After Nick’s most recent MRI, Cate had completed the necessary paperwork. She’d arranged for Nick’s medical records and images to be sent overnight to Duke.
Nick was a match. That was what the person on the other end of the call was telling Cate. And just that morning, a place in the trial had opened up. One of the patients had dropped out. How soon could Nick get there, because the study was getting ready to close.
Why did the person drop out, Nick wanted to know. But Cate shook her head. She was trying to hear what the other person was saying. Cate had already opened her laptop and was typing at the same time she was listening and nodding her head and answering questions, and Nick had always marveled at the way she could multitask. And then the call ended, and Cate said to Nick, “We don’t have much time.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Cate said, “There’s a flight out of Spokane this afternoon. If we hurry we can make it.”
Nick smiled for the first time that day. “They want me.”
“They want you, Saint Nick. We’re going to do this.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“It can buy us more time. I want more time with you.”
Nick went to the hall closet and took down two suitcases. He noticed that he was walking with a little more ease. A healthy dose of endorphins, no doubt. Cate was still on the computer buying their tickets. She would arrange for a wheelchair to and from their gates, he knew. Probably not a bad idea. She’d sounded positive when she’d spoken to the nurse from the clinical trial on the phone. “Yes, he is mobile. Yes, he can handle the procedure.”
* * *
• • •
People talk fast when they have a lot to say and they’re afraid they will lose the attention of their audience, or when that window of time is smaller than all the things the person wishes to express. Cate was talking fast that day as they made the two-hour drive to Spokane International Airport. At first it was the mundane things that had to do with their attempt at an orderly escape from the house: Did he make sure the cats had enough food and water? Should she call the post office and ask the clerk to hold their mail? She hoped Leonard, the teenage boy down the street, would remember to check on the cats. She was sure the key to the back door was under the lawn cushion. She told Nick other things, like the ballet teacher she’d had when she was small who’d developed lung cancer and who had survived and whose lung had grown back. Nick thought, This is what hope looks like, and yet he reminded Cate that brain tissue didn’t work that way. He wasn’t growing a new brain; he’d have a couple of holes in his head if the tumors weren’t there. Then he asked Cate to describe the procedure to him.
She used words like stereotactic and convection-enhanced delivery. She said the catheter would be threaded into the center of the tumors.
“There are a lot of connections between my skull and the center of my tumors,” Nick said. “What if they miss?”
“They’re not going to miss.”
“Why did the one candidate drop out?”
“She experienced a lot of swelling.”
“She was paralyzed.”
“Yes.”
Nick thought of everything that could go wrong, as if checking it off his list. “Aside from paralysis, what are the risks?” he said.
“You could experience a brain bleed.”
“I could die.”
And Cate said, “You still have time to change your mind. I don’t want to force you to do something you don’t want to do.”
“Since when has anyone forced me to do anything?”
Cate reached over and laid her hand on his thigh. “I’m serious, Nick. I don’t want you to do this on account of me.”
“I’m doing this for both of us,” he said. “Hell, I’m going to end up in a wheelchair anyway. Might as well go out swinging.” And with the warmth of her hand on his thigh, Nick felt the pain of nostalgia.
“You’re forgetting the other side of the equation,” Cate said. “What if you live?”
Nick squeezed her hand. “Well now, that would be something.”
Other conversation passed between them: Did Cate call Peter and what did he say, and how were the girls?
“He’s catching a red-eye tonight. He’s going to meet us at the hospital in the morning. The girls and Elizabeth are fine.”
“Did you buy the return tickets?”
“Of course.” And Cate looked at him and smiled.
“When are we coming back?”
“They’ll want to keep you for observation. We’ll be home in about a week. You’ll return for a checkup in another three months.”
“That’s good,” Nick said. And then, “I should call Marian.”
“Did you bring your phone?” Cate asked. After his episode in the woods, she’d purchased a phone for Nick. She’d had him call her a few times for practice.
“What kind of question is that?” Nick said.
“Do you want to use mine?”
“I don’t know her number.”
“What about calling the place where she works?”
Cate reached in her bag that was on the console between them. She handed Nick her phone. “It’ll go to Bluetooth,” Cate said.
Nick dialed information. “A text message has been sent and your call is being connected.”
The phone rang several times. A male voice answered.
Nick asked to speak with Marian.
“Sorry, but she’s not here.”
“Is this Trainer?” Nick asked.
“Speaking.”
Nick identified himself, and then said, “I need to get a message to her.”
“I know who you are. You’re the shrink Marian’s been talking to.”
Nick wasn’t interested in making conversation. “Do you have something to write with?” he said.
“Whoa, not so fast, Doc. It’s not every day I get a profiler on the phone. I’m curious. Do you actually talk to the killers? What’s that like for you?”
Nick continued. “Look, I’d like to make sure Marian has this number. It’s critical that she get this message.”
Nick gave Trainer his wife’s cell phone number. “I’m going to be out of commission for the next few days, maybe longer. I need her to know that,” Nick said.
“You going under the knife or something?” Trainer asked.
“Something like that.”
“Well, hey, what are you going to do.”
Nick asked Trainer if he’d written down the number.
“Got it,” Trainer said.
The call ended. Nick returned the phone to Cate’s purse.
“Do you feel better?” Cate asked.
“A little,” Nick said.
But Nick didn’t feel better. If Marian was so concerned about keeping her inquiry quiet, why had she told this guy? The conversation he’d just had wasn’t sitting right.
30
PRESENT
August 2017
MARIAN
Flathead County, Montana
Marian awoke to sunlight and dust motes and two restless dogs that were climbing on top of her and licking her face. She picked up her phone and couldn’t believe the dogs had let her sleep in till almost nine o’clock. Trainer would have already left, she knew. Wednesdays were his day to run errands in Kalispell and do the weekly grocery shopping. He’d be out of the house by seven and usually wouldn’t return until sometime around noon.
Marian sat on the edge of the bed and put on her running shoes. She still felt somewhat groggy from the tranquilizers. The night before felt surreal. She thought about emailing Nick, but the dogs were eager to be let out, so she opened the door and walked them back to their kennel in the barn. She fed them breakfast and told them she’d take them for a run, and because the sun was warm, maybe she’d br
ing them for a swim. She was determined to push herself through this day, and spending time with the dogs was the only way she knew how to make it from one hour to the next.
She walked over to the main house for coffee. Inside the kitchen she found a thermos on the counter, which Trainer had left for her with a note: Morning, Sunshine. Marian drank the coffee. She ate a protein bar. She remembered her wash and went into the laundry room to start a load, but her clothes had already been cleaned and folded. She appreciated Trainer’s gesture, even though she wasn’t entirely comfortable with him folding her personal things. She dressed in a pair of running tights, a pair of socks. She looked for her running tank, but it wasn’t there, so she grabbed a clean T-shirt instead.
She brought Arkansas and Yeti out to her vehicle and loaded them into two travel crates in the back. Then she drove a couple of miles to a clearing along one of the forest roads. She had mapped out a five-mile course along forest trails and roads that, three miles in, cut along the north shores of Gilman Lake, where she could let the dogs swim.
The air was sun-soaked and the sky clear, a welcome change from the cooler temperatures the night before. Marian attached bells to each of the dogs’ harnesses. As she took off on the trail and the dogs’ bells jangled alongside her, she was glad for the noise, knowing that the three of them were making enough of a clamor to alarm any bears. She thought about the report she’d read on Tate’s death, the images that she’d seen. Something small and wrenching was nagging at her. She kept going over the report in her mind, reexamining each detail: the blow to the back of the head, which the coroner believed was the result of Tate having been knocked to the ground; the bruising on Tate’s right arm and hand, which were also consistent with a bear charging Tate and him trying to block the bear. According to the coroner, Tate had died from injuries received during the attack. But there was the irony of it all: Tate’s larynx had been crushed, the same as each of the Stillwater victims. Marian couldn’t help but wonder if the pressure to his larynx had been the cause of his death.
Marian tackled one incline and then another, until she was on a more even stretch, and as she moved through timber of spruce and larch, the peculiar realization hit her that she’d never liked not knowing where Tate was when they were in the woods together. There had always been something about him that had seemed elusive to her, even dangerous. And yet, if she was honest with herself, hadn’t it been that element of intrigue that had made Tate all the more enticing? She’d asked Nick once, “At what point do we know when to walk away?” And Nick had said, “The point at which something doesn’t feel right. That’s when you walk away, or run if you have to.”
Nick had said that if Jeffrey identified the ring, then she and Nick should go to the authorities. Lyle and the other handlers and Tate’s sister would find out. For an incredibly brief moment, Marian wondered if she and Nick were wrong, as if none of this had happened at all when in fact all of it had. If anything, she needed to hold on to her moments of clarity like armor. Anything less would make her ineffectual.
Again she thought of the bear attack. Again she went over the report. Forty percent of Tate’s body had been consumed. His face had been mauled, as had his right shoulder and left leg. Tate had experienced bruising on his right arm, which was positioned over his head when the body was found. She had not seen any mention of bruising on his left arm. But Tate was left-handed. If a bear were charging him, wouldn’t he have instinctively raised his left arm, rather than his right? And if he had raised both arms, wouldn’t his left arm have been bruised as well? She picked up the pace of her running until the trail met up with yet another forest road that curved around to Gilman Lake on her left. The dogs saw the lake as soon as she did, and they went running ahead of her and splashed along the shore and picked up sticks that Marian could throw for them and they could retrieve in the water.
The summer had been especially dry and hot, and the lake level was much lower than it had been only a couple of weeks before, and was that something out in the water, about fifty feet from the shore, and Marian was sure that it was, a large, dark rectangle reflecting the sunlight. She tossed one of the sticks toward it. Both dogs took off in the water before the stick landed, but when it did land there was the thud of wood against metal, like that of the roof of a car. Marian removed her shoes and socks. She waded into the mountain-fed lake, numbing despite her warm muscles from the run. About fifteen feet from the shore, she plunged the rest of the way in and began to swim until her fingers were touching what was indeed the roof of a vehicle. Marian quickly dove underwater. The vehicle had completely filled with water, and there was no one inside it that she could see. She swam to the surface to take a breath, and then dove under again to have another look, all the while thinking the black SUV looked familiar. She grabbed onto one of the door handles and pulled herself along to the back, looking in all the windows to be sure no one was trapped inside, and that was when she saw the vanity license plate, JCAT49, and why was Jenness’s vehicle not in Alaska where Jenness had been all this time and was supposed to still be? And Marian’s voice, though muffled, yelled out Jenness’s name, even though Marian knew that Jenness wasn’t there.
31
PRESENT
August 2017
NICK SHEPARD
Spokane, Washington
Nick and Cate had made the two-hour drive to the airport in Spokane and were sitting at their gate. He’d declined the help of a wheelchair. The airport was small. Their plane would be boarding in another half hour. In six hours they would arrive in Raleigh-Durham. As Cate drank a coffee and said they should go out for barbecue that night, and wasn’t North Carolina known to have good barbecue, Nick was watching CNN News from a suspended television and thinking about the conversation he’d had on the phone with the guy at the facility where Marian worked. Something wasn’t right about the whole thing, something the guy said, his provocative demeanor. Nothing about the call made Nick think he’d been talking to some good ole boy from Louisiana, as Marian had described Trainer. Nick played the conversation over in his mind. And what was that line? Then Nick asked Cate, “Did you find that guy odd on the phone?” But Nick wasn’t even sure Cate had been paying attention to the conversation. She’d had her own things on her mind, which mostly had to do with getting Nick to his appointment that next morning with the oncologist at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center, part of Duke University Hospital.
“A little odd, yes. But I wasn’t really listening.”
“There was something about him,” Nick said. “A supreme indifference. ‘Well, what are you going to do.’ That was it. Sounded like something Danny Rolling would have said. There was no ‘Good luck,’ or ‘I’ll be sure to get the message to Marian.’ Hell, I don’t even think the guy wrote down the number I gave him. Something’s not right about this. And since when did a guy from Louisiana lose his Southern accent? I need to get in touch with Marian. If that guy wasn’t Trainer, then who the hell was he?”
“You can log into your email account from my phone,” Cate said. “You can send her a message.”
“That might work,” Nick said. And then he remembered that Marian had emailed him her cell phone number after they’d first been in contact.
Nick asked Cate if she would log into his account for him, and so she did. She pulled up his emails and was able to run a search for messages that included Marian.
“Here it is,” she said. “Do you want me to call it?”
“Yes.”
But the call went to voice mail. Cate handed Nick the phone. “Marian, it’s Nick. It’s important that you call me. You can reach me at this number. You need to stay away from The Den. You’re not safe. Get someplace safe and call me.”
When he ended the call, Cate said, “If she’s anything like Peter, she’ll never check her messages. She’ll see a missed call and will hopefully call it back, and when she does, we won’t be able to answer.”
“‘You are in danger. Stay away from The Den. Get out of there. Go someplace safe.’” Then Nick said, “And let her know the text message is from me. Tell her to call us when she gets to a safe place. We’ll be in the air, but we can call her back when we land.”
Cate hit send. “Is there anyone else you can call?” she asked. “Do you want to call the authorities?”
“And tell them what, that some guy was rude to me on the phone, that he didn’t send me his well-wishes. It’s just a hunch,” Nick said. “And not something the authorities are going to pay any attention to.”
“I’ve always trusted your intuition.”
“That’s good,” Nick said. “I need you to trust it now.”
Their plane was beginning to board. Cate said, “What does your intuition say about the cancer study?”
“I haven’t had time to think about it,” Nick said. “I’ll trust your intuition on this one.”
Nick picked up the paper Cate was reading. The two of them got in line.
“If you had a wheelchair we could board sooner,” Cate said.
But Nick said zone four was fine. “I like to think I’m still one of the masses.” He opened the paper and thumbed through most of the news that he’d already heard, all the while feeling anxious. He asked Cate if she’d checked her phone. “Don’t turn it off till after we board,” he said.
Toward the back of the paper was an article about a hiker on the Pacific Northwest Trail who was still missing—a young Irishman who’d spent the summer backpacking alone. He was supposed to meet up with friends in the town of Ozette, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, at the end of the trail. He’d been sending them text messages and pictures. The friends became alarmed when the young man by the name of Elias didn’t show. And Nick was fairly certain that the Pacific Northwest Trail cut across the same area of Washington where Tate had been attacked by the bear.
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 28