As she stepped into the woods on the far side of the alpine, she thought she heard Ranger’s bell, from somewhere off to her right. And then she heard Tate calling for her.
“Over here!” she yelled.
He’d come back for her, she thought. And when she saw him he was carrying something out in front of him in the palm of his right hand.
They caught up to each other, and he kissed her and showed her what he’d found for her—a thrush nest, the outer layer made of fir and hemlock twigs, the inside a hardened cavity of mud and decomposing grass and downy bird feathers. “Kind of apropos, don’t you think?” he said. And his eyes were glistening and he was smiling.
She had never seen a thrush nest before. She reached inside the nest and rubbed the down feathers between her fingers. “They’re so soft,” she said.
Tate took the bear spray out of her hand and slipped it back into her harness. “Did you see a bear?” he said.
“No. But there might have been one.”
Marian removed her pack and set it on the ground. She’d brought a wool hat in case the weather had turned colder. She took out the hat and fit it around the small nest—about four inches in diameter and a couple of inches deep. Then she laid the nest on top of the other items in her pack.
Tate lifted her pack, and Marian slid her arms through the shoulder straps and fastened the hip belt.
As they walked on, Ranger trotted ahead of them a short ways, and Tate told Marian about a girl he once knew who could draw like no one he had ever known. “She’d draw birds: hawks, ravens, falcons, hummingbirds, boreal owls. The detail was extraordinary. She was one of those Audubon supporters. She could spend an entire day observing birds. I swear she was some kind of raptor in a previous life. I called her the artist girl, but I guess the bird girl would have been more apt.”
Marian wondered if Tate was talking about someone he’d been involved with, and she hated the way that thought made her feel. Nothing about this day had gone as she’d planned, and because she was feeling jealous, her thoughts turned to Jenness, and all she could think about in that moment were the pictures she’d found on Jenness’s camera. Marian said she wished she could draw, or was as adept with a camera as someone else they knew. And then, “She has a thing for you, you know,” Marian said.
“Who does?”
“Jenness.”
“What makes you say that?”
Marian told Tate about the photos Jenness had taken of him. “I saw them when I had her camera.”
“She takes photos of everyone. That’s her job.” Marian could hear the irritation in Tate’s voice, and she could have stopped. She could have gone back to the way things had been, to the two of them having a nice walk through the woods to the vehicle.
But Marian continued. “She’s got pictures going back two years or more. Hundreds of pictures.” And then Marian said, “I think she’s jealous. I saw photos of the two of us together.”
Marian told Tate about the picture of her getting out of the truck the night they’d gone to see the northern lights. “It’s like she’s watching us. It’s like she’s always checking up on where we’ve been. She’s probably wondering where we are now.”
“That’s quite an assumption you’re making. It’s a stretch, even for you. You should be real careful about what you’re saying. I can only hope you haven’t said this to one of the others.”
“Tate, it was four in the morning when we got back. Why would she be up so late?”
And then Tate stopped and turned to Marian. “Do you have any idea the kind of hours Jenness and I were putting in? Do you have any idea what it takes to be a crew leader? You think it’s all just about going off with the dogs and tromping through snow and bagging all kinds of shit. Or hanging out in the woods and picking mushrooms like Hansel and Gretel. You don’t get it. The two of us were lucky if we got any sleep at all. You didn’t decide which cells the teams would visit each day. You didn’t keep track of where the teams had already been, or which roads were actually open, or where the oil company was focusing their seismic activity. It wasn’t your responsibility to make sure everyone knew where the trappers or traps were in the area, or where the oil company’s machinery might be in the field that day. You weren’t the one who had to shadow incompetent handlers or novice beginners, or do routine checkups on the dogs, or take the dogs out at four in the morning because one of them had gotten sick. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Marian. And besides, if Jenness were jealous of you, why would she want you in the picture? Think about it,” Tate said.
If it was Tate’s intention to make Marian feel bad, he had succeeded. She couldn’t undo what she had already done. She couldn’t take back her presumptuousness, or the fact that it was she who had been jealous of Jenness. Of course Tate would come to Jenness’s defense. Why wouldn’t he protect someone with whom he’d worked side by side and whom he’d known for almost six years longer than he’d known Marian. And then Marian got it. Jenness probably knew Tate better than anyone else ever had. Maybe Marian had it all wrong. Maybe Jenness had been looking out for Tate. The other handlers would come and go. Jenness had said so herself. She and Tate were the only two who’d remained constants.
Marian and Tate continued to follow a course back to the truck, him walking in front of her again. The stretch ahead would be easier now that they were moving downhill. She hated the silence between them. If only she could salvage the day. And then she heard the birds, slow at first, and she realized how quickly the hours had passed, how imminent the long drive back to The Den was. And she heard the hooting of a great horned owl, barely audible with the sound of their footsteps and Ranger’s bell and the steady sounds of running water. And she thought about the bird girl. And because Marian so badly wanted Tate and her to be talking again, to go back to the way the two of them had been, she asked him if he, too, had heard the owl, and he said that he had. And she told him about an irruption of snowy owls that had been showing up in Michigan. “Once they make it across Lake Superior they’re really weak,” she said. “We have a place that rehabilitates them. Still, a lot of them don’t make it.” And when Tate didn’t say anything, she asked him about the bird girl. “Is she someone you dated?”
But Tate was still quiet. Not angry or impatient, just subdued, as if his thoughts were very far away. “I’d rather not talk about it” was all he said.
Marian was tired. She knew Tate must be tired, too, and she wondered why it was taking them so long to get back to the vehicle. Tate seemed to be slipping deeper into his thoughts, and she noticed that once again he was moving farther ahead. She opened her hip pouch to take out her phone and check her navigation, and when she did she saw the morel mushrooms that she’d stored in there earlier, and how did Tate know she had stopped to pick mushrooms when he and Ranger had been out of sight. She stood still to check her phone more closely, and yes, she was sure, they were moving in the wrong direction. And there was something amiss that she could not name, a persistent uneasiness like a cool compress against her skin, and she felt suddenly afraid, and she turned to her left in the direction of the truck, and she stepped onto a game trail that switchbacked down the hill, and she quickened her pace, deep shadows rubbing against her, the air swabbing her arms and legs. She reached in her pocket and took the river rock that Tate had placed in her palm and chucked it as far as she could, her fear as pure as anger.
And how did he and Ranger make it there before her, she would never know, but there they were, and Tate was grinning and said she wasn’t putting that ring he’d given her to much use if she was going to keep falling so far behind. And then Tate told her she was suffering and he was sorry for his part in that. “Sometimes my words can be harsh. I don’t mean them to come across that way. I talk openly with you because I feel safe with you. I share things with you because I feel I can do so.”
And Tate’s words softened her anger and fea
r, and she said she was sorry, that maybe she’d been selfish, because, really, she regretted what she’d told him about Jenness, but mostly she wanted to put this day behind her.
And Tate said, “Be that of what you are, Miss She-Wolf Engström, I adore all the levels of you.”
And yet on the drive back, as Marian feigned sleep, she thought about the swift-moving Bull River, and the debris that the high runoff had swept from the banks and that its current had pulled under, and she thought of the apple core Tate had thrown to the other side, and the rock he had thrown later, and a black dog named Arthur who, when Tate was a boy, had drowned in a river somewhere in Montana.
19
PRESENT
August 2017
NICK SHEPARD
Bonners Ferry, Idaho
Nick wasn’t afraid of dying; after all, it was the one thing he had in common with every other living creature in the world. But he was afraid of other things, like not being able to go for a walk, or wipe his own ass, or smoke some good tobacco, or make love to his wife. And he was afraid of the things he would no longer remember, like the name of his son, or a single line from a T. S. Eliot poem, or the first time he saw his wife cry when she witnessed a homeless child begging for food on the streets of San Francisco.
But on that particular Thursday, Nick’s body and mind were still in good enough working order. He patted the breast pocket of his big flannel shirt to make sure he had his pipe and his pouch of Larsen Signature tobacco that his son had brought back for him from Amsterdam. Then, with the help of two ski poles, Nick made his way across the yard to the back of his property and onto a trail that cut through the woods.
The deeper he ventured into the two-hundred-some acres of hemlock and aspen and larch, the greater his exertion became, and he felt the rush of anxiety come over him, but not because of the pain in his body, which he cursed with each breath, but because walking in these woods reminded him of so many of the crime scenes he had visited. In over ninety percent of the cases he had worked, that was where the bodies of the victims had been found, among trees and leaves and detritus. But he was one of the privileged. He was a man, and a good size at that, over six feet before the last couple of years, when, he swore, he had shrunk at least an inch, and still weighed more than two hundred pounds. With a younger body, or even a healthier one, he could walk these woods any time he liked. He could run along neighborhood roads or walk across parking lots. He could enjoy the kind of solitude that put women at risk. Then there were the statistics: Ninety-five percent of stranger-to-stranger homicides were committed by men against women. Maybe he’d get his wife a Rottweiler before he died, or a Doberman pinscher. His wife liked dogs. They’d once had a cocker spaniel they’d adopted from the pound. They’d had cats over the years also, a couple of which were still hanging around.
Nick’s wife didn’t think women should carry guns. Nick wasn’t so sure about that. His wife carried pepper spray. She’d never had to use it. More than likely the pepper spray had expired. He’d have to remember to order her some more. He’d order her a box of the stuff and place it on automatic reorder for every couple of years after he was gone. Not the most romantic of gestures.
The walk was becoming more difficult. He stopped to catch his breath, and then goddamn it if his leg didn’t spasm, and he yelled out in pain and dropped the ski poles and grabbed his left leg, which crumpled beneath him and sent him to the ground. The doctor called these episodes seizures. Nick was supposed to place a white pill under his tongue, but he didn’t know where he had put those little white pills, probably someplace convenient back at the house, which was the farthest thing from convenient right now. And besides, those little white pills put him to sleep, and wouldn’t that be something, him falling asleep in these woods and his wife sending out an entire search posse for him. He continued to yell and curse his leg and curse the cancer, and by the time the seizure subsided he was drenched in sweat and his body fatigued.
He grabbed hold of the ski poles, but it was useless to try to stand. He simply didn’t have enough strength left in him. And so he scooted off the trail and propped himself against the trunk of a hemlock. The dry wind began to chill his damp skin. He took out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco. His wife wouldn’t be home from work for a couple more hours. He didn’t have a cell phone with him, didn’t even own one, swore they were a nuisance to humanity. But maybe having a cell phone right now wouldn’t be such a nuisance if he knew how to use the damn thing. He took a pinch of tobacco and packed it down in the bowl of his pipe. Then he packed down a couple more pinches and struck a match. With the bit in his mouth, he puffed gently and lit the tobacco. After a half-dozen more puffs, he tamped down the ash residue and lit the tobacco again. There was something about smoking a pipe in the woods that was intensely satisfying—the rich aroma of the tobacco mixed with the scents of late summer.
He could get used to this, he thought, spending more time outdoors, smoking in the woods. He wouldn’t be here in six months. He probably wouldn’t be here in three months either. His wife didn’t like to talk about that, but it was true. And how much time did he have before he lost his independence, before the cancer decided to grow again and take over the infrastructure of his brain?
Nick brought his attention to Marian. He’d felt an urgency to help her and to learn all that he could about Tate. Nick and Marian had been in regular contact over the past couple of weeks, including a number of video calls and emails. He’d told her, “Tate was the orchestra leader. He was the center of his world. From what you’ve described so far, this guy would not have been capable of a long-term, committed relationship.” Nick’s impression was that Tate had a tendency toward objectification. Marian had been an object to Tate, something he could use to his benefit, until he began to experience boredom with his newfound toy.
Instead of loving Marian, Tate had projected upon her traits that he’d believed were worthy. Very simply, she’d become an extension of himself. “You bring a lot of qualities to me,” he’d told her. She was brilliant; she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; she was God’s gift to the dogs; she was courageous and strong and sure and kind. What more could he ask for? He spoke of her being gifted to him and how fated they were to be together, and in the words of a true narcissist he told her how similar they were, that they were cut from the same block of wood.
In the beginning of Marian’s relationship with Tate, he had seemed too good to be true. He praised her often. He was charming and confident. He told her no one compared to her. If she felt bad about something, such as missing her dog or getting stuck in the ice, he made her feel better. Tate had performed well, and she’d fallen hard for him. They’d danced beneath the northern lights, watched endangered caribou from a helicopter, hiked in some of the most beautiful landscape known to humankind. He’d given her the perfect birthday: a candlelight dinner, exchanges of endearment, passionate lovemaking, romance at its finest. Tate had her, and he knew it. The prize had been won. And like a high-potency drug, Marian had become addicted. The best cocktail she’d ever had. But just at the moment when he’d had her complete trust, his façade had begun to crack—an insult here, a glib comment there, a cold shoulder, a rude edge, the withdrawal of emotional intimacy. And a bewildered Marian had been left trying to make sense of the man she had loved.
Marian had told Nick about a conversation she’d had with Tate on the phone when they’d been on separate assignments. “Early on he’d said we shouldn’t talk about past relationships. That couples got themselves in trouble when they went down that road. But that night he started asking me questions. He wanted to know how many men I had been with. I told him I had been with one other man, but it had been wrong, that I didn’t feel toward the man the way I felt about Tate. ‘Then why did it happen?’ Tate wanted to know. Why had I lowered myself to that standard?”
Nick pointed out to Marian what he was sure she already knew, that Tate had set her
up for the insult.
“How did you move past that?” Nick asked.
“I don’t think we ever did,” she said.
And then there was the deception. It was true what Nick had told Marian, that each person is the author of his or her own storybook. We start that book early on. We shade a little here and there, until we start to believe it. But most of it is accurate. Tate was writing what he wanted to present to the world, and most of it was bullshit. He wasn’t boastful about it. He’d usually wait until he was asked and then present things as matter-of-fact. This was who he was by his creation: the savior, the rescuer, the center of his universe, the guy who pulled people out of muskeg and saved dogs’ lives by stitching their wounds. Getting Marian to believe his lies was a way for him to indulge in his fantasies, while laughing the whole time at her gullibility. From the way Marian had described Tate, if he were the killer, he would be like a predatory Paul Bunyan. He was bright. He was smart. Sex wouldn’t have been a necessary component of his crimes.
Without an exact timeline and hard evidence, Nick had cautioned Marian regarding connecting Tate with the murders. Yet now with the green loaner vehicle and Marian’s investigation into the program’s records, which suggested Tate may very well have been in the area when the homicides occurred, he was looking more interesting all the time as a possible candidate. The Stillwater Forest was Tate’s territory. He knew those roads and woods intimately, instinctively, like a hound on a hot scent. Nick also believed that if the killer had been involved with someone, the relationship would have played itself out in much the same way as Marian’s had played out with Tate.
Nick thought about Cate and how fortunate he had been. All these years cemented between them. Had he ever really deserved her? They’d been two kids in college listening to Leonard Cohen at a coffee shop on Boylston Street, sitting among friends, and Nick had said if he was drafted he would travel to Canada. Cate said she liked colder weather and she would go, too. She was a Buddhist; he was an atheist. They got along just fine.
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 19