Once, in northwest Montana, up near Glacier National Park, Pete had flown into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for a three-week backpacking trip with a legendary backcountry pilot named Dave Hoerner. Hoerner had told him how a very large boar griz had been disrupting camps on the Middle Fork of the Flathead, and had been shot with a tranquilizer gun and captured. It was Hoerner’s job to move the bear from a mountain airstrip called Schafer Meadows. Hoerner flew a Cessna 185 single-engine workhorse, and the tranquilized bear was so big that when the Forest Service crew loaded it into the back of the plane it stretched through most of the airframe and the huge head lay against Dave’s right hip where he sat in the pilot seat. In his lap was his .44 Magnum. Hoerner taxied back to the downwind end of the strip and was ticking off his run-up checklist when he looked down and saw the monster griz’s mouth twitch. Holy crap. He pulled back to idle, set the brakes, ran around, threw up the cargo door, and hauled on the bear’s legs and paws with all his might. The bear hit the grass with a thud and got to his feet and wobbled. By then Hoerner was back in his seat and throttling forward and the last he saw of the animal it was glaring back at him and striding toward the woods. Damn. Imagine if all that had happened five minutes later at two thousand feet above the ground. Mayhem.
Pete got a kick out of that story. But the fact remained that grizzly bears, like most predators, were smart enough to know that tangling with humans in any way was a bad idea. It was very hard to believe that one bear might have killed and vanished three people over a fifteen-year span. But not impossible. One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary, really.
He and Celine talked about Gabriela’s case over several nights, and Celine wondered if she had the strength. The last year had taken its toll. Pete was more concerned than she was. When she was upset she struggled to breathe, and he watched her with concealed alarm. One night over Wicked-Good Green Chili—her name, not his—he reached across the café table and put his hand on her arm. “Maybe this is one to let lie,” he said. “We’d have to travel, probably for more than a few days.” Her lips compressed. She was annoyed. She picked a piece of broccoli out of her stew. What was broccoli doing in chili? He was always trying to sneak something in.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “The reasonable thing is not usually the right thing. Why is that?”
Pete had not fallen in love with Celine Watkins for her timidity. He dutifully picked up the discarded broccoli and ate it.
There was something in the case she could not relinquish, and the more she mulled it over, and the more she thought about Gabriela’s shadowed life, the more energized she became.
On September 19th, Celine called Gabriela in San Francisco and told her that she would try to find her father. Or confirm that he had died. Gabriela would have to prepare herself. The young woman answered as Celine knew she would: with relief. She had money, she said, and insisted on paying expenses and the going rate of New York PIs. Celine could tell this was nonnegotiable and she did not object.
Next Celine called Hank in Denver and asked if they could borrow his truck and camper for maybe three weeks; could they fly out to Denver in a few days to pick it up?
“And Hank,” she said, “the little Glock 26 I gave you for your birthday that time? Can I borrow it, too? I’d rather not fly with mine. I have to declare it and everyone can see, and I’m always terrified it will get stolen by some baggage handler. Like that time Bruce Willis made such a fuss.”
She made Hank laugh. That time was a family legend. She had been struggling with her bags through LaGuardia when a hand had joined hers on the handle of the carry-on and a voice had said, “Allow me, ma’am,” and it was the movie star himself. He eased away the roller bag, too.
That was good enough for a good story. But then they had arrived at the check-in counter together and she had pulled the little lockbox out of her checked bag and declared the Glock, and Mr. Willis had cracked his signature smile—the warm one, not the one before he blows you away—and he’d become enamored with Hank’s mom. It was a few weeks before the New York City Police Department was to switch over from revolvers to the Glock, and so several curious airport cops came over, too, and autographs were signed, and when Willis heard Mom was a PI he gave her his personal card with an assistant’s phone number. He said, “I wish you were my mom,” which always made Hank a little jealous. Willis said that if she and her husband were ever in L.A. to please look him up. Maybe he thought her story would make a good movie.
Anyway, when she arrived in Maine to solve the case of Penobscot Paul, which became another favorite story, her treasured Glock was missing from her luggage. She always attributed it to the fuss and bother famous people leave in their wake. She considered fame to be a terrible and irresistible trap. Once she told Hank, “Hank, if you are going to do something—say, writing—do your very best, and if it happens that you also become the best in the world, that’s wonderful, but try not to let too many people know about it.”
But what made Hank happier when she called him was to hear the new tone in her voice. There was vigor there, a contained excitement he hadn’t heard in a while. And he knew that it was because she had committed again to do the work she was born for. He told her she could borrow both the truck and the gun.
Celine hadn’t ever really needed to carry a gun. The type of investigative work she did rarely involved dangerous perps. She had tried that and didn’t like it. After working for a detective agency that mostly handled domestic matters—yuck—and learning her trade and getting her PI license, she was almost immediately contacted by the FBI. The bureau, it seemed, did not have many agents who were comfortable moving in the milieu of the investment banker–Fishers Island crowd. Well, Celine had spent every summer there for most of her life. The bureau needed an associate who could call someone in the Connecticut Blue Book and ask delicate questions, and who would be trusted—the two families might even know each other, perhaps they were even second or third cousins. They were going after a man who had perpetrated a very large fraud on the Bank of New York, and they thought he might be in the environs of his family in Old Greenwich or Darien.
No one realizes the power or extent of the aristocracy in America; it exists and holds enormous sway despite the inroads of all the techy, sneaker-wearing New Money. Celine was born into it. Fourteen of the governors of the Plymouth Colony were her ancestors, and their families had continued to consolidate and expand their power for more than three centuries. They summered on Nantucket and Fishers and Islesboro, Maine; their sons and daughters attended Ivy League colleges and had careers with Big Banks and Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve; and the most daring and radical of their children became artists and filmmakers or worked for the Nature Conservancy, and these were everyone’s favorite cousins and nieces and were endowed with a certain mystical reverence—they were not so much the black sheep of the family as special children who were indulged like the shamans of other cultures who only walk backward. Celine was one of these. Perhaps even farther afield than most. She was not exactly an outcast, but she had deliberately stepped out of the fold, and so she could see it with an outsider’s perspicuity.