The Last Woman in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

  Marian collected the materials back into the folder. She felt unsettled and something akin to fear, and maybe it was because nighttime was upon her, and the cold dark outside the window had muted her spirit and reminded her of shadows. She used the bathroom at the bathhouse one last time, and even the gritty sound of her footsteps in the hard-packed gravel unnerved her.

  The cabin was almost too warm when she returned. She would let the fire burn down. She unrolled her sleeping bag on the bed and crawled in. She felt wide awake and wished she had something to read other than the case report. She also wished one of the dogs were with her. As she lay there, she thought about her visit that past June, the last time she’d seen Tate, her memories bittersweet.

  In one of her conversations with Nick, he had asked her if she was ever afraid of Tate. She’d told him about the afternoon in the Cabinet Mountains, though she had also acknowledged that upon looking back she was sure she’d overreacted. There was something mysterious and almost haunting when standing alone in a place as wild as the Cabinets, when all visibility is lost in the dense woods and you realize how truly vulnerable you are. But she had not told Nick about her second night at this cabin, the last night she would ever spend with Tate, and even now she wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or he was awake, because he’d seemed to be suspended in another level of consciousness.

  Marian had gotten up at some point in the night to use the bathroom, and when Arkansas had seen her, she, too, had stirred as if she needed to go out, and so Marian brought her along. When she returned, Tate was sitting up in the bed. He wasn’t propped up on his pillows. He wasn’t leaning against the headboard; he was just sitting up staring straight ahead. Marian had used the flashlight on her phone when she’d gotten up, and though she was not shining the light directly on Tate, she could see his face, smooth and empty, and that glazed-over look in his eyes, as if his picture had just been taken and a flash had gone off in front of him and he hadn’t been expecting it. She asked him if something was wrong, and he’d asked her why she would think something was wrong.

  And she said, “Because you have a different look on your face. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  He seemed agitated then. His voice became pressured. “Different and weird are the same. It must have been a weird look. Is weird normal?” he asked.

  And Marian said, “No, I guess not.”

  “If it’s different, then it’s not normal, not the normal look, so weird and normal must be the same.”

  Tate lay back down. He turned his back to Marian. “Sometimes it’s hard to struggle. It’s hard not to struggle,” he said.

  And the rest of the night, though they lay side by side, their bodies didn’t touch, as if Marian could feel a draft wedged between them.

  * * *

  • • •

  The morning after Marian had gone through Tate’s belongings, she woke early, the cabin still dark. More than anything she missed Arkansas and Yeti and Winter. She even missed Trainer. She rolled up her sleeping bag, fit it in the bottom compartment of her pack, and set the pack in the vehicle. She loaded the crate and dog food and a box of miscellaneous supplies—marking tape, an extra halter for Ranger, dog treats. Then she took out the cooler with the dry ice and unlocked the outside storage closet so that she could access the freezer. Tammy had already returned the vials to Lyle, who had sent them to the lab. Marian was simply here to pack up the frozen samples, golf-ball-size sections of the scat, each mushed together and somewhat flattened to mix the hormones.

  Marian was surprised by the amount of meat in the freezer, in addition to the scat samples, and almost laughed at the idea of it, of food being stored with a bunch of crap. There were all kinds of elk and deer meat that had been processed and packaged, and Marian wondered if Tate had helped himself to any of it while he’d been there.

  Marian packed up a couple hundred samples of elk, deer, wolf, and some caribou. Tate had definitely done his work on the study. She taped up the cooler and attached the necessary paperwork in a clear plastic envelope, along with the address label. She then locked up the cabin and left the key beneath the geranium pot along the side of the structure, per the owner’s instructions, and drove the hour north to the post office in Metaline Falls. She picked up breakfast and a coffee and ate in the vehicle, while waiting for the post office to open. And while she waited, she checked her emails. There was another message from Ryan Schulman. His questions were becoming increasingly personal. In his last email he’d wanted to know how people in her line of work managed a relationship and if she, herself, had a boyfriend. She’d hesitated briefly, thinking his question was intrusive, but then she told herself he was only doing his job, and so she answered, letting him know that her boyfriend had been killed by a grizzly, that maybe Schulman had heard about the incident, and that relationships could be hard. This time the reporter wanted to know what her grief looked like. Are you lonely? he asked, and How do you spend your days and nights now that your boyfriend is gone? And this time Marian was indeed uncomfortable by the personal nature of his questions and found it odd that he had not offered her his condolences. She was also curious about Schulman’s contact with Jenness. Sure, he could have been communicating with Jenness about the program, in the same way that he’d been emailing Marian, but why had Jenness kept his number in a folder that seemed dedicated to the Stillwater cases?

  The post office had just opened and Marian was in a hurry. She’d deal with Schulman later. She carried the cooler inside and shipped it off. Then she took Forest Service roads to the Crowell Ridge trailhead along the western edge of the Salmo-Priest Wilderness.

  24

  PRESENT

  August 2017

  NICK SHEPARD

  Bonners Ferry, Idaho

  Nick was scheduled for his three-month MRI, followed by a checkup with his oncologist. Cate would take time off from work and drive him on these days, and Nick would try and act like it wasn’t a big deal.

  But this time the oncologist wasn’t all smiles when he walked into the examining room. He sat at the desk and pulled up the images on a monitor. He pointed to pictures of Nick’s brain matter, even though it all looked the same to Nick. Bottom line, the cancer was growing. It would soon metastasize to different parts of the brain. How aggressively the cancer would spread, the doctor couldn’t say, nor could he say how much time Nick had left. Six weeks, three months. And the doctor was sorry, so very sorry, he said.

  “It’s okay, Doc. I’ve had a good run of it.”

  Cate held Nick’s hand and rubbed her thumb back and forth over his fingers. “What about another surgery?” Cate asked the doctor.

  Nick already knew the answer, and he was sure Cate did as well. Surgery was too risky. It would leave him a quadriplegic at best, and that was if he pulled through.

  The doctor mentioned palliative care. He said steroids could be provided to reduce inflammation. He would give them a prescription for morphine should Nick experience pain.

  Then the doctor asked if they had considered hospice. And Cate said they had not. She would take a leave from work. She could take care of Nick at home. There were visiting nurses who could help. She would make sure he was comfortable, but he needed to be able to see the trees, and the deer that would feed in the field in front of their house, and hear the birds outside their window.

  “And Nick, there’s one more thing,” the doctor said. “You shouldn’t be driving anymore. Your peripheral vision won’t be the same and you’ll be at a greater risk for seizures.”

  When they left the doctor’s office, a harpist was taking song requests in the waiting area. Nick turned to Cate. “I wonder if she’s ever heard of the Bee Gees. We should ask her to play ‘Staying Alive.’”

  * * *

  • • •

  That night, after they’d called their son and spoken to their granddaughters, and eaten very little for dinner, and held each other, a
nd Cate had cried, they lay in bed and played a word game, to keep Nick’s existing brain cells sharp and to take their minds off Nick’s prognosis. This particular game carried them through the alphabet, where they took turns coming up with a country that began with whichever letter they were on: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, and so on. And, as with the nights before, Cate began to sound drowsy, and neither she nor Nick could come up with a country for X, so they skipped to Y. Cate said, “Yemen.” Nick said, “Zimbabwe.” After a couple of minutes he heard Cate’s heavy breathing. “Are you asleep?” he asked her, but she didn’t respond.

  Nick went back to the beginning of the alphabet. This time he changed the game. For each letter, instead of a country, he spoke a victim’s name: “Amber, Bearnice, Christina, Dawn, Erin, Frances, Gael, Heidi, Ilene, JonBenet, Kathy, Lynn-Marie.” Then he got to the letter M, and instead of Michaela or Mary or Maura or Melissa, Nick said, “Marian.”

  He’d developed an affection for the girl these past few weeks but was also becoming increasingly troubled, his sleep more disturbed. Marian possessed the same traits as the Stillwater victims; there was no question about it. She was trusting and loyal. She was benevolent and kind. Natasha Freeman worked with children; Erin Parker volunteered at an animal shelter; Lynn-Marie took care of geriatric horses; Melissa Marsh rehabilitated injured birds; Marian worked with shelter dogs in an effort to protect endangered or threatened wildlife. And there was something about the innocence of each of these women that had remained intact, as well as a belief each held in the good of others.

  The women were also primarily loners. They’d built lives outside the mainstream. And each possessed a streak of bravery. At eighteen years old, Natasha had left everything familiar to her and driven across the country to meet a cowboy and make a new life. Erin Parker had ventured out west with the remote hope of meeting a father she had never known. Lynn-Marie had left her family and her plans for college to live alone in a yurt surrounded by pastures. Melissa had cleared trails in some of the steepest mountain terrain in this country. Marian’s life had taken the shape of a conservation gypsy. With the Stillwater victims, Nick believed the young women’s bravery mixed with their trusting nature had been a deadly combination. Nick was certain that none of these women had exhibited fear initially when the killer had come in contact with her. Natasha had no doubt appeared grateful and empathic, afraid of turning the killer down or hurting his feelings. Lynn-Marie and Melissa would have demonstrated empathy, as well. Nick had spent hours imagining the spiel the killer had put over on Melissa—he had an injured dog at home; a mutual friend of theirs was in danger. Any number of scenarios would have worked with her. Nick remembered one case where a ten-year-old girl was home alone shooting baskets in her driveway. A stranger pulled into the driveway and told the girl her mother had been in a car accident and he’d come to take the girl to her. The girl’s lifeless body was found behind an abandoned property three weeks later. In that case, the killer was apprehended and confessed to the crime.

  As with the ten-year-old girl, the Stillwater victims were transparent. The killer would have easily interpreted their body language, the inflection in their voices. Marian was no different. Tate had read her like a traffic sign.

  A growing amount of evidence was beginning to stack against Tate in regard to the Stillwater murders. Granted, some of that evidence was soft, but lately the very mention of Tate’s name was sending Nick’s body temperature down a few notches. Working from memory, Nick reviewed what he had so far. First, Tate fit Nick’s profile of the killer. It was uncanny, really. Then there was the green loaner vehicle that Tate had been driving the day Melissa Marsh disappeared.

  Tate’s treatment of his mother’s body had also caught Nick’s attention. Nick thought of an earlier case he had worked in which he had been called to the scene of the crime. Nick had been struck by the postmortem treatment of the body. It was something so minor police had overlooked it. Nick was taken with the way the twigs and branches had been laid over the corpse. Police thought the debris was for the purpose of concealing the body. Nick saw a pattern that reminded him of the Russian Orthodox cross. Police had been able to home in on a suspect of Polish descent who belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church.

  In each of the Stillwater murders, the victims’ bodies had been found unclothed and beside a stream. Tate’s mother had died in a hospice. She’d had stage four breast cancer. A practice of the hospice was to bathe the body of the deceased before it was picked up for embalming or cremation, a ritual that was performed by the nurses and often a family member. Tate had been his mother’s next of kin and had assisted the nurses in bathing his mother’s body. Because the bodies of each of the Stillwater victims were found unclothed and by a stream, Nick believed the killer may have performed a similar ritual.

  Then there was the call from Jeffrey Garrett, who had been a friend of Erin Parker’s. He’d wanted to know if there were any new leads on the case. He’d reached out to Nick because the detectives had not gotten back to him. Six years had passed since Erin’s death, but her murder was still fresh on this young man’s mind. He’d given a ring to Erin before she had moved away from Arkansas and was curious if the ring had ever been found. And in that second of the conversation, an idea had hit Nick as if it had been dropped down from the clouds. “Can you recall if Erin was a nail biter?” Nick had asked. And Jeffrey had said, yes, she was, and that she was terribly self-conscious of her hands.

  Erin’s hands had been severed at the wrists. No one, to Nick’s knowledge, in the course of the investigation had mentioned that Erin had been a nail biter. And yet Tate had included that detail in his description of the body he’d presumably found.

  After speaking with Jeffrey, Nick had revisited his notes. He’d believed there had been a struggle between Erin Parker and her assailant. And maybe there was a struggle. Erin was a good size, five-nine or five-ten. Nick had determined that she’d scratched her killer and in doing so had trapped the killer’s DNA beneath her fingernails. But with this new information Nick was drawing an even more startling conclusion: Erin’s hands weren’t severed because of the perp’s DNA; they were severed because her killer was repulsed by the sight of her fingers. Cutting off her hands had brought him some kind of twisted pleasure. And it had given him power over the victim. He’d been able to punish her for what he saw as a weakness.

  And yet, despite all of these things, there was something Nick couldn’t get out of his mind. He’d asked Marian if she could recall any times when Tate had seemed cold, indifferent. She told him about a couple of comments Tate had made, one in which Tate had shown disregard for the victims of natural disasters. In another comment, Nick was reminded of his profile of the killer. He’d said that the killer would go so far as to blame the victim for her own fate. The killer would be of the mind-set that if this person weren’t a woman, these things wouldn’t be happening to her. In one of Tate’s conversations with Marian, he’d implied that the Stillwater victims were responsible for what had happened to them because of their poor choices.

  As Nick lay in bed next to his wife, though the cancer had no doubt dulled his mind, he felt a sickening clarity. Tate had been able to hold it together most of the time, to deliver a grand performance, to pull off his lies and deceit. Nick was convinced that Tate’s supposed empathy was nothing more than a charade, a tool he’d developed by closely observing others and mimicking their behaviors. But there were those few glimpses Tate had given Marian where his walls had come down. Nick shivered against the warmth from his wife’s body, against the down of the comforter that lay over them. My God, he thought. Tate was a fucking psychopath. No longer was Tate simply a person of interest or a likely candidate in Nick’s mind. He’d become Nick’s number one suspect. And Nick couldn’t shake the feeling, the god-awful knowing that if Tate were still alive, Marian would have been his next victim.

  25

  PRESENT

  August 2
017

  MARIAN

  Selkirk Mountains, Washington

  Marian had brought her GPS receiver and paired it with her phone, where she’d entered the waypoints for the site where Tate’s body had been found. She’d already hiked over seven miles through rich forests of hemlock, cedar, larch, and subalpine fir. At times her visibility was almost zero, particularly as she began the hike through dense pockets of virgin alder. In some ways the area felt wilder to her than the Cabinets, but she was also aware that she was bringing a different experience to these parts. She was bringing with her the knowledge of what had happened to Tate, and unlike her day with Tate, this time she was truly alone. She ascended about three thousand feet in elevation where thousand-year-old cedars pierced a clear azure sky. And as she stood on the northeast-to-southwest ridge on the Idaho side of the wilderness and the wind kicked up around her, tossing the mountain air in her face, she felt a sense of the wildlife: the cougars and bobcats and gray wolves and coyotes; the elk and deer and martens and lynx; the black bear and grizzly bear; and the only woodland caribou herd in the lower forty-eight.