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Harry Ruick and Lester Van Slyke waited for them at Packers Roost, the staging area near Going to the Sun Road. Harry had loftier things to attend to than playing taxi driver, so A
Knowing what was coming, she maneuvered herself from the rear of the pack to Harry Ruick's left. She wanted to see Rory's face when he found for certain-sure his stepmother had been slain. So far, the emotions the probability had elicited from him-at least publicly-had been out of balance.
Clearing her mind and draping herself with what empathic tendencies she could muster, A
"Son," he said, "Rory-" His voice broke and he stopped.
On an infant's face, every feeling is clearly manifest, as visible and identifiable as wind patterns on water. Rory was old enough to have developed the mask humans build to hide their emotions. The blueprint of the mask had probably been in place by the time he was seven years old. By the time he was thirty it would be complete, a false face that he himself might not be able to penetrate. At eighteen there were still thin places in the veneer. A
For the briefest of instants there was a flicker of light, a candle quickly extinguished behind his eyes. Before thought or memory came to quench that flame, Rory had been genuinely glad to see his father.
"It was your stepmom, son. She's gone," Les said, having recovered his voice. His pale blue eyes filled with tears that ran u
Light winked out of Rory's eyes, apparently extinguished by his father's tears. The emotions that followed passed beneath the distorted glass of civilization so quickly A
Rory noticed A
"Do you know who killed her?"
"No," Ruick said honestly. "We're hoping the forensic evidence sent to the lab will give us a clue. Till that comes back we're going to need to ask you and your dad a lot of questions, get to know everything we can about your stepmom. We might get a lead from that."
Rory nodded, looking considerably older than his years. Perhaps because nature abhors a vacuum, Les had taken on the role of the child, at least outwardly, and snuffled into a crumpled handkerchief. "I feel so lost," he said, and sounded it.
As they climbed into the sedan, Les asked Rory to join him at the motel where he was staying but the boy declined, preferring the grubby, spartan NPS researchers' dorm to greater comfort bought at the price of his father's company.
Lester took the rebuff with resignation. This was not the first time his son had slammed a door in his face. Compassion hit Joan so hard she grimaced as though she'd sustained a punch to the stomach. A
Rory's adult facade was crumbling and Lester Van Slyke was frankly gray with exhaustion. Of necessity and not generosity, Ruick postponed the taking of statements and the interview process until the following afternoon.
Five of them squished into a sedan for twenty minutes, breathing each other's fear, anger and sweat was pressing heavily on A
By the time they reached the employee housing area and Ruick pulled the car into Joan's drive, A
Once inside Joan made an incredibly generous offer. "Do you want to shower first?"
A
Neither Joan nor A
Joan chose to dull her brain not with television or booze but with her personal drug of choice: work. She sat surrounded by several days' worth of bear incident management system reports and a pile of faxes, e-mails and 10-343 law enforcement reports that she had, in the addict's age-old habit of stockpiling drugs, radioed ahead and asked her assistant to leave on her dining table.
"E-mail first," Joan said as she opened her laptop. "Ah, three from my map boy wanting to know where the bears will seek food this week."
"How do you know where they'll be?" A
"I don't. I just know where the food will be. What's ripe. Like that."
A
She was amusing herself by cataloguing the gross errors committed by law enforcement on some cop show when Joan broke the long and peaceful silence.
"Four bear sightings since we've been in the high country," she said.
"Mmmm." A
"One's pretty fu
A
She could almost feel Joan's need to talk.
Joan cracked. "Seems this one was dancing."
"Next they'll be riding bicycles and lobbying for the vote," A
Contact was made. Joan rubbed her eyes, her glasses riding up on the backs of her hands. "Do you think Rory'll be okay?" she asked. "I mean he seemedokay. Way too okay if you ask me."
"It's quiet, too quiet…," A
"Yeah, like that. Didn't it seem to you that he kind of went away inside himself when his dad and Harry flew out to ID the body? He had to know it was his stepmom. The rest of us figured it was."
A
"He'll be okay," A
"I don't know," she amended. She told Joan of Rory's vagueness about what had transpired during the thirty-six hours he'd been missing, about her fears his cowardice in abandoning them to Ursus horibiliswould permanently scar his psyche. She told Joan about Carolyn Van Slyke's missing water bottle and Rory turning up out of the woods with a spare. The recitation done, A