Anna thought of the water bottles and wondered if Rory had not merely thought it was Carolyn but known for a fact it was.
"He'll be okay," Anna said, then remembered it was Joan she was talking to. Not someone she wanted to blow off. She sat up, folded her legs under her tailor-fashion and muted the television.
"I don't know," she amended. She told Joan of Rory's vagueness about what had transpired during the thirty-six hours he'd been missing, about her fears his cowardice in abandoning them to Ursus horibiliswould permanently scar his psyche. She told Joan about Carolyn Van Slyke's missing water bottle and Rory turning up out of the woods with a spare. The recitation done, Anna felt much relieved. She couldn't say the same for Joan.
Owl-eyed behind the oversized spectacles, Joan studied her as if she was a scat specimen. "How do you walk around like a normal person with such creepy thoughts in your head?" she asked finally. "It must be like being Stephen King but without the money."
"I guess," Anna admitted, feeling guilty for casting her shadow side over Joan's naturally sunny self. "I think good thoughts, too." She was remembering Joan's lecture on rainbows, roses and whiskers on kittens.
"Name one," Joan challenged.
Anna drew a blank and Joan laughed her wonderful laugh, joy and appreciation of the absurdity of the human condition running up and down the musical scale. Relenting, she said. "I know you do. It was unfair to spring the question on you at this time of night."
Anna accepted the reprieve but her failure bothered her and she finally came up with one: "Kittens. Not just the whiskers, the whole ball of wax."
Again the laughter. When it had subsided, somberness reclaimed Joan, and Anna waited for the inevitable. It wasn't long in coming.
"Do you think Rory did it?" Joan asked.
Anna wanted to say no for the sake of her friend but chose not to defraud her with a half-truth. "I don't see how he could have," she said instead. That, at least, was honest.
They were saved from wandering too far down that darkling road by a knock on the door.
"I'll get it," Anna said as Joan yelled, "Come in." Both, it seemed, welcomed the distraction.
Ron, the bear-team guy who'd given them a lift to the bottom of Flattop Trail four nights before, let himself in the front door. Those four nights had stretched into years in Anna's mind and she didn't remember Ron's name till Joan called out a greeting.
Big and bearish himself, Ron was well-suited to his profession. Descended from some sturdy sun-drenched people, he was of middling height with thick black hair, a glossy close-cut black beard and rambunctious black chest hair that sprang out of the vee of his uniform shirt.
"Joan has all the fun," he said seriously as he flopped his two hundred pounds into an aging Barcalounger with childlike disregard for the load limits of its infrastructure. "Then I was off when the search team was called out so I didn't even get in on that.
"Let's see. What did you guys miss down here at Adventure Central? Tom up at Polebridge ranger station"- Ron named the station on the northwest boundary of the park-"got to tow a gutted horse trailer from where it'd been illegally parked. Lord knows what they were hauling. The drug dogs didn't like it much but didn't hit on anything.
"On the east side Alicia had a lady she thought had symptoms of a heart attack-shortness of breath, bad color-and had her taken out by helicopter. Turns out the lady wasn't having a coronary. She was eighty-three years old and tired. Poor old gal will keel over when she gets the bill.
"And while you guys were out finding bodies, right here in the megalopolis of West Glacier, crime capital of the world, yours truly was called on to risk life and honor shooing a chipmunk out of some lady from Virginia's tent."
More laughter from Joan; too much for the nominally amusing chipmunk incident. Joan laughed a lot. It was how she let the pressures that built up inside her skull escape since her innate kindness and empathy forbade darker, more violent expressions. Anna was coming to know the nuances of her laughter. This was sharp with the relief a change of subject provided.
The change was short-lived.
"Tell me everything," Ron said. "I'm on till midnight so take your time."
Trading the conversation back and forth effortlessly Anna and Joan wove a picture of their four days in the high country. Joan's instincts were excellent and neither she nor Anna shared anything about the water bottles, the precise location of the body, the contents of the pack that had been found or any other detail Ruick might wish kept secret for investigative purposes.
"Wow," Ron said when they'd finished. "Could be anybody. But why would anybody do it?"
"That's it in a nutshell," Anna said.
Dead ends summarily reached, the conversation limped on for a while, Ron dragging his visit out as long as he could. The four-to-midnight shift could be deadly dull. Anna and Joan managed to yawn him out the door a little past ten. Shortly after that they both headed for the unparalleled luxury of a mattress covered with clean sheets and dry blankets, and under a roof.
At eight a.m. both women were in a conference room down the hall from Harry Ruick's office. Anna was filling out a statement encapsulating what she had experienced and observed regarding Carolyn Van Slyke's murder. Joan was filling out reports on the bear attack on their camp and her involvement with the search for Rory. Joan could easily- probably more easily-have done her work in the relative comfort of her own office. The resource management building was an older structure with fewer conveniences but had loads more personality than the bricks of headquarters.
She'd come with Anna to keep her company, she said. Anna suspected she also wanted to pick up any new information there might be about Rory's involvement, or lack thereof, in his stepmother's death. Ruick had no news on that score but, good as her intentions, Joan stayed with Anna till they'd finished and Anna left to meet with Ruick.
The chief ranger's office was several doors down on the right. His window opened onto an uninspiring view of the back parking lot.
As in Joan's house, Anna felt at home. The walls held cheaply framed posters of parks Harry'd worked and photographs of him, younger and thinner, grinning from the tops of mountains with like-minded men wearing fleece and wool and wind-chilled smiles. The tops of the ubiquitous metal filing cabinets held marksmanship trophies and strange pieces of rock and bone.
Ruick was behind a gray metal desk working through the pile of papers that had accumulated in his IN box during his excursion to the field. His door was open. Anna tapped on the doorframe.
"Come in," he said as he glanced up to see who it was. When he noted it was her he stopped what he was doing and gave her his undivided attention. Since getting the full bore of his administrative persona was rare, Anna was flattered and mildly alarmed. She took her place in the armless metal visitor's chair and waited to be enlightened.
"I've got a little problem I'm hoping you can help me out with. I'm short-handed at the moment. As you know, two of my district rangers and four other law enforcement rangers are out in California on the Miranda fire."
Anna'd been out of the loop for a while and hadn't heard of this particular conflagration but was unsurprised. Great swaths of California burned most Augusts. High desert and dry, forest fires burned fast and hot and too often near heavily populated areas.
Ruick was looking at her. Dutifully she said yes to whatever it was he was expecting her to agree with.