The Wild Inside (28 page)

“But his wife will tell him that you saw the gun, won’t she?” Monty asked, pushing up his glasses. “Then he’ll just get rid of it.”

“Maybe, maybe not. She’s scared since she ratted him out for the gambling. I have a feeling she’s afraid to say that she’s betrayed him by giving me any information at all. Plus it was only chitchat when I saw the gun, and she has no idea that Victor was shot. Only that he was bound and eaten. But still . . .” I rubbed the back of my neck with my other hand. “It’s the chance we take. We can’t get a search warrant without something more specific than betting on sports games. We need something to tie him to the scene of the crime.”

• • •

I fit in a jog—actually more than once—during the investigation, which, according to Monty, Park Police and rangers had begun calling Investigation Bait
—
a title started by Ken Greeley. After dealing with Lou, I decided Monty was right, I needed the stress relief, and Natalie was nice enough to not expect me before seven thirty or eight.

I ran from my cabin, past headquarters, by the pay gates, past the bright red Bear Country sign—All Wildlife Is Dangerous—Do Not Feed—and up to Apgar Village, only about two and a half miles. I had a sharp knifelike pain in the side of my knee when I got to the tiny village and slowed to a walk to Lake McDonald’s shoreline. A small cherry-red building with bright white trim that used to be a school for park employees’ children at the beginning of the century stood now as
a souvenir shop. A lodge, a motel, and some motel cabins with a white freezer for ice between two of them lined the road before reaching the lake. All were boarded up.

When I reached the Boat Rentals sign, I passed several tall cottonwoods and some birch trees, the leaves shimmering in the late afternoon light. I looked at the shoreline as I stretched my legs and noticed that the floating docks were pulled for the winter. The glassy lake provided a mirror image for the already snow-covered peaks. The Belton Hills gradually rose to my direct right, and Gunsight, Edwards, Little Matterhorn, and Mount Brown reached for the sky at my one o’clock. Mount Cannon, the Garden Wall, stretched out before me at twelve o’clock, and Mount Vaught, Stanton, and Rogers Peak popped upward at ten and eleven. To my left tapered the small and burned-out Howe Ridge, with its skinny lodgepole pines making the entire flat ridge look like it had a bad crew cut. To the north of Howe was the Inside Road area, which held Fish Creek, McGee Meadow, Logging Lake. . . . I thought of the bear, that if they’d gone ahead with initial plans to let him go, where he’d have made it to. I imagined him crashing into the woods without looking back. Then I thought of Lou, destroying his marriage with a silly addiction. And myself, letting my marriage fall apart because I couldn’t open up. Humans, we were all so damn predictable.

Shelly knew only bits and pieces about Oldman Lake—mostly scraps of information from Ma and Natalie and one-word answers and shoulder shrugs from me in response to her probing questions.
Did you suffer post-traumatic stress? For how long? Do you have nightmares still? Maybe you’ve never fully grieved the loss?

One time I came home from work and she showed me some self-help books that she’d bought for me, books titled
Victims No More
and
Secrets to Grieving.

“Trust me,” I told her. “My mom has already given me plenty of these types of books.”

“Did you read them?” she pleaded, tucking her blond strands behind her ear.

“Yes,” I lied. It was a hot summer afternoon in August, and our house in Kalispell felt small and stifling. The fan spun at high speed, pushing warm air around. I went into our bedroom next to the living room to take my uniform off, and she followed me in.

“But these have exercises that you can do.”

“So?” I unbuttoned my work shirt.

“So it might help?”

“Help what?” I threw it on the bed.

“Help you become, I don’t know, more open.”

“What’s some silly book going to do? Change who I am?” I looked at her—her round eyes pleading. Her flimsy tank top clung to her stomach, and I could make out her belly beginning to swell with the beginning of pregnancy. “If you can’t accept who I am, then we have a problem.”

“It’s not like you’re broken, Ted. You might have some cracks, but you’re not broken, and all marriages take work. I want more for us, for myself, for . . .” She looked down at her stomach. She never finished her sentence, as if she’d had a premonition even then that it wouldn’t work out. I turned away and dug around in the dresser for some shorts. She waited for me to look back at her, to say something, and when I continued to take way too long to find a pair, I heard her sigh deeply and leave the room.

I found a boulder to sit on and stared out at the placid water. It felt good to run, but I was tired, some kind of exhaustion that had nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with the mental and the emotional. Not that the case was testing my intellectual capacity to its fullest, yet. It was more a deep-bone exhaustion that came to me unexpectedly, as if I was someone who couldn’t swim and had lived the rest of my life since Oldman Lake trying to stay away from the deep end of the water—away from riptides—and suddenly found myself in
the wrong current, frantically treading water and pushing back with feet and arms to stay clear of the drop-off. Living in Florida had taught me early that when you get caught in a riptide, the best thing to do is swim sideways with it, not fight it, until you can find a place to swim to shore.

Still, the day before me on the Continental Divide, many miles from any ocean, was glorious. Nearly painful because the colors were pure, the air fine, the lake cobalt, the leaves so poised in their golden glory . . . Even two bald eagles flew above, fishing, circling together as they rode gentle air currents as if they were performing a choreographed dance. I watched them for some time until my neck began to stiffen. None of it felt real because it was too polished, like some overcolorized movie.

“Damn,” I whispered. I had to work this case quickly, get it over with, and get the hell out. I wanted to get up, but I didn’t. I sat still in the sun, let its slanted rays hit my face. They provided only a low-grade heat at this point. The memories are put away and locked up, as if in a steel vault. Only at certain times do I crack that vault and let a few spill out. I suppose so much pressure builds up behind the door that it has to open a bit or there will be an explosion of sorts.

That fall day came too quickly after an abbreviated Montana summer. The summer of 1987 gave only forty-two frost-free mornings and never went above eighty-five degrees. It was peppered with heavy, gutter-filling rains, obnoxious, demanding windstorms, and cloudy, cool days, even in August. A funnel cloud formed on Flathead Lake’s waters. My sisters and I drove my ma crazy complaining of boredom.
Go outside
, she’d say.
It’s too cold
, we’d yell back.
It’s too wet
. So when the still-tawny Indian summer came, the people of the Flathead Valley were spring feverish, cabin-bound, and dying to get out and catch the sun’s rays, even as oblique as they were in late September. Hungry for sun, fun, and life: that’s the way the dawning of that long-needed, brilliant, and deadly weekend was all those years ago.

My dad wanted to take me camping, and I thought, yes, finally something fun to do. Get away from my sisters and all the arguing over stupid stuff like whose turn it was to take out the trash, set and clear the table, sweep the garage, or walk Tumble. Dad was busy in the lab all the time, so to go with him alone and get away from my sisters was like a true idyllic
Leave It to Beaver
situation. I got ready, remembering my knife and pushing it into the front pocket of my shorts.

I didn’t have one of those red Swiss Army knives with the small blades, the narrow pair of scissors, tweezers, or a corkscrew, that some of my buddies from Scouts had. For my eleventh birthday, my dad gave me a pearl-handled jackknife with only one six-inch blade that was significantly longer and larger than your average pocket blade. He said I needed to be careful with it because the blade was very sharp, but that I would need a proper knife if I intended to gut fish.

When my line got tangled while we were casting for trout on some jade-green lake toward Libby, he told me to use my knife to cut the line. When I told him I forgot to bring it, he made a face like he was disappointed in me and told me that one should always be prepared when out in the woods. Afterward, whenever we went camping or fishing, I always took it with me.

I did have that knife at Oldman Lake. And I can’t say I’m very superstitious, but sometimes those little things just get the best of me. I continued to carry it even after Oldman Lake until I saw that grizzly with Kendra and her dad on the Almeda trail. With the renewed pangs of fear and loss settling in my stomach like acid for weeks after the incident, I decided that maybe the knife brought me bad luck, so I put it away in the top drawer by my bed.

But that particular day before we left for East Glacier, I did have my knife. We also packed turkey and cheddar sandwiches, beef jerky, filled canteens of water, trail mix with peanuts, M&M’s, raisins, cashews, and dried coconut flakes. I remember oatmeal packets we took for breakfast. I rerolled my sleeping bag several times to get it tight
enough to fit into the impossibly short and narrow bag. I shoved my warm clothes, including heavy cotton long johns, into the pack. Not much of the fancy polypropylene stuff was out then.

When we got to Glacier’s Two Medicine campground, snow that never melted over the summer and new layers that had arrived in late August and early September coated Sinopah and Rising Wolf Mountains. The golden aspen leaves scintillated in the sun and twitched nervously with the breeze. Even then, I remember feeling strong undercurrents of anguish. They came on suddenly and in a rush as if those sensations had been put in a syringe and given to me intravenously.

I’ve always wondered if my dad felt them too. If there was a moment when his radar picked up on the oncoming danger, if he paused briefly when he looked out with his raven-sharp, deeply intellectual eyes toward the passage between Dawson and Ptimakan Pass, at the massive structures in the distance—the backbone of Montana—as the Blackfeet referred to it.

When he scratched the razor stubble on the side of his face (I remember he hadn’t shaved that day), had he wondered if we should just stay in the campground and not go into Oldman Lake? Or had he chalked it up to the fact that that’s just the way the eastern front felt to everyone most of the time—wild, untamed . . . ominous?

And if he hadn’t and I had, should I have said something and would it have mattered? Should I have told him that the gently lapping water of Two Medicine Lake had given me goose bumps for no good reason, that when the aspen leaves shook in the light breeze, I felt nervous, not calm? All of this, in retrospect, is essentially to say I had some tabs on the future, some radar picking up on events about to occur, which I didn’t.

• • •

The police didn’t find anything under the first two small bridges on the way out from McGee Meadow, a relatively shallow creek that was easy to
search with metal detectors and no divers. Now Walsh’s men were working under the McDonald Creek Bridge on the way out from the Inside North Fork Road, a medium-size, much deeper body of water flowing out of the Lake McDonald and feeding the Middle Fork drainage.

After my jog, I had just enough time to shower and visit the dive site with Monty before heading to Nat’s. The sun set softly through the trees as we parked before the McDonald Creek Bridge, and the temperature dropped quickly. We stepped out and walked toward the riverbank where the divers had set up their operation. The underwater search unit consisted of four divers, one of whom is a dive supervisor. Essentially, all of them are regular county officers who fulfill their diving roles as an additional duty for a small amount of extra pay. Now two divers still slinked along the river bottom in the freezing water in their dry suits and with their underwater metal detection devices. The supervisor and one other diver stood on the side with several gear bags and two bright yellow tanks lying on the bank.

I glanced at the deep and darkening jade-colored water sliding past. In the spring, during the runoff phase, I knew McDonald Creek turned bright turquoise, and at the point where it met the Middle Fork, you could see a clear demarcation between the bright, milky turquoise water from Lake McDonald and the brown muddy water of the Middle Fork. Now the water was clear and mysterious, and the smell of damp soil rose to my nose. I introduced myself and Monty to the supervisor, a man named Otto Burns.

“Any luck?”

“Nope. The usual—cans, a beer bottle or two. A kid’s toy truck.” Otto pointed to an old rusted, metal army truck, covered with a growth of green algae. “And a pocketknife; don’t suppose that could have been your weapon?”

“Nah.” I shook my head. “How much longer?”

“We’re pretty much done here.” He looked to the setting sun. It was
getting dark quickly, and the sky was turning a deep lavender. “If we come up with anything, I’ll let Walsh know immediately.”

“Thanks, I appreciate you guys doing this. I know it’s extra work for your men and that you’ve been busy lately over in Flathead Lake.”

“It’s our job. No problem.”

Monty thanked him too, and we walked up to the bridge and halfway over it. We peered down into the clear water and could see the bubbles from the divers farther out as they quartered back and forth. “My father used to say,” Monty spoke in a low voice, “never trust a guy whose name can be spelled backward and forward.”

“That so? Well, he looks pretty trustworthy to me.” I smiled.

Monty chuckled.

“What does your dad do?” I asked.

“He runs a construction company in Kalispell.”

“And you didn’t get sucked into that business?”

“Nah, I did my time with it when I was younger, before I got into this.” Monty rested his arms on the bridge railing and peered into the water. I had been curious as to Monty’s roots. But I made it a habit not to pry into the history of any of the partners temporarily assigned to me. I often thought of detectives I remembered on the Kalispell force, officers who partnered for life and knew each other’s moves and comments like married couples, who’d fight over some significant detail in a case, then slide right back into a routine the next morning as if nothing happened. A part of me envied that, but my job didn’t afford that kind of partnership. And even if it did, I didn’t know if I’d understand what do with that kind of companionship. In general, I’d learned to not get into anything too deep or personal. However, with the bubbling sound of the river and cool breeze in my hair, a dozen other questions for Monty popped into my head out of nowhere, about where he lived in the valley, which high school he went to, whether he shared any of my same teachers, which college he attended, and how he came to
choose Park Police. Yet instead of probing, he asked me, “What about your family? You call yet?”