“I don’t want him,” I said, and I really, really meant it. I didn’t want him for me and I didn’t want him for her. I didn’t want him in our lives and here he was, bound to us by law. “You could have told me,” I said softly. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want you to talk me out of it.”
“I got the job,” I said miserably.
She stared at me. “So we’re moving to Alaska?”
“You have a husband now.”
“So?” Aggie demanded. She slid off the wet vanity. “So fucking what? He can come if he wants but it’s you and me, right?”
Relief, so profound I was embarrassed by it. “Right.”
A grin split her face. “It’s wolves, baby. Fucking wolves.” And then she grabbed me and threw her head back and howled her wolf’s howl and a woman who was entering the bathroom took one look at us and turned straight back around and I laughed and laughed and then I joined in.
When we were done, Aggie headed back to the table but I lingered to use the toilet. As I washed my hands I told my reflection to go out there and enjoy herself. My sister knew what she was doing, she always did. This would be okay.
Someone was moving through the dark hallway as I came out of the bathroom. We bumped gently, and I was pushed against the wall and it was Gus, I’d have known the feel of him even were it pitch black.
“I missed you, baby,” he said, breath hot on my ear, hands moving to my breasts.
I shoved him away. “Gus, what the fuck.”
He blinked, then looked shocked. “Oh shit. Inti?”
“Bullshit,” I snapped, my face burning. “My hair and clothes are different, for Christ’s sake.”
The shock fell away to reveal amusement. “It was a joke, kid. For old times’ sake.”
I stared at him, stunned. “No more of this, all right? Whatever this little game is that you’re playing.”
“No game,” Gus said. “Friends, okay?”
I gave him a hard stare.
He laughed and put his arm around me, guiding me back to the table. “Actually,” he said, “it’s family now, sis.”
* * *
Bonnie is sitting at her computer when I enter the tiny police station. There’s a receptionist who asks me how he can assist me, but Bonnie spots me and waves me over. There are about six desks in the open-plan room, most seem to be shared by a couple of police officers, while the largest sits in an office separated only by a glass wall on which a plaque reads DUNCAN MACTAVISH, CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT. He’s not in his office—I made sure of that before I came in here.
“How are you, Inti?” Bonnie asks.
“Well, thanks. Thought I’d follow up on the alibi.”
She nods. “Let’s use Duncan’s office for some privacy.”
I follow her in and she takes a seat behind his desk, while I sink into the chair opposite. It’s a small, untidy office, full to the brim with towering stacks of paper. He doesn’t have any photos or personal items. “Guess he hasn’t embraced the digital era, huh?”
Bonnie glances around at the chaos and smiles. “Yeah. No. But it is actually easier to keep things straight when you have them in front of you. Would you like to make a written statement, Inti?”
“I’ll just tell you, if that’s easier.”
“It’s less formal.”
“Okay, well I’m guessing you guys don’t much care about formal.”
She sighs. “I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you directly. Duncan’s my boss, and I wanted to afford him some discretion because of the nature of his statement, and I figured you’d appreciate that discretion too.”
“I just don’t really get it. Am I a suspect or not?”
“At this stage you’re not. You’re a person of interest. Which is why I haven’t yet followed up on your initial interview.” She pauses and leans back in the chair. “I did think it was strange that he didn’t record it. So I asked him, off the record, and he told me he hadn’t made it formal because he knew where you were that night, and that was enough for me.” Another pause. “You’re not a suspect, Inti, not as far as I’m concerned. But if you have anything you’d like to tell me, anything that could help…”
“That last time I saw Stuart was outside the pub with Duncan, and when Duncan came inside he’d been punched or something. Did he tell you that?”
Bonnie nods. “We have a solid timeline of Stuart’s whereabouts until early in the morning, when he disappears and isn’t seen again.”
“So where was he?”
“I can’t discuss the details of an open investigation with you, I’m afraid. Is there any particular reason you’re concerned about this?”
“Sure, he was abusing his wife, and I want to know what happened to him.”
“What I can say is that we found no evidence of him having left.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning we’ve decided to treat this as a possible homicide.”
“Couldn’t he have had an accident or something?”
“Of course. Back country out here is pretty perilous. We lose hikers sometimes, to rough terrain. Always find their bodies, though. And now we have animal attacks to consider, too.”
“You’d find remains,” I assure her.
She nods. “We have your expert advice on that. But you’d be pretty highly motivated to assure us of that, wouldn’t you? If the wolves have killed a person they’ll need to be destroyed.”
“What, all of them?”
“Unless you can identify a single culprit, and then we’d need assurance it acted on its own.”
Which, she knows, would be very hard for me to give her.
“Shall I ask the question then?” she asks. “Where were you on the night Stuart Burns was last seen?”
“I was at the pub in town and then I went home with Duncan.”
“To his place?”
“Yes.”
“What time was that?”
“Best guess, about nine.”
“And you were there for the whole night?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Inti, I’ll include that in your file.”
She doesn’t ask me if he was there all night. So I don’t say anything. I think it’s because revealing his lie could uncover mine. But there is also a voice inside telling me not to speak up yet, not until I have some proof, or at least more of a concrete sense that Duncan really did kill Stuart, more than this terrible gut feeling. I don’t want to land him in shit if he hasn’t actually done anything.
“How do you narrow down your list of suspects for something like this?” I ask.
She shrugs. “We look at anyone Stuart might have had conflict with, anyone who had a reason to want him gone, to harm him. It’s always hard without a body.”
“What if it wasn’t about Stuart at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well … getting rid of someone so thoroughly, and leaving no trace—it’s a good way to make everyone jump to the conclusion that he must have been eaten by the brand-new wolves they’re all so determined to see the end of.”
She nods slowly. “I understand. We’ll consider that.”
“Thanks, Bonnie.” I stand up to leave.
“See you at Duncan’s for the next one?” she asks brightly.
I pause at the door. “Bonnie, look. He’s not coming off too well right now. Sleeping with married women. Sleeping with multiple women at the same time.”
Bonnie shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know what to tell you, Inti.”
“Tell me if you think he’s a good man or not.”
“I think he’s human.”
“Yeah, that’s what I suspected.”
* * *
I sit in my car and type “Duncan MacTavish, Chief Superintendent” into Google. Pages of links come up. Most of them are newspaper articles about Stuart Burns, given Duncan is the officer in charge of the investigation. He’s also mentioned in other articles for just about
every minor and major crime in the area, dating back years, mostly because he’s the one making the statements about them. I start reading through the articles and when I come up for air I realize hours have passed and it’s dark outside. I haven’t got any real sense of who he is, except that he’s a good cop. He gets things done, as far as I can tell, although there are also a few unsolved crimes, from vandalism to farm equipment theft.
He doesn’t have any social media that I can stalk. So I call Fergus and take him up on the drink offer.
* * *
The pub is quiet this evening. Fergus and I sit at a corner table and share a jug of beer and a bowl of chips. I don’t drink the beer but he doesn’t notice. We chat idly for a while—meaning Fergus chats idly for a while and I listen—and I get a sense of his restlessness; I think he is a man who longs for the time when everyone still partied into dawn. He paints a picture of his adolescence, a time out of control, when he had only his friends and they all adored each other, they were as restless as he was, as keen for experience, as bored as you become when you grow up in a small town.
“I feel stuck there, to be honest,” Fergus admits. “A sixteen-year-old in a forty-year-old body.”
“Was Stuart part of this group?” I ask.
“Sure. Lainey too. And Duncan and Amelia. We all went to school together.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
Fergus shakes his head. “Maybe he just got done with it all.”
“All what?”
“The farm. Such a thankless life. I dunno, it’s a strange one.”
I get the sense he doesn’t feel right talking to me, an outsider. I try to probe gently but I’m not that good at gentle anymore. “Do you think he would have left his wife like that, though? Out of the blue, with no word?”
“Doesn’t seem likely, no. No one could have accused Stuart of not loving his wife.”
“Sure, he seemed set on loving her to death.”
Fergus tenses. “They’ve been together since we were kids,” he says as though this explains everything, and maybe it does. “All the boys round here were a little in love with Lainey. But she found her match with Stuart. Good-looking and kind and all that, and everyone knew they were meant to be together.”
“So what changed?”
“Nothing.”
I shake my head. This whole fucking place was blind to a woman in danger.
“I mean, I guess…” Fergus thinks about it for a while. “The drink’s a curse for some men. Makes them not themselves anymore. He kept trying to quit, but I suppose there was a time there when I would have put money on her being the one to disappear, if either of them did.”
“Do you mean leave? Or get killed?” I demand.
“Leave!” he exclaims. “Jesus, if I thought she was gonna get killed, I’d have…”
“You’d have what?”
Fergus looks back at me. “You’re so hard.”
I forge on. “Do you think anyone might have hated him? Jealousy or anger, or whatever?”
“Now you sound like Mac, sniffing around.”
“Duncan? He questioned you?”
“Sure, he’s questioned everyone in town.”
We go quiet a while.
Eventually Fergus says, “You ask me, if someone did get rid of him, they’d have to have a gargantuan set of balls on them. He’d be no easy man to take down, that Stuart—and getting away with it, that’s another story.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause Mac won’t stop sniffing. Bloodhound, he is.”
And will he sniff his way to a false culprit if it means protecting himself? Has he got his sights on me?
“Has he always been that way?” I ask carefully.
“Yeah. For as long as I can remember. He fixates. And you never know with someone if that’s what they were born like or if it comes from the shit that happens to them.”
“What happened to him?”
“It was in the papers. It’s not a secret or anything.”
I wait.
Fergus sighs. “Duncan killed his dad.”
* * *
Fergus drinks to get drunk. I see that pretty quickly. He speaks of what happened but only a little, enough for me to know that he was there, after, and he saw what had been done and he’s never forgotten it. They were all there, Duncan’s closest friends. He called them before he called the police. Lainey, his girlfriend. Fergus, Amelia. Duncan didn’t cry, Fergus remembers. He never once cried, through all the bits of it that came after.
I drive Fergus home and help him inside. He stumbles and I feel a pang of such pity for him as I put him in bed and get him a glass of water. Then I head home. Aggie’s already in bed, so I crawl into mine and sink low under the covers, scrolling on my phone until I find the article from twenty-five years ago.
It was Christmas night. The police arrived to discover two dead bodies.
Duncan’s father had been bludgeoned to death. His mother beaten to death. At first the cops couldn’t make sense of the terrible crime scene. They thought it must have been a home invasion. But when they found Duncan and his friends huddled together upstairs they were able to piece together what had happened.
Duncan had been trying to protect his mother. He hadn’t been able to.
His actions were ruled defense of another. He was sixteen. I stare at the picture of him, his head shaved, shadows beneath his eyes. The boy gazing back at me is broken.
I turn the light off and try to hold my body still, but it won’t stop shaking. Trauma can create new patterns. I’m no stranger to this.
* * *
There is a party. It moves around me. Soundless. Weightless. My body is alive with them, with these bodies in my house, bodies I don’t know but can feel. I walk from the living room. I am looking for Gus. Looking for Aggie. My edges are smudged.
My feet take the stairs slowly. Surely. My spirit is racing ahead. To their bedroom.
The door is closed.
I am inside, somehow. On their bed, a bed that is moving. There is a hand around my throat and I can’t breathe, I can’t get away.
* * *
“Inti!”
I wake with a lurch. My sister sits on my bed, holding my arms, holding my seams. I must have dreamt her voice saying my name, because she doesn’t speak, my sister who knows more words than anyone.
You were crying, she signs.
A wave of nausea rocks me and it takes every ounce of energy I have to dash into the bathroom and vomit. Aggie pulls my hair back for me and when I’m done she hands me toilet paper to wipe my mouth and we sit facing each other on the cold tiles.
What a pair we make, Aggie signs.
I nod. Exhausted.
Morning sickness?
“I guess so.” It’s easier than telling her what I was dreaming about. She knows anyway, of course she does.
“Work with Gall today,” I say, voice breaking. “She needs love.”
I can’t go outside.
“Why not, Aggie?”
He could be out there, she replies simply.
I stare at my sister and think—and it’s bizarre that this should be the first time I truly think it—I don’t know if I am equal to this madness.
I dream again, but this time not of monsters. Of wolves. Of running with them into the shadow of the mountain.
17
I have known some truly bad days. In one of them I killed a wolf.
It was my first plane-darting. I’d been working out of the Alaskan base in Denali National Park and Preserve for many months and dreading this moment, the moment I’d have to pull a trigger and tranquilize a wolf without knowing what would happen to me in the process, knowing I would have to find out at some point. So we took the plane up. I was strapped in, and shown how to hang out the side, so that when we flew low and close to the ground I would have the best shot, and soon we found her, loping along a stretch of grassy prairie, and I took aim, using all those years of Dad’s practic
e shooting at painted targets to slow my breathing, to calm my hands, to sight my crosshairs and squeeze the trigger. The dart hit her and I let out a gasp as she fell to the ground; I was watching and felt my legs liquify, my chest sting with the impact. It was lucky I was strapped in.
By the time the plane had circled down to land I was myself again. Niels, who’d gone up in the plane with me, led the way to the fallen wolf. We crouched over her but something was wrong. She wasn’t breathing.
The dart had collapsed her lung and killed her.
My own lungs stopped working, but I don’t know if it was because of my mirror-touch or because I was sobbing so hard. In all that time spent in the forest I had never killed a living thing. The moment was unbearable, sitting there with her fur between my fingers. I had been watching her for months, learning her, caring for her. I began to wonder if what we were doing was right. If our involvement in their lives was too much. We were trying to save them but we killed them sometimes, too. We stomped through the world and crumpled things where we walked, too human, not creature enough.
At home, in the flat I shared with Aggie and Gus, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried in the shower for so long Gus started pounding on the door because he thought I must have collapsed. Aggie slept in my bed with me for days, even though after the first night it pissed Gus off. He shared Mum’s attitude, that I needed to toughen up. This was my job, wasn’t it? Shit happened when you worked with living things.
After a week Aggie made me take them on a hike I’d been rambling on about for ages. She hadn’t wanted to go before, this was a patent attempt to cheer me up, but I went along with it because we weren’t spending much time together. Work was a maelstrom, a whole new life. For her part she’d started studying linguistics and our schedules rarely lined up. So we returned to the national park I worked in, and Gus tagged along, as he always did.
As we staggered to the top of an incline I held my breath, knowing the view that waited. A world of autumn color. A feast. One sloping hill covered in deciduous larch, aspen, and black cottonwood trees, all having turned so yellow they hurt to look upon, and some among them a fiery orange. There were paper birches with bright red leaves, and dotted throughout were the evergreen spruces. On the other side of the lake the landscape was more like tundra, treeless hills covered in cherry pink and red shrubs that ran down to embrace the edges of Lake Wonder, shimmering lilac now under the streaky gold and purple sunset. And looming over it all was the snow-covered peak of Mount Denali, crisp and white and staggering in its enormity.
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