He thought about it. I could see him counting back in his head, still massaging his hand in the palm of the other while trying to figure out where he was. “I think I was here. Nothing going on those nights.”
“Was anyone with you to vouch for that?”
“No. I was here alone. I live alone—nothing I can do about that. As you can see—I don’t have any neighbors. You’re more than welcome to go out and question some of the deer ’round here.”
I didn’t bother with a reply. I wrote the information down and stood up. Suddenly, I wanted to get out. The late afternoon shadows were pooling in the cabin’s corners and strange emotions I didn’t want were rallying in the edges of my mind. Lara’s words, “people grow up,” pinged in my mind along with a good dose of annoyance. I wasn’t done with Adam by a long shot, but for now, for now, it would have to do.
“That it? All done with your questions?” He seemed surprised.
“Yeah, for now.”
He looked unsatisfied, but didn’t push it further. He stood up, walked to the front door, brusquely opened it, and held it for me. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said. “Always good to catch up with family.”
“Thanks for your help,” I said as sincerely as I could muster in the face of his sarcasm. “I’ll probably need to talk to you again before long.”
“Can’t wait.” He smiled and shut the door behind me.
38
* * *
BEFORE STOPPING AT a convenience store to pick up a chemically processed ham-and-cheese sandwich, I had gone to the office and checked on Ken to see if he’d picked up anything suspicious off the surveillance tapes. He said he hadn’t, but that he’d finally gotten some of the files rounded up from the Leefeldts, which was like pulling teeth since youth records are sealed and with little regulation of these schools, there was no pressure to keep good and accurate records around anyway. It required Ken calling numerous times to get Mrs. instead of Mr. Leefeldt on the line, who clearly wanted nothing to do with us. The missus ended up being easier to work with, and Ken pulled out a little cowboy charm, getting her to agree to send some files and a list of as many students as she could who attended during the period that Mark Phillips worked at the academy.
I thanked him and took the files home with me. I was feeling tired and agitated simultaneously. The aftermath of talking to Dorian and Adam was settling in my bones. I sat on my couch trying not to think about my brother, his lonely bare cabin, the white knuckles on his clenched right hand, and the hatred and guilt crawling up my spine while visiting him that I’d thought I’d put behind me long ago. I could hear the echo of silence in my own bare dorm, so I got up and opened the fridge and grabbed a cold beer, and went back over to the files. They were incomplete, and we only obtained them for the period of 1994 to 1996, during which the Miranda incident occurred, but Mrs. Leefeldt had also made a list of other clients whom she no longer had files for.
I felt spared that I didn’t have to look at a file on Adam, although he was a person of interest. Mainly, I wanted to see all the students who’d had contact with Phillips as a counselor. I looked for anything strange that might point in the direction of a revenge situation, but I knew it was all a humongous long shot, even though the majority of the kids had mental health issues that were nothing to shrug about.
I went through the boys’ files first: Jonathon Fieldland from Seattle, Washington; Zachary Gentry from Missoula, Montana; Paul Monroe from Syracuse, New York; Eric Olmsfield from Scottsdale, Arizona; Jayson Prince from Walnut Creek, California; Patrick Stoddard from Tallahassee, Florida; Lawrence Schieble from Whitefish, Montana; Bradley Talbert from Kalispell, Montana; Terrance Wicker from Stamford, Connecticut—the list went on. They all had varying degrees of clinical depression, alcohol and drug abuse, anger management problems, self-harming tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, oppositional-defiance disorder, reactive-attachment disorder. . . .
I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes and noticed that my banged-up eye was feeling better. The girls’ files were similar with more self-harming tendencies, including cutting, head-banging, anorexia, bulimia, exercise bulimia. . . . I looked at Rebecca Olson from Portland, Oregon; Katherine Fliegle from Memphis, Tennessee; Gina Bates from Whitefish, Montana; Grace Winston from Bellingham, Washington; Abigail Farrington from Long Beach, California; Britta McIntire from Bozeman, Montana. . . . The notion that parents were paying for their clinically disturbed children to be among the beauty and wild of Montana to heal, while unqualified, arrogant counselors like Phillips worked with them was incomprehensible.
When I thought of Adam in that situation, in spite of my anger at him, a weariness descended upon me. I shook it off. If there’s one thing to understand in this line of work, it’s that life isn’t always fair. Tragedies occurred, one after the other, and all there was left to do was instill some order to the mix of it all.
My phone buzzed, and I took it out of my pocket and looked at it. It was a text from Shane Albertson saying he wanted to meet the next day and that he had some information for me, but couldn’t talk at the moment because he was at some function with his wife. I texted him with a time for first thing in the morning.
I stared at the screen of my phone and thought of calling Lara. She had quit trying to call me. I recognized that we had both retreated into our own hardened spaces, wondering who would try to break through the other’s shell first. Our marriage was feeling more and more like a shipwreck. I had always thought that once I broke away from my family, that I had the power—the control—to set my own course. That I could take that ship across any kind of water as long as I was careful and steered clear of its dangers—avoiding the rocks, the icebergs, the hurricanes, the white squalls . . . It didn’t have to be littered with hazards like my own parents’ lives were.
With Lara, I had communicated well—told her how my mother had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (an umbrella disorder that covered depression and schizophrenia) in the nineties because—the doctor told my dad—she demonstrated baseline psychotic symptoms, like hearing voices in her head and extreme bouts of paranoia, but also fell easily into slumps of despair. Lara was understanding and sympathetic.
And my father, I explained to her, suffered from alcoholism. I made it abundantly clear, so I thought, that it made no sense to take the huge risk of bringing a child into this world from a family tree ragged with psychological ill health, and when she agreed, I figured we had the future covered. We had each other’s backs. From our marriage on, all we needed to do was be careful, respectful—set the safe course, steer clear of obstacles, avoid the genetic iceberg protruding straight up from the chilled waters like a bright-white warning beacon.
Now, here I was as the lead on one of my first real investigative cases as a park officer being dragged straight into my family’s past by some heavy anchor I thought I’d cut loose long ago.
But still, Lara and I loved each other. That had been undeniable for the majority of our relationship. I was crazy about her and she me. But I could feel that slip away as the shells formed around each of us, neither one of us wanting to approach one another for fear of getting completely shattered. And now, I wondered if it was too late—if the end result was not worth the effort and perhaps some storms should be avoided entirely instead of trying to navigate through them.
This case, which had dragged me to my own brother’s den, was taking me in directions I’d never considered. An image of the ferocious wolverine that I’d read about in Wolfie’s notes—wild and fierce in its cage after capture, still lashing out at any hand or object coming close—slid into my mind. Maybe I’d been fighting for things to work out between Lara and me for too long.
Shit, I thought, like at the reunion. I’d been a nice guy, maybe too nice. I’d compromised, gone to help her with her family as ridiculous as I knew the whole thing was. The motion-picture image of my leaving with the storm kicking up got me pressing the heels of my hands
into my forehead, massaging my brow until I shook off the weary lack of hope settling in.
Eventually, I grabbed my laptop to switch gears and googled the kids from the files, looking for alarming or suspicious incidents, and tried to track their parents as well to see if there was anything that stood out. Again, it was a long shot. Many could not be found and among all the Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter presences and other professional odds and ends that popped up for the ones that I could locate, I found sweet-all nothing of interest except for legal documents on the Miranda lawsuit against Global Schools.
I paid particular close attention to the students from Montana on the chance if they still were around, something interesting might pop up: Zachary Gentry, Bradley Talbert, Lawrence Schieble, Gina Bates, and Britta McIntire. Zachary and Lawrence now lived out of state, one in Seattle; one in Santa Cruz. I found nothing on Bradley Talbert, Gina Bates, or Britta McIntire.
Around midnight, my eyes were burning, so I stepped outside to get some fresh air and look at the night sky. A meteor shower was scheduled to occur, and there was no better place to watch stars than Glacier Park, away from any city where the lights hazed the night sky. The infinite stars twinkled and danced above the black mountaintops as if I was in an immense basin created by the spires of the Divide. And the Milky Way, a deluge of constellations, splashed through like its namesake suggests, like milk splayed straight across the heavens.
The truth about Glacier, the thing it did for me—since it was far more commanding and breathtaking than what anyone could describe—was take me out of myself. I was just simply another life form making my way in the unflawed, ever-fluctuating eloquence of things. I thought of the wolverine again, about its unfettered, endless movement and travels through the Divide. Glacier held magic all right—the power to take me away from my problems. So right under the deepening night and blinking and shooting stars, feeling the park’s exquisite cool, summer breeze like a soothing caress, Adam and Lara began to recede to the far back corners of my mind. I watched the sky for a long time, meteors jagging across the sky and the torrent of the Milky Way so bright it ached. I watched until my neck stiffened, and when I went back in, I was able to get some sound sleep.
• • •
In the morning, I drove back to headquarters where Albertson was waiting for me. When I walked in, I could smell fresh coffee. Karen had made it and offered me a cup. I thanked her, took it with me and went to find Ken, who was already back at work on the surveillance tapes.
“This is my third time through,” he said when I walked in, leaning back and letting out a long, audible exhale through pursed lips. “I’m not seeing anything at all except the first footage we’ve got on Phillips driving in on the morning of June eighteenth and of Wolfie on June twenty-second, consistent with the time his wife mentioned. The camera isn’t wide enough to get good footage of the vehicles leaving, so I’ve been trying to magnify the exiting vehicles, but our equipment just isn’t good enough.”
I nodded. “Maybe Gretchen can help us with that.” I made a mental note to call her.
When Shane arrived, it was good to see him and he gave me a big squeeze on the shoulder and a pat on my back. I introduced him to Ken, then showed him to our makeshift incident room and offered him some coffee.
“Nah, man.” He gave us his signature wide grin and patted his belly under his light-beige standard game warden uniform shirt. “I just ate.”
“Did you get anything more out of Dorian?” Shane asked me.
“No, nothing much. So what have you found on your end?”
“So it didn’t occur to me until you told me what Dorian’s girlfriend’s name was—Tammy—when you called me after you arrested him. At first I didn’t think anything of it, just that I didn’t know or care who the hell the guy dated. Then, even though it’s a common name, something about it started to nag at me,” Shane said. “So I did some looking around through some of our files, and bingo, I found who I think is the same Tammy linked to an incident that took place about five months ago on the east side. Not my jurisdiction, which is why I didn’t think of it earlier, but get this: in February, a woman walks into the Browning post office and tries to mail a box to Canada—to Calgary, to a post office address and bogus business named Dante’s Cargo. Anyway, the attendant at the post office noticed that there was blood leaking at the box’s seams, so she took her sweet time with it, went into the back room for a moment and called the police before going back to the counter and taking her payment. Police stopped her on her way out, checked the box, and bingo. Turns out it was a pelt from a freshly killed wolverine that she was sending to Canada. And the lady sending the package—a Tamara DeWitt.”
“Tammy,” Ken said. “Dorian’s partial alibi.”
“Her brother, Darryl DeWitt, is one of the guys who hangs out with Dorian,” I said. I thought of the rundown, boarded-up Winnebago on her property and could only imagine what it contained.
“But that’s interesting. Canada, huh?” Ken added. “I would think they had plenty of their own wolverines around.”
“Doesn’t matter, there’s a demand for wolf and wolverine pelts in many countries. Canada’s no different,” I told Ken, then looked back to Shane. “And?”
“We fingerprinted the box to see if there were other prints because we figured she wasn’t working alone, but only hers came up. She had put a false name for a return address—a Patty Brown, but her ID in her purse said Tamara DeWitt. And, while questioning her, they were able to get her to admit that her brother was in on it. Your Darryl DeWitt at the bar, but no one else. At the time, we had no idea there was a connection between her and Dorian or a connection between Dorian and wolverines. We’ve only been watching him because of possible elk poaching, but we hadn’t caught him doing that yet and haven’t enough reason to search his place for signs of poaching. And, of course, we’ve had our eyes open over his love of weapons, but can’t do anything about that. Until now, that is. Thanks to you.” He bowed his head toward me and removed his light beige matching uniform cap. “By the way, how’s that eye of yours?”
“Better. And worth it,” I said. “We’ll see what the judge slaps on him in Missoula, but I’m pretty certain he’ll end up with a federal crime since he assaulted a federal officer. One very unlucky punch for him, but he knew I worked for the park. Anyway, doesn’t matter how much jail time he gets as long as you now have a reason to confiscate his weapons. That alone is justice. This Darryl DeWitt—” I steered the conversation back to the wolverine pelt. “Interesting that Tammy would rat on her brother, but not Dorian. I’m willing to bet she was seeing Dorian then too, and obviously still is even though he’s two-timed her with Melissa.” I took a sip of my coffee. “They were pretty cozy at the Outlaw’s Nest the other evening.”
“She’s probably good and afraid of the asshole,” Ken added. “He likes his threats.”
I thought of Melissa, had a hard time feeling sorry for her, but a part of me wanted to. Lara used to say I was a sucker for too many people’s problems—a bleeding heart. I knew that wasn’t true, I just wanted to impose order where I could, help out where I was needed, and it seemed to me that Melissa was so close to getting her shit together, yet so far. Bad habits were working against her. “What were they charged with?”
“Well, since the wolverine is not federally protected, she was only charged with some small-time fines—around twelve hundred, and her brother about eight.”
“I’m going to call the county,” I said. “I want all of Sedgewick’s box traps fingerprinted. I’m sure we’ll find all the standard prints: Ward, Pritchard, Kaufland, Bowman, after we run elimination prints. But now that we’ve got Dorian’s, if he comes up as a match, it’s one more piece to pin on him. And—” I turned to Ken. “I’ll see if Gretchen can get this footage in for a closer look. It would be good to know what time Phillips left on the day of June eighteenth, drove home and safely put his car back in his garage.”
In the back of my mi
nd, when I thought about running prints on the traps, was whether an unknown set of prints might turn out to be my brother’s. Which meant I had an errand to run before I called Gretchen. And it involved going to Lara’s.
39
* * *
GOING TO LARA’S, I heard myself think. Not—going to our house—anymore. My new reality was happening all on its own.
I pulled up, figuring Lara was at work, halfway hoping she wasn’t and partly hoping she was so I could see her and check to see how she was doing. I pulled up and noticed her car was gone. I still had a key, so I parked in the driveway and let myself in. I knew exactly where I was going, to the basement to grab an old box of memorabilia I had tucked away years ago, but I paused in the front door and took in the view.
The living room was much more disheveled than when we lived together, and I wondered if getting rid of me with my itch for order had been a relief, if it had worn on her more than I realized. She had always sworn up and down that she loved a clean, neat place, and at times, I thought she was worse than I about always needing to pick things up instead of sitting down and relaxing, letting it wait. But in our typically tidy living room, a sweater lay lazily across the lounging chair, the silky throws—usually folded neatly over the sofa—were bunched and tangled, one in a ball in the corner of the couch, and the other on the opposite side across the sofa’s arm. Throw pillows usually stacked upright uniformly against the sofa corners were thrown wherever and lying flat. A mess of catalogues, papers, and magazines lay strewn across the coffee table with no rhyme or reason.
Good for her, I thought, to relax into herself. A dose of regret and a little shame washed through me to see her real, unmasked tendencies. I also felt guilty for being in the house without letting her know, without giving her a heads-up, but it was still my place too, and I really didn’t need permission.
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