“What do you think prompted him in the end?” Marian asked.
“The unthinkable happened. You met Emily Marsh. You started questioning things Tate told you. You, his perfect victim, so trusting and naïve. He’d waited too long. And now you had the ring. He’d been foolish giving it to you, taking too many chances, and yet he would have felt tremendous excitation each time he gazed upon the ring on your finger. Still, he’d gone too far this time. It was only a matter of time before you and Jenness corroborated. He felt hemmed in by his mistakes; yet the buildup was too great. He had to fulfill his fantasy. And at the same time, he had to ensure his freedom. And my God, the thrill of pulling off a scheme that big, of faking his death and watching the woman he was about to kill grieve for him. What immense satisfaction that would have brought him.
“You see, Marian, a man like Tate seeks only power and control over the people in his life, and those people are no more than objects to him. He’s superficial, showering others with praise and platitudes, charm and wit, because these are avenues to dominate and manipulate whomever he chooses. He doesn’t feel guilt or remorse. He sees himself as invulnerable, a veritable Superman walking the planet and playing the game. He is the whole show—the actor, the director, the scriptwriter, the stage manager, the makeup artist. How much more power he can acquire by having the world believe him dead.”
And Marian said, “He had to know we were getting close. We had the ring, the loaner vehicle. We had all the clues that pointed to him as the killer.”
“I’m convinced that when Tate discovered that the two of us were in contact, he had an insatiable need to know what clues he may have left behind, where he might have gotten sloppy. And when we were closing in on him, he would have waited just long enough for the perfect opportunity to pull off his final act. He knew Lyle made this trip every year. He knew Trainer’s routines. He knew your schedule. The other handlers were away. Tate wanted to see his victory on your face. He wanted you to know how greatly you had been deceived, not only by your falling in love with a man who turned out to be a cold-blooded killer, but by the fact that the person you thought was dead was still alive, and you were going to be his next victim. And he almost got away with it.”
* * *
• • •
On Jeb and Marian’s second night camping along the ridge, with another clear sky all around them and the sun casting a purple glow over the horizon, Marian decided it was the perfect time and place to honor Jenness. Marian knew from the others that Jenness had held out hope for years that she’d one day be assigned to a study in the forty-ninth state. When that didn’t happen, she saved her money and was prepared to take a leave without pay. And she’d no doubt had hopes at one time of sharing that experience with Melissa. “It’s crazy when you think about it,” Marian said. “Jenness traveled the world, and yet she never made it to Alaska.”
Marian had brought a picture of Yeti, and the St. Francis medallion that the authorities had released to Marian. She’d also brought copies of some of the photos in Jenness’s hut—pictures of Jenness’s family, and the picture of Jenness with Melissa. Using a small shovel, Marian carved out a divot in the ground and placed the items into the small space. “They loved you, Jenness. I wish I’d gotten to know you better. I’m so sorry for everything that went wrong.” Jeb knelt beside Marian. He rubbed her back. He laid his hand over her shoulders. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. Then Marian scooped up handfuls of the moist soil and covered the items. She and Jeb set a pile of stones over the items also, including smaller stones they’d each picked up along the trail.
Marian had brought a passage by Rachel Carson, and asked Jeb if he would read it: Those who dwell as scientists or laymen among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. And Marian remembered everything, the first time she’d met Jenness in Alberta, the feather tattoo on Jenness’s wrist, the conversations in Jenness’s room, the competence with which she’d led the teams in the oil sands, the gentle way Jenness had brushed Marian’s hair, Jenness’s ease with the dogs and the way she had loved Yeti. “Jenness, I am so sorry. I am so very sorry.”
34
June 2018
MARIAN
Nokai Dome Wilderness Unit, Utah
A little over nine months after that fateful day in Montana, Marian had returned to the Nokai Dome wilderness to finish what she had started the year before, to complete the bighorn sheep study. She’d insisted to Lyle that she’d wanted to return to Utah alone, that she needed to face the solitude, that the trip would be good for her. She no longer wanted him to think of her with a handicap because of what she’d been through with Tate. “At some point I have to get back to the way things were,” she’d said.
This time, Marian only had one dog with her. She was here in June, when the temperatures were still relatively mild for the high desert, rarely reaching above eighty. She would be working Yeti three days on, one day off, with most of their field hours taking place before midafternoon.
She’d done well at first, but with each passing day and night, she’d felt more alone, and her anxiety had gotten the best of her. She’d have fitful sleeps and long for the company of others, and sometimes at night, she was certain she’d called out in her sleep, because she’d awaken to Yeti sitting alert or licking her face.
Marian had asked Nick why the dogs, with their keen sense, didn’t know something wasn’t right with Tate. “They liked him,” Marian had said. “I don’t get that.”
Nick said it wasn’t uncommon for psychopaths to have a relationship with dogs, or cats for that matter. “Animals pick up on the stress levels of individuals,” he said. “The psychopath typically carries himself with great ease. The only real emotion he is capable of is externalized anger, which is short-lived, or the excitation of a crime. The average person experiences a variety of emotions in any given day. For an animal, the psychopath might be a welcome reprieve.”
* * *
• • •
It was the eighth day of the study. The morning’s transect had been difficult, and the sun was too hot for Marian or Yeti to find comfort. Marian stopped for lunch beneath the shade of a couple of juniper trees. She removed her pack and set it on a slab of sandstone, then removed her hip pack also. She looked over her shoulder at Yeti, who had stopped a couple of yards away. Marian heard the snake before she saw its diamond-shaped head, its body coiled in a loose loop, and there was Yeti standing in front of the snake, her head toward the ground.
Marian told Yeti to stay, because she knew if the dog moved, the snake would strike. She took a stick and banged it against the slab of rock to get the snake’s attention, to take its focus off Yeti, not knowing if her strategy would work. At first the snake’s rattle grew louder, and it seemed to raise its head higher as if it were ready for attack, but then ever so slowly, it lowered its head toward the ground and slithered away until it was beneath another ledge of rock to Marian’s left. Marian ran to Yeti and told her what a good girl she was, and loved on her profusely because what would she do if she were without the dog.
In all of this emotion, Marian’s phone rang, when she didn’t even know she had a signal, and she sprang toward her hip pack to answer this call from civilization, to hear the voice of another, and by the time she got to her phone, she saw that she had a missed call from Jeb. She picked up both packs and led Yeti away to another couple of trees about twenty yards or so from where she had last seen the snake. She dropped the packs to the ground and tried to call Jeb back, but she’d lost the one bar on her phone, and even when she tried other locations, she couldn’t get a signal.
She felt desperate to return Jeb’s call. She removed her satellite phone from her pack, turned it on, and waited for it to lock onto a satellite. And when Jeb answered, she couldn’t believe it, as if she hadn’t spoken to him in a couple hundred years.
“Marian, what’s wrong?” he said, as soon as he
heard her voice.
“I thought this is what I wanted. To be here, in places like this. I begged for it. And yet I can’t do it, Jeb. Why can’t I do this? What’s wrong with me?”
“Marian, it’s okay, you’ve been through a lot. Maybe it’s just too much for you right now.”
“It’s everything I imagined and it’s none of it. Does that even make sense? What if I don’t want to do this anymore? What if I can’t?”
“First off, your desires aren’t a life sentence, Marian. People change. Experiences change.”
“I’m so alone, Jeb. I’m so fucking alone. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re not alone, Marian. I’m right here.” And then he said, “I’ve always been right here.”
Marian’s breathing slowed. She sat on the ground. Yeti stepped on her lap and licked her face. And Marian heard what Jeb said, and he was right; he had always been there.
“You’re close to Edward Abbey country,” Jeb said. “Abbey wrote that the only thing better than solitude was the society of a friend.”
And then Jeb told her the real reason he’d called. Though his program ran through the summer, he had a midterm break coming up in a couple of weeks. “I don’t know how you feel about this, but I was thinking you could use an orienteer. I ran it by Lyle, and he had no problem with it. I could fly into Salt Lake or Grand Junction. I could rent a car. I could come meet you.”
“Are you serious? I mean, yes. I’ll help you with the cost. I still have money from Tate’s vehicle. I sold his vehicle. Did I tell you that? Tammy told me she didn’t want the money. The program rented a truck for me. I can come pick you up. I’ll pick you up. Don’t rent a car.”
And Jeb laughed and said, “I can’t wait to see you.” And Marian said, “Jeb, this is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. I miss you so much.”
* * *
• • •
That night amid the stoic shadows of the cliffs and beneath the desert sky, Marian didn’t feel the pains of loneliness, but rather the company of anticipation. She didn’t know where her relationship with Jeb would go, and yet she looked forward to seeing him again with the notion of all possibility. And with that possibility she felt something larger than the guilt and shame she’d carried with her that past year. She felt the plenitude of hope, the abundance of gratitude.
Marian thought of the society of a friend, to be heard, to be seen, to be touched, to hear and see and touch another. She closed one eye. She reached a hand to the sky, positioned her fingers just so to create the image of holding one of the stars in her palm. And she entertained the thought of Jeb lying on his back in a park or on the campus green and positioning his hand in much the same way, so that he would be holding the same star as she. It was a romantic gesture, she knew, and yet as she thought of the great connectivity of the earth and sky, there was an exhilarating feeling that really, neither she nor Jeb were very far away from the other.
Marian found the Big Dipper and Scorpio and Cassiopeia, the only constellations she knew, and maybe she would study the stars one day, buy a large telescope and look at the galaxies, but for now, Marian felt content, truly content, something she had not felt in a very long time. As she continued to stare at the sky, she found other impressions, and one that reminded her of the woodland caribou, and she thought of the gray ghost whom she had witnessed in the forest, tenuously balanced in an endangered ecosystem. And in that moment she felt such great empathy it hurt to breathe, as if she were one with everything.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was eighteen years old, a man whom I knew and trusted locked me in a trailer and, at knifepoint, assaulted me for twelve hours. A number of years later, that same man shot his wife before turning the gun on himself. I was one of the lucky ones; I got out of there alive. After this incident, my mom shared with me her own story. When she was five months pregnant with me, a man broke into her home while my father was away and my two brothers were asleep in another room. She, too, had been asleep, only to awake to the face of a stranger. John Philpin, the criminal psychologist and author, who assisted me with my research on this novel, says that ninety-five percent of stranger-to-stranger homicides are committed by men against women. Regardless of whether rape is involved, these crimes are sexual homicides, as they involve men exerting their power over women. Too often women fail to trust their intuition when something doesn’t feel right. Too often they blame themselves for their vulnerability. And too often, for the rest of their lives, they carry the burden of shame for having been violated. John addressed these points in an email to me: “We can be quite effective at punishing ourselves for our perceived sins when what we really need to do is get in touch with our own anger. Your personal world was stacked against you; the culture was/is stacked against you; your gender becomes a target you wear on your back. Are you at fault for any of this? Of course not. Maybe it’s past time to be totally pissed off.” This novel is my attempt to address the fear and vulnerability too many women live with every day, and to encourage women in those incidences when they still have a choice, to pay attention when something doesn’t feel right, to heed that small voice inside themselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Last Woman in the Forest has been an absorbing, at times personal, and immensely rewarding journey. I am ever so grateful for the people who have contributed to the research and supported the writing process along the way. As I prepare to acknowledge individuals, I am reminded of the moment at which the first hint of this novel caught my attention.
Over ten years ago I began dating a forester, Shaun Hathaway. He told me about the Connecticut River Valley killer who murdered at least six women during the nineteen eighties along the corridor of the Vermont and New Hampshire border. The killer was never apprehended. Having moved to New Hampshire from Colorado, I had not been familiar with these murders. A little over a year into my relationship with Shaun, he was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma multiforme, a terminal brain cancer. He and I married, and eventually we hired a young, male home health care worker. One day I asked the home health care worker if he had any siblings, and he told me that his sister had been one of the Connecticut River victims.
After Shaun’s death, I felt compelled by these murders and the stories of these young women’s lives. I turned to a book Shaun had told me about: Shadow of Death by Philip E. Ginsburg. Upon reading the book, I learned of one of our nation’s first independent criminal profilers, John Philpin, internationally renowned for his work, who assisted law enforcement on the Connecticut River cases. John, who is mostly retired now, has worked on over two hundred cases and authored eight books. It felt imperative that I connect with him. A new novel idea was taking hold, and John was the person with whom I wanted to explore the idea further. After John ran a background check on me, he returned my call. We began talking over Skype, corresponded via email, discussed plot points at length over the phone, and spent an entire day together speculating on the minds of my characters. We discovered we shared a love for Bob Dylan’s music, and literature, and nature, and when I’d become overwhelmed with the writing, he’d reboot my mind with a dose of Bob Dylan recordings. His generosity and the wealth of information and insight he provided me is beyond anything I could have imagined. It is to John whom this book is dedicated, but it is not solely for my appreciation of the help he has provided me, or for the inspiration I’ve found from his writing, but also because of the more than thirty years of his life that he has committed to assisting law enforcement with identifying the victims’ killers. John, you became my confidante throughout the course of this novel. You are a dear friend and I cannot thank you enough.
I also owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to the wildlife biologists and conservationists who have assisted me along the way. As Wallace Stegner so eloquently captured in his “Wilderness Letter,” the wild country is a part of the “geography of hope,” and these scientists and la
ypeople live that hope every day. In determining the framework for the novel and my protagonist, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Mark Freeman, a student at the time in the graduate program where I was teaching. Mark’s love for the wilderness resonated with my own. He spoke to me of his time as an orienteer and conservation canine handler while working as a wildlife biologist. Lightning went off in my mind. That was it. Mark provided me with endless resources and contacts and pointed me to the densest grizzly bear population in the lower forty-eight. And so I boarded a plane and was on my way to Montana, Idaho, and northeastern Washington.
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