Mortal Fall (36 page)

“Yeah, I knew who the guy was. He was the talk for a bit. You know, the guy who was single-handedly gonna screw up all our land-use rights because he wanted more wilderness for his wolverines.”

“And you’ve seen him before? Even if you’ve not spoken to him.”

Adam nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen him.”

“Where?”

“At the Outlaw’s. He came asking around for Dorian. Asked Melissa. Wanted to talk to him about his traps.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Said he just wanted a civil conversation, was sure he could shed some light on what he was doing and that once they understood, everything would be fine.” Adam shook his head and looked down at the wood floor. Two rectangles of light angled and lengthened across it, picking up dust, as if exposing the flaws and hopelessness inherent in the idea of a levelheaded, educated guy like Wolfie trying to reason with a man on Whitesquad. I sensed that same burden of sadness that I had picked up on at the reunion with no clue why it would show up on him, with his messed-up, perfidious ways. It was only a flash across his face—resentment laced with a guarded frailty—and it receded quickly back into the hardness of his expression.

“What was happening that he wanted to work out?”

“You know what.”

“Tell me.”

“Apparently, his traps were being messed with. I don’t know how or why he came to figure Dorian for it.”

“Was it Dorian?”

Adam sat back in a sprawl again, tilting even farther back on his chair and shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you.”

I waited for him to say more. A brief image flashed in my mind of being very small and seeing who could make the other one laugh first. I wondered if he was thinking the same ridiculous thing—if he was even capable of having that kind of memory.

“What about Phillips?” I finally said when it was clear he was going to offer nothing more.

“What about that prick?”

“Why did you fight with him last year?”

“Because we ran into each other in some bar. Because I never liked the guy and he never liked me. Because there were a lot of assholes at
that place you convinced Dad to send me to for”—he held up his fingers to create quotation marks—“you know—therapy.”

“Don’t tell me we gotta go down altered-history lane here. I didn’t even know about the place. I was all of what? Thirteen?”

“Just the same. You ratted me out for smoking pot and drinking. Like who the hell didn’t do that as a teen in our school?”

“You just keep telling yourself that lovely little story, Adam. Your twisted version against mine.”

“You forgot to say
twisted
before yours too.”

“You can tell yourself whatever you want, but I clearly remember Dad getting the shock of his life when he checked out the tracks on your arms. Yeah, so tell me again it was just pot and drinking.”

“Dad, shocked? Dad, the concerned father? Shit,” he said, disdain saturating his voice. “Dad wanted nothin’ more than an excuse to get me out of the house once you were old enough to look after yourself. Before that time, I took care of you.”

My blood pressure was starting to go way up and I let loose a sharp laugh. “Are you kidding me? As if I wasn’t taking care of myself from way before thirteen. Way before you ever left the house.”

“And you just keep telling yourself that nice, little lie.”

I glared at him. Suddenly I was angry at myself for not bringing Ken along to keep us in check. Neither one of us would be going down this ridiculous black hole, spouting off about long-past family drama, if someone else were along. I held up my palm to halt things. “Look, when was the last time you saw Mark Phillips?”

Adam’s right hand had instantly balled into a hard fist, the whites of each knuckle showing, and before he answered, he massaged it out with the other hand, let his fingers go long again. I thought of my own pumping fists on the drive over. “The last time we fought,” he finally answered. “A year ago.”

“And where were you on the evening of June twenty-second?” I didn’t have Phillips’s exact time of death, just the surveillance tape showing the day he entered with his truck, which he’d clearly driven
home safely to his garage. But Wolfie’s would do for now. “That would have been a Wednesday.”

He thought about it. I could see him counting back in his head, still massaging his hand in the palm of the other while trying to figure out where he was. “I think I was here. Nothing going on those nights.”

“Was anyone with you to vouch for that?”

“No. I was here alone. I live alone—nothing I can do about that. As you can see—I don’t have any neighbors. You’re more than welcome to go out and question some of the deer ’round here.”

I didn’t bother with a reply. I wrote the information down and stood up. Suddenly, I wanted to get out. The late afternoon shadows were pooling in the cabin’s corners and strange emotions I didn’t want were rallying in the edges of my mind. Lara’s words, “people grow up,” pinged in my mind along with a good dose of annoyance. I wasn’t done with Adam by a long shot, but for now, for now, it would have to do.

“That it? All done with your questions?” He seemed surprised.

“Yeah, for now.”

He looked unsatisfied, but didn’t push it further. He stood up, walked to the front door, brusquely opened it, and held it for me. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said. “
Always
good to catch up with family.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said as sincerely as I could muster in the face of his sarcasm. “I’ll probably need to talk to you again before long.”

“Can’t wait.” He smiled and shut the door behind me.

38

B
EFORE STOPPING AT
a convenience store to pick up a chemically processed ham-and-cheese sandwich, I had gone to the office and checked on Ken to see if he’d picked up anything suspicious off the surveillance tapes. He said he hadn’t, but that he’d finally gotten some of the files rounded up from the Leefeldts, which was like pulling teeth since youth records are sealed and with little regulation of these schools, there was no pressure to keep good and accurate records around anyway. It required Ken calling numerous times to get
Mrs.
instead of
Mr.
Leefeldt on the line, who clearly wanted nothing to do with us. The missus ended up being easier to work with, and Ken pulled out a little cowboy charm, getting her to agree to send some files and a list of as many students as she could who attended during the period that Mark Phillips worked at the academy.

I thanked him and took the files home with me. I was feeling tired and agitated simultaneously. The aftermath of talking to Dorian and Adam was settling in my bones. I sat on my couch trying not to think about my brother, his lonely bare cabin, the white knuckles on his clenched right hand, and the hatred and guilt crawling up my spine while visiting him that I’d thought I’d put behind me long ago. I could hear the echo of silence in my own bare dorm, so I got up and opened the fridge and grabbed a cold beer, and went back over to the files. They were incomplete, and we only obtained them for the period of 1994 to 1996, during which the Miranda incident occurred, but Mrs. Leefeldt had also made a list of other clients whom she no longer had files for.

I felt spared that I didn’t have to look at a file on Adam, although he was a person of interest. Mainly, I wanted to see all the students who’d had contact with Phillips as a counselor. I looked for anything strange that might point in the direction of a revenge situation, but I knew it was all a humongous long shot, even though the majority of the kids had mental health issues that were nothing to shrug about.

I went through the boys’ files first: Jonathon Fieldland from Seattle, Washington; Zachary Gentry from Missoula, Montana; Paul Monroe from Syracuse, New York; Eric Olmsfield from Scottsdale, Arizona; Jayson Prince from Walnut Creek, California; Patrick Stoddard from Tallahassee, Florida; Lawrence Schieble from Whitefish, Montana; Bradley Talbert from Kalispell, Montana; Terrance Wicker from Stamford, Connecticut—the list went on. They all had varying degrees of clinical depression, alcohol and drug abuse, anger management problems, self-harming tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, oppositional-defiance disorder, reactive-attachment disorder. . . .

I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes and noticed that my banged-up eye was feeling better. The girls’ files were similar with more self-harming tendencies, including cutting, head-banging, anorexia, bulimia, exercise bulimia. . . . I looked at Rebecca Olson from Portland, Oregon; Katherine Fliegle from Memphis, Tennessee; Gina Bates from Whitefish, Montana; Grace Winston from Bellingham, Washington; Abigail Farrington from Long Beach, California; Britta McIntire from Bozeman, Montana. . . . The notion that parents were paying for their clinically disturbed children to be among the beauty and wild of Montana to heal, while unqualified, arrogant counselors like Phillips worked with them was incomprehensible.

When I thought of Adam in that situation, in spite of my anger at him, a weariness descended upon me. I shook it off. If there’s one thing to understand in this line of work, it’s that life isn’t always fair. Tragedies occurred, one after the other, and all there was left to do was instill some order to the mix of it all.

My phone buzzed, and I took it out of my pocket and looked at it. It was a text from Shane Albertson saying he wanted to meet the next day and that he had some information for me, but couldn’t talk at the moment because he was at some function with his wife. I texted him with a time for first thing in the morning.

I stared at the screen of my phone and thought of calling Lara. She had quit trying to call me. I recognized that we had both retreated into our own hardened spaces, wondering who would try to break through the other’s shell first. Our marriage was feeling more and more like a shipwreck. I had always thought that once I broke away from my family, that I had the power—the control—to set my own course. That I could take that ship across any kind of water as long as I was careful and steered clear of its dangers—avoiding the rocks, the icebergs, the hurricanes, the white squalls . . . It didn’t have to be littered with hazards like my own parents’ lives were.

With Lara, I had communicated well—told her how my mother had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (an umbrella disorder that covered depression and schizophrenia) in the nineties because—the doctor told my dad—she demonstrated baseline psychotic symptoms, like hearing voices in her head and extreme bouts of paranoia, but also fell easily into slumps of despair. Lara was understanding and sympathetic.

And my father, I explained to her, suffered from alcoholism. I made it abundantly clear, so I thought, that it made no sense to take the huge risk of bringing a child into this world from a family tree ragged with psychological ill health, and when she agreed, I figured we had the future covered. We had each other’s backs. From our marriage on, all we needed to do was be careful, respectful—set the safe course, steer clear of obstacles, avoid the genetic iceberg protruding straight up from the chilled waters like a bright-white warning beacon.

Now, here I was as the lead on one of my first real investigative cases as a park officer being dragged straight into my family’s past by some heavy anchor I thought I’d cut loose long ago.

But still, Lara and I loved each other. That had been undeniable for the majority of our relationship. I was crazy about her and she me. But I could feel that slip away as the shells formed around each of us, neither one of us wanting to approach one another for fear of getting completely shattered. And now, I wondered if it was too late—if the end result was not worth the effort and perhaps some storms should be avoided entirely instead of trying to navigate through them.

This case, which had dragged me to my own brother’s den, was taking me in directions I’d never considered. An image of the ferocious wolverine that I’d read about in Wolfie’s notes—wild and fierce in its cage after capture, still lashing out at any hand or object coming close—slid into my mind. Maybe I’d been fighting for things to work out between Lara and me for too long.

Shit, I thought, like at the reunion. I’d been a nice guy, maybe too nice. I’d compromised, gone to help her with her family as ridiculous as I knew the whole thing was. The motion-picture image of my leaving with the storm kicking up got me pressing the heels of my hands into my forehead, massaging my brow until I shook off the weary lack of hope settling in.

Eventually, I grabbed my laptop to switch gears and googled the kids from the files, looking for alarming or suspicious incidents, and tried to track their parents as well to see if there was anything that stood out. Again, it was a long shot. Many could not be found and among all the Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter presences and other professional odds and ends that popped up for the ones that I could locate, I found sweet-all nothing of interest except for legal documents on the Miranda lawsuit against Global Schools.

I paid particular close attention to the students from Montana on the chance if they still were around, something interesting might pop up: Zachary Gentry, Bradley Talbert, Lawrence Schieble, Gina Bates, and Britta McIntire. Zachary and Lawrence now lived out of state, one in Seattle; one in Santa Cruz. I found nothing on Bradley Talbert, Gina Bates, or Britta McIntire.

Around midnight, my eyes were burning, so I stepped outside to get some fresh air and look at the night sky. A meteor shower was scheduled to occur, and there was no better place to watch stars than Glacier Park, away from any city where the lights hazed the night sky. The infinite stars twinkled and danced above the black mountaintops as if I was in an immense basin created by the spires of the Divide. And the Milky Way, a deluge of constellations, splashed through like its namesake suggests, like milk splayed straight across the heavens.

The truth about Glacier, the thing it did for me—since it was far more commanding and breathtaking than what anyone could describe—was take me out of myself. I was just simply another life form making my way in the unflawed, ever-fluctuating eloquence of things. I thought of the wolverine again, about its unfettered, endless movement and travels through the Divide. Glacier held magic all right—the power to take me away from my problems. So right under the deepening night and blinking and shooting stars, feeling the park’s exquisite cool, summer breeze like a soothing caress, Adam and Lara began to recede to the far back corners of my mind. I watched the sky for a long time, meteors jagging across the sky and the torrent of the Milky Way so bright it ached. I watched until my neck stiffened, and when I went back in, I was able to get some sound sleep.