“Three cuts,” Dalton says. “First on the side. She avoids that and gets a shallow slice. The second blow penetrates, but not deeply. Then comes the third.”
April frowns. “I’m sorry, Eric, but I don’t understand. Avoids what?”
I get to my feet, forceps still in hand, and walk over to Dalton. He nods, knowing what I intend. Still, when I stab at him with the forceps, April gasps, leaping up like I’ve gone mad.
Dalton swings sideways, avoiding the blow, and the forceps graze his side instead.
“One,” he says.
I pull back for another stab, and this time, as I make contact with his stomach, he yanks away, staggering backward. He barely has time to say “Two” before I’m on him again, and this time, the forceps hit him straight in the stomach, my hand sliding up the metal, as if they’re penetrating deep.
“Three,” I say as I turn to April. “Three blows. Looks like you were right after all. She didn’t fall. She was attacked.”
4
After that, we transport the woman to the ATV, and I drive her back to town with April, while the others bring the horses. An hour after we reach Rockton, I’m in bed, asleep.
That sounds awful. I’ve just realized that someone in the forest attacked this woman and left her for dead, and I’m going to drop her off at the clinic and catch up on my beauty sleep?
No, I’m not. I’m going to . . .
Well, that’s the problem. What am I going to do at 3 a.m., with an unconscious and medically stabilized victim who doesn’t speak English or French, and a crime scene somewhere in a night-dark forest? The answer is nothing. I can do nothing tonight. Which doesn’t keep me from hovering over the patient until April drives me out. Or from heading to the police station until Anders physically bars the doorway. Or from returning home and pulling out my notebook until Dalton slings me over his shoulder and carries me up to bed.
They’re correct in their chorus of “There’s nothing you can do tonight, Casey, except get a good night’s sleep.” It just feels wrong. Someone tried to murder this woman and I’m heading off to my comfy bed, curled up with my partner, my dog snoring on the floor beside me.
It’s not even light out yet when I bolt upright with a gasp, as if surfacing from underwater. As I hover there, Dalton murmurs, “You can’t do anything tonight.”
I glance down at him, lying on his back, his fingers tracing my bare side.
“The nightmare is bullshitting you,” he says. “Nothing has changed. You’re not forgetting anything. You’re not failing to do anything.”
“Nightmare?”
He gives me a hard look, as if I’m being coy. It takes a second for the dream to filter back. Me, napping in bed while shouts echoed all around me, people screaming and running for cover, a mass murderer with a knife charging from the forest, slaughtering residents as I grumble that I really wish they’d stop screaming so I could sleep.
I tell Dalton, and when he chuckles, I’m the one giving him the hard look.
“Sorry,” he says, reaching up to pull me down in a tight hug. “I know it was frightening at the time.” He presses his finger below my breast, where my heart beats triple-time.
“Reminds me of nightmares where I forget to study for exams,” I mutter. “I haven’t been in school for a decade, but I still have them.” I sigh and look up at him. “You don’t ever get those, do you?”
“Having never been to a class or taken an exam, oddly, I do not.”
“Lucky bastard.” I shift in his arms. “I bet you don’t get anxiety dreams at all.”
He purses his lips.
“Do you even know what those are?” I ask.
“Never heard the term, but considering what you just described, yeah, I get them. After my parents left Rockton, and I was sheriff, I used to have nightmares where no one listened to me.”
I fight a sputtering laugh. “For you, that would be a nightmare. Did it ever happen, though? Even back then?”
“Hell, yeah. There are always people who don’t listen until I show them why they really should.”
“So that was the nightmare, then? You gave orders, and someone ignored you?”
“Everyone ignored me. Laughed at me, even. I’d wake up in a cold sweat. Truth was that it shocked the fuck out of me that people did listen. I was the youngest resident, and here I was, playing sheriff, giving orders and tossing curses and glares. I was never the biggest or toughest guy here. I just acted like it. I’d seen it work for Ty, but that’s different.”
“The man is the size of a grizzly.”
“And I’m not. Yet residents treated me like I was the person I was pretending to be, while I kept waiting for someone to call me on my bullshit, and no one did.”
“So the nightmares stopped?”
“Eventually. Now I just get the ones where you’re not here, and when I go looking for you, no one knows who I’m talking about.”
I wince.
“Yep, those suck,” he says, kissing my cheek, “but then I wake up, and you’re here, and I know you’re staying, so I can shove that bullshit in the closet where it belongs.”
I run a finger over his cheek, prickly with stubble, the winter beard shaved. He’ll keep the stubble, though. There’s something in his face that needs the scruff to keep him looking like the hard-assed sheriff. Otherwise, there’s always an innocence there. A wide-eyed innocence and a wounded innocence, and a man who cannot allow the world to see either. It’s only when it’s the two of us that the wall comes down and that strong jaw relaxes and those gray eyes lose a little of their steel, letting me see what lies within.
What lies within is a boy who grew up in the forest, with parents who loved him and a younger brother who adored him. A harsh but also idyllic life. Then Rockton’s sheriff Gene Dalton found him.
Gene took the boy home and, according to the town records, the nine-year-old was suffering from severe malnutrition and had been abandoned by neglectful parents. That was bullshit, but it gave Gene the excuse to present his wife with a son, after they’d lost their own child down south in the tragedy that brought them to Rockton.
It was like those old stories of missionaries “rescuing” “heathen” children, when the truth was that they stole those children from loving parents who followed a different way of life.
What happened next is hazy in Dalton’s mind, tainted by the stories Gene told him growing up. Then, a few years ago, he reconnected with his brother, Jacob, and learned that his parents weren’t the negligent guardians that Gene claimed.
Yet it wasn’t as if he’d been taken as a baby. Dalton had repressed nearly a decade of good memories, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. So he decided not to. His birth parents were dead, and the Daltons had retired down south, so what was the point in digging up the past? What’s done is done. Keep moving forward.
It obviously isn’t that easy. All those questions he’d tamped down had left a smoldering keg in his soul, the rage and hurt of a boy who’d been abandoned by loving birth parents and then, as an adult, come to realize that his loving adopted parents actually kidnapped him. Little wonder he has nightmares where he wakes to find me gone, to discover I never existed at all.
It was only last winter that Dalton agreed to talk about his parents. While Jacob is more than happy to fill in the missing memories, he cannot supply the most critical answer of all. Jacob had been seven when Dalton disappeared into Rockton. He knows their parents searched frantically for his brother. He eventually came to understand that Dalton was in Rockton, where their parents assured Jacob that his brother was healthy and happy. They made it sound like having an older sibling at boarding school in a far-off place.
He’s gone away to learn new things and grow up, and when he does, he’ll come back to us.
From what I’ve heard of Steve Mulligan and Amy O’Keefe, there is no way they decided their son was better off in Rockton and left him there. So what really happened?
We have no idea. They both
died fifteen years ago.
So much trauma visited on a family who only wanted peaceful lives in the forest. Further proof, as if we needed it, that the biggest danger out there isn’t the animals or the landscape or the weather.
It’s the people.
And here we are, reminded of that yet again with the tourist we found. A woman who came here expecting to deal with the animals and the landscape and the weather, and what put her in our clinic, fighting for her life, was another human being.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions,” I whisper against Dalton’s chest.
“Yeah, pretty sure I’m trying not to jump to the same ones.” He pulls back to look down at me. “We can discuss it, if that’ll help you sleep.”
I shake my head. “Once I start, I won’t stop. We’re thinking the same thing. I know we are. It can wait. It can all wait.” I glance at the clock. “At least for another couple of hours.”
He pulls me to him in a kiss, and I lose myself in it, pushing the rest back, at least for now.
* * *
It’s 6 a.m., the sun fully risen, and I’m in the clinic, cupping a mug of hot coffee between my hands as Dalton stokes the fire. My sister had been up all night with the patient. We’ve sent April to bed now, and we’re sitting vigil waiting for the woman to wake. We’ve left Storm with Petra—the clinic is no place for any canine, but especially not one who can destroy a thousand dollars in equipment with one enthusiastic wag of her tail.
As for the patient, the sedative wore off long ago, and this is simply the deep sleep of exhaustion. She’s hooked up to an IV replacing her fluids. There’s a heart monitor, too. That is all we can do for her right now, that and antibiotics.
Last night, April and Anders looked after the stomach wound, sterilizing it better and using the ultrasound to get an internal look. Those images rest at my elbow, and they add nothing to the story of this woman’s trauma. As predicted, the weapon pierced mostly muscle. It was intended to kill her. I’m certain of that. The only question is whether her attacker expected her to immediately perish from her injury . . . or knew it would take time, leaving her to a slow and agonizing death alone in the forest.
I’ve barely taken a few sips from my coffee when a soft rap sounds on the exam room door. Dalton opens it to find a dark-haired woman hovering uncertainly.
“Hey, Maryanne,” I say. “Come in.”
As she does, her gaze flits to the patient and then quickly away. Anyone seeing that would dismiss Maryanne as a nervous woman. I know better. I understand that what’s making her uneasy is the patient lying on that bed and what she represents.
“Kenny came by the stable this morning to take Champ for an early ride,” she says, “and he mentioned you’d brought back a woman. A tourist who was attacked in the forest.”
“Kenny talks too much,” Dalton grumbles, but there’s no rancor in it. We both know there’s a reason Rockton’s carpenter—and head of militia—let Maryanne know. The same reason that brought her here this morning.
Maryanne came to Rockton nearly fifteen years ago, yet no one here except Dalton had ever met her before last winter. Rockton is a town of transients. It’s meant to be a way station on the journey back to an ordinary life. You come, and catch your breath and wait for the storms to pass, and then you return. Residents are guaranteed a two-year stay. After that, they may apply to extend their stay up to five years. We do have two who’ve gone beyond five years—Mathias and Isabel—but they secure those extensions by blackmailing the council.
When Maryanne came to Rockton, fleeing a nightmarish marriage, she’d fallen in love. Not with a person, but with the wilderness. She’s a biologist, and the child of hippies, and here she rediscovered her passion for wild places. She joined three others and set off into the forest.
That isn’t an officially sanctioned choice. In reality, it depends on the sheriff. If someone wanted to go these days, Dalton would try to talk them out of it. If they weren’t equipped to survive, he’d dump them in Vancouver before he’d let them walk into the wilderness. But if they could handle it and truly understood what that life entailed, then, as a child of the forest himself, he would look the other way.
Gene Dalton took a very different view, not surprisingly given that he stole Dalton from that wilderness life. Gene aggressively pursued would-be settlers, and he’d done that with Maryanne, gathering the militia for an all-out search. When they found the camp, a week later, it’d been empty, supplies ripped apart, mementos abandoned, the ruined remains of their temporary settlement telling a tragic story.
The true tragedy, though, came later.
As Maryanne leans over the mystery woman, her graying hair falls in a curtain and she reflexively starts to tuck it behind her ear. A pause, then she tucks it back anyway, and that’s partly defiance, but partly, too, because she knows there’s no one here who hasn’t seen the frostbite. The elements don’t explain the odd pattern of scarring on one cheek. Ritualized scarring. She speaks carefully, her lips hiding teeth that will get dental caps this spring to hide the damage. That damage wasn’t tooth decay—it was intentional filing.
What happened in Maryanne’s camp all those years ago wasn’t a bear attack. It was humans. Humans that belong more in a badly researched prehistoric movie than in twenty-first-century reality.
We call them hostiles. They’re former Rockton residents who have reverted to something more primal, adopting a hodgepodge of tribal elements and presenting as wild people barely capable of communication, more dangerous than any creature out here.
To the people of Rockton, hostiles have always been the bogeyman. An urban legend created by law enforcement to keep residents out of the forest. Dalton knew better. Yet to him, they were as much a part of the wilderness as the settlers and caribou, and he’d accepted the council’s explanation that this was what happened when people immersed themselves too fully in the wilderness life. They lost what it means to be human.
I’m sure that can happen, but . . .
In Rockton, Dalton and Maryanne had been friends, as much as a teenage boy and a thirty-something woman could be. She’d taught him biology, and he’d taught her naturalism. Two keen and curious minds eager to discover everything the other knew. A year after she left Rockton, he met her in the forest and she attacked him. Nearly forced him to kill her to escape. She’d become a hostile. That kind of deterioration cannot naturally happen in a year.
I’d had lots of theories about how it did happen, most more outlandish than I care to admit. The key came, fittingly, with Maryanne herself. Dalton met her again last year, and she did recognize him. Thus began six months of encounters in the forest, until finally, she was in a mental place to accept help. She’d spent four months living in a cave once inhabited by a friend. She had recently agreed to move into town, taking over from the stable worker who left this winter.
So what happened to Maryanne in the forest? Two words that often go together. Cult and drugs. The hostiles have two narcotic tealike brews, which they seem to have adapted from the Second Settlement.
Rockton gave birth to two settlements out here, unoriginally known as the First and Second Settlements. Both were created by residents who didn’t want to go home. The first is led by Edwin, now an old man. The second, founded in the seventies, reminds me of a commune, complete with mildly narcotic teas.
I believe the hostiles began as a small group who left the Second Settlement to pursue a more nomadic life, not unlike Maryanne and her comrades. They took the settlement’s tea recipes with them, and at some point, the brew went from mild intoxicant to hardcore drug.
The Second Settlement has two teas, referred to as the peace tea and the ritual tea. The former acts like a nice glass of wine. The latter, which they only use for rituals, induces mild hallucinations. The hostiles created stronger versions of both, brews that can no longer be called anything as benign as a “tea.”
The first keeps them in a state of moderate euphoria where their former life
becomes a shadowy dream they no longer care about. The second whips them into the frenzied state that Dalton first encountered with Maryanne, when she tried to kill him.
What does all this mean for the woman lying in the bed? She isn’t a hostile. She might look as if she’s been living rough, but clear polish clings to her ragged fingernails, her hands are smooth and soft, and she was wearing contact lenses, which April removed.
Maryanne has come to see this woman because, in what we know of her story, Maryanne sees echoes of her own past: the horror that began her years as a hostile.
Her quartet had made camp a few nights after leaving Rockton. Having lost Gene Dalton and his men, they didn’t post a guard. Healthy bears won’t attack four sleeping humans around a smoldering fire. Fellow settlers were known to be territorial and unfriendly, but not thieves or murderers. As for the hostiles, well that was just a story, and a rather silly one at that.
That night, they learned the truth about those silly stories. The hostiles attacked while the quartet slept. They wanted the women and the supplies. They slit one man’s throat before he woke. The other, though? They used a stone knife on his stomach and abandoned him to die in agony, alone.
5
This is, of course, what both Dalton and I thought of first when we realized what happened to our mystery woman. It’s what Maryanne thinks of when she hears the story. It’s why she’s here—to help determine whether hostiles attacked a group of tourists. Whether there might be other survivors out there, women like her who’d been given the choice between a narcotic brew and a horrible death.
When Maryanne was captured, she drank the drugs, thinking she’d play along and then escape. Her companion refused and thought Maryanne weak for giving in. For that, the other woman was bound to a tree, with someone nearby, waiting for her to surrender. A week later, Maryanne got to see what remained.
A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel Page 4
