Anna and Joan had shoved their personal things willynilly into a garbage bag the morning after the attack, when their organizational skills had been somewhat challenged. As night came on, they sat around the bag, flashlights trained upon it, like brigands dividing their spoils. Anna found herself wishing for the hissing glare of Coleman lanterns, something more substantial than a six-inch Maglight to keep the terrors of the dark at bay.
From what she could observe, Joan wasn't doing much better and Rory was just about jumping out of his skin every time one of them shifted in their seat and made a scuffling noise that could be attributed to bears stalking. Cold was rushing in with the darkness; Anna's muscles tensed against it. They all needed hot food.
The divvying up went on. Joan, like Mrs. Santa, disappeared head and arms into the bag and brought out the things one at a time.
Moccasins for Anna, underwear for Joan, a single sock for Rory. Sweater for Joan, Levi's for Anna, water bottle for Rory.
Anna suddenly broke out of the Christmas rhythm and jerked her spine straight. "Goddamn motherfucking water bottle," she growled.
The other two looked at her as if she'd gone insane.
Chapter 8
Anna chose not to explain her outburst. Under pressure she claimed chronic and fleeting Tourette's syndrome. The questions that the wretched water bottle brought to mind were not those she wished to pursue in the dark of night ten hours' hike from reliable backup.
Though unasked, the questions were hot and sharp in her brain and they kept her from sleep. Beside her, snuggled into her navy-blue down bag, Joan snored gently. Women snoring was a well-kept secret. Not from the world at large or husbands and lovers and roommates with ears to hear, but from the women who did it. Idly, Anna wondered if she snored. No one had ever told her she did, but then they wouldn't, would they? It crossed her mind to wake Joan up, make her listen to scary stories. She seriously considered doing it on the "one little cloud is lonely" and "misery loves company" schools of thought. The snoring made her relent. Joan had such a happy, child-like snore. On an occasion less fraught with evil surmisings, Anna would have found it as reliable a soporific as Piedmont's deep and rumbling purr.
Curling herself into aball like a corkscrewed cocoon, her soft underbelly protected from the predators, Anna gave herself over to the lonely contemplation of the goddamn motherfucking water bottle. Or, to be precise, water bottles plural. There were three. Three unusual, mailorder-only, hot-off-the-presses water bottles, all with a built-in filter, all by the same manufacturer.
Rory had one when they started their adventure. Rory had one when they found him after his thirty-six hours lost. Les had had one at Fifty Mountain. Now Rory had two. The only member of the family who did not appear to have one, who, indeed, had no water bottle at all, was Carolyn Van Slyke, the dead woman. Surely the bottles had been a family affair. Probably researched, ordered and disbursed by Carolyn herself. Lester didn't appear to know or care much about backpacking. Rory was new to it. But Carolyn was a photographer and her hiking boots, if Anna remembered correctly, were old and much used.
Rory had not taken water with him when he fled the bear. It was here, in camp, in a garbage bag the whole time. Sometime in the day and a half Mrs. Van Slyke went missing, she'd lost her water bottle. Sometime during those same thirty-six hours Rory had acquired it, or one just like it.
Anna reached behind her, running her hand along the floor of the tent where it met with the nylon wall. Her fingers found the slick folds of plastic-wrap draped loosely around a cylinder, and she was reassured the mystery bottle was still in her possession. She'd lifted it quietly first chance she got. Not the bottle from the garbage bag, but the one Rory had been carrying when he turned up unscathed from his sojourn.
Ideally, to preserve the fingerprints, the bottle would have been put in a paper bag. Having none, Anna had improvised. When she arrived safe and sound back in West Glacier, she would turn it over to Harry Ruick so it could be dusted for fingerprints and tested for blood residue. If it did turn out to belong to Carolyn Van Slyke, Rory was going to be in an awkward position.
Cold swept down her spine from nape to nether regions as a Psycho-like image of a knife plunging through the thin nylon of the tent took over her consciousness: a picture of Rory, wild-eyed and hair awry, running amok in camp. Curling down more tightly, she suffered the craven wish that Joan rather than she slept on the side of the tent nearest Rory's.
Pushing Hitchcock's genius for evil aside, she comforted herself with thoughts of murderers. Often, in prisons it was the murderers who were chosen as trustees. Not that rare bird the serial killer, but garden-variety one-corpse-type murderers. These men and women were in reality no longer a threat to society. They had killed the person they needed to be dead and were done. Usually these were people who had killed someone they knew and, in their own minds at least, killed them for a perfectly good reason.
What perfectly good reason could Rory have for killing his stepmother? The butchery to the woman's face, done after death, suggested a desire to annihilate Carolyn Van Slyke as a person, hatred so great that merely taking her life was not adequate to slake it.
Rory spoke as if he admired his stepmom and scorned his biological father. That fit the pattern if he was an abused child. Children have an uncanny ability to know that to survive they must please and placate the abuser. To an outsider, they appear to be genuinely attached. If Rory suffered at Carolyn's hands and his dad failed to protect him, he might understandably hate him for it, cleave to Carolyn.
But Rory was no longer a little kid and, though not a beefy young man, he was strong and fit. Once the child was no longer a child the pattern shifted, fanned out. Any number of responses of the adult victim would be normal. Including a rage so long sublimated to the survival needs of a child that when it broke free it resulted in homicide.
The theory hung together after a fashion, but Anna was unsatisfied. Too many unanswered questions. If Rory was the murderer, how did he set up the assignation with his stepmother? If he didn't and meeting her was simply a coincidence happening after he ran from the bear, what did he use to carve off her face? Only the exceptionally deranged-or the marvellously foresighted-slept with a cleaver secreted about their pajamas. If is not necessary that you think so much.Molly, in her role as psychiatrist and worried sister, had given that advice to Anna shortly after her husband died. Anna heard the words again now and resolutely cleared her mind of boys and cleavers and high-tech drinking apparatus. Into this cleared space came the gentle rhythm of Joan Rand's snore. Anna let it lull her to sleep.
The hike down was uneventful. They went back the way they had come, West Flattop Trail east to Fifty Mountain Camp then Flattop Trail south to the sheared-off edge of the mountain where the steep descent began. The country they traveled was beginning to look way too familiar to Anna. Walking through the common miracle of intensely green and living glacier lilies bursting joyously through exhausted black char, she found she looked mostly to the mountains rising above Flattop, and dreamed about new trails and new views. Cleveland, Merrit, Wilbur. Wilbur,for Christ's sake. Mundane names for objects of such staggering beauty.
Rory was leading the way. Anna had made him point man on the flimsy pretext that it would be good for his orienteering skills-as if a blind three-year-old could get lost on the clear tracks of Glacier's main trails. He complied. Joan looked her questions but never asked them. The answer would have been that Anna just didn't feel comfortable with Rory at her back. She wanted the lad where she could keep an eye on him until a few wrinkles were ironed out.