stuck a Post-It note on the paper-clipped pages that read "cc to A. Pigeon." Anna felt a sense of failure. In her home park, the Natchez Trace Parkway, she'd not been able to command the cooperation from her field rangers that was being accorded her in Glacier as a matter of course.