Beatrice beat her tail against the backseat furiously again, somehow understanding they were going for a hike.
An evening thunderstorm had moved through an hour earlier, leaving raindrops like strung crystal beads on the cottage windows. Moonlight now peeked out from behind fast-moving clouds, throwing shadows into the woods like light from behind a slowly moving fan.
Fiona saw men in those shadows. She couldn’t tear herself away from the window, had been unable to do so for days now. She stared out over the back of the couch for hours at a time, like a cat or dog, her imagination running wild. She’d been here before, nearly in this same situation, forcing her to question how it was that she might face such a thing twice in one lifetime when some women-most women-never experienced it even once. Did she invite it upon herself, as some had suggested? Did she ask for it, subconsciously want it? If so, what kind of twisted individual did that make her? How could she not know her own self?
She fell into a trance of self-hatred and confusion, her eyes glazed over for minutes at a time, not seeing, not hearing, yet unable to tear herself away. She thought this must be the same sick attraction that people had to horror films. Morbid curiosity. She had projects to complete. Phone calls to return. She needed a shower. Some food. But there she sat, legs tucked up into her chest, chin on the back of the couch. The terror she’d experienced a few nights before had been the anomaly; she rarely felt such things anymore. They’d been burned out of her, as if her body had developed an immunity to fear. It was not that she felt brave-far from it. Numb more aptly described her. Resolved. For all the work, all the so-called progress, the countless hours poured into not seeing herself as a victim, she had little to show for it. An e-mail along with one thud on a wall, and she’d recoiled, reverted, regressed. She’d failed to find her way out, knowing with absolute certainty what this was about, whom this was about.
That was why, when the sound of a car came up the driveway, when its engine idled a long thirty seconds before shutting off, she knew in a moment of clarity what was coming, and yet felt helpless to prevent it. She didn’t believe in fate; destiny was, to an extent, something one could control. There were external forces and powers, certainly, and these were things to be reckoned with. But there was also determination and hard work and, from somewhere in the distant reaches of her mind, this idea of faith. For all the times she’d told herself to fight back if ever given this chance, she now felt more inclined to accept the inevitable. Monsters were real.
She knew this firsthand.
A knock on the door.
She held her legs more tightly.
Noises in the bushes.
When Walt’s face pressed to the glass, sliced into stripes by the blinds, staring into the darkened room, she suppressed a laugh, covering her mouth and slumping down to where she hoped he might not see her.
The gap between what she’d anticipated and seeing Walt was too enormous, too much for her to bridge at a moment’s notice. Instead, she froze, hoping he might go away. And then, by the time she’d come to her senses and wanted to see him, longing for his company, she was far too embarrassed to move. How could she possibly explain herself when her one great wish in life, the sum of all her effort, was to never have to explain herself to anyone? To be accepted for who she was, not who she’d been.
He tapped on the glass. She willed him to go away.
And this particular time her will proved the stronger. She thought she heard the door to the main house close, but didn’t get up to look. She knew she owed him, if not an explanation, at least an excuse, but didn’t pick up the phone.
The motor came back to life and the Cherokee’s backup lights shone brightly against the blinds. Slats of light flooded the room as she hung her head, cursing herself for squandering such a chance.
The sound of the motor mixed with the hum of the refrigerator and the rush of blood across her eardrums, and finally faded completely. For the next twenty minutes she sobbed beneath a blanket. Entirely alone.
As the low rumble of a vehicle broke the silence, she knew it had to be him, and she mentally thanked him for giving her a second chance. She hurried to a mirror and worked on her face, wondering if it could be salvaged. A car door thumped shut. She did the best she could: some tissue to the eyes, some lipstick, and she headed to the door to greet him.
Walt and Beatrice ascended the hill trail, the dog working ahead of him, swinging left and right in unpredictable patterns, her nose to the ground. The only discernible sounds were her huffing and snorting as she vacuumed the pine straw. He would never understand how the seemingly random nature of a dog’s scenting could produce results, but he’d witnessed it too many times to doubt its success. The only command he’d given her had been “Find it,” a birding command that had been honed and modified by trainers to have her search out a human scent, dead or alive. She could do so with laser precision. Given her current agitated state, she had not yet locked onto any scent of importance, a fact that had Walt looking over his shoulder back at the lights of the Engleton place, and up the slope toward the ridge that led to Hillabrand’s. Without Gilly’s silence, the more intelligent strategy would have been to work Beatrice up that ridge, attempting to pick up the intruder’s scent. But Gilly’s well-being trumped any such notion.
He pushed himself more quickly up the hill, burdened by the added weight and encumbrance of the emergency backpack and by carrying the shotgun in his right hand. His radio called him-backup was just arriving to the Cherokee, fifteen to twenty minutes behind him.
Beatrice stopped abruptly and lifted her head. Walt paused as well, watching her. She scented the air, looked back at him, her eyes iridescent in the glare of his headlamp, and then continued on. False alarm.
A quarter mile later he broke off trail and Beatrice extended her search area, ensuring they weren’t leaving a scent behind. Soon, she was working ahead of him again, her paws crunching, her nose sucking and snorting. She would disappear for a few minutes and then circle back to measure his pace and reestablish herself. He would cluck for her, letting her know he’d seen her. It was too dark, and he was in too big a hurry to do any tracking; he left all the work up to her.
His thoughts wandered back to Fiona and a series of mental photographs in his mind’s eye: the dark shape of her huddled on the couch; the chair misplaced in the center of the room; the absolute dark of the place-both the cottage and the main house without a single light inside, but the motion-sensing exterior lights working; the calm of the pond; the night sounds all around him. Had he seen her car? He thought it had been there, but couldn’t remember its exact location. Why had Kira been hiding behind that tree with a baseball bat?
Beatrice circled back from the dark and nudged his hand: she’d found something. How long had she been gone? One or two minutes. Walt picked up his pace, and in her excitement she rushed ahead of him and out of the glare of his headlamp.
Thirty seconds later, she reappeared and returned to nudge his hand, her tail beating furiously.
“Good girl! Find it! Find it!”
He was jogging now, the backpack bouncing, the funnel of light in front of him setting everything in the forest in motion as shadows stretched and danced. His boots crunched on the trail, his breathing was raspy and heightened.
He recognized his location. He was just below the level ground of the illegal campsite. Bea had led him around to the northern edge.
There, ahead of him, was the unmistakable shape of a human form, its back to a tree. Unmoving. He whistled Bea away-imagining it as a crime scene before he reached the corpse. She jerked as if a rope had been attached, returning to his side and heeling. He reached down and patted her head.
Gilly Menquez came into the beam of the headlamp. Something in his hand at his side. A gun?
A bottle of wine.
Empty.
Walt came to a stop in front of the man. Menquez was snoring. Passed out. Walt nudged him with the toe of his boot. Menquez snorted but didn’t awak
en.
Walt’s eyes drifted back into the dark forest, imagining the lights of the Engleton place, the black pearl of the small pond cut into the hill. Anger welled up in him. He staggered back and slumped against a tree, his radio already in hand.
12
Fiona came awake to the rough sensation of Angel licking her hand.
The bird songs told her it was early morning. As she blinked repeatedly to clear her eyes, as her fingers uncurled and absentmindedly stroked Angel, she became acutely aware of a hangover headache, dry mouth, and blurred vision. She tried to sit up, but the pain in her head cautioned her to take her time. She reached back and felt a long horizontal knot along the base of her skull, then looked up to see the edge of her kitchen counter directly above and connected the two. To her left, the collapsible footstool was overturned, and this too fit into the picture.
Angel took the opportunity to climb onto her chest and settle into a deep and satisfied purr, and Fiona continued to scratch her behind the ears. She tried to think back, to solve the mystery of finding herself lying on the floor with a lump on her head, but nothing came to her. Only silence where an image should have been. From that silence came the sound of a car, but that had turned out to be Walt-or was that even the right night? Had there been a second car that same night, had it been an altogether different night?
She lifted Angel off and eased her to the floor and tried again to sit up, this time managing to wedge her elbows under her. Her vision woozy, she felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up. And though the pain drummed intensely at the back of her skull, radiating down through her and provoking the urge to retch, she identified the vertigo and the unexplained silence as the source of her fear. For the fear overcame her like a wave and drowned her. As she vomited, she hoped the purge might clear her head and help her to reorient herself-to remember something, anything. But it was as if someone had placed her there on the floor, had played some awful trick on her, abandoning her with no hints or clues about the cause of her condition, that she was the object of a joke gone horribly awry.
The smell of the vomit disgusted her and made her move. She sat up, pushed away from it, and struggled forward onto hands and knees. If she hadn’t felt the bump she would have sworn she was severely hungover and wouldn’t have been surprised to find a near-empty bottle on the coffee table. A few times in her life she’d drunk herself into blackouts, although not since college. She couldn’t imagine she’d done this to herself, but at that point she would have welcomed any explanation. Anything would have been better than the mental silence that stretched as an empty bridge between her present condition and whatever had come before.
She struggled to her feet and, keeping a hand out on the back of a stool, a wall, and a doorknob, found her way into the bathroom, where she undressed and showered. The blurriness of her vision came and went, and when she threw up for a second time, she told herself to get to the hospital. Not trusting her own ability to drive, she called over to the main house, hoping for Kira, but she never picked up.
With the hospital less than a mile away, she moved slowly toward her Subaru, only to realize she was wearing only her bathrobe. She turned and admired her cottage as if seeing it for the first time. The driveway of Mexican pavers formed a kind of courtyard between the main house and her cottage and there was something there, something that connected everything. Again she tried to fill the void of what had come before the fall-for having found no bottle or evidence of drink, she assumed she’d tripped over the footstool. Her brain was functioning enough to tell her that the only viable explanation for the knot on her head was that she’d been walking backward at the time. Away from something. And that it must have been something compelling to keep her attention off the footstool behind her.
But as she drove off the property, even these thoughts became difficult to recall. She couldn’t firmly place where she’d been when she woke up. She touched her hair and found it wet, but didn’t remember having taken a shower.
She clutched the wheel more tightly, white-knuckled, focusing on the car and road like when she’d driven solo for the first time. That was her only glimmer of hope: she could recall the moment with absolute clarity-sixteen years old and terrified, her father in the passenger seat.
She convinced herself she wasn’t going out of her mind-only that she’d just lost a very important piece of it, a piece she hoped like hell to reclaim.
13
Looking out his back window at the sway of the aspens in a light breeze, Walt recalled a time when his two girls had played just as they were now, but with another woman by their sides. He was grateful for Lisa’s help, her tireless patience, her willingness to both discipline and comfort the girls, but he would have preferred Gail despite all her failings as a mother. The night before, he and the girls had watched a DVD that had landed on his office desk, a documentary about a Mongolian camel who wanted nothing to do with her offspring. The story had had a happy ending: a prayer, a reunion of mother and child, and a weeping camel. There would be no happy ending for his family, for his daughters. From now on the girls would be shuttled between two lives, two very different households, and no matter how hard he tried to explain it, it would be up to them to sort it all out, to make sense of the fractures they would encounter for years to come. He hoped to be the glue to hold it all together, to mend the fractures or at least keep them from widening. He could keep the day-to-day routine working; he knew routine, respected its importance. But watching Lisa laugh and play with them-on their level-he couldn’t help but see Fiona out there-all four of them out there, laughing and teasing and rebuilding something. It was absurd to make such a jump, but now that he’d crossed one line, the other wasn’t so hard, the distance not so great.
He’d clear a day soon and take the girls camping-although they’d probably prefer the shopping malls in Boise. Or maybe shopping and a movie and a motel with a pool.
“You okay?” It was Lisa. He hadn’t seen her approaching.
“Yeah. Good. Real good,” he said.
“You looked a little zoned.”
“I think I just came to an important realization,” he said. “I’ve been laboring under this notion that the girls and I need to suffer because Gail’s gone. You showed me something out there just now.”
“Me?”
“Fun is fun,” he said. “We’re going to start having fun around here.”
“I like the sound of that,” Lisa said, “and I know the girls will too.”
“Thank you,” he said to her, making sure she felt his sincerity. “You’ve practically been living here for far too long. That’s going to change.”
“No problem,” she said. She turned to call the girls. Walt caught himself glancing at the wall phone and thinking of Fiona.
Two nights had passed since the Hillabrand intruder, and still nothing but a few voice mails back and forth. She’d been pleasant enough but not gushing, and he’d expected gushing. She wasn’t feeling well but didn’t want him visiting. He tried to take it in stride. It wasn’t easy.
He debated leaving her yet another message, but couldn’t imagine a more adolescent move.
He returned to the office and sat at his desk, unable to keep his eye off the phone and e-mail. He read over a proposal currently in front of the county commissioners to privately host the Dalai Lama in Sun Valley, an outdoor event expected to draw an audience of between twenty and fifty thousand, with at least ten thousand coming from out of town. There was no way his small office could manage the traffic and simultaneously guarantee the Dalai Lama’s safety; no way he was going to turn over that responsibility to a private security firm, as was being proposed. He nearly began drafting an e-mail, but changed his mind. It could wait.
He reviewed other paperwork instead. A man held in their drunk tank had suffered convulsions and was attempting to sue the county. A suspected rapist needed transfer to Ada County. He signed some paperwork, sent a few e-mails, and made several calls. But each time he reached
for the phone, he thought of her, and debated driving out to her place again.
Nancy, his assistant, stood in his doorway. “A body’s been found. Mile marker one twenty-five. Some kids, an Adopt-A-Highway crew, discovered it. Tommy Brandon responded and called it in. Says it isn’t pretty.”
Walt checked the clock. He was scheduled to pick up the Seattle detective, Boldt, at the airport.
“Okay, tell him I’m on my way,” Walt said. “And have someone meet that flight and get the sergeant settled, will you, please?”
“No problem.”
Typically, news of any death ran a feeling of dread through him as he always thought first of his late brother. But that wasn’t the case. He was instead unusually grateful to be called away from his desk, to be rid of the monotony. On the way out the door, he took one last look at his desk phone. Longing.
“And call Kenshaw,” he added, trying to make it sound like an afterthought. He appreciated the excuse to contact her. “Tell her to bring her gear and meet us. Same with the coroner. And Barge Levy. And you’d better check with Meridian to test their availability.” The state crime lab would be involved if there was a determination of foul play.
On his way to the Jeep Cherokee, he identified a lightness to his step, and tried to suppress it.
Several cars and trucks lined the breakdown lanes on both sides of State Highway 75. Fiona’s Subaru was not among them.
Parked on the shoulder behind Brandon’s cruiser were two pickup trucks, one with six Boy Scouts in the truck bed, all armed with pokers and Day-Glo garbage bags. He felt bad that they’d discovered the body, and urged Brandon to release them and get them “the hell away from here.”
Brandon had cobbled together a police tape barrier using a real estate sign, a lug wrench, and a broken ski pole as fence posts. Walt spotted the body at the epicenter of the confined area.
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