Mortal Fall

by Christine Carbo

  Glacier Academy squatted in the canyon, past Coram, close to the park. My dad and I (usually my mom was too down or ill to go) would get in the car and head there on family day on Sundays. Despite my complaints—that I’d rather go hiking instead—my father would insist I go with him and would give me a choice: either go there with him or stay with Mom in the house with the shades drawn. I decided it was better to get out of the house.

  When we’d arrive, we were shown into the campus lodge made out of dark coffee-colored stained logs and a green metal roof. It had a large great room that was used as a cafeteria and all the boys and girls shuffled in to greet their family members with long faces.

  I remember having spaghetti and garlic bread, which I ate heartily. Adam wouldn’t say much and would barely touch his food, as he was still sulking and angry at my dad for admitting him and furious at me for too many things to count. After dinner, there was a session for just the parents and the children and one of the counselors usually suggested I go outside and enjoy the scenery.

  I met Serena then. She was a little older—about thirteen at the time—and she was there for the same reason: her older brother was enrolled. She showed me around, and we went into the woods where she’d found an old tree stand for hunting deer, and we climbed it and sat talking about school. She went to the middle school in Kalispell, in the center of the Flathead Valley, and I was in the middle school in Columbia Falls, near the mouth of the canyon where Glacier Academy sat. For the good part of a year, every Sunday on family day, I met her there and we’d spend an hour or two exploring the woods, playing soccer or badminton on the campus lawn, hanging out by a nearby creek and talking about other kids. She was my first real kiss.

  “You know if he has family around locally?” Gretchen’s voice brought me back.

  “I don’t, but I guess I’ll be finding that out. What brings you out here?” I asked. “You look like you have the day off.”

  “Yeah, I’m off, but couldn’t stand not nosing in. You know, the case is interesting.”

  “You don’t have a family to go hang with?”

  She shook her head. “If this turns into more than two accidents, are you calling Systead or another Series Eighteen-Eleven in?”

  “That would be up to Joe, but I’m hoping it’s not necessary.” I doubted it would go to that level until we had more details, and that’s exactly what I planned to get. Right now, I was adrift in a vast sea of unknowns.

  • • •

  After Gretchen left, I passed the break room where Ken was microwaving a burrito, grabbing some coffee, and chatting and laughing like a frat boy with two rangers, one of them Michael Bridwell who had helped secure the Loop area when we found Wolfie. I smiled and said hello as I passed and knocked on Smith’s door.

  He called me in and I laid out what Gretchen had found from Wilson. I told him that I had remembered our new victim, even though I’d never met him, and that he’d worked at Glacier Academy when I was a kid.

  Smith listened closely, then placed his chin in his hand, and said, “Are there other family members?”

  “Yes, his mother is in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The father used to be in Missoula, but is no longer at the address we found. They’re divorced. And apparently he has an ex-wife—a Lisa Nash—and a son in Cleveland, Ohio.”

  “Okay, start with the parents first.”

  I sat there for a second, because what I was thinking was that my brother had gotten into a bar fight a little over a year ago with Mark Phillips, and I never really knew why. I only knew about it because a local Kalispell cop told me about it. Trust me, it can be a very small town when it comes to gossip and other news around the entire Flathead Valley. Neither was taken in to the station; the cop just broke it up. But for a second as I put away my notepad, I had this image like a movie clip suddenly playing in my head of my large, scowling brother pushing Mark Phillips off the Loop Trail in some revenge-fueled fury.

  But my brother wouldn’t be caught dead in Glacier Park, and I tend to have an active imagination. What good is a detective without the ability to imagine things? The trick is to not let your imagination run wild. The brawl was inconsequential, so I decided not to mention it to Smith. I went back to the incident room where I found the phone numbers for Randall Phillips in Missoula and Marlene Phillips—she’d kept her ex’s last name—in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

  16

  * * *

  THE PHONE CALLS went as well as could be expected. I have to say I was selfishly relieved to not have to deliver the news in person and Ken was even more relieved than I, but it wasn’t exactly pretty over the phone either. I’ve always known that delivering the news of the death of a loved one was definitely the worst part of being an investigator, but now, with the burden fully on me, I realized that it would never get an ounce easier to do this dreadful task no matter the amount of practice.

  I had asked an officer from Marlene Phillips’s jurisdiction to stand outside the residence to help take down contact information, confirm that it wasn’t a prank, and set her up with a local chaplain. I could have had him take care of the whole miserable task, but I wanted to speak to her myself in case there was any clue to be gleaned.

  Luckily, poor Marlene Phillips had her boyfriend home with her so she wasn’t alone. When she began to sob and could no longer talk, he picked up the phone and I was able to give him more details and directed him to the officer outside. He gave me Mark’s son’s phone number (a teen named Devlan who lived with his mother in Ohio) and told me Mark’s ex-wife worked as a wealth advisor for a financial institution in a suburb of Cleveland where her family lived.

  Mark’s father, Randall, was harder to track down. He wasn’t at home and neither Marlene nor her boyfriend knew where he worked, or if he worked. Last she heard, he’d left for the Bakken Oil Fields to find employment. She gave me his cell phone number, but it was no longer in service.

  I was able to track his Social Security through the IRS to recent wages coming from Moore Electric and to get a different cell phone number from the company. I sat for a moment before calling him, imagining the Bakken Oil fields in North Dakota. Since the drilling had begun, there had been a striking rise in crime in the makeshift communities full of hungry-for-wages men: drug-related crimes, gambling, brutal rapes and murders, prostitution. We kept a close watch on it since some of the crime had been spilling into the eastern part of Montana and many of the workers used Highway 2, which runs right through East and West Glacier, to either get home to their families and loved ones in the Flathead Valley or to simply get away from the crazy conditions in the fields.

  I picked up the landline, called his cell, and got his voicemail. I left my name and number and politely asked him to call me when he had a chance.

  • • •

  Mark’s ex-wife, Lisa Nash, had already got the news from her boy’s grandmother. When I spoke to her, she agreed that it would be good for Devlan to talk to me, to hear it officially. When I spoke to Devlan, he got quiet, then after a long pause, sighed, and said, “They’ve told me, but I can’t believe it. How . . . how did it happen?”

  I told him about the Loop and he said he was familiar with it because he grew up in Kalispell, in the township of Evergreen to be exact, with his mother mostly. His parents were divorced when he was five and they moved to Ohio when he was ten. He hadn’t spoken to his dad in over three weeks, since sometime in late May when his dad called to wish him a happy birthday.

  “What did your dad do?” I asked.

  “He’s a cartographer. Works for the state, the county, or whoever else contracts for his services.” Devlan didn’t catch his use of the present tense, and I didn’t expect him to. Sometimes it took time for reality to sink in, especially when the news had come by phone and not in person. There were no physical images, no somber looks from the official delivering the news, to lock the reality into place. The other end of the line suddenly got very quiet, and I asked Devlan if he was okay. I could hear him br
eathing.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled. I could tell he didn’t feel up to any more talking, so I asked if he could put his mother back on, which he did without another word.

  Lisa got back on and I apologized for how difficult it was. She said she understood and asked how she could help.

  “Did he have a significant other?” I asked.

  “My ex has”—she paused, sighed and lowered her voice, probably so Devlan couldn’t hear—“had trouble with relationships. He’s had several since we’ve split. Some lasted for three years, some as long as five, but he always seemed to blow them in the end. I don’t know exactly why. Let’s just say Mark had trouble being there for people when you needed him the most. He had an addictive personality. He never could do anything just a little—it always had to be all or nothing. He was an odd mix of health and utter destruction.”

  “How so?”

  “He loved to hike, bike, eat right, meditate, you name it, and on the side, he gambled, drank, took drugs—”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah, pills mostly. I don’t even really know what exactly. I just remember seeing some heavy-duty stuff around at times—like Oxycontin and Dilaudid. There were always sleeping pills around as well. I guess he had trouble sleeping. Basically, he could be the nicest, most helpful and caring guy around and at other times, the most selfish, meanest, and ridiculing person you could know.”

  I wrote notes and encouraged her to keep talking, but she paused as if it suddenly occurred to her that she was revealing personal qualities about her son’s father to me and that she was somehow betraying her son by doing so. When I could tell she wasn’t going to offer anything more, I asked, “Did Mark know or ever mention a Paul Sedgewick, also known as Wolfie?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Do you know the name of his last girlfriend?”

  “It was Bev.” Her voice sounded smaller now. Small and afraid for her now-fatherless child, even though they lived a long way from him. Perhaps the fact that she’d moved her son far from his father would take on a different light. Maybe she was suddenly regretting the lost time he not only experienced with him alive and well, but would now never make up. “Beverly Lynde,” she added.

  “And one more question”—I paused, and she didn’t say anything—“did your ex-husband ever mention working at a place called Glacier Academy?”

  “Of course,” she said. “That was years ago, but that was where he worked before I met him at the community college in cartography school. He had quit because he wanted to go back to school. Said he was tired of working with manipulative, messed-up teens who were going nowhere fast. Funny”—she huffed, a sound like a horse makes—“in retrospect, how I came to . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  “How you came to?” I prodded.

  “Oh, I don’t know. . . . I shouldn’t say, but, well, how I came to know Mark as the manipulative one.”

  I thanked her, told her again how sorry I was for Devlan, and reminded her of resources for teens dealing with grief in public schools and in the communities.

  17

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY the papers announced that another body had mysteriously turned up in the same area as the body of Paul Sedgewick, but we had not yet released his identification.

  Cathy Sedgewick called me and I told her what I knew—that the death could be a coincidence, but it definitely raised our suspicion level to the point where we were considering the possibility that the two incidents were related. And if so, it meant that neither one was an accident since the time of death on the bodies indicated there couldn’t have been a struggle in which they both fell at the same time to their demise. I reminded her, though—mainly to manage expectations—that the second body did not rule out a freak coincidence of two accidents occurring around the same time and in the same vicinity. Stranger things had happened. Night of the Grizzlies, a well-known book among Glacier Park visitors, explored how two unrelated females were attacked on the same night in two separate parts of the park. The very fact that it happened on the same night had captured people’s imaginations for years.

  Still, my suspicion meter was staying high as Ken and I headed to Mark Phillips’s residence. He lived on Colombia Avenue in Whitefish in an old white house in need of a new coat of paint with two bedrooms, a small living room, a tiny office, and a medium-size kitchen all on one floor.

  We began in the garage where Mark’s truck was safe and sound: a Toyota Tundra. Inside lay some stray empty and crushed cans of soda on the floor beneath the passenger seat, a bottle of sunscreen on the front seat, and his registration, insurance card, car manual, and some maps in the glove box. “Interesting,” I said to Ken. “That his car is here. Means he got a ride from someone into the park.”

  Inside Phillips’s house, which opened directly into the living room, I paused and recalled what my Investigative Procedures instructor in DC had said about searching houses. They supposedly were much easier to handle than outdoor scenes since they were naturally contained. Peter Mack, the teacher—a short, balding guy with a gray mustache—stressed the process: Divide the house into a grid, handle each room slowly, methodically and one by one.

  “Okay,” I said to Ken. “Let’s divide it up. You take the north side—the two bedrooms and bathroom. I’ll take the south—the kitchen, living room, and office.”

  The living room sat quiet and plain with basic furnishings: a dull beige, past-its-prime sofa, an old trunk used as a coffee table, a big-screen TV hanging on the wall that looked pricier than all the furniture in the room combined. Wires snaked from the cable box and the DVD player up the wall to the backside of the flat screen. A small plate with leftover crumbs and a dirty glass perched in the corner of the trunk while some of last week’s newspapers hogged the majority of its surface. Very few mementos stood on the built-in shelves on the side of the room: just two silver candlesticks empty of candles, and a picture of Phillips and a small boy who I presumed was Devlan when he was younger.

  I knew exactly where in the park it was taken because I recognized the boardwalk leading up to Hidden Lake from the top of Logan Pass. Two early-summer scruffy mountain goats stood in the background and Phillips, with short, wavy dark hair, a prominent nose, and a crooked, half smile kneeled down to get closer to his son’s height for the picture. Devlan looked maybe six or seven, big grin, with thick unruly hair flopping over his ears. I took the photo with me.

  Yes, I vaguely remembered what Mark Phillips looked like and could see him in my mind standing on the wooden deck at Glacier Academy, barking orders at one of the students who was sweeping the deck for him. Do as tell you or I’ll . . . Of course, I’m not sure what he actually said, but that’s what was ringing in my ears for no particular reason.

  Several bestsellers like Lonesome Dove, The Da Vinci Code, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (not the whole series), Shutter Island, Carrie, Misery, and Michener’s Alaska and The Covenant stood on the shelves, but mostly gave way to nonfiction: Glacier Park’s Best Hiking, Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, Northwest Montana Hikes, and some books on random topics: astronomy, the cosmos, evolution, eating right, afterlife experiments, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

  “Okay, so you read a little, but you mostly like to learn something when you do,” I whispered to myself. “And you like to hike.”

  In the kitchen, the cabinets were full of cereal boxes—one completely empty, but still on the shelf, a box of reduced-sugar instant oatmeal, peanut butter, cans of soup and black beans, refried beans, and green beans. Stray Cheerios and Special K flakes scattered across the shelves, unlined with paper to protect them the way Lara always did when we moved into a place. Sticky-looking stains and more bits of food lay on the counters and when I opened the fridge, a foul smell sprang forth, telling me he’d been away long enough for something to be going bad.

  But even without the milk and meat going bad, he seemed sloppy, maybe lazy in certain ways—except for the hiking—and something inside me insti
nctively prickled, telling me I wouldn’t have liked Mark Phillips if I had ever gotten to know him.

  His bookshelves were nothing like Wolfie’s, crowded and showing a deep thirst for knowledge. I didn’t begrudge his curiosity, but there was something about the smattering of these that seemed like a façade, as if Phillips wanted to dabble in some ideas, but didn’t want to dive too deeply into any one subject. Of course, this was pure speculation and probably more than a little judgmental on my part. “Why are you not liking this guy, Monty?” I whispered out loud to the empty room again. I wondered if it was simply because he represented Glacier Academy, the place that was supposed to have been Adam’s salvation. But things are never that easy. Plus the fact that he and my brother had been in a fight grated on me. There was no reason I should care about that. My brother and I hadn’t spoken in over four years.

  Maybe he simply reminded me of Adam.

  Ill-tempered, volatile, and quick to express his not-so-kind beliefs, Adam and I made no music together. We were opposites, not only in build and stature, but in pretty much everything: dress, demeanor, tidiness, thoroughness, religion, and if our politics happened to line up, it was for all the wrong reasons. Basically, all those years ago, I was a snitch, and Adam never forgave me.

  About a year after the Nathan Faraway incident, Adam began getting into more and more trouble, getting into fights after school, drinking, and taking speed. I told on him, and when my dad found out that it wasn’t just pot and booze, that it was speed and some stronger stuff too (I overhead one of his friends say heroin, but I was never sure), he’d sent Adam to Glacier Academy, relying on the school to help solve Adam’s problems—to come to the rescue when his wife couldn’t and he had a job to go to each day.