The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  And perhaps it was all of the craziness brewing in her mind and her sleep deprivation and her diet of caffeine and energy bars that was standing in the way of sound decision making. On the morning that she was supposed to take one of the dogs into the Whitefish Range and look for fresh deer and bear scat for training purposes, she’d decided to drive a little farther north and explore the woods around Stryker Ridge, where three of the Stillwater victims’ remains had been found. She’d brought Winter, a husky mix whom Marian swore was a wolf hybrid, with her. And she’d justified her decision, telling herself there were bear and deer in those parts, too. The sky was a sharp blue, and the temperatures were to reach eighty by the afternoon. She took a right off the highway and drove as deep into the forest as she could, taking one of the old logging roads.

  Two things happened that day, and Marian would never be able to erase them from her mind, and she would severely wish that she could, because the memory of them would haunt her each time she stepped into the woods. The first happened midmorning, after she and Winter had canvassed the area for a couple of hours. She’d just stopped to get Winter some water, when she looked up and saw a strip of leftover crime tape tied around the trunk of a western larch, maybe ten feet in front of her, and God help her if her skin didn’t turn cold and her feet tremble. The instant had happened so unexpectedly, and all she could think of was that one of the victims may very well have lost her life in this exact spot where Marian was standing. She had this horrible sensation that she’d been traipsing over sacred ground, like a burial site. But she didn’t walk away. Instead she knelt and wrapped her arm around Winter and told him to stay. He was a young dog, and yet in that moment he was remarkably calm.

  Over the past few weeks, Marian had experienced a growing sensation of having known the victims. As much as she’d thought about Tate, she’d thought about them, too, had memorized their images, the details of their lives. The air was as still as Marian’s breathing—not an insect buzzing in her ear, or an animal skittering about. Even the birds were silent. And Marian wondered which of the victims had died in this spot. She held all four of the women in her mind, prayerlike, one at a time. She felt nauseous and hollow. Her hands quivered.

  “Let’s go, Winter,” she said. The place made her whisper. She stood and stepped slowly, softly, as if afraid to disturb the area any more than she already had.

  She and Winter would circle back to the vehicle, taking a different but more direct route. The terrain was steep, and as Marian hiked, her legs felt weak. She drank water but had lost her appetite. And then she realized there were minutes she had not kept track of, like driving someplace and having no idea how you’d gotten there. She brought out her phone, checked her path. She’d ventured off course, nothing too significant. She’d keep her phone out and follow the route more closely.

  The sun was directly overhead, filling the forest with wraithlike streams of sunlight. Marian’s skin glowed with sweat. There was something white or gray among the thick patch of trees ahead of them. Marian drew closer, stepped carefully. Winter’s ears were alert, his body rigid. And Marian said, “Oh my God,” her voice not even a whisper, because she knew she was looking at the same kind of nondescript trailer Nick had told her about. And though her mind froze, her body continued to edge closer. The hitch of the camper was set on two cinder blocks. The metal siding was mostly gray, though painted with patches of white primer where the metal had no doubt been repaired. The door was wooden and splintered at the bottom. A gold curtain covered the small window. Marian grabbed onto Winter’s harness and held him back. “Stay,” she said. And in that fraction of a second a large dog lunged at the window from inside with a stream of ferocious barks, the gold curtain parting, and Marian felt her heart flip in her chest, and Winter was barking and trying to break free of Marian’s grasp, his hackles raised all the way down his spine, and Marian stumbled backward, still holding on to Winter’s harness. Every part of her was shaking. She turned and led Winter away from the camper. And maybe this wasn’t the spot where Lynn-Marie had been taken, and yet given its proximity to the crime scene where she had just been, every molecule in Marian’s body believed that it was. And someone was using it now, despite the memory of what had happened there, which made Marian believe that whoever it was didn’t have a soul.

  She was still carrying her phone in her left hand. She followed the GPS course exactly this time, her legs moving on pure adrenaline. Winter stayed close, as if he were afraid, and Marian felt certain that he was. And she cursed herself and her madness in these woods that felt so unutterably strange and haunting. And she told Winter she was sorry. What had she been thinking? She began to panic and was sure she couldn’t breathe. She’d become obsessed with her search for Tate’s innocence, or guilt, or whatever it was. She’d become obsessed with the killings. She was out of her depth. And she told God she was sorry, she really was, but she didn’t know how to stop this quest that she was on, and she asked for help, and she tried to slow her breathing, and the sweat dripping off her chin felt as cold as ice water.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the next morning, Marian had finished going through the last of the files in the program’s archives, and again she hadn’t slept more than three or four hours. She still had nothing positive to show for her efforts. She was beyond exhausted and discouraged, and her life was crawling around her with all of its details to take care of—laundry and groceries and responsibilities at work and her mother’s birthday to remember, and emails to answer for the program. And so she’d set aside a day to take care of some of the noise.

  The brakes on the Xterra were making a grinding sound. She’d put off having them checked for too long, so she made an appointment in Kalispell where she knew Tate had brought the vehicle in the past.

  The rear brake pads needed to be replaced, she was told after the inspection, and the service department could replace the pads that afternoon. The whole thing would take a couple of hours, and did she want to wait or did she need a loaner vehicle. She said that she would wait. And she relished having those couple of hours where she could close her eyes and sleep.

  She sat in the waiting area with magazines and leather chairs and a big-screen TV, and she got distracted by the news that was covering the recent hurricane along the Gulf Coast. And then she thought about something Tate had said, and she’d been shocked when he had said it, about people who built their homes in natural disaster zones, and what did those people expect but to get hit with a natural disaster. They lacked good common sense, he told her. And Marian said he was cruel, and he said people’s mistakes were costly. Only minutes before, they’d been washing the dishes together in the main house and being silly, and Marian had felt so completely happy, and how had they even gotten onto the topic of natural disasters, but then she remembered; it had to do with an assignment in Louisiana that the program had put in a bid for, and one thing in the conversation had led to another, and now the giddy atmosphere had completely dissipated.

  Marian was staring blankly at the TV screen suspended on the wall, when the thought came to her like a flicker. She approached the service desk. She had a question, she said. Would the service history for her vehicle show whether the previous owner had ever taken out a loaner? The man behind the service counter said the service invoices would give her that information. Marian asked if it would be possible for her to get a copy of those records. And the man said perhaps what she was looking for was the Carfax report. But Marian said, no, the invoices would be more helpful because they would show how much money had been spent on the vehicle, and that would be good knowledge to have, didn’t he agree? Then she said the previous owner was deceased and had been a close friend of hers, as if that might make a difference. And maybe it did, because the man said how sorry he was for her loss, and yes, he could pull up those invoices. He’d try to have them for her by the time her vehicle was ready. And Marian said if it would make it easier,
she only needed them from the past three years.

  Marian was back in the waiting area with her head tilted over the seat and her eyes closed, when the service man said, “Ma’am?” And Marian opened her eyes and sat up, and the man was holding a stack of papers, not too thick, and Marian thanked him, and he said, “Not a problem.”

  Marian laid the papers in her lap. She began thumbing through the dates, and really, she did not expect to find anything. But then she came across several invoices from a couple of years ago, and God help her if her heart didn’t stop in her chest. On May 18, the day before Melissa Marsh went missing, Tate had brought the vehicle in to have a couple of gaskets replaced and a brake line repaired. He’d taken out a green Nissan Rogue, and had returned the loaner two days later. Marian felt numb. She continued to stare at the invoice. Someone called her name. Her vehicle was ready. She put the papers in her backpack. She walked to the service desk. She paid. She collected her keys, and perhaps she said thank you, but everything she did felt automatic.

  She stepped outside. She climbed into her vehicle. Tate was driving a green SUV the day Melissa went missing. There it was. And Marian wondered how many other people were driving a green SUV on May 19, over two years ago. And surely there were hundreds of people in the Kalispell area whose vehicle matched that description. And how reliable was the witness anyway? In one of Marian’s conversations with Nick, he’d said that the witness had been home from work sick. She’d gotten up to use the bathroom and had looked out her bathroom window. She did not have her glasses on, and she’d seen the vehicle from at least a couple hundred feet away. And Marian thought perhaps the vehicle the woman had seen was charcoal gray, or dark blue, or even black, and that it had only looked green because of the glare of the sun. And maybe the person getting into the vehicle wasn’t Melissa Marsh, because how sure could the woman be from that distance without her glasses on? Any of these things were possible, Marian thought, as she drove down the highway and made the appropriate turns until she was back at The Den, and she felt like she was hyperventilating, because her fingers and legs still had that numb and tingling feeling.

  She had just shut off the engine and was reaching over to the passenger seat for her backpack, when Trainer slammed his hand down on her hood and startled her to no end, and she flew back in her seat, and he apologized to her through her rolled-down window, because he didn’t mean to scare her, and how was she doing, he asked.

  Marian said, aside from being three hundred dollars poorer, she guessed she was doing all right.

  “Take a ride with me,” Trainer said.

  “Where to?”

  “The farmer’s market. There’ll be food there. About time you started eating again.”

  “I’m eating,” Marian said.

  “Energy bars don’t count.”

  And Marian said she supposed she could go with him, but she wanted to drop her backpack off at her hut first.

  Marian felt light-headed as she climbed the hill toward her hut, and Trainer was right, she knew. She needed to start eating better. She needed to cut back on the coffee and get some proper sleep. She took the invoices out of her backpack and placed them in her desk drawer, but before she closed the drawer all the way, she stopped. Something was off. Her desk chair was pulled out. Not a big deal. She usually sat in the chair when putting on her shoes. But she had this thing about chairs. Even as a kid she’d make sure all the kitchen chairs were scooted back in around the table after her family had eaten. Call it obsessive-compulsive or just quirky; it was her thing, and something didn’t feel right. She set her backpack on the floor. She sat at her desk and opened her laptop. She wanted to send Nick an email. Her desktop screen came up. What the heck, she thought. She was sure she’d turned off her computer after she’d used it that morning. Maybe she’d just thought she’d turned it off. Maybe she’d hit the wrong key, and had closed the laptop instead and put it to sleep.

  She opened her email account. She had a message from Ryan Schulman, a reporter for the Daily Inter Lake News out of Kalispell. He’d been in contact with her lately about the program, and more specifically about the role of the handler. She’d been taking care of these kinds of communications while Jenness was away. She’d get back with him later, and hurriedly pulled up a new message to Nick: Tate was driving a green loaner vehicle the day Melissa went missing. I have the records. She hit send. Then she shut down her computer, and she waited until it had completely powered off before closing it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marian and Trainer were on their way back from the farmer’s market in Whitefish when Trainer bypassed their usual route to The Den, and when Marian said, “Where are you going?” he’d said he had something to show her. They drove a couple more miles to Stage Hill Road.

  As they came up on Dana Lear’s house, Trainer told Marian to take a close look.

  “What am I looking for?” Marian asked.

  “Notice anything different? Look closely.”

  The black truck was still parked in the front lawn beside the road, but the For Sale sign was gone. Then Marian noticed a Keep Out, No Trespassing sign on the front door that she hadn’t remembered seeing the day she’d pulled off the road and gotten out of her vehicle. The other thing she noticed was the detached garage. The garage door was open, and inside the garage was a green SUV, just like the one that had been coasting in front of Marian on her run the week before.

  Trainer drove past the house and said, “It seems to me the guy doesn’t want people coming around. You were asking a lot of questions the other day. You don’t want to be messing with this guy.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Marian asked.

  “Because he called this afternoon. Wanted to speak with the lady of the house. Identified himself as King Lear. When I told him there was no lady of the house, he said he was sure Lady Cordelia lived there and that she’d stopped by his place the other day.”

  “What makes you think he was looking for me?”

  “Described her as having long, flowing black hair. A little creepy, if you ask me.”

  “My hair’s brown.”

  “You’re splitting atoms with me, Marian. You know the gist of what I’m saying. You ever read King Lear?”

  “Maybe in high school.”

  “Well I’ve read a little Shakespeare. Was an English major back in the day. If I’m not mistaken, Cordelia doesn’t make it.”

  “And the purpose of completely freaking me out is?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more careful. Don’t go looking into those murders you were asking me about. Best to leave things alone.”

  17

  FROM NICK SHEPARD’S FILE

  VICTIM PORTRAIT #3

  Lynn-Marie Pontante

  I was eighteen when my father left my mother. I had already graduated from high school and had spent the summer at an equine training camp in Idaho. The day I returned my father was sitting in a chair across from the sofa, in a small room we referred to as the library. He’d called a family meeting with me and my mom and my two older brothers. The air was hot from the sun’s glare through the windows and my own apprehension and the other emotions and bodies in the room. The smell of the barn and horses from the camp where I had been was still on my skin and clothes. Horsehair stuck to my arms. I picked off a single short strand and pressed it between my fingers.

  I didn’t go to college that fall, despite my parents’ and my original plans. I needed to look into the eyes of horses and a sweet old Lab that had always been mine. I needed to feel the mountains and the larch and the tall western pines.

  I came upon the ad on a Sunday afternoon while I was reading the paper. Wanted: Caretaker of senior horses. Housing provided. I didn’t tell my family that I had applied, and they were surprised when I said I was going. I cried the first two hours of the drive from Spokane to Libby, with my dog, T
ully, sitting beside me. I could still smell my mother’s perfume and sadness on my face.

  I moved into a yurt on a large piece of tangled property with six fenced-in paddocks and a barn that housed eight horses. Most of the horses were lame, and though they could no longer be ridden, they seemed to enjoy themselves and came right up to me when I called them.

  There was a picnic table outside the barn. Between chores, I would sit on top of it and play my guitar. I would write songs about love and Jesus and kindness. I would sing to the horses and to Tully stretched out on the picnic table beside me, the sun warming her black coat and the white hairs on her belly.

  Jason pulled up to the barn one day when I was singing. He stepped out of his truck with his long, lanky legs. He wore jeans and cowboy boots, a long-sleeve shirt, and a cowboy hat. He carried a toolbox and said he was the farrier. The owner of Greener Pastures had told me the farrier would be stopping by. But I hadn’t expected someone like Jason, boyish and almost shy though he was in his midtwenties, with eyes as green as a meadow and wavy brown hair the color of the bark on an alder. Two of the horses had hoof rot, or thrush as Jason called it. He showed me how to apply the antiseptic and gave me boots to keep their feet dry. I liked the way he talked to the horses, and I liked the way he talked to me, patient and gentle in that simple way of his, as if nothing in his world were ever in a hurry.