Radio chore completed, she sat on the ground near Lester Van Slyke. She kept the radio. If he cared about it one way or another, he didn't let on. She guessed he didn't. By the look of him, he didn't care much about anything. If he'd appeared old and sick and gray when they'd met, he looked three days dead now. The sparse hair was greasy and stuck to his pate in dark strands. His skin hung loose, the sagging jowls rough with two days' growth of beard. His pale blue eyes were rimmed in red and he blinked a lot as if he had trouble focusing.
"Why do you stay here?" Anna asked on impulse.
"I have to," he said vaguely. "Maybe there's something…" His voice trailed off. She waited. "Something I can do," he finished finally.
"About what?"
A minute passed. The drop of life that had animated him when he gave her Harry's message drained away.
"I can't do anything," he said so softly she barely heard him. He wasn't talking to her but to himself, undoubtedly repeating the mantra of ineffectualness the second Mrs. Van Slyke had spent so many years literally and figuratively beating into him.
For a while Anna watched him grow grayer and smaller. Lester was very nearly catatonic. The man was deeply disturbed and had withdrawn to a potentially pathological extent. Molly would know what to do. Fervently Anna wished her sister were there, would take over, make things right as she'd so often done when Anna was little. But Molly would have wanted to take the tack that was best for the patient, for Mr. Van Slyke. Anna just wanted answers.
It was not that she was without compassion, at least she liked to think she wasn't, but there was that about Les that brought out her anger. She could understand why his son hated him instead of the woman who tormented him. She could see how he would attract and incite abusers of every stripe. Les Van Slyke was the flesh and blood equivalent of the tar baby. He seemed to invite violence by his self-negation, acceptance of violence only enraging his attacker. Anna put the thoughts inside. They made her uncomfortable. Sweetness, comfort, safety, would that allow him to open up? Or was he so accustomed to responding to abuse from women that Anna would have to don the guise of his dearly departed wife to rouse him?
Maybe because she feared her own tendency to want to kick the cringing dog, she opted for sweetness and light. To make it ring true she closed her eyes, pictured him not as a self-involved, self-pitying shell of a man but as an old tomcat, battered and beaten till it could barely move, a cat who'd been so misused, when approached by a human hand, it could no longer even hiss but only close its eyes, wait for the blow and hope, this time, it would kill him.
For animals, compassion came easy. Keeping the vision of the tomcat firmly in mind, she began to speak and was pleasantly surprised to hear her words sounding genuinely kind.
"I can see that you're tired, Les," she began. "Tired almost to death. And you're alone like you've been alone for a long time, but now it's somehow worse. Everything's worse. Before, you were alone and you were hurting but she was there. She kept things going, moving, like she'd got things moving after your wife died. She was hard and she was angry but she was alive. You were alive. At least a little. And now she's gone and you're tired. Too tired almost to breathe." Les had not moved since she'd begun speaking but tears filled his eyes. They spilled down over his cheeks, divided and divided again as they dripped into the creases time and worry had cut into his face. Bleak as it was, it was a sign of life, and Anna pressed on not knowing whether the experiment would prove cathartic or would break the last weight-bearing wall in his poor old brain. Practicing without a license,Anna thought. She kept her voice low, monotonous, as hypnotic as she dared make it without sounding theatrical. She didn't want him to think for a while, just hear and follow.
"Without her, things have gotten in such a mess. You don't know how to make things right. You've never known how to make things right, not since your first wife died. At least Carolyn made things real. She made things happen, didn't she?" Anna hazarded a gentle question.
Les nodded. Satisfied, she went on, spinning an inner landscape for him, wondering as she went how she was going to get where she was headed.
"Now you're tired and you're scared. You're afraid of what you've done-"
Les's hands, till then hanging like dead leaves between his knees, twitched. Anna'd got it wrong and the jar threatened to wake him.
"-you're afraid of what you've done to Rory," she amended. The twitch stopped. Rory then. Anna followed that. "All those years, Rory loving his stepmom and not you. How could you know he knew? The beatings you took were for him, weren't they?" Anna asked, suddenly knowing that in Les's mind this was true. "You took them to keep the marriage together, because Rory needed a mom, because you couldn't bear to see him lose her a second time."
The tears fell harder. Les nodded again and weak mewling noises made their way out from a deep well of emotion Anna suspected was liberally salted with neurosis in the form of martyrdom, joy of victimhood, selfaggrandizement, and other smarmy and seductive feelings.
Desperately she rifled through her brain. For whatever sick reasons, Les let Carolyn beat on him. To live with himself he convinced himself he did it for his son. Now he'd convinced himself he was staying in Glacier because he was scared, not for himself, but for his son. Did that mean Les thought Rory killed Carolyn, and by remaining, Les might be able to "do something" along the lines of impeding the investigation or tampering with evidence? Or that he killed her himself and, by lousing up the investigation, could salvage himself-a dad-for Rory?
Anna couldn't guess which and she dared not remain silent. If the tears were any indication, Les was believing her, hearing her speak as if she knew the innermost secrets of his mind, as if she were in some way his own voice. A wrong guess now and she'd break the spell.
She came from another direction, feeling her way carefully. "You knew Carolyn was gone that night," Anna said. "You knew she'd left the tent."
"I knew," Les mumbled, "but I didn't think anything of it. She used to leave at night. She…"
"She'd go out," Anna affirmed.
"She'd meet men," Les said.
The light dawned. "She met men," Anna said. "She took things from them didn't she? She borrowedbits of their clothes, things you'd find so you'd know. Like she borrowed the army coat she was wearing."
"She did it to hurt me," Les said. "I never let on, but it hurt. It hurt a lot." More tears.
"That's why you pretended you didn't know where the coat came from? You thought she'd been with Bill McCaskil? Had she known him before? Met him anywhere? An internet chatroom? A courtroom? A conference? Anything?"
"No. I don't think so."
"She just meets him around the campfire and hops in the sack with him?" Anna said skeptically.
"You didn't know her. It didn't take long. It didn't matter who. She'd go off with bellboys when we stayed at hotels. Or the bartender. When I was in the hospital she got to my orderly. A boy no older than Rory is now. I didn't want Rory to know. The coat and all. I didn't want Rory to know."
One mystery solved: why Carolyn had McCaskil's coat on and why Les was so peculiar on the subject. None of that factored into why Les stayed on, unless he wanted vengeance on McCaskil and, after the bellboys and bartenders and orderlies, why bother?