“If I hesitate, it is uncertainty, not evasion. They disappeared. At first, we assumed they’d gone hunting. It was summer, and they’d mentioned traveling farther afield. When we didn’t hear from them by winter, we grew concerned, but by then, if they’d died—as we feared—it would be too late to help. We could only fret and grieve. It was two years later before we saw them again and by then . . .”
She shifts on the log. “By then they were not the people we remembered. Only one was still from our settlement and she was . . . not open to communication. The elders met. I wasn’t one of them at the time, so I can’t speak to the specifics. I only know that after two days of meetings, the elders decreed that our brethren had ‘rejoined nature,’ shedding the restraints of civilization to live closer to the divine. We needed to understand they had undergone a spiritual transformation, and we had to respect their ‘otherness.’ Respect their obvious wishes, too. Don’t communicate with them. Don’t interfere with them. Allow them to live their lives as they see fit.”
“You never had any violent encounters with them?”
“Yes, but that came much later, and by then, the doctrine regarding the wild people was entrenched. They were like wolves or bears, and if we had a negative encounter with them, the fault was ours, for stumbling onto their territory.”
She folds her hands around her tea cup. “The fault was always ours.”
* * *
On our hike home, I tell Dalton what I learned. When I finish, he says, “Fuck,” and doesn’t speak for a few minutes, as we walk in thoughtful silence. On the way here, I’d told him my theory. That’s something we’ve had a problem with in the past. When I’m considering a new direction or a possible link in a case, I’m much more comfortable saying, “Hey, Eric. Do you mind if we go chat with some people from the Second Settlement. Why? Just . . . because.”
Hold my cards to my chest until I can confirm—or refute—a potential theory, and if I’m wrong, well, there’s no reason to tell him what I’d been thinking, right? Save myself the embarrassment. Which is a shitty way to treat a law enforcement partner, and if mine had acted like that, I’d have been looking for a new one.
But Dalton isn’t just my partner. He’s my boss, so I want to impress him. He’s also my lover and my friend, and both of those also mean I want to impress him. Except he’s my junior investigative partner. My mentee. I’m supposed to be teaching him detective skills.
It’s unconscionable for me to make him follow blindly so I can pull a rabbit from the hat and look brilliant. I’m only lucky that when he did call me on it, he was gentle, and he knows me well enough to realize it arose from my fear of looking stupid rather than deliberately cutting him out of the process.
So before we’d reached Lynx Lake, I’d shared my wild theory, and he’d added his thoughts, which helped me solidify the idea in my mind.
“You were right, then,” he says when he speaks again.
“There’s no proof—”
He lifts a hand. “Let me rephrase that. You did not disprove your theory. You accumulated additional evidence to suggest you may be looking in the right direction. Is that equivocal enough for you?”
I squeeze his arm. “Thank you. Yes, this does suggest I’m not as far off base as I feared. It also means . . . Shit. I’m not even sure where to go with this right now.”
“Then let’s talk.”
We do that, walking with Storm and talking. As for my theory?
It goes back to being in the station, jokingly offering tea to Edwin. He said they don’t drink it, which I knew. But then later, after hearing his story, I’d thought that the council was probably glad the Second Settlement had the tea. They were the peaceful settlement, the hippie commune, its people happily bonding with nature and drinking tea that kept them calm and content with their lot.
What if the Second Settlement didn’t just randomly invent that tea? What if someone took advantage of their New Age ways and gave it to them to keep them docile?
Yes, it was a wild idea, and it made me feel even more like a conspiracy theorist. First, I think the council is responsible for the hostiles. When I’m proven wrong, I can’t just admit that I was mistaken. I need to concoct a new theory that implicates them.
It’s the tea that ultimately created the hostiles? Well, then, the council must be responsible for the tea.
Even if they are, that doesn’t mean the council knowingly “created” hostiles. They gave the Second Settlement a mildly narcotic tea that it uses recreationally. The ritual tea was an accidental formula that Hendricks cautioned them about and, again, the settlers have been responsible with it.
The problem is that a splinter group left the Second Settlement, exactly as I’d hypothesized. They took the tea recipe and tinkered with it, and that led to a dangerous increase in potency. Yes, that’s speculation, but it’s also a logical extension of the facts.
What does all this mean for the crimes I’m investigating? On the surface, nothing. I suspect hostiles attacked the tourists. No answer to the evolution issue would change that. This doesn’t shed any light on who killed the settlers, either. It may, however, help resolve the problem of the hostiles in general.
The council refuses to do anything about them. Not their problem. If I’m right, though, it is their problem. They gave the commune settlement the tea. That tea, in turn, brought about the hostiles. So, in attempting to ensure that the Second Settlement remained peaceful, they actually created people who posed a greater threat than Edwin’s settlement. I’d see the irony in that, if I didn’t also see the tragedy.
Hendricks seems to be a plant. His story is too odd otherwise—he stays in Rockton only a couple of months, gets introduced to the commune by Rockton’s leadership, and then stays there just long enough to create the tea before being allowed to return home, far short of his two years.
The council sent Hendricks to the Second Settlement to formulate a tea from local ingredients. The question is whether the entire council was involved or . . .
Wait. There hadn’t been a council at the time. There’d only been a few administrators and the board of directors.
The board of directors. Which had been Émilie and her husband and their two friends. Were they involved? Or was this something the administrators dreamed up . . .
A memory slams into my head. Last winter, when Petra had been shot by an arrow, I’d sat with her in the clinic for days while she recovered. We’d talked endlessly, and one piece rises now.
It was a conversation about Émilie. About her work with Rockton and the amount of time and money the family had devoted to the town. I’d been saying that was how Rockton should be funded. If residents had money—like me—they should pay for their stay, but the town should also seek donations from wealthy former residents, the way schools do. Émilie was the perfect example of that.
“Well, I wouldn’t say perfect,” Petra said with a smile. “It’s not entirely altruism.”
“She can’t claim it as a charitable donation, though.”
“Oh, I’m sure part of it becomes a write-off. But while she’s definitely grateful for what Rockton provided . . .” She shrugged. “There’s guilt there, too. No one donates like big pharma.”
I must have looked confused, because she continued, “That’s where our money comes from. Profits from the drug trade.” She winked. “The legal kind.”
Her family’s money came from pharmaceuticals. We talked about that, including her own discomfort with it. Afterward, I realized she shouldn’t have told me this. It was personal information that could identify Émilie and Petra, and for what? A self-conscious joke about the guilt of earning your fortune overcharging for medicine?
I thought medicine itself had been the reason she overshared. She’d been on painkillers for her injury. It made her loopy, and she’d inadvertently revealed more than she intended. When we never spoke of it again, I hoped that meant she didn’t realize what she’d given away.
Which underestimat
ed Petra entirely.
She knew exactly what she’d given me. If called on it, though, she could blame the pain meds.
Three days before that, she’d been lying on the ground with an arrow in her chest. We’d had no idea how deeply it had penetrated, only that she’d been shot near the heart, and she was bleeding in the snow as I knelt beside her, panicking, trying to assess the damage.
“Émilie,” she’d whispered. “The . . . the hostiles . . . Your . . . your theory.”
At the time, I thought she’d wanted me to tell Émilie about my theory. Clearly, Petra had been in shock, not quite making sense, her brain seizing on this meaningless bit of unfinished business as her last words.
Tell my grandmother about your hostile theory. She can help.
No, that wasn’t what she’d been saying at all, was it?
That’s where our money comes from. Profits from the drug trade. The legal kind.
She hadn’t been telling me to work with Émilie. She’d been saying that my theory might be right . . . and her grandmother could be responsible.
Petra had been trying to give me one last gift, in case she didn’t survive. Words she couldn’t say while she lived, not when they implicated her beloved grandmother.
Don’t give up on that theory of yours.
Look into my family. Into my grandmother.
Later, she couldn’t go back and explain her meaning. But she could nudge, couldn’t she? Give me another tidbit, in case I made the connection between the hostile narcotic brews and Rockton.
If I’m right, I need to confront Petra. First, though, I need to be sure I’m making the right connections.
I turn to Dalton, who has been walking in silence while I retreated into my memories. Now he slants a look my way, one that isn’t quite convinced that I’ll share my thoughts. I take a moment running my hand over Storm’s back as I consider how to word it. A distant shout makes me jump, but when I look up, I realize we’re only about ten minutes from Rockton.
“How much do you know about big pharma?” I ask.
His brow creases in confusion, and then his face tightens in a look I know well. Like when residents make pop-culture references. It doesn’t annoy him, even if his expression might convey annoyance. It’s pride snapping the shutters closed before anyone mocks his ignorance.
“Pharmaceutical companies,” I say quickly. “The really big corporations that manufacture prescription drugs.”
“Ah,” he says. “I know what they are. We’ve had people with that in their background.”
He relaxes. “Before Beth came, we were looking for someone with medical experience, and we had a person who’d worked for a pharmaceutical company. I made the mistake of confusing that for ‘working for a pharmacy.’ The council set me straight. That resident didn’t know anything about drugs except how to sell them. Which I thought was an odd occupation but . . .” He shrugs.
“Some of the richest people in the world made their money off drug manufacturing.”
He frowns. “There’s money in that? Sure, I don’t figure they give them away, but Canada has free health care. Drugs are covered by taxes.”
“Health care, yes. Drugs, no.”
“You mean optional medication. The ones you need are free, though.”
I shake my head. “There are programs if you can’t afford them, but medication is never free, and the drug companies are definitely in it for profit. Lifesaving drugs can cost a thousand times the manufacturing cost.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yep. And that’s where Émilie’s money comes from.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Petra told me. Seemingly out of the blue. Big-pharma families are among the world’s greatest philanthropists, and she was joking about it being guilt money. Except I don’t think it was really joking. She said it a few days after she’d been shot. When she had just been shot, she said something about my hostile theory and Émilie, and I thought she was just going into shock.”
He says nothing, just walking, his distant gaze telling me he’s searching for connections, rather than asking me to supply them.
I continue, “This Hendricks guy came from Rockton, and I’m speculating that he was sent to the Second Settlement to create the tea from local ingredients.”
“To keep them calm. Reduce the risk they’d set their sights on Rockton, like the First Settlement did”
“Right. He clearly had some idea what he was doing, and Josie figured he was a professor . . . or a scientist.”
Dalton’s hand tightens on mine. “Like someone who’d work for a drug company. Not selling them but making them.”
“Exactly. It—”
Another shout comes, and we both stop. Storm halts, too, her ears perked as she turns toward the source. A few minutes ago, I’d heard what sounded like a neutral shout. Not anger or excitement but surprise mingled with mild warning. Like realizing someone is about to walk straight into a tree.
We were close enough to Rockton that I’d presumed it came from there and only made a mental note to warn people against being so loud when a search party could be looking for the Danish tourists.
This shout is different. Rockton is to our left, and the only people allowed in the forest right now are the militia on patrol, who wouldn’t be that far from town.
We strain to listen, but nothing else comes. I’m about to ask Dalton what we should do when another sound rips through the forest. A bellow that only comes from one creature out here.
“Bear,” I whisper.
Another shout then, clearly human, spiked with panic. A young voice, and in it I hear an accent I recognize from Edwin’s settlement. There’s a recognizable note in the voice, too. One of Felicity’s friends.
24
We make our way carefully toward the voices. It seems to be two men, their voices coming through as we draw near. They’re shouting at a bear to scare it off. It is not scared. It is angry, and the more they shout, the angrier it gets.
I put Storm behind us. She doesn’t like that, but we have no idea what we’re walking into. Well, yes, we have some idea. Bear versus human. It’s the specifics that elude us, and so we’ll keep Storm at our rear, lest the bear spot her first and attack.
We soon see one of the settlers. A third man, perhaps in his thirties, this one not making a sound as he stands with his empty hands raised. Dalton grumbles under his breath. Your hands should never be empty out here. Even if a bear surprises you, you should have time to at least pull a knife. But this man has clearly been caught unawares, with no weapon within reach. As soon as I think that, I spot a bow propped against a tree. Why the hell didn’t he grab it as soon as he saw—
“Fuck,” Dalton breathes, and I see the answer to my question as I get past the tree that partly blocks my view.
At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. My gaze is level with the man’s shoulders, and there is something right in front of him. It is a wall of brown fur, and I have to look up at least a foot above the man’s head to see the muzzle of the beast.
A grizzly. Brown bears, as they’re more rightly known. Alaskan brown bears, a head taller than their southern brethren. I’ve caught sight of them fishing. I’ve spotted them in the distance, decimating a berry patch. I’ve seen them making their way along a mountainside. I’ve even encountered one up close. I’d been goofing off with Dalton and darting around a fallen tree to find a grizzly rooting out grubs. In each case, the bear had been on all fours, and while I’d thought Holy shit, that beast is big, nothing compares to seeing a brown bear on its hind legs, towering over a grown man. . . .
Something inside me gibbers in panic, a tiny voice telling me to get the hell out of here now. Grab my man. Grab my dog. Push them ahead of me if I have to. Just get out.
This unarmed stranger has made a fatal error, and if his companions have any sense, they will run. Let their companion’s death buy them time to escape.
It is a horrible, cruel thought, a pri
mal terror that lasts only a second before I feel the reassuring weight of the gun in my hands. My mind taps images of my bear spray and knife, tiny pats of reassurance. I am fully armed. So is Dalton. As for Storm, she has seen what we do, and thank God, she does not leap at the beast. Does not even growl. She just slips forward enough so her head brushes my leg. She recognizes that we are not in danger. Just this other man. This stranger.
As the man’s companions shout instructions, Dalton says, “Shut the fuck up.”
He doesn’t yell it. The words still reverberate through the clearing. The only one who doesn’t turn our way is the bear itself. To it, Dalton is just more noise.
“Everyone, just shut the fuck up and stay calm,” Dalton says. “You’re only pissing it off, and it already seems plenty—”
A growl sounds, and Dalton’s head snaps up. That growl doesn’t come from Storm. It doesn’t come from the grizzly. It comes from behind the man . . . and I follow it to see a second bear. A juvenile, probably a yearling, already bigger than Storm.
With that we see the problem. The very big problem.
Last summer, I came between a black bear and her cub. That’d given everyone near heart failure, but we’d avoided bloodshed by getting that cub back to its mother. Also, black bears are only modestly protective of their cubs around humans. Grizzlies are a whole other situation.
The settler found himself between the two, and before he could rectify that, the mother reacted. It’s pure luck that she hasn’t attacked already, maybe because her cub isn’t a baby. She’s ready to do it, though. Just waiting for this settler to give her an excuse. Which means he can’t go for a weapon, can’t step aside, can’t do anything except wait for her next move.
“Fucking settlers,” Dalton mutters, loud enough for them to hear. “You’re as bad as our residents, and at least they have the excuse that we don’t let them into the forest. Hell, even most of them know you don’t shout and wave your arms at a grizzly. That’s for black bears, who might actually be intimidated. Does she look intimidated?”
A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel Page 21
