Marian’s first project after returning from Alberta had been a bighorn sheep study in Utah, with Arkansas and Yeti. Tate had been assigned to a wolf study in Washington, with Ranger, one of the program’s newest adoptees. It was on Saturday, July 15, while Marian was on the sheep study, five months into her and Tate’s relationship, that she’d received word of Tate’s death. The sun had been setting over an escarpment of sandstone, the remaining daylight glowing a rich garnet and lavender. She’d picked up her phone to take a picture and had seen that she had a missed call from Lyle. Already she feared the worst, because for the past two days Tate had not returned any of her calls.
“Tell me,” Marian said, when she called Lyle back. “It’s Tate, isn’t it?”
It had been all Marian could do to pack up and make the drive back to The Den. And there was Emily Marsh, the summer intern who’d been working with Marian, and the two dogs, and the night wind blowing through the rolled-down windows. Tears spilled down Marian’s face as she drove, and Emily offered more than once to take over, but Marian said no, she needed to drive.
There’d been a vigil when Marian had returned, around a bonfire in one of the fields. Trainer played his guitar and sang songs by the Beatles and Bob Dylan and James Taylor and Don McLean: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “American Pie,” “Fire and Rain,” “Let It Be,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and the handlers pulled up the lyrics on their phones and sang along. Different ones in the group shared stories, and Marian laughed and cried with the others until the sun rose.
But the next day Jenness had knocked on Marian’s door and told her Lyle needed to see her and to meet him at the kennels. Lyle had checked on Arkansas and Yeti, as was routine when a handler returned from a study, and he’d found the dogs whimpering and in rough shape. Lyle said he hated to do this to Marian right after she’d learned about Tate, “but did you see this?” He showed Marian the pads on the dogs’ paws, raw and cracked and bleeding. And Marian dropped down beside the dogs and took their paws in her hands.
A dog’s pads could become raw and cracked if the dog was covering a lot of rough terrain, or running on hot asphalt, or stepping on sharp objects. But Marian had checked both dogs faithfully while in Utah; she was sure of it. She wondered what could have happened between Utah and Montana. It was program policy that should a dog’s care be neglected, a handler’s contract would either be suspended or terminated.
“Take some time off,” Lyle said. “Go home. Go see your parents in Michigan.”
Marian was still kneeling beside the dogs. She held one of Arkansas’s paws gently in her hands; she stroked the top of the paw. She couldn’t go back to Michigan and leave everything that reminded her of Tate. She couldn’t leave the others who knew the man she loved. She couldn’t leave the dogs.
And maybe Lyle had felt bad for Marian, because he agreed that she could stay on at The Den, though she’d be suspended for the time being from any new projects. She could help with the dogs, he said. She could assist him in the office.
During the weeks following Tate’s death, one by one Marian watched the other handlers leave: Liz and Dudley to new assignments; Jenness on a backpacking trip to Alaska.
Marian’s alarm would wake her at six each morning. She’d be at the house before six thirty and would make the coffee. Then she’d spend the next four hours exercising the remaining eight dogs who were not on assignment with Dudley or Liz or the handful of part-time handlers. She’d take the dogs, two at a time, for runs on a circuit of forest trails, or have them run alongside her on a mountain bike through the woods, and sometimes she would double over in a spasm of grief and the dogs would jump on her and lick her face. In the afternoons Marian would work in the office or help Lyle train the dogs. And she was filling in for Jenness while she was away, answering emails from people who had inquired into the program and updating the group’s social media.
But the evenings were the hardest. This was one of those nights. She’d just returned to her hut when Nick Shepard got back to her.
“Is this a bad time?” he asked. And Marian said no, this was fine.
“I’ll get to the point,” Nick told her. “Your boyfriend didn’t find one of the bodies.”
Marian was sitting at her desk. Nick had confirmed what she’d already suspected. Still, her uneasiness spread. “Why would he tell me such a thing?”
“To elicit a reaction. To get your attention. I’m not sure.”
Then Nick said, “I’m more interested in your reason for doubting him. Someone found the bodies. Why not Tate?”
Eventually Marian would tell Nick everything. “It’s complicated,” she said. “I wanted to believe him. But he always seemed to have a tragic story to tell. And this time there seemed to be an element of truth missing. He never said the woman’s name or who she was. He never said where she was from. And I was too shocked at the time to ask him. Then I read where one of the bodies was found by a man and his dog, and I thought that could be Tate.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I was working a job in Utah. I had a summer intern with me. She told me her sister was one of the Stillwater victims. That’s when I took another look at the articles. I was curious about the murders; that was all. But then something unsettled me. Tate had gone into great detail when telling me about the body. What he described wasn’t possible, given the times the bodies were discovered. They would have been too badly decomposed. Either Tate was there shortly after this particular woman died, or he was making the whole thing up.”
“When did Tate first tell you about the body?”
“Back in March, a couple of weeks after we’d become involved.”
“How did he describe it?”
Marian propped her elbows on the desk. She remembered every detail of that night, she and Tate lying on his bed, his arms around her, her trying to believe him. “He told me she was unclothed. She was lying on the bank of a stream. Her ankles and feet were still in the water as if she’d been taking a bath. He described her hands, saying she’d bitten her fingernails until they’d bled. And he talked about her eyes. He told me it was as if they were looking right at him. I was a biology major. I’m familiar with the stages of decomposition. And this was a body that had been left in the woods. One of the first things to be scavenged would have been the eyes.”
“So Tate tells you he found one of the bodies. You’re not sure you believe him, but you’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Those doubts escalated when you met the victim’s sister. When was this?”
“In July, before I learned of Tate’s death.”
“At some point you searched for my number. It’s not listed. Doesn’t matter. You found it. What changed for you? What was the deciding factor that made you call?”
“I’d read about you in the articles. But it wasn’t until Tate’s sister visited that I decided to call. She came by The Den to collect Tate’s things. We ended up spending the day together. It was chilling, really. Her brother suddenly became someone I barely knew. He had lied to me about so much, and I had no idea why. Once Tammy left, I looked up your number. I found it through a paid service online. I waited until I’d scattered Tate’s ashes to call you.”
“Tate had deceived you. Was the sister aware of this?”
“No, and I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do.”
“Tell me about the lies.”
Marian leaned back in her chair and pulled her legs up on the seat. “He’d said he was from Glendive, Montana, that his dad was a rancher. But he wasn’t from Montana. He was from a small town in Nebraska. And he didn’t grow up on a ranch. He never even lived on a farm. There were other things, like his childhood dog. He said the dog drowned in a river and he’d tried to save him. But his dog had run out in the road while Tate was playing one day and had gotten hit by a car. I realized that if Tate had lied about his c
hildhood, maybe he’d lied about other events in his life.”
“Aside from the body Tate said he’d found, were any of these other fabrications apparent to you when Tate was alive?”
“He told me his dad had been mayor of Glendive. I couldn’t find anything about his dad online. I couldn’t find anything about Tate either, which didn’t surprise me. Tate wasn’t on social media. But I told Tate about not finding any mention of his dad.”
“What did Tate say?”
“He said something about me not trusting him, about me accusing him of being dishonest. Then he told me it was his stepfather who had been mayor, and that his biological father had beaten the shit out of him, that he was a raging alcoholic who had left home when Tate was nine. He said it wasn’t something he really liked to talk about, but since I’d brought it up, since I’d gone sniffing around in his past, I might as well know the truth. ‘There are skeletons in closets,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes those skeletons are best left alone.’ I felt terrible.”
“He played the situation to its fullest,” Nick said. “He got you to feel sorry for him, and he made you think twice before ever doubting him again.”
Marian picked up a pen off her desk and turned it around between her fingers. “Until I met his sister.”
“Tell me about the sister.”
“She was named after Tate, after his initials. Tate Alexander Mathias. They were four years apart. She lives in Omaha now. She and Tate grew up in the small town of Crete. Neither one knew who their father was. Their mother worked in a pet food factory. It was just the three of them. Their mother never married.”
“So there wasn’t a father or stepfather. Could have been a boyfriend of the mother who abused Tate. Sometimes a person’s lies can be based on half-truths, like the incident with the dog, but we’ll get to that later.”
“Tammy thought it would be nice to have some of Tate’s ashes spread in Montana. She planned to bury the rest of his ashes next to their mother’s. She said Tate and their mother were close.”
“What happened to the mother?”
“She died of breast cancer.”
“How old was Tate?”
“He’d just started college when she’d gotten sick. He quit school to take care of her and pay the bills. Tammy said he worked at a veterinary hospital close to home. I think their mom died a couple of years later. Tate had told me about his mother’s passing. For once he was telling the truth.”
“Did Tate have any kind of criminal record that you know of?”
“No, that wouldn’t be possible. His job took him all over the world. He had to be able to pass through border patrol and customs. Just this year there was an orienteer who got turned away at the Canadian border for a prior DUI. I’m pretty sure Tate had a clean record.”
“I can run a background check to be certain. It would be good to have that information.”
Then Nick said, “Marian, how long has it been since Tate died? I looked for an obituary. I didn’t find one.”
“Almost three weeks. Tammy was going to put something in the paper in Crete. Maybe she hasn’t gotten around to it. Tate hadn’t been back since their mother died.”
“When was the last time Tammy saw Tate?”
“She visited him a few years ago when he was working on a project in Illinois. She said she never made it out to Montana, and Tate had only visited her once in Omaha. They didn’t speak often, maybe once a month.”
“Your grief is still raw. This can’t be easy for you.”
And Marian thought about the initial qualities she’d come to know Tate by, his kindness and compassion, his intuitiveness and understanding. And then there was the physicality of him; of course there was that. “Like I said, it’s complicated,” she said. “I miss the man I thought he was. Other times I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t trust my thoughts. I remember things. Mostly subtleties. Sometimes those things frighten me.”
“Are you thinking Tate might have been involved with the murders?”
The light through the windows had muted. Soon Marian would be sitting in the dark. She hesitated too long. “I loved Tate beyond belief,” she said. “I don’t think he was involved with the murders. He was never violent. And yet there is a small part of me that wonders if he could have been responsible, and those thoughts are what I’m afraid of. I even tried to find an alibi for Tate. I thought there would be studies he was on when the victims went missing. So far I’m not coming up with anything. But I haven’t had much to go on, only the program’s social media. I tried to get information from our coordinator. Tate hadn’t been in my life a long time. I was trying to fill in the missing pieces. I said something to that effect. But Lyle wasn’t much help. He’s got handlers coming and going all the time. He talked to me in general, but none of the studies matched the dates the women went missing. I think the information I’m really after is on a network, which I don’t have access to, and it’s not really something I can ask Lyle to spend his time on.” Marian added, “When I called you, I was hopeful. You know, thinking you’d get back with me and it would have been true, what Tate told me, that he’d have found the body exactly as he said he had, and I could turn off all these thoughts. I have to find a way to put this behind me. But right now I don’t know how.”
“The man in your life has died a violent death. The events are recent. You have a lot of uncertainty about him and your relationship with him, enough that you reached out to me. In moving forward, what are you looking for from me? How can I help?”
The kindness in Nick’s voice affected Marian deeply. “I want to know who the man was that I loved. I want to know why he lied to me. I’ve been looking for signs, something he might have left behind that will give me answers. But I keep coming up empty. And if I’m really honest with myself, I want to know that Tate wasn’t capable of killing these women.”
“First, I’ll support you in whatever way I can,” Nick said. “As far as determining who Tate was, what you’re asking for is a psychological autopsy. I’ve done a few over the years, usually involving suicides, or when law enforcement wanted an assessment of a deceased suspect. But without evidence, without detailed information regarding Tate’s movements, a psychological autopsy isn’t going to tell you whether Tate killed these women. At the very least it will give you insight into the man you were involved with, and it might tell us whether he would have been a person of interest in the murders.”
“Am I crazy to think he might have been involved?”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re concerned. You have every right to be.” Nick continued, “In keeping an assessment of Tate quiet, I’ll be working with a lot less information than I’m accustomed to. I’ll be pumping you for every tidbit you can recall, every incident, every odd statement, every email he sent you.”
“We never emailed,” Marian said. “Tate didn’t even own a computer. If he had to send a message or upload data, he used his phone, or else he used one of the program’s computers.”
“What about any journals or handwritten letters?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“That’s going to make things difficult, but not impossible. I’ll be relying almost completely on your recall,” Nick said.
And then he asked, “How comfortable are you with the sister?”
“We spent the good part of a day together. She’s someone I feel comfortable with.”
“I’ll want a timeline for Tate. I know you’ve made some efforts toward that, but maybe there’s someone else you can talk to. Perhaps Tate’s sister can be of help.”
“All right,” Marian said.
“At some point we should talk about the cases. I don’t know how much you know. There was some information in the papers and not all of it may have been accurate. We’ll be discussing sensitive material.
It would be best if we could talk in person. I’ve relied on video calls before and that may be helpful.”
Marian wanted answers and was eager to talk to Nick again. “I wouldn’t mind making the drive,” she said. “I’ve got time later this week.”
Nick hesitated, and Marian hoped she wasn’t being too presumptuous. “You’re the only one I’ve spoken to,” she said, because she wanted Nick to trust her.
“All right, then,” Nick said. They agreed to meet that Friday. Nick gave her his address.
* * *
• • •
Marian was indeed sitting in the dark when she got off the phone. Her hut felt hot and dry and stifling, and smelled of her sweat and too much pent-up emotion. Despite her extreme gratitude toward Nick and her resolve to work with him, she hated the thought of betraying Tate’s sister. She’d felt an affinity for Tammy immediately. They’d promised to stay in touch. She would have to tread carefully.
She gathered her towel and the flannel shorts and T-shirt she slept in and descended the hill toward the shower house. She’d set something in motion with Nick. This was happening. God, she hoped she hadn’t made a mistake. Her job was already tenuous. And she wanted this job. None of her other work had felt as meaningful, had brought her the same level of satisfaction. If the others found out about Nick, if they knew what she was up to, she could lose everything she’d worked so hard to attain. Tate had been with the program for ten years. He’d been one of them. She was still the newcomer. Again, she wondered how Arkansas and Yeti could have become injured while in her care. She felt edgy and unsure of herself. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She feared this night wouldn’t be much better.
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 8