The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  And Marian smiled then. “I’m really sorry about Pacific.”

  “Yeah, well, like you said, there are other programs.”

  Later that night, after Marian and Jeb had grabbed dinner at the cafeteria and she was walking back to her trailer, she wondered why she had told Jeb about the deer and not Tate. And she was surprised about what she’d shared with Jeb about the homeless man.

  She set her pack on the floor in her room and took out her phone from her pack’s top-load compartment. The battery had died hours ago. She plugged the phone into the charger. She and Tate wouldn’t be going into the field the next day. They would be giving Arkansas a break. Marian could wait until the morning to download her data.

  As soon as her phone had enough juice, she saw that she had a text from Tate: I was looking forward to seeing you tonight. I thought you would have stopped by. I had something to tell you. I miss you. I know it’s silly, but I sorta do.

  The walls in Marian’s room were a thin panel. Hanging across from her bed was a painting of a deer beside a lake, the kind of painting with bright colors and cheap acrylic that amateurs sell along roadsides. Until that night, Marian hadn’t paid much attention to the painting. But as she looked at the deer, for the first time she noticed its dull black eyes, more like two gaping holes.

  Are you still up? Marian texted Tate back.

  Sleep is for the fainthearted, he replied.

  Marian put her parka and hat back on and walked over to the other trailer.

  “You came,” Tate said. He was lying in bed with the lights out.

  “You told me you were still up,” Marian said.

  “I am.”

  Tate rose, wearing only a T-shirt and blue boxer briefs. He hugged her and pulled off her fleece hat and kissed the top of her head. He reached behind her and shut the door the rest of the way and Marian heard the metal turn of the lock.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” He unzipped her parka and slid it off her shoulders. Then he took her hand and led her to the bed. “Climb in with me,” he said. And so Marian climbed into the bed with Tate, and he pulled the covers over them and held her close. “Talk to me,” he said.

  “What do you want me to talk to you about?”

  “Anything.”

  And Marian asked him what it was he wanted to tell her.

  “I have a lot of things I want to tell you,” he said. “I have it all planned out. I can talk to you in general now, about the images that keep playing in my mind, from when we first met at the airport to that day you got stuck in the muskeg, and lots of other images, and they all feel surreal. I’ve had this image, this feeling almost my whole life of what it would be like with the woman I loved, what it would feel like, how she would look, how we would be together, how it should be. When you’ve been sort of looking for it all this time, all these years, and then after all these years it happens, it feels surreal. Like déjà vu. Do you understand what I’m saying? It also makes me mad in a way, because of all the years I didn’t know you.”

  It was a lot to take in, and Marian couldn’t help but wonder if this was love, and if Tate was telling her he loved her, did she feel the same way about him?

  “Marian?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You still with me here?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You can say something, you know. That was kind of a nice thing I just told you.”

  She slid her hand over Tate’s T-shirt. She could feel his heartbeat beneath her palm. “What you said was really beautiful.”

  “Tell me something, Matilda,” he whispered into her ear. “Tell me why you got so quiet today.”

  “Why did you just call me Matilda?” she asked.

  “Because Matilda means mighty. It means strength in battle. You’re a very kind person. Being kind can require a fearless quality.”

  Marian settled in closer to Tate. “There was a deer in the woods. A young buck.” She went on to describe the deer she’d found.

  Marian and Tate were lying on their right sides. He lifted his left hand and rubbed her shoulder. He kissed her ear. He stroked her hair.

  “There was something about his eyes,” Marian said. “Like he knew.”

  “Animals do that. I think people do that, too,” Tate said.

  “Have you ever seen an animal die?” And just as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she said, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot. Tate, I’m so sorry.”

  “Shh, it’s all right.”

  “I meant because of you growing up on a ranch.”

  “I know what you meant,” he said.

  And then Marian asked him if he would tell her about his childhood, because she wanted to picture Tate as a little boy. He told her about the ranch and calving and the eastern Montana winds. He talked about the time he and his sister as primary school kids had dug a path to the barn when fifty head of cattle had gotten stuck in the snow, and he told Marian about the night when he was barely thirteen and had pulled a full-term stillborn from the uterus of an Angus cow.

  When Marian had almost drifted to sleep, he said, “I found a body once.”

  “A deer?”

  “No. A woman.”

  Marian rolled onto her back.

  “Her body was naked like a newborn’s. She was laid out beside this stream. Her ankles and feet were still in the water as if she were taking a bath.”

  “How old were you? What did you do?”

  Tate shifted onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t so long ago. Did you ever hear about the Stillwater murders?”

  Marian told him she hadn’t.

  “It was back in Montana.”

  “Was Arkansas with you?”

  “No, this happened before Arkansas. I was working with another dog, this little German shepherd named Tillie.” Tate laughed then. “Kind of like Matilda,” he said. “She was a brave thing, too. I was scouting out this new area for some training ground, and there this woman was. I told Tillie to stay and I went up to the body. Her clothes were lying in a pile beside her. Her head was tilted and her eyes were looking right at me. As I got closer I saw the woman’s hands. They were large hands and she’d bitten her nails so short they’d bled.”

  Tate went on to tell Marian about the four murders, and that three of the bodies were found in the state forest, less than an hour from the group’s camp.

  “It made national news,” Tate said. “I thought you might have heard.”

  “This is so sad,” Marian said.

  “It is sad. And the worst part is the killer was never found.”

  “He’s still out there? That’s horrible. Those poor families.”

  Tate pulled Marian in closer and encircled her with his arms. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to you. I worry about that. I know how independent you think you are. I know you think you can take care of yourself. But the truth is, a woman is never safe.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was two in the morning when Marian awoke with Tate’s arms still around her. She tried to slip away without waking him, but as she stirred, she felt his hold tighten. “Don’t leave,” he said, his voice groggy.

  “I have to,” she said.

  She rolled over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll see you later.” But when she began to push herself off the bed, Tate tugged her hand and she fell back into his arms and he burrowed his beard into her neck.

  “You’re so warm,” she said. “You’re like this big bear.”

  “Come hibernate with me.”

  “I can’t. I really have to go.” And so she pulled away again.

  “I’ll buy you breakfast,” Tate said. “Cafeteria special.”

  Marian laughed and said okay.

  “Call me when you’re up,” he told her.


  And then he mumbled something, and it sounded like “love,” but Marian wasn’t sure.

  As with previous nights, Jenness’s light was still on when Marian returned to the trailer. Marian tapped lightly on Jenness’s door.

  “Come in.” She was on her bed with a pile of knitting in her lap.

  “You’re still up. Do you ever sleep?” Marian asked.

  “I had some work to do. Now I’m just trying to turn my mind off. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Would it be all right if I get you the camera tomorrow? I want to take a look at the pictures I shot.”

  Jenness hesitated for a couple of seconds. She said that would be fine. And then, “Marian, remember what I told you about relationships. They never work out in this line of work. Just be careful.”

  There was a pause between the two women. Marian acknowledged Jenness with a nod. “I’ll return your camera in the morning,” she said.

  Marian felt fully awake when she got back to her room. She was thinking about Tate and was curious about the murders and the body he’d said he found. She wasn’t sure she completely believed him. He seemed to be full of tall stories and there had already been so much tragedy in his life. She set her laptop in front of her on the bed. Once it had booted, she ran a search on the Stillwater murders. She found articles going back over seven years. She pored through them, looking for something that might indicate Tate, that might confirm that what he’d told her was true. But none of the articles mentioned who had discovered the bodies, other than generalizations. Then she read where one of the bodies was found by a man and his dog, and she knew that must be Tate, and she felt guilty for having doubted him and a strange sense of relief at the same time.

  She thought of the day they’d just spent together, the beautiful scenery, the image she’d captured when Tate was looking out the window at the caribou herd. She’d planned on downloading the pictures she’d taken that day to her computer when they’d returned, but she had gotten distracted. And so she retrieved the camera from her pack and discharged the memory card. She climbed back onto her bed, rebooted her laptop, and inserted the memory card.

  Hundreds of images began to load from that past year. A number of minutes passed before she saw the pictures she’d taken earlier that day: Tate kneeling in the snow to attach the bell to the harness Arkansas was wearing; Tate walking ahead of Marian with Arkansas bounding behind him and kicking up flecks of snow; that moment on the pond when the world went still and the sky went blue and the sun felt warm. There were other pictures, including the one of Tate looking out the side window at the caribou, and she knew no one like him would ever come her way again and tell her that she was a beautiful path and that he fucking adored her and that he never doubted wanting to be with her. And there were pictures of their girl, Arkansas, her face so happy when she alerted them to a find.

  Marian checked off the pictures she’d taken and saved them to her laptop. Then she went to delete the pictures she’d taken of Tate from the memory card. She scrolled through the photos, and except for a couple where Tate was working with Arkansas, she selected them and hit delete. But then she continued to scroll through other photos, months and months’ worth, one picture after another, and her fingers began to tremble. In addition to photos of the dogs and the other handlers, there were hundreds of pictures of Tate—Tate walking to his truck, Tate sitting on the steps of a small building, Tate brushing Arkansas. There were too many to count. And in none of the pictures was Tate looking directly at the camera, as if he never knew the photos were being taken. But perhaps what Marian found even more disturbing were the pictures she saw of herself, as if this whole time Jenness had been watching her. Marian leaned in closer to the computer, her eyes so wide and dry they burned. She went back and forth through the pictures. She downloaded each one.

  14

  PRESENT

  August 2017

  NICK SHEPARD

  Bonners Ferry, Idaho

  It was a Saturday, the temperatures remaining in the upper seventies, and not a cloud in the sky. Nick had just finished picking the last of the ripe tomatoes from the vines and placing them in a brown paper sack to bring inside. Cate was working in the rock garden about twenty yards away. Nick stood on the patio with the sack braced between his torso and his arms, just stood there looking at the woman he loved. There were rosebushes in the garden and Cate was fertilizing them with compost.

  Nick opened and closed the back door quietly. He wanted to retrieve his camera and capture some candid images of Cate while she was still in the garden. When he returned with his Nikon, he set it on the patio table and positioned himself on the wrought-iron chair behind the camera, because the table would keep the camera steady in a way that his hands and arms could not these days. And there she was. Why was it that he could see her so much better with the aid of a camera? But he knew it had nothing to do with the camera lens. It had to do with his entire attention being on the subject on which his camera was focused, and what a lovely subject it was today: Cate wiping the perspiration from her brow with the back of her hand, the soft smile of her lips, the flecks of dirt on her lightly freckled complexion.

  After he’d let the shutter fly a half-dozen times, he leaned back against the porch chair and turned his face to the sky and let the sun warm his body. I am the observer, he thought, because he felt like he was observing a lot of life lately, rather than participating in it the way he had before. For a killer it was the same thing, like watching life through a lens, always the camera between him and his subject matter, never a real participant in the life going on around him.

  Marian was right, Nick thought. He hadn’t seen the Stillwater cases all the way through. He’d backed out before his work had been done. He’d told Marian he’d wanted to spend more time with Cate. That part was true. He also wanted to sleep better at night. Over the years the dreams had gotten to him. They’d become especially troublesome during the Stillwater killings. In trying to inhabit the killer’s mind, Nick had stepped over to the other side. He hadn’t told anyone about that night, not even Cate. Maybe that was why he wasn’t terribly shocked when he was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme. He had invited the darkness to take up residence. But in the end he had betrayed himself. He’d not kept himself safe, and he’d been reminded of how vulnerable and weak the mind can be. Don’t be surprised one day if the darkness turns on its host.

  The incident had happened after Melissa Marsh had gone missing. Though Nick had driven around in his vehicle for months after each homicide, even stopped at the Stillwater Bar and sat in the parking lot, imagined Erin Parker talking on her phone, imagined himself offering her a ride, as the killer had done, this time Nick had gone too far. He’d cruised the roads, stopped by certain locations that seemed ripe—a convenience store here and there, a pizza hangout. He’d offered a girl a ride. He’d looked at the girl the way the killer might have. He’d made her afraid. He’d driven the girl where she’d wanted to go, the mall. He’d gotten onto her for accepting a ride with a stranger, as if now he were the good guy. But there was still that look of fear in the girl’s eyes that had stayed with him. All those years he had pursued the beast. That night the beast lived in him, and the whole thing terrified him.

  The recurring dream Nick had had while working on the Stillwater cases had continued to haunt him: a killer chasing him into the woods, Nick stumbling and falling, then turning over to see the face of Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper, who’d been responsible for the gruesome murder of five female students in Florida and who’d confessed to the murder of three other people. Nick had exhausted himself on the Florida cases, had spent countless hours interviewing Rolling.

  But after he gave a ride to the young woman, the face of the perpetrator in the dream changed. No longer was it the face of Danny Rolling. From that night forward it was always the face of one of the victims. That was when Nick began writing the portraits. With each one
he’d felt closer to the women who’d been killed; he’d taken on their respective voices. He was no longer looking through the lens of the killer; he was looking through the lenses of the women whose lives the killer had taken, drawing himself closer and closer to their worlds. Each of the victims was different, and yet there was that one trait that they each possessed: the assumption that sincerity would be met with sincerity.

  And now there was Marian. He’d let her in, and she was leading him back to a place he’d sworn he’d never return to.

  Upon first glance, Tate’s childhood had appeared normal, and aside from a girlfriend breaking up with him, Marian wasn’t finding anything in Tate’s life that pointed to humiliation from a female. And yet, after learning of the peeping-Tom charge and of a similar incident with the girlfriend, Nick was curious. He wanted a longitudinal study on this guy and had spent the past week making additional calls. He’d cited his credentials, said he was Tate’s therapist and was seeking information to help him better understand his late client and close Tate’s file. Bending a few ethical rules wasn’t a concern of his. He needed information. Crete was a small town. People know a lot in a small town. And people love to talk.

  Nick reached out to Tate’s high school. He spoke with a guidance counselor, who pulled up Tate’s records. Tate was an above-average student. Mostly Bs, some As. He’d been suspended his sophomore year. A girl said he’d touched her inappropriately. He worked at the granary, didn’t play sports, wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities. Nick asked if there were any teachers still around who would remember Tate. Nick was given a couple of names.

  Nick made a call to the granary. He wanted to know what kind of worker Tate had been. The owner remembered Tate. “When he worked, he worked hard. Nice guy, mostly a loner.”

  One of the teachers remembered an incident where Tate had run away from home. “Wasn’t gone long,” she said. “Maybe thirty-six hours. No apparent triggers, no conflicts. Never really said where he went. Mother was beside herself.”