“Don’t call him my dad. He’s not my dad. He’s just some drunk. Get out. Now.”
I swung my legs over the edge to the ground.
“Hurry.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Will, how many are you going to toss over the edge? You think this stops with killing a police officer? No. Then, it gets even crazier.”
“They won’t know you’ve been killed. Another accident. If they even find you, they’ll think you were up at the scene of the crime and while investigating, you fell. Just like the others.”
“No, no they won’t. Three bodies—one particular area? Radar goes way up. Way up. When it was just Wolfie, maybe, but after we found Phillips, full-blown investigation. With the guy doing the investigation added to that count, we’re talking special agents from the department.”
“Quit talking and walk.” He shoved me toward the cliff near the road. “I’m not going to have you go down in the same spot anyway. This will be a different spot. Better. Can’t see down the ravine from the road or trail. No one’s going to find you.”
“But I’ll be missing and they’ll know you were the last person I was looking into.”
“Stop, just stop talking,” he yelled, his voice frantic. A bubble of hope rose in me that he would not be entirely in control. Then again, frantic people did frantic things. One quick shove and it could be over. An acidic taste formed at the back of my throat and for a moment—piggybacking on one of the crisp breezes brushing across the parking lot—I thought I smelled the scent of fear that I always linked to my mother.
Coyotes began to yip in the distance, and he pushed me again. I shimmied in very small steps toward the trail where he led me, the gun at my back. My boots scuffled on the lumpy trail while the vocal call of the coyotes ripped through the canyon. Fear clogged and pounded into my chest. If I let him lead me to the edge and he pushed me over, I would die instantly, snapping against the rocks just as Phillips and Wolfie had—my broken, lifeless body relaxing into scree or maybe some stream, disintegrating into the earth while the world continued on. I’d seen it too many times already. I couldn’t let him get me to the edge, but I couldn’t try to juke or shove him with my body either. He was scared but still in control. One pull of the trigger and I was dead.
“Hurry,” he said again. I could hear, even feel, his heavy and fast breathing against the back of my neck.
“If you take the ropes off my ankles, I can walk normally.”
“Not going to happen. Keep going,” he said.
He was right. He was leading me to a different area, just off the Loop and far away from the wildlife camera, but around the bend so no one could see it from the road. “When I go missing,” I began again, “they’ll retrace my steps. They’ll go to the bar, they’ll ask Lindsay if I was in for a beer. She’ll tell them you left early and that I asked about that. What? You going to shove her off the cliff too? And my car. You just going to drive it back to Whitefish, for God’s sake?”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“But they’ve probably already got someone looking—”
“Stop,” he yelled at me again and pushed me off the trail toward an outcropping of rock.
I was getting to him. I forced myself to keep talking. “They’ll look through my files. They’ll see I was investigating Glacier Academy—they’ll see the names of all the boys I’d researched, including your brother.”
“Don’t talk about my brother anymore. Just keep moving,” he said, and shoved me in the back. I went flying forward, stumbling over an exposed root, my face smashing into prickly brush and sharp stones. I could feel a searing pain on my cheekbone and dirt smeared before one of my eyes. I gulped for air and turned and looked at him. My vision had blurred on one side, but I could see he was cupping his head with his hands. “Just stop talking!”
I clumsily got back up on my feet into a crouch position. A wet trail of blood rolled down my cheek and I could taste the grit of dirt in my mouth.
Will continued to cup one hand over his left ear and pointed the gun at me with the other. His free hand started pulling at his wiry hair. “Just shut up, will you?”
I slowly stood up.
“I didn’t want this,” he yelled. “I didn’t want that biologist to die, but he had that damn film. He and that guy Ward, they came in for a beer and were talking about the wolverines, about the camera and how the one was going to go up and get it and the other was going to replace the cartridge for him over the weekend. I don’t believe in coincidences. They came to my bar to talk about that for a reason. The universe was protecting me, telling me I’d done the right thing with Phillips, and now I just needed to get the film. It took me hours to find it, but I finally did, and—” Will shook his head in quick, jerky movements. “He shouldn’t have fought me over it. He was stupid. He should have left me alone when he found me at the camera.”
“But it was his film. His camera. He needed it.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was unlucky, but that’s how it happened. I had no choice and then you came sniffing around.”
“I only wanted what’s right, Will. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” And when I said it, I knew it was true—could hear the sincerity in my own voice. It really is all I ever wanted—a sense of fairness, a sense of order.
“What’s right? As if that’s something people can just have! As if what’s right is a car or something you can own. If we could have rightness in this world, my brother would be alive today. People like Phillips wouldn’t be on this planet if we could have what’s fucking right. Bottom line is that sometimes to do what’s right, you have to do what’s wrong.”
“Will,” I said. “My brother was sent to Glacier Academy too.”
He froze for a second. “You’re lying.”
“No, no. I’m not. His name is Adam, and he was hurt by Phillips too. I just found out—just like you said you did—that things did not go well for him there.” I had Will’s attention. I could see his head tilt with curiosity in the diffuse moonlight. “You know what he said? You know what he said when he found out that Phillips was dead? He said he deserved it. Said it served him right.”
Will was looking at me confused, trying to tell if I was making it up or not.
“I swear, man. I’m not lying. Phillips and his gang—they took him out to the woods, had him tied up. They did stuff to him. I can understand you wanting to hurt him. When I found out, man, if he wasn’t already dead, I would have wanted the same. But this stuff, it was years ago.”
The anger was falling away from Will’s eyes, and they got large and sad, full of a thick, palpable despair, the kind I’d only ever seen before in my mother’s. “He was my twin,” he mumbled. “You have any idea what it’s like to lose your twin? It’s like half of you is ripped away. And Phillips, he did shit. He hurt him. I found the letters.”
“What letters?”
“From his girlfriend, telling him how sorry she felt for him because of all that Phillips did. How awful it must have been. I found ’em after it was too late. In his stuff in his apartment. And after he lost his job working for those researchers, he got severe. He got”—Will shook his head—“unreachable. But it wasn’t the researchers’ fault. Phillips made it all worse, so much worse. If he’d gotten treatment when he was young instead of getting abused . . .” Will’s eyes pleaded for me to understand as his voice trailed off.
“I can imagine,” I said. “Why weren’t you at the camp?”
“Me?” He looked confused for a moment to be asked such a personal question, as if it was fair game to talk about everyone but himself, but then he answered. “I was fine back then. I was normal growing up. It was my brother who was depressed and moody. He’s the one who started doing drugs, talked about suicide, skipped school all the time. . . . My mom and stepdad thought it would help him. And it should have. That’s the whole point.” Will’s voice began to rise again.
“I understand, Will. I do. My brother, he was there because he was a b
ully and messed up on drugs too, but he didn’t deserve that either.” It was important for me to diffuse the hate and the zealotry behind his eyes that would justify the shove. “He was there for treatment, but he got very little of that,” I continued. “I can understand wanting to hurt a guy like Phillips—even kill him—get a guy like him off this planet so he doesn’t hurt others.”
Will gave me a solemn nod, listening, captivated by what I was saying. The coyotes still called in the far distance, their yips growing fainter. They were moving away from the park, away from wolf territory. “Wolfie,” I said. “I can see that that was just collateral damage—a bad thing that wasn’t supposed to happen, but bad things happen in this world, Will. Right? Bad things happen?”
“That’s what I said. That’s exactly what I said. But now it’s too late, and another bad thing has to happen.” What I could make out of his expression in the darkness appeared transformed into something distorted and unrecognizable. In the force of his voice, I could sense righteousness straddling on his sadness and fear. On some level, Will felt justified that he had made the world a better place by killing Mark Phillips.
“No, no, it doesn’t. You can still have a normal life.”
“Don’t be talking to me about prison. Don’t even say it.” He shook his head emphatically side to side.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “It would just be for a while. You’d get out. People get out; they lead normal lives again.”
“No, no, no, no, no . . . ,” he muttered, still shaking his head rhythmically. “In prison, they’re all like Phillips. No, no, no, no, no . . . ,” he kept murmuring.
“Will, you need help.”
“No,” he screamed at the top of his lungs, ceasing his murmurs. His voice sliced the already chilled night like a blade of ice, echoing off the mountain ridges that reared up like humongous humpbacked monsters circling us, watching us. His voice rebounded back, streaking into me. An electric pulse burst through me, but I forced myself to stand still.
“Okay, okay.” I held both my tied hands up. He was losing it. I knew I needed this conversation to end—the whole scene to change. In one swift move, I jammed my forearm and elbow up into his hand. The 9 millimeter catapulted through the air and to the side. I dived across the ground to grab it but felt prickly bushes and rock instead. Panic cut through me as I frantically began patting the rocky, brushy ground with whatever speed and agility I could manage with my hands tied.
Will fell to his knees beside me as I continued to search. All bets were off if Will got to it first. He shoved me to my side, toward the cliff’s edge, and I fought to get back, pushing off my elbows, then onto my hands and knees and when my hand hit the ground below me, I felt the cold metal of the barrel. I instantly pulled it up and aimed it at him. “Stop,” I yelled. “It’s over.”
Will froze in the dark, a silhouette on all fours like an animal.
“Will. It’s over. I’m going to need you to lie on the ground and place your hands behind your head.”
Will slowly stood up and I repeated my command. “Will,” I yelled. “Get back on the ground on your stomach and put your hands behind your head.”
Will’s panting seemed to surround me, loud and expanding. His dark shape began to back away from me. I yelled, “Stop right there. Get on the ground, Will.”
Will took two more steps back. He was right on the edge.
“Will,” I heard my own voice like it wasn’t mine. It sounded shrill and separate, like something that was part of the land, a tinny, fleeting breeze moving through the mountains. “I need you to stop right there. Got it? Stop right there. Look, I’m putting the gun down.” I started to bend my knees, reaching for the ground with my tied wrists. I had no intention of letting it out of my hands, but I did not want Will to go over the edge. He killed two people, and I did not want to be the third. I kept my eyes on him and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not, but I could almost see his pale skin and the whites of his eyes in the dark. “Okay?” I said as smoothly as I could. “I’m going to put it down.”
He was shaking his head again rhythmically, and there on the edge, although I knew he wasn’t, it seemed to me that he had become Adam—his frame tall and sturdy, his shoulders broad, his person a split image—someone searching, wanting, and frail; but at the same time, someone solid and tough moving away, distancing. Jumping, falling. My mother’s car hurtling down a ridge, steel slamming against rock, and the vehicle crashing into the river flashed in my mind for a split second.
“It’s over,” he whispered.
I almost didn’t hear it, but then I saw his dark shape slide back. He took another large step backward, his body slipping over the rock, sliding back and over, his scream filling the night and becoming one with the faint call of the coyotes. I shot forward, flinging myself to the rock ledge, trying to catch some part of him—anything—an arm, a leg, his hair, but my hands caught nothing but the cool, pristine air and wet skunkweed. I stared at the edge, my chest heaving into the hard-edged rocky ground below me. I pushed myself up and scurried quickly to the side to try to see him, but I couldn’t make out his body in the dark below. It was too far down and too steep.
I wildly untied the ropes around my ankles with jerky movements and ran back to the car, my legs feeling suddenly free without the binds. I tripped and catapulted over exposed roots and partially protruding rocks on the trail since my hands were still bound, and I couldn’t use them for balance. I took gigantic gulps of the cool air as I ran, somehow managing to stay upright and making it to the parking lot without flailing face-first into the ground again. I opened the car, the artificial light flooding my eyes, which had become one with the pale and dim blue-white of the night. I instinctively squeezed them shut for a moment, then opened them and looked around. My cell phone, my keys, and my gun lay on the passenger seat. I found my MagLite in the glove box.
I picked up the phone and held it in my shaking hands and tried to call for help, even though I knew better. There was no cell reception in the heart of Glacier, and I had left my radio at the office. I ran back out to the spot Will went over without even turning on my flashlight. My eyes had readjusted to the meager blue light of the partial moon in the night within seconds. When I got to the spot, I turned the flashlight on and moved the beam over the ridge and to the ground below. All I could see was scree, rocks, and brush swaying in the breeze, but no Will. I ran over to another spot to get a different angle and tried again, but he had been right. There was no good vantage point to see below. Nobody would spot someone without knowing they had fallen. Nobody would have spotted me.
I felt a shiver run through me. I gulped the cold mountain air and repeated to myself that it was for the best—that he was a tortured soul and couldn’t have lived with what he’d done. But I couldn’t stop hearing the sound of Will’s scream as air had blasted through his lungs and how all had gone silent except for the scuff of body and bone against hard rock, once, twice.
Then I heard a different howl, not the high strident coyote call, but an anguished moan—much closer and slowly rising, reverberating through the mountains, pitching up and up, corralling in my ears, pouring into me and expanding. I stood still listening to the wolves, my body quivering, my vision still a little blurred, and suddenly, as the wails became more numerous and lengthened, as they stretched and grew, I felt my chest well with pain—pain for Will’s brother, for Will, for Adam, for Lara, for my father, for my mother, and for myself.
It wasn’t just the ancient pull of sadness that had been with me since I was a boy, a sense that tragedy was never too far away; it was a lack of hope—something new, something I never let in. For me, no matter the dysfunction, there had always been an essential order to things, like the rise of the sun, the fall of the first snow, the budding leaves of spring, the start of another school day, another workday . . . and in that order, there was always hope that things would work out. But now something heavy as wet sand sifted through me and washed away the veneer I’
d always shielded myself with, made me sense that maybe things didn’t really work out after all.
My legs buckled beneath me, and there among those unflinching mountains, with the wolves howling their haunting, mournful song, tears came to my eyes.
48
* * *
I WALKED BACK TO the car and collected my thoughts for a moment, figuring I would need to walk the nine miles down to Lake McDonald Lodge. Then I remembered that I had recently put the spare keys I usually kept at home in my console because I wanted to keep them at the office instead of my dorm since I now lived alone. I opened it up and saw them, let out a sigh of relief and with great trepidation since my wrists were still tightly bound, drove the dark and curvy, Going-to-the-Sun Road to Lake McDonald Lodge, where I rousted the front-desk help sleeping in the back office and called for emergency services.
• • •
Ken gave me a ride back up and we watched the Search and Rescue helicopter make its way up Lake McDonald and through the mountains, its bright beams slicing across the dark mountainsides, turning swaths of trees blue and flattening the bear grass and other wild foliage. There was a very small chance that Will was still alive and injured at the bottom of the ravine, but I didn’t hold out much hope. The wolves had stopped howling, and all was still but the raspy, choppy and obnoxious roar of the helicopter.
I was ordered to sit on the hood of my car, while a medic swabbed my face and told me I’d probably need stitches, and was not allowed to help in the retrieval even though I wanted to. Four other men performed it under the bright floodlights, just as Ken and I had done for Wolfie under the piercing sun two weeks ago. Two of the county officers, Walsh’s men, were sent up to debrief me, get my statements, and go through all the formalities as soon as my wounds were cleaned and dressed.
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