He was good-looking enough. The determinedly reddish hair had a natural wave to it. A lean face and strong hooked nose over a well-shaped month lent him strength. The effect was marred but not ruined by acne scarring on his checks and chin. His body was attractive: tall and lean and gym-buffed. The kind of fit that doesn't look fit for much but mod-cling clothes.
Thinking that, it came to her why she felt a wrongness. He didn't want to be here. Didn't like the wilderness. Didn't like camping. His repeated desire to get away from people didn't ring true under the circumstances. He struck her as the sort who, if wanting solitude, would go to the clubs on an off night when the crowds were thinned. So why was he on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?
Anna decided on the direct approach: "So why did you decide to come on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?"
For most visitors this was not a trick question. It was one they were dying to answer in great effusive gusts. McCaskil acted as if she'd asked for the solution to a complex algebraic problem.
"Why does anybody decide to go anywhere?" he countered finally.
Anna went on to ask the questions she'd come to ask but unsurprisingly Bill hadn't noticed when or where Carolyn Van Slyke was at any given time. The one piece of information he did throw out was that Mr. and Mrs. Van Slyke's marriage wasn't made in heaven.
"You wouldn't believe the way she talked to that old boy," was how he put it.
"Did they fight?" Anna asked.
"Not fight. I don't think there's any fight left in that man if there was any to begin with."
"What then?"
"She was a carper. Carped on him all the time. Snide little comments about his paunch, his bald head. He couldn't do anything right. The poor bastard. A woman talked that way to me would get a fat lip. Not that boy: 'yes dear, no dear.' " Bill laughed, showing big white teeth, the two front incisors turned in toward each other giving him a jagged animal bite. The laughter was derisive and aimed, it seemed to Anna, not at Mrs. Van Slyke but at the poor bastard who'd married her.
Leaving his camp, threading her way down the footpath past the other sites, Anna resisted the urge to break into a run. Bill McCaskil had a dark indrawn tension about him that made her uneasy. A mean streak, if his response to Lester's humiliation was any indication.
She stopped again at the camp where the midwestern couple was staying. The woman, as domestic as you please, was neatly hanging socks from a tent rope.
"One more thing," Anna said, feeling so much like Columbo she was immediately self-conscious.
"Yes?" the woman said politely.
"Do you remember why you thought the blond woman was married to the tall man camped back up there?"
The woman paused a moment, a sock held before her in two hands. "It's just that they were always together, I suppose. Not holding hands or huggy-kissy but just together. Here and there. I do remember seeing the little man, her husband I guess he is, but not so much with her."
"Thanks." Anna went on her way. McCaskil had a closer relationship to Carolyn Van Slyke than he had admitted. Why not say so? There were no laws against socializing in the backcountry. If he knew she'd been murdered, it would make sense. No one wants his vacation taken over by the tedious machinery of law enforcement. In the wilderness, no neighbors, coworkers, political opponents or extended family to focus on, there was a definite lack of much in the way of suspects. Because he was there and an unsavory type, Anna filtered McCaskil through her mind. Had he known Carolyn before, followed her or met her here at her invitation? Was he, so obviously uncomfortable away from the amenities of civilization, merely here on a hunting trip and Carolyn was unfortunate enough to be the game?
Anna found it much easier to imagine Bill McCaskil crouched over a kill, elbow deep in blood, than the unassuming Lester Van Slyke. McCaskil told Anna there was significant friction between Les and his wife. Merely a ploy to cast suspicion on Les by providing him with a motive for killing Carolyn?
Unaware she did so Anna shook her head. It hadn't felt that way. McCaskil called Lester "old boy" and "poor bastard," remarking that there was no fight left in him. That was not the portrayal of a man capable of violence. Not unless Bill McCaskil was so infernally clever and torturously subtle that he painted the picture of the quintessential worm in hopes Anna would make the leap to the idea that the worm had turned, and in a big way.
"Anna? Are you in there?"
Anna came out of her self-induced trance to see Joan peering at her from a foot away. Wrapped tight in her own thoughts, Anna hadn't realized she'd come to a stop in the middle of the trail half a dozen yards from the food preparation area.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" Joan asked.
"Sorry," Anna apologized and followed Joan's lead down the path.
"I've heard of people being in a brown study," Joan said. "I'd just never seen anybody get locked in before."
"My powers of concentration frighten even me," Anna replied.
Joan laughed. "Well, concentrate on walking. Weneed to get back before dark. If you remember, Mr. Bear left our campsite at sixes and sevens."
Sixes and sevens hardly described the utter ruin of their camp. Twilight was settling toward night as they arrived. The three of them stopped on the edge of the little clearing, no one in a hurry to go into it. Overhead the sky was the sea green peculiar to mountain dusk. No shadows fell, they merely gathered beneath the trees, growing stronger as night neared.
An anxiousness as cold as the sweat of sickness balled behind Anna's breastbone. Days busy with the search and then the body recovery, bustling with people and helicopters, had driven out the rending visceral fear she'd felt the night the grizzly had come for them. In telling and retelling, the tale had grown unreal, like a war story borrowed from someone else's battle. It was real now.
The tents she and Joan had piled up were ragged with great tears. Fragments of cloth and clothing littered the grass. It was way too easy to believe the bear was nearby, just waiting for darkness.
"He's moved on by now," Joan said, as if the same fear raked her insides. "They have a huge range and he didn't get any food reward here."
"Maybe he wasn't looking for food," Anna said.
"What?"
Anna didn't repeat her comment. It didn't make sense even to her. It was just a remark the subconscious had smuggled past her censors to her tongue.
"There're the new tents." Rory pointed to two undamaged blue stuff sacks set by the boulder that dominated the green.
"Let's get to it." Anna forced herself to move. "We'll feel better after we're situated and fed."
Tents were pitched. By common, unspoken consent the shredded remains of those they'd slept in two nights before were bundled out of sight behind the rock. The "fed" portion of Anna's rehabilitative program had to be skipped except for what snacks they could find in their day packs. For reasons they could not fathom, when the bear team had dropped off the replacement tents, they had taken down the food from where it was cached and packed it out.
"What the hell do they think we're supposed to eat?" Anna groused.
"Maybe they were more concerned with what might eat us," Joan returned.
Anna decided she wasn't all that hungry anyway. What she mostly was, was tired.