None of the three of them said more than a dozen words the entire trip, not even when they stopped and ate their meager lunches. Anna'd had too many words in her mouth over the past three days and was glad to be rid of the taste of them. Joan seemed lost in her own thoughts. From the expression on her face in unguarded moments, none of them were particularly jolly. Rory was silent as well but for what reasons, Anna could not fathom. He knew his stepmother, whom-if he did not kill- he presumably liked, was probably dead. Yet he did not grieve or fret in any of the ways Anna had come to expect. Perhaps he was in classic and total denial, but she didn't think so. That would require a veneer of high spirits. He appeared simply to be a man with a complex issue that drew his energies inward as he worked through the ramifications. Whatever it was it didn't seem to frighten or sadden him and it didn't slow his pace, so Anna was happy.
Harry Ruick and Lester Van Slyke waited for them at Packers Roost, the staging area near Going to the Sun Road. Harry had loftier things to attend to than playing taxi driver, so Anna knew Carolyn Van Slyke was really truly dead. Lester had identified the body. Now the hard news would be brought home to Rory.
Knowing what was coming, she maneuvered herself from the rear of the pack to Harry Ruick's left. She wanted to see Rory's face when he found for certain-sure his stepmother had been slain. So far, the emotions the probability had elicited from him-at least publicly-had been out of balance.
Clearing her mind and draping herself with what empathic tendencies she could muster, Anna watched. Lester Van Slyke was the first to speak.
"Son," he said, "Rory-" His voice broke and he stopped.
On an infant's face, every feeling is clearly manifest, as visible and identifiable as wind patterns on water. Rory was old enough to have developed the mask humans build to hide their emotions. The blueprint of the mask had probably been in place by the time he was seven years old. By the time he was thirty it would be complete, a false face that he himself might not be able to penetrate. At eighteen there were still thin places in the veneer. Anna watched emotions flow beneath the unfinished mask as one might watch a mime act through rain glass.
For the briefest of instants there was a flicker of light, a candle quickly extinguished behind his eyes. Before thought or memory came to quench that flame, Rory had been genuinely glad to see his father.
"It was your stepmom, son. She's gone," Les said, having recovered his voice. His pale blue eyes filled with tears that ran unnoticed over soft and sagging cheeks, catching in the stubble of two days' growth of beard.
Light winked out of Rory's eyes, apparently extinguished by his father's tears. The emotions that followed passed beneath the distorted glass of civilization so quickly Anna was not sure she interpreted them correctly. It looked like a draft of disappointment with a disgust chaser.
Rory noticed Anna watching him and his face firmed. Another lesson in deceit learned. Next time the mask would have an added layer of opacity. If he grieved, it was deep inside. Openly ignoring the weeping Lester, Rory spoke to Harry Ruick.
"Do you know who killed her?"
"No," Ruick said honestly. "We're hoping the forensic evidence sent to the lab will give us a clue. Till that comes back we're going to need to ask you and your dad a lot of questions, get to know everything we can about your stepmom. We might get a lead from that."
Rory nodded, looking considerably older than his years. Perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, Les had taken on the role of the child, at least outwardly, and snuffled into a crumpled handkerchief. "I feel so lost," he said, and sounded it.
As they climbed into the sedan, Les asked Rory to join him at the motel where he was staying but the boy declined, preferring the grubby, spartan NPS researchers' dorm to greater comfort bought at the price of his father's company.
Lester took the rebuff with resignation. This was not the first time his son had slammed a door in his face. Compassion hit Joan so hard she grimaced as though she'd sustained a punch to the stomach. Anna wondered if she was merely imagining the hurt or if her sons, Luke and John, had dealt such a blow themselves.
Rory's adult facade was crumbling and Lester Van Slyke was frankly gray with exhaustion. Of necessity and not generosity, Ruick postponed the taking of statements and the interview process until the following afternoon.
Five of them squished into a sedan for twenty minutes, breathing each other's fear, anger and sweat was pressing heavily on Anna. She rolled down her window, pushed her face into the onrush of air and closed her ears. Rory, sitting in the backseat between her and Joan, jostled her at every turn in the twisted mountain road. At each nudge Anna suffered the burn of childhood fury when herside of the backseat was encroached upon.
By the time they reached the employee housing area and Ruick pulled the car into Joan's drive, Anna had her hand on the door handle. She pulled up on it before the car rolled to a full stop and got out with a harried sense of escaping. It was all she could do to remain in their company long enough to unload her pack from the trunk. Ruick was still throwing verbal instructions at her back as she headed toward the front door.
Once inside Joan made an incredibly generous offer. "Do you want to shower first?"
Anna managed a nod of bare civility before shutting herself into the blessed sanctity of the bath.
Neither Joan nor Anna had the desire, much less the energy, to talk shop that night. Clad in her teddy-bear print, goin'-visitin' pajamas, Anna lay on the couch watching whatever network was on, alternately blessing and cursing her hostess for being a teetotaler. Had there been alcohol in the house, given her present mental and physical condition, Anna would have dearly loved to imbibe. When the angels perched on her shoulder, she was grateful that temptation in the form of the cunning, baffling and powerful was not set before her. When demons in the form of rigorously edited memories of drug-induced bliss shrieked at her, she longed for that same temptation so she could give into it forthwith.
Joan chose to dull her brain not with television or booze but with her personal drug of choice: work. She sat surrounded by several days' worth of bear incident management system reports and a pile of faxes, e-mails and 10-343 law enforcement reports that she had, in the addict's age-old habit of stockpiling drugs, radioed ahead and asked her assistant to leave on her dining table.
"E-mail first," Joan said as she opened her laptop. "Ah, three from my map boy wanting to know where the bears will seek food this week."
"How do you know where they'll be?" Anna said.
"I don't. I just know where the food will be. What's ripe. Like that."
Anna left her to it.
She was amusing herself by cataloguing the gross errors committed by law enforcement on some cop show when Joan broke the long and peaceful silence.
"Four bear sightings since we've been in the high country," she said.
"Mmmm." Anna made a noise to excuse herself from being out-and-out rude but which she hoped would discourage any further intercourse.
"One's pretty funny," Joan said.
Anna refused to ask how so. Several seconds ticked by.
She could almost feel Joan's need to talk.
Joan cracked. "Seems this one was dancing."
"Next they'll be riding bicycles and lobbying for the vote," Anna said.
Contact was made. Joan rubbed her eyes, her glasses riding up on the backs of her hands. "Do you think Rory'll be okay?" she asked. "I mean he seemedokay. Way too okay if you ask me."
"It's quiet, too quiet…," Anna intoned.
"Yeah, like that. Didn't it seem to you that he kind of went away inside himself when his dad and Harry flew out to ID the body? He had to know it was his stepmom. The rest of us figured it was."