I try to answer. I try to say, I will, Dad, don’t worry, I will, but I’m frozen. I can’t speak. I’m tangled in something wet. I try to get out of my wet bag, kicking and frantically fighting it, my arms and legs flailing and finally I break out, stagger into the unspeakable night toward the sounds: the crunching, the ravens screeching like blades being sharpened, the unbearable shrieking. Then it all goes quiet. Dad? I manage. Dad? But there is no answer. Please, Dad, please, go limp. You play dead. Please, Dad, stop talking. You play dead.
My lips are moving, I’m sure, but I’m not certain that sounds are escaping. I look frantically around, but it’s so dark and all I see are millions of stars in an inky sky and shadowy phantom, twisted and gnarled objects that I somehow figure are trees even though everything is all wrong and all order is lost. There are too many levels for order: frigid air, water gently lapping by the lake, bright stars, stunted trees, the soft flutter of a bat’s wings, no human voices . . . and the horrible snap of bones.
The hollow moaning yanked me back, along with someone’s hands pulling at me by the arm, shaking me, the smell of bear still in my nostrils. “Ted? Are you all right? Are you all right?”
I tried to stand, but my legs kept giving.
“Jesus, Ted, are you all right? Are you drunk? What the hell’s going on here? Just stay seated.”
I fell back hard on the cold, wet ground and put my head between my knees and breathed, gulping in the dank air sodden with the musty smell of earth.
“Just stay seated, will ya? I’m going to call an ambulance.”
I managed a loud “no.”
“Well, stay there. I’m going to turn these lights off. I’ll be right back.”
In I don’t know how long—a minute, five, ten—Joe returned and crouched by my side. “Do I need to call a doctor?”
“No,” I said, my vision sharpening, my breathing trying to slow. “No, I’m fine, really.”
“Fine is not how I’d describe this.”
“I just want to get back to the cabin for some rest.”
“All right, then, let me help you.” Joe grabbed my arm as I stood, and after a few steps away from the cage, I felt sturdier. I turned and looked back. The red glow was extinguished, and the bear’s moaning had subsided. The forest surrounding us felt still. I turned back and kept walking.
“My car’s in the lot.”
“The walk,” I managed. “It’ll be better for me.”
Joe stopped and looked at me, his face etched with deep concern. “I think I should drive you.”
“No, really. I want to walk.”
“You sure?”
I started down the path.
“The lights,” he said. “Kurtis called me since I’m closest and he’s in Kalispell. He told one of his men to turn them off, but the guy forgot and remembered about an hour ago, so Kurtis called me and asked me if I could come out and turn ’em off. Not good for the guy to have lights on him all stinkin’ night.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Did you hear him moaning from your cabin?”
“Not from the cabin, but I was out for a walk. Couldn’t sleep. I heard him when I got closer and came over to see what the deal was. I could see the lights were still . . .” I quit talking because I felt it begin to rise, the same damn drill, the nausea building, breaking through the clench in my sternum. I broke away from Joe and made my way to the side of the road.
• • •
After Joe got me some water and I sat on the couch, he sat in a chair kitty-corner to me. I could feel that my butt was damp from being on the ground. He wore an old pair of jeans and a thick red-and-gray-checked flannel shirt. Razor stubble covered his pointy jaw and his thinned white hair stuck straight up in a fuzzy mess. I thought of the tufted hair on a baby duck. He had poured himself a glass of whiskey.
“I see you found the good stuff.” I looked at my glass of water. “I could use one of those.”
He cocked his head to the side and eyed me for a moment. “I’d hop right up to grab you one, but I’m trying to figure out if you’ve already had too much, and I’m thinking you haven’t since I don’t smell alcohol on you.”
“I’m not drunk, Joe.”
“No.” He stood. “I’m not thinking you are. I didn’t smell it on ya out by the cage either. Which begs the question then of what the hell is wrong with you? Should you even be here right now and not getting some tests run in the ER?”
“I’m fine, really. I just . . .” I shook my head. “I just had some kind of an anxiety attack.”
He peered down at me, studying me, his eyes narrowed in concern and confusion. “You get those often?”
When I didn’t answer right away, he went to the kitchen and grabbed another glass and the bottle.
“No,” I said when he came back in. “I don’t. That was, well, strange. I guess I just haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Insomnia and anxiety?” He handed me the glass and sat back down.
“More like insomnia causing some anxiety.” I took a big gulp, relished the sting of it cutting through the acrid taste of my own vomit.
“Hmmm.” Joe’s eyes were like my father’s again.
I turned away, stared at the floor. My hand shook and I saw him looking at it, so I put the glass down and set both palms on my thighs above my mud-stained and wet knees, Abe Lincoln–like.
“What’s really going on here, Ted?”
I thought about telling him. I really did. It would have been a relief, but here’s what I ran through my mind: if I told him, he’d probably feel obligated to fill Ford in, who in turn, would fill Sean in, and then my ass would be in hot water for not mentioning it earlier to Sean. Not that I’d done anything wrong by not mentioning it. In fact, I felt extremely embarrassed that there was anything to talk about in the first place. After all, what happened when I was fourteen had no bearing on a murder case I’ve been called in on. Unless, of course, the thing that happened affects my mental ability to get the job done. Before this evening, I would have said, absolutely not. After what had just happened, I was no longer so sure. All I could think was that I needed that bullet and I needed that bear released. “It would be good if we could get that slug,” I mumbled.
“Yes, yes, it would,” Joe said in a monotone voice and stared at me. “But if you don’t mind me asking, what does that have to do with you shaking like a leaf on your knees out in the middle of the night in front of the bear’s cage?”
“Nothing, I guess. It’s just, well, you heard him moaning. We need to either put him down and get that slug, or we don’t get it and he goes on his merry way to hibernate. It snowed heavily this morning in the higher elevations.”
Joe rubbed his chin, his face serious.
“But,” I said, “there’s no way I can let him go without getting the evidence.”
Joe sipped his whiskey and licked his lips, exactly as his daughter had done earlier. The prior events of the day seemed a million miles away, and suddenly I felt exhausted, so drained that I didn’t feel like I could say another word. “You should get some sleep,” I mumbled to Joe.
One corner of his mouth lifted upward in a wry smile. “I think,” he said, “you need to get some sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.” He stood, grabbed his glass, and went to the kitchen with it. When he came back in, he asked, “You need help getting to bed?”
It was my turn to smile wryly at the thought of Joe tucking me in like a child. “I can manage.”
He turned to go, and when he got to the door, he stopped and glanced back. “If you want to talk, you’ve got my word that I won’t say anything to Ford. I know how you feel about him. I don’t know why you feel that way, but I’m pretty sure I can respect it, whatever it is.”
“Thanks,” I said, then lifted my hand to give a wave good-bye, which ended up looking weak and pathetic
and I’m certain betrayed how spent I felt.
Joe bowed his head and shut the door behind him.
20
IT WAS HIGH TIME I revisited the murder site. I’d only been there twice so far. Usually I make a habit of checking it numerous times on an investigation because it keeps my mind fresh and active and prevents me from conjuring up ideas that aren’t possible since I’ve forgotten the layout of the site. I knew I was overdue in paying it a visit, so I grabbed Monty, and we headed up the Inside Road to McGee Meadow.
The morning had a milky fog hanging over the mountains, making them disappear and changing the landscape into some eerie limbo state, some parallel universe where nothing is crystal clear and the edges fuzzy. We drove the bumpy road, even more grating on my nerves than the first time we did it—when I had the feeling of a new investigation before me, the case filled to the brim with anticipation.
Monty kept glancing at me with his wide-eyed, are-you-sure-you’re-okay look while I drove because I’m certain I looked like pure death after my panic debacle the night before. When I didn’t say much, he began filling me in on what he’d come up with so far on all the Shelton grandkids.
“They’re an interesting bunch, as you can guess.”
I didn’t respond.
“There’s Mark and Angie’s four kids, whom I’ve already told you about, Lou and his first wife’s kids—Trish and Benjamin, Lou and Becky’s son, and, of course, Penny’s, now only Megan. And then, there are the kids’ kids, the great-grandkids, that is. ”
“How many total?” I asked.
“Grandchildren or great-grandchildren?”
“Grandchildren?”
Monty began to say their names, counting on his fingers as he went, “Let’s see, there’s Kendall, Mica, Paige, and Jordan. Then there’s—”
“Did you make me one of those charts?” I stopped him because the names blurred in my head.
“Uh, no, not yet.” Monty curled his four fingers back into his palm but still held his hand loosely in the air. “I can though.”
“Have you found anything else useful?”
“Not yet, but the ones I’ve spoken to definitely have their own ideas about what ought to be done with the place once Lou is out of it, and most of ’em seem to act like they’re fairly entitled to it. Something interesting might pop up. But you’re right.” He nodded his head firmly. “A chart with the family tree would be useful.”
I was thinking of what to say, maybe telling him not to bother unless he came up with something more useful or to say the complete opposite: to go ahead and make a chart because it could come in handy. But just as I was about to speak, a moose trotted across the road, and I hit the brakes.
“He’s a big one,” Monty said.
“Yeah, he is.” I felt a grin spread on my face. It felt odd because I wasn’t expecting a smile, a moment of joy brought on by such a simple thing. Suddenly, I recalled a time camping at Therriault Lake with my dad the first summer we were in Montana. We saw a moose and her calf trot along the shore, bright moonlight scintillating on the lake behind them. Dad didn’t say a word, just tilted his head in their direction to make sure I saw, a small smile on his lips and his eyes uncluttered with intellectual thoughts.
“There’s just something about them,” I said to Monty, thinking of their large, cumbersome bodies and broad, flat antlers, how they move gracefully in spite of themselves. I rolled down my window and peered through the trees in the direction he ran to see if I could make him out in the distance. “You see him?”
“Nah, he’s gone,” Monty said. “Already over the ridge.”
I nodded and slowly applied pressure on the gas pedal and drove the remaining five minutes of the drive feeling better than I had all morning, but it didn’t take long to wipe the smile off my face and a deep-bone exhaustion to return. The walk out toward McGee Meadow was muddy, cold, and wet, and even though I knew there was no grizzly around, I still felt that with each breath I took, I could taste the same strong stench accompanying the unusually warm afternoon when we found Victor just eight days earlier.
Water droplets lay on the yellow-and-red leaves of the ground cover, and the trees continued to make a ghostly creak with every slight and chilling breeze that crept through them. My boots got stuck in deep mud every other step and created a suction effect when I pulled my foot up.
I grabbed my quarter, held it snugly in my palm as we walked, and began rolling it when we got to the site. I stood before the tree where Victor was bound, the bark still stained from his blood, and thought of that day, when Gretchen and her CSS techs and photographers went at it all day and into the evening, scraping every leaf, pinching any stray hair off bark, taking molds of any possible prints.
The trees scraped against each other again, and I looked over my shoulder as if someone had spoken. Monty peered at me with his brow furrowed as if to ask, What the heck do we do out here?
“We’re just looking, sensing. That’s all,” I said as if he had asked out loud. “Seeing the place might make you consider something new, something you couldn’t think of the first time since you didn’t know much about anything. Now we know a thing or two about the victim’s life, his family, his girlfriends—”
“His cruelty,” Monty added.
“That too.” I turned and walked away from the large tree toward the woods to the west where Gretchen had found the boot. “So just look around,” I said over my shoulder. “Observe.”
Monty walked toward the trail we’d come in on and turned and looked back to the tree to gain perspective. I searched the ground with my eyes, hungry for some clue that Gretchen and her team overlooked, although I knew that wouldn’t happen. Besides, the heavy rains had altered the ground. Funny enough, the grizzly prints were still in the same place, appearing even larger than before because the rain had made them expand in the mud.
I thought of the night before—of standing in the red lights before the grizzly’s compound—as if there’d been a pair of spectral hands to my back, pushing me, guiding me to the cage. My breathing quickened and my heart began to speed up, but just a little. I was still extremely exhausted, and my fatigue seemed to override any automatic panic response that seemed to be occurring too frequently these days. My nerves felt splintered, and I was enough on edge that when the trees rubbed together and groaned again, I jumped, accidentally flinging my quarter into the bushes to my side. “Damn it,” I swore.
“What?” Monty came over.
“I dropped my quarter.”
“Oh Jesus. Call 9-1-1.”
“I glared at him, then bent to the bushes to look around for it.
“It’s just a quarter,” Monty said. “I’ve got another if you want.”
I wanted to scream, I don’t want another. I want this one—the Vermont one, but I was aware of how ridiculous and childish I would sound.
“Besides,” Monty added, “it’s probably a habit you ought to stop anyway. Especially when you’re driving. It’s not good, you know.”
“What? You my mother now?” I turned back to the bushes, separating dripping branches to find it, looking for a shiny edge but not seeing one.
Monty began to laugh.
I turned to him. I felt momentarily stunned at first, then felt the urge to join him, but not sure I could find the energy. Then a forceful welling up of pressure pushed against my jaw muscles and images flooded my mind, seemed to gather and create an inertia as if at the top of a hill: my moment with Ford in which I wanted to laugh after reading the paper, my humiliating performance before the bear cage, Joe wondering if he should help me to my bed, myself suddenly grinning about seeing a moose, losing my Vermont quarter . . . and I began to laugh with him. Then we gained momentum and laughed even harder like we were in junior high and unable to stop ourselves. I held my stomach and bent over and without expecting it, my eyes began to water. My laugh started to
turn to a cry, and I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing.
I turned away from Monty. I could tell that his outburst had begun to subside. It felt like I was the only one in the world, bent over, laughing and crying, but that I was listening to someone else, my own voice tinny and distant. For a moment, I wondered if I was going crazy, becoming schizophrenic. I sat down on the ground, put my head on my forearm, and tried to rein it all in.
Monty said nothing. I could tell he was confused, trying to figure out if I was still laughing or crying and perhaps taken aback at seeing a grown man losing it suddenly and weeping. I wiped my eyes, shook my head, and stood. I didn’t dare look at him, just started walking back up the muddy trail to the SUV.
• • •
Monty followed me out of the woods, and when we got to the car, he held out his hand for the keys. “I can drive.”
“No,” I said firmly. “I’m fine.”
He stood with his hand stretched out, and I ignored him and hopped in. I could hear my rattled breathing, and I didn’t want Monty hearing it too. I tried to slow it down, which felt like a difficult task that required more strength than I actually had. He paused for a bit, then went around to the passenger side and climbed in. We sat in the restless silence for a moment; then I shifted in my seat and put the key in the ignition.
“Excuse me, sir,” Monty said all polite as if it was his first day on the job again, “but what’s going on? Is something up?”
I let my hand drop off the keys onto my leg, leaned my head and shoulders back into the seat, and sighed. “You didn’t sign up for this, but I’ll tell ya because otherwise, I just look plain nuts.”
Monty said nothing. He rotated slightly sideways so that he could look at me as he leaned his shoulder against the inside of the car door.
“I don’t really know how to start other than to just get it out.” I tried to take a deep breath, but it was nothing more than shallow and shaky. “When I was fourteen . . .” I looked out the window at the cross-country ski marker on the tree and paused. I’d like to say that telling someone came easy for me—the simple act of announcing what happened that night. But after all the years of distancing and numbing myself, I was out of practice in the disclosing department. I hadn’t told anybody about the incident since the sketchy version I gave Shelly and my Missoula therapist.
The Wild Inside Page 29