It wasn’t until she reached the Pacific Northwest Trail, which crossed the wilderness, that she saw her first group of hikers, three thru-hikers whom she walked with for about a mile before she turned south from the trail and came across her first posting: Warning! Due to Bear Danger, Area Beyond This Sign Closed.
Marian had met with Waller; she’d read the review of the attack, which had included the autopsy report; she’d held Tate’s bloody belongings in her hands; and yet, it was as if none of it had really sunk in until she saw this sign, this warning, as a result of Tate’s death. He had been here, in this area, and his presence felt palpable and so different from whatever presence he’d left behind at the cabin. All the knowledge she now held of his passing seemed to coat her airways like sand. She’d just emerged from the lush areas of forest that received over fifty inches of precipitation a year, where a person was lucky if she could see three feet in front of her, much less be aware of a grizzly.
Make noise, she reminded herself. A holster of bear spray hung from each hip. She removed one of the canisters, slid its safety valve lever to the side, and held it in her right hand. As when working a study, she’d brought her GPS receiver and paired it with her phone, which was opened to the app that showed Tate’s last route. And she sang off-key to a bunch of Beach Boys songs that she’d grown up listening to her dad play over his turntable and speakers.
Three more miles and she was in the thick of the southern portion of the wilderness, the forest floor a mosaic of green hues, and all around her towering trees of dark evergreen. There was plenty of moose sign and some elk and the occasional deer, and she wondered if any of these droppings were targets Ranger had come upon. Though she saw bear scat, it did not look fresh. Even so, she sang louder.
Marian had considered the dangers before making this hike. But the snares had been removed. The signs were going to come down. There had not been any other bear encounters. Never before had there been an attack by a black bear or grizzly in this wilderness. Marian absorbed the scenery around her and thought about the contrast between Washington’s northeastern rain forest, where she was now, and the vast rocky spaces of Utah’s desert: the forest’s lush blueberry and huckleberry shrubs and lichen and grand fir, and the desert’s stonecrop and evening primrose and cacti and yucca and Indian ricegrass.
But she wasn’t in Utah. She was here, in this wild space, lured by fear and mystery in a similar way to how her grief had lured her deeper into Tate’s world. And yet was it really the loss of Tate that had anchored her back to him, or was it all the things she could never know? Even when he had been loving her, his love had felt elusive, his arms a ghost at times, and perhaps that elusiveness had drawn her closer to him, like a hunger for something that wasn’t there, and if she kept digging deeper, if she loved him more she would find it. And how real is something that is always just out of reach, a mirage that one never gets to, a distance one travels until she is so far gone she doesn’t know how to find her way back to the person she was or to a world that exists without him, to a place that is all her own.
And because she was looking at the different plant species and thinking so many thoughts, maybe she had forgotten to keep singing. A branch broke and then another. There he was, standing so regal, parallel to her, about fifty feet away, his coat light gray, almost brown, like velvet; his chest white; his face and legs as dark as chocolate; his massive rack curved backward. He had to weigh at least six hundred pounds. And Marian stood so still, and when she finally breathed, she let the air out slowly so as not to make a sound. She was looking at one of the twelve remaining woodland mountain caribou in the lower states, and one of the forty woodland mountain caribou in the world. In that very moment Marian was witnessing one of the gray ghosts, powerful and fragile and beautiful, an ecosystem species that within a few years might no longer be around.
He turned toward her, a second of eye contact that felt like eternity, and then with all the grace in the world, he walked away, disappearing into the old-growth forest. Marian remained where she was, her body still, her feet rooted to the ground, and for the first time since arriving in Washington, she cried.
* * *
• • •
Marian did not travel the remaining mile to the scene of Tate’s attack. She returned to the trail in the direction from which she had come, and continued to follow it to the western edge of the wilderness, where the trail eventually looped around to a trailhead on Mill Pond. Marian had hiked sixteen miles. The sun would be setting in a couple of hours. And there were other hikers returning to their vehicles, and one of them asked her if she’d seen any bear, and Marian said she hadn’t. Another hiker talked about the warning signs that had been posted and that someone had died from a grizzly attack sometime in July, and Marian said, yes, and what a terrible thing. There were two female hikers who were getting into an SUV with an Idaho license plate. Marian asked them if they would mind giving her a lift to the Crowell trailhead, and they said they’d be happy to give her a ride.
26
PRESENT
August 2017
MARIAN
Libby, Montana
It was after nine o’clock when Marian pulled into Libby, Montana, and stopped at a convenience store to refuel. After she put gas in the vehicle, she parked in front of the store and went inside to buy coffee. She sipped on the coffee while she waited in line to pay, and on the wall beside the checkout counter was a bulletin board with community announcements and business cards and a pair of lost-and-found mittens that looked small enough to have belonged to a child. As her eyes lingered on the bulletin board, she caught the upper-third edge of one of the flyers because it bore the name of Lynn-Marie Pontante, the third victim in the Stillwater murders.
Marian paid for the coffee and walked over to the bulletin board. She repositioned a couple of the business cards and an advertisement for a potluck dinner so that she could see the notice better. The shoulders-up picture of the young woman holding on to the halter of a horse had faded. Lynn-Marie had dark blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was last seen wearing a long-sleeve white shirt with blue jeans and cowboy boots. The flyer asked for any leads into Lynn-Marie’s disappearance, and Marian realized the notice had been placed almost four years ago, before Lynn-Marie’s body had been found.
Marian walked outside, the night laced with the chill of fall. She got back into her vehicle. She checked her phone before leaving and saw that she had another email from Ryan Schulman. This time he wanted to know what her schedule looked like the following day. Would she be taking the dogs on a run, and if so, perhaps he could observe her. And he reminded her that all of this was to help him build a picture of a day in the life of a handler at The Den. Marian emailed him that she might be taking the dogs for a run, and that she should probably clear his request with Lyle.
Once Marian was back on the highway, she thought about horses and a girl she had known in Michigan who’d been thrown from a young gelding and who had not walked the same since. And then Marian thought about other things, such as the cost of feeding a horse versus feeding a dog, and she tried to come up with a ratio of an animal’s weight per its helping of food, because she did not want to keep thinking of the image of Lynn-Marie Pontante.
She was about twenty minutes outside Libby, the road ahead as dark and bleak as one of the great lakes, when a deer jumped in front of her, and Marian slammed on her brakes and instantly made impact. Marian pulled the SUV onto the wide right shoulder and turned on her hazard lights. She shut off the engine and switched on the flashlight on her phone. She then climbed out of her vehicle and with the small beam of light discovered some blood and fur from a deer on her left fender, though she did not see a carcass. Marian worried about the animal’s injuries, and then in the silence of the highway, she heard movement in the woods and the braying of a deer, and thrashing.
Marian left her vehicle and ventured up the embankment and through the
trees toward the sound, and upon shining the flashlight on the ground she was able to pick up the deer’s blood trail. As Marian continued to follow the blood trail, the thrashing ceased and the deer became quiet. Then, about a hundred feet from the vehicle, the woods opened up to a small clearing and some old fencing, and caught in the barbed wire was the injured deer, whose eyes were wide and staring back at Marian.
“It’s okay,” Marian said. “I’m here to help you.” Marian would need to report the accident, she knew. She would contact the Lincoln County sheriff’s department, and from there someone would most likely reach out to Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The deer’s injuries from the vehicle did not appear serious, but the more afraid the deer became, the more danger she would cause herself by lashing about, and what if the deer had suffered internal bleeding?
Marian continued to speak softly as she backed away. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you help.” She then walked the rest of the way to the vehicle and around to the driver’s side. When she opened the door and the overhead light came on, she noticed the passport that had no doubt slid out from underneath the seat when she’d slammed on her brakes. She thought about the days Tate had spent going back and forth across the border on the caribou and wolf study that had spanned all of the Selkirk range in Washington as well as into British Columbia and parts of northwestern Idaho.
She set the passport aside. She would look at it later. She first needed to contact someone about the deer and hoped she could get a signal. She opened her phone and was glad to see she had a couple of bars. She contacted the sheriff’s department and estimated her location, as she did not have an exact mile marker. The dispatcher let her know that a deputy would be there shortly. Marian said she would wait so that she could lead the deputy to the injured animal.
She sat back in her seat and picked up the passport. She opened it to Tate’s picture. She did not recall ever having seen a picture of him without his beard. The picture was almost ten years old, as the passport was just shy of being expired. She thumbed through the rest of the pages and looked at the stamps: Nepal, Zambia, Cambodia. She was familiar with the studies from these countries. Nepal involved a pangolin habitat study. With the Zambia project, the dogs had searched for poaching contraband along roads and in villages. Cambodia was the Indochinese tiger project through the World Wildlife Fund. And yet, as she got to the last stamped page for Brazil, where Tate and Dudley had studied the health and population of the maned wolf, a wild canid found in the grasslands of central South America, she felt unsettled by a nagging sensation that something was amiss. She went back to the first few pages of the passport, to a trip Tate had made to Patagonia. This time she turned each page carefully, to make sure she hadn’t missed something, and what she didn’t find was a stamp from Norway. She picked up her phone and ran a quick search to see if Norway did in fact require that passports be stamped. Maybe it was just an oversight, but deep down something was taking hold of Marian: Tate was never in Norway; he never studied polar bears. Marian realized that none of the materials she’d read on the Svalbard archipelago project gave the name of the handler. And if Tate wasn’t on the study, then he wasn’t out of the country when Natasha Freeman, the first Stillwater victim, went missing.
Trainer’s number was programmed into Marian’s phone. When she called him, he picked up on the second ring. He was glad to hear from her. He’d left her dinner. “It’s on a plate in the refrigerator,” he said.
Marian thanked him for thinking of her, and could she ask him a question, because it had been on her mind. “Who went on the Svalbard archipelago study?”
“That would be Lyle,” Trainer said.
“Tate didn’t go?”
“We only had enough money to send one team over. We were a small operation back then. That was the year Tate drove to Omaha to spend Christmas with his sister.”
Marian was quiet. Trainer asked her how she was doing. “I was getting worried,” he said. “Tried to call you a couple of times, but your phone was turned off.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I was trying to save the battery.” Marian told him not to worry, that she was in one piece.
Trainer tried to convince her to drive on back to The Den. He assured her the authorities would be able to find the deer. “I’m not too keen on you staying out there by yourself.”
“The doors are locked. I’ll be fine,” she said.
“In case we miss each other in the morning, is there anything you need me to pick up for you at the store?” Trainer did the grocery shopping on Wednesdays.
Marian said she was good. And when they ended the call she was aware of a continuing shift in her perspective of Tate and her involvement with him, as if the whole thing were surreal, and she wondered if she might be as crazy as Tate now seemed to have been, because everything—her being on the side of this road, Tate not having been in Norway, women disappearing, people getting mauled by bears, the woodland caribou being reduced to near extinction—felt very wrong.
Marian thought of Lynn-Marie with her deep-set brown eyes, her high cheekbones, her blond hair, almost brown. And Marian tried to hold on to some hope that Tate wasn’t the killer, and if he hadn’t taken these women’s lives, then someone was still out there, in these woods, along these highways. She opened the glove compartment and took out the gun, and as she did so, the receipt on which she had written Nick’s telephone number fell like an autumn leaf onto the floor.
Marian picked up the receipt, and she’d forgotten how late it was, because if she’d realized it was close to ten she wouldn’t have made the call. Instead of searching through her phone contacts, she entered Nick’s number from the receipt. Nick’s wife answered. Yes, he was still awake. And Marian said she was sorry to call so late, that time had gotten away from her, and she could call the next day if that would be better. But then Nick was already on the phone. His voice was weak. He sounded tired. “I can call back tomorrow,” Marian told him.
“Nonsense,” Nick said. “I was playing with the cat. I’ve got plenty of time to sleep.”
And maybe it was because of the cell reception or because of the sound of a truck that had just passed Marian on the highway, but Nick said, “Marian, where are you?”
She told him about the deer and her waiting for the authorities to arrive. And Nick said, “Do you want me to stay on the phone with you until they get there?” And Marian said, “That would be nice.”
Then Marian said, “Nick, I think I’ve made a mistake.”
And Nick said, “What’s wrong?”
She went on to tell Nick about the files she’d discovered, that she thought she’d finally found an alibi for Tate for at least three of the murders. “I thought Tate had been in Norway when Natasha Freeman went missing. There was a study in Svalbard archipelago. I was sure he’d been on the study. But I was wrong. He wasn’t on the study. He was driving to Omaha to see his sister. Helena is between Whitefish and Omaha. It’s not a direct route, but Tate liked to drive. Taking a longer route is something he would have done.”
And she said, “Nick, there’s more. There was a grizzly and black bear study in Alberta. The first tier took place between mid-May and the end of July. Tate was there and I have nothing to suggest he left the study and picked up Erin Parker. But he was just over the border and it’s possible. Where it gets interesting is with the second tier of the study that took place from the first of August to mid-October, four years ago when Lynn-Marie disappeared. Tate was on that second leg of the study. I have a copy of his team’s tracklog. But according to the data, he wasn’t working the day Lynn-Marie went missing, or the day after. Libby would have been about a five-hour drive for Tate. With that two-day window, he could have made the trip.”
As Marian was speaking, the words rolling off her tongue like thunder, she was staring at the receipt with Nick’s number, which she now held in her left hand. And then she
stopped abruptly, the air catching in her lungs.
“Marian, are you still there?”
“I’m here,” she said, her voice wary, almost quiet, because she could not believe what she was seeing. She held the phone in the crook of her neck and picked up the receipt for the coffee she’d purchased back at the convenience store. She compared it to the receipt that had been in the glove compartment, the same one she’d written Nick’s number on two months earlier, just after Tammy had left. Marian had been running errands in Kalispell. And after one of those errands she was sitting in the parking lot of Cabela’s, and, using her phone, she’d entered her credit card on an online site in exchange for Nick’s number.
As Marian looked at the two receipts, she felt as if the night were closing in on her, cornering her in a very tight space. “Lynn-Marie was last seen at a convenience store in Libby. My God, Nick, Tate was there. He was at that same store the day Lynn-Marie went missing. I have the receipt. I’m looking at it right now. All this time it was in the glove compartment. I was just there, at the store. The receipts are the same. He stood in the exact same spot where I stood, at the counter. He bought a beverage, I don’t know, a Gatorade or something. Do you realize what this means? Tate could have killed these women.” Marian said all of these things because up until that very moment she had not believed, not really and truly believed Tate could have been guilty. But now there was the receipt she held in her left hand. And there was the passport and the green loaner vehicle and Tate had looked in windows when he was in college. And how could someone Marian loved do something like this?
Nick asked Marian if there was a time on the receipt. And Marian said there was: 5:23 p.m. Nick said he could make some calls. He could find out if the time on the receipt matched the time Lynn-Marie had been at the store. There had been video surveillance footage, Nick said. He’d always believed the perpetrator would be on that footage, even though the images weren’t clear and the killer would not have shown his face. Nick told Marian that the detectives hadn’t agreed with him on that point. They’d thought Lynn-Marie’s killer had been someone who had been a client of Greener Pastures, someone who would have been familiar with the place. But Nick had believed the killer may have followed Lynn-Marie from either the convenience store or one of her earlier destinations, such as the feed store, then remained out of sight just long enough to pull the whole thing off. He was capable of performing any number of scenarios to gain Lynn-Marie’s trust, Nick said. This was a killer who played his victims, and he played them well.
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 25