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The other two looked at her as if she'd gone insane.
Chapter 8
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Though unasked, the questions were hot and sharp in her brain and they kept her from sleep. Beside her, snuggled into her navy-blue down bag, Joan snored gently. Women snoring was a well-kept secret. Not from the world at large or husbands and lovers and roommates with ears to hear, but from the women who did it. Idly, A
Curling herself into aball like a corkscrewed cocoon, her soft underbelly protected from the predators, A
Rory had one when they started their adventure. Rory had one when they found him after his thirty-six hours lost. Les had had one at Fifty Mountain. Now Rory had two. The only member of the family who did not appear to have one, who, indeed, had no water bottle at all, was Carolyn Van Slyke, the dead woman. Surely the bottles had been a family affair. Probably researched, ordered and disbursed by Carolyn herself. Lester didn't appear to know or care much about backpacking. Rory was new to it. But Carolyn was a photographer and her hiking boots, if A
Rory had not taken water with him when he fled the bear. It was here, in camp, in a garbage bag the whole time. Sometime in the day and a half Mrs. Van Slyke went missing, she'd lost her water bottle. Sometime during those same thirty-six hours Rory had acquired it, or one just like it.
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Ideally, to preserve the fingerprints, the bottle would have been put in a paper bag. Having none, A
Cold swept down her spine from nape to nether regions as a Psycho-like image of a knife plunging through the thin nylon of the tent took over her consciousness: a picture of Rory, wild-eyed and hair awry, ru
Pushing Hitchcock's genius for evil aside, she comforted herself with thoughts of murderers. Often, in prisons it was the murderers who were chosen as trustees. Not that rare bird the serial killer, but garden-variety one-corpse-type murderers. These men and women were in reality no longer a threat to society. They had killed the person they needed to be dead and were done. Usually these were people who had killed someone they knew and, in their own minds at least, killed them for a perfectly good reason.
What perfectly good reason could Rory have for killing his stepmother? The butchery to the woman's face, done after death, suggested a desire to a
Rory spoke as if he admired his stepmom and scorned his biological father. That fit the pattern if he was an abused child. Children have an unca
But Rory was no longer a little kid and, though not a beefy young man, he was strong and fit. Once the child was no longer a child the pattern shifted, fa
The theory hung together after a fashion, but A
The hike down was uneventful. They went back the way they had come, West Flattop Trail east to Fifty Mountain Camp then Flattop Trail south to the sheared-off edge of the mountain where the steep descent began. The country they traveled was begi
Rory was leading the way. A
None of the three of them said more than a dozen words the entire trip, not even when they stopped and ate their meager lunches. A