I keep my expression neutral. Dalton only stretches out his legs, crossing them at the ankles and crossing his arms, too. The body language is clear, and he doesn’t care if she knows it.
Émilie continues. “I was not at Mathias’s house. I truly was just out for a walk.”
“Okay,” I say.
Our gazes meet. I don’t believe her, but this conversation won’t proceed as long as we lock horns over this.
“Petra’s gone,” I say.
When her entire body goes rigid, I realize how that sounded. I should hurry on to clarify. I don’t. I pause, if only for a moment, to throw her off balance.
I continue, “We found a man in the forest, injured. He’d been the one who dropped the Danes off, and he was searching for them when they missed their pickup. He was attacked by a hostile. While I tended to him, Eric and Storm returned to Edwin’s trail. Petra stayed with me. We got into an argument.”
Those last words are the ones that truly penetrate. Émilie’s head snaps up, her eyes wide, and I know what she’s thinking. That this is the end of the story. How her granddaughter died.
We got into an argument.
“I confronted Petra with a theory about the hostiles and your involvement.”
This is why I am callously dragging out the ending. Because if I uttered those words “your involvement” under any other circumstances, her defenses would fly up in the proper expression of confusion. But all she’s thinking about right now is Petra. She does not react, and that tells me everything.
I continue. “Eric and Storm ran into trouble in the forest. Hostiles. I heard Storm in distress, so I took off, leaving Petra with the pilot. When we came back, she was gone. They were both gone.”
“The hostiles took—?”
“No. Petra was aware they were in the area. We had an encounter ourselves, with the same group that ran into Eric. They were in retreat. But I left Petra on full alert, in a defensive position, guarding a blind man. If they’d been attacked, there would have been bodies. All we found was a trail. It headed straight for the nearest body of water, because Petra knows how to evade Storm.”
“No.”
“No to what? Petra wouldn’t know how to confound a tracking dog?”
“No to all of this, Casey. Petra wouldn’t do that. I thought you knew her better.”
My face hardens, and I open my mouth to answer, but Dalton cuts in, his voice calm, breezy even.
“When Casey came to Rockton, Petra sought her out,” he says. “Made a point of winning her friendship. Casey was flattered, naturally. Petra cultivated the friendship of the new detective, the sheriff’s girlfriend—”
“No,” Émilie says. “She cultivated a friendship with Casey. The person. In Petra’s former job, they knew better than to send her undercover to cozy up to targets. It isn’t her skill set. Her friendship with you was real, and if you felt—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say quickly.
“Fuck, yes, it matters,” Dalton says. “You were hurt. Anyone would be.”
Émilie meets my gaze. “Endangering your friendship hurt her more than you can know, Casey, but a little part of her, I think, was glad of it. Not to lose you as a friend, but to burn away the lies. To be who she really is, at least with you. To share the parts of herself that you two have in common.”
“None of that matters right now,” I say. “This isn’t Casey-Petra relationship therapy. It’s me convincing you that she came back here. I told her my theory, and she didn’t deny it. She granted me that much, and I hope you’ll do the same. But knowing that the truth was out, she saw an opportunity to protect you, and she took it. I don’t blame her for that.”
“How does this protect me?”
I don’t answer. I can’t without telling her what I know, and that will come later. Soon.
When I don’t respond, Émilie shakes her head. “That isn’t what’s happening here.”
“Then what is?”
“I-I don’t know.”
Émilie fidgets, and in her face, I don’t see the turmoil of an old woman telling herself her granddaughter wouldn’t do that. When I worked special victims, I cannot count the number of times I sat across the table from parents, telling them what their teenage son did, watching Dad explode in righteous fury as Mom retreated into sick horror and grief. I’ve heard the snarled cries of “Not my child,” while the look in their eyes quietly whimpers, “Oh, God, what has he done?”
This is not that look. This is the look of a parent genuinely struggling to find another explanation, firm in their conviction that there must be one.
Émilie straightens. “You say this man has been blinded. You’d left to help Eric, and it was getting dark, and I’m presuming the storm had passed by then. Petra’s bringing him back for medical care. She saw the sun dropping and knew you and Eric would be fine.”
“And the fact she led him through a stream?”
“They had to cross it.”
“We didn’t cross a stream coming from Rockton, so when she reached it, she’d know they’d gone the wrong way. The water is barely above freezing. They waded in near-freezing water to lose Storm.”
“I . . . I don’t know what the answer is, Casey, but I know Petra was not running away.”
“Not running. Coming to protect you. And before you keep denying it, you need to hear what I told her, Émilie.”
31
As I tell my story, Dalton makes coffee, knowing there’s no chance we’re getting to bed tonight. I step through the full story, from Maryanne’s description of the tea to the research we’ve done to Josie’s tale. I leave nothing out, even the bits Émilie has already heard.
There’d been a time in my life when I dreamed of getting a doctorate, or at least a master’s degree. Then my career took off, and I found plenty of other opportunities to expand my education. I knew people who’d gotten those higher degrees, though, and it involves defending your thesis, the culmination of your studies.
This is my thesis, the project I’ve been working on since I first came to Rockton. And this is me, defending my dissertation, to the person with the knowledge and experience to shoot it down.
When I finish, every muscle is tense, waiting for Émilie to do exactly that. Shoot me down. Laugh even. She won’t mock me, but I will see mockery. I am the doctoral student no one expected to get this far. I’m just not smart enough, see? My parents always told me so. My sister always told me so. I don’t have what it takes, and if I overreach, I’ll embarrass myself.
I hold myself like there’s a bomb in my gut, ready to explode at a single touch. And I’m not the only one. I see the set of Dalton’s jaw, the steel in his gaze. He’s a watchdog straining at his chain. Even Storm, who’d napped as I spoke, is awake and shifting, sensing the tension in the air.
Émilie does nothing. Says nothing. Just sits there, watching me as if I’m still talking. Or watching me as if there’s more to come. Surely there must be more. Maybe I’ll burst into laughter and tell her it’s a prank. Or I’ll start blaming space aliens so she can chalk my mad theory up to delusions. Too long in the bush, and I snapped.
With each passing second, I tense a little more, the bomb inside me buzzing, so close to triggering. It’s coming. I know it’s coming, and I want to handle it without exploding . . . and I’m not sure I can.
I know I’m right.
No, I knew I was right as I stood in the forest and saw Petra’s face. Now the fear creeps in again. Like marking down an answer on an exam that you’re absolutely sure of, only to later second-guess.
Should I have couched my theory in question marks? Acted like it was only a hypothesis?
No. I believe in my facts, and I must stand up for them. I might have a detail or two wrong, but the overall theory is sound. I’m sure of it.
“I . . . can see you’ve put a lot of work into this,” Émilie says, and something inside me collapses, deflates into this hard nub in my stomach.
I know what comes
next. I’ve heard it before, in that same, careful tone. Every time my music tutor graded a test piece, her gaze would slide to my mother, standing stiff, her expressionless face radiating cold judgment. The tutor never looked at Dad, relaxed and open, smiling as if I hadn’t just massacred Chopin.
That’s the mistake everyone made. If someone drove me too hard, if someone could crush my self-confidence under their thumb, clearly it was my mother, right? The Chinese tiger mom? Oh, my mother definitely had high standards for me, definitely pushed me to achieve them, but the one who would lambaste me after this musical disaster? That would be the genial Scot lounging on the couch.
I can see you put a lot of work into this.
That’s what my music tutor always said, and she’d been right. I’d worked my fingers off practicing, but it never mattered. I suspect she always wanted to award me an A for effort. She couldn’t, though. My parents would see through that and send her packing, like they had her predecessor. Effort is not enough. The world only rewards achievement.
Now Émilie says those words, and the same pronouncement is coming. A for effort, Casey. C for achievement.
I don’t speak. I won’t speak. I sit as still as I had on my piano bench, chin raised, eyes hooded, inwardly raging and shamed, outwardly channeling my mother.
“You say Petra confirmed this?” Émilie continues.
“She confirmed the pieces she could. I have no idea how much she knows.”
“Nothing,” Émilie murmurs. “She knows nothing. But yes, she could confirm the pieces, and that would be enough. She would put them together and know that your theory is fundamentally correct.”
“Right, which is why she ran—” I stop. “Fundamentally correct?”
Her eyes are distant, as if she’s only half listening, half lost in another place.
“You are correct about the Second Settlement,” she says, “and the young man. What was his name?”
“Hendricks.”
“Ah, yes. An alias. Henry, I believe it was. Henry Richardson? Henri Richard? I can’t recall, but it hardly matters. He’s dead. Car accident a few years after he left Rockton.” She meets my gaze. “Yes.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
A sad curve of her lips. “But you were thinking it. Car crash. How convenient. At the time, I thought nothing of it, other than a spot of grief for a man I only vaguely knew. My husband knew him better. Hendricks’s mission in the settlement, though, was my idea. It seemed so terribly clever. Take a group of people already inclined to peace and natural intoxicants, and nudge them a little down that path. A tea to keep them happy and calm and unlikely to attack Rockton.”
That wistful smile grows rueful, one corner of her mouth twitching. “It seems silly now. A tea? That’s going to fix the inherent problems of dissatisfaction and envy? How naive. But part of me was still the girl who watched Edwin put a gun to my husband’s head. I was obsessed with avoiding that. So I synthesized a brew based on local plants.”
She glances up at me. “That’s how Robert and I first met—I worked a summer term at his family’s company while studying pharmacy and biomedical science. I devised the brew, and we tested it ourselves, naturally.” Her eyes twinkle. “That was the fun part. Then Robert hired Henry to join the Second Settlement and continue perfecting the tea while convincing them to adopt it as part of their lifestyle.”
“Which he did.”
“Very successfully, yes. Now here’s where your theory slips, just a little. You believe someone from the Second Settlement broke off and turned the two teas into narcotics, and that was the birth of the hostiles.”
“I know that the original hostiles did come from the settlement.”
“True, but your version is a little more . . . innocent than the truth, I fear.” She sips her coffee and settles in. “Shortly after Henry returned, my husband’s family began joint research with a European firm. They came across my Second Settlement study, and they were fascinated. They saw wider uses for the tea, beneficial uses, and they sent researchers in, posing as Rockton residents. We would have rather sent Hendricks back but . . .”
“They wanted their own people.”
“And they got that, without argument, because Hendricks was conveniently dead.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, ah. Had he died after they asked to send in a researcher, we’d have seen a connection. But his accident occurred before they suggested it.”
“They came prepared.”
“Evidently, and as you have guessed, this European company plays the black-hat role in my story. Which you will have every reason to doubt. It’s an obvious ploy, isn’t it? Blame some shadowy foreign corporation.”
“Just tell me the story.”
She nods. “So they sent two researchers to Rockton. A man and a woman. They arrived acting as if they’d never met, and then they feigned a whirlwind romance and skipped off into the forest together. The Second Settlement fell for their story and welcomed them in. Their purpose, as far as we knew, was to study the long-term effects of the tea, and I was thrilled by that. While I saw nothing in the ingredients that raised concern, there is always the risk of unforeseen side effects. I welcomed their investigations. It eased my conscience.”
“And then?”
“And there the story ends. Or so it appeared. The researchers stayed for a year. While they found no evidence of long-term effects, they also didn’t find what they’d hoped for, in terms of the tea having useful applications. Other drugs did the job more efficiently and cheaper. My husband’s family soon parted ways with the European firm.”
“Okay . . .”
“Decades pass, and then along comes Rockton’s first detective, who starts doing what she was hired to do. Detecting.” She smiles at me. “Funny how that works, isn’t it? Hire a detective for a town where she might have a case or two a year, which leaves all this extra time, and she finds new things to investigate. Like the wild people living in the forest. The council always dismissed those reports as obvious exaggeration. Clearly, past sheriffs had encountered the wilderness equivalent of the homeless—people suffering from mental illness or other issues. If they didn’t want help, then the only course of action was to stay out of their way. Suggesting they were living in packs? Ludicrous. Residents had seen a few troubled settlers and blown it out of proportion.”
“You thought the same?”
“I did. I’ve been here. I know this wild place preys on the imagination. Every dead tree becomes a bear. Every red-squirrel nest is a wildcat poised overhead. Even the settlers can be both frightening and dangerous.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“As soon as you mentioned Maryanne’s experience, I started to dig. At first, my thoughts paralleled yours. A splinter group from the Second Settlement must have altered the recipe. That made it my fault. I failed at proper scientific procedure. I introduced a new drug, and then I walked away, without monitoring it, without taking responsibility.”
“Then you remembered the European group and decided they were to blame.”
“That isn’t how my mind works, Casey. I don’t go looking for alternate targets. I accept my mistakes, and I strive to fix them. The same way you would, I think.”
I say nothing.
She continues. “My way of fixing it was to support your efforts to resolve the issue. Lobbying for the council to take the problem seriously. Then it seemed as if they were considering a solution. A drastic solution.”
That has Dalton’s head jerking up.
“Attrition,” she says.
I’m still struggling to understand what she means when Dalton says, “They’re shutting us down.”
“What?” I say. “No. They haven’t given any signs of . . .” I trail off and Dalton murmurs what Émilie just said. Attrition.
I continue, “They’ve all but stopped sending us new residents. And they aren’t extending stays past two years. That’s what Jen was talking about. It’s not just her. They aren
’t granting any extensions, and we weren’t thinking much of it because everyone who was denied—including Jen—has other reasons for being turned down.”
Dalton nods. “Our numbers fluxtuate all the time. Since I’ve been here, we’ve been as low as one-fifty and as high as two-twenty. Sometimes it’s budget. Other times . . .” He shrugs. “It’s a natural flow. I wouldn’t have really thought much about it until we dropped low enough to have trouble filling positions.”
“Wait,” I say. “We have a few clashes with hostiles, and we discover that some of them are former Rockton residents—our residents, kidnapped and brainwashed—and this is the council’s solution? Not how can they rescue our people? Not how can they detox the hostiles and see what they want? But shut down the town?”
“Relocate, most likely,” she says.
“It’s an excuse,” Dalton says. “We’ve been inconvenient. Misbehaving. You can sure as hell bet that we aren’t on their hiring list for the new town. None of us will be. This isn’t abandoning the house and moving the people. It’s letting the fire burn it out and starting fresh. They’d tell us Rockton was permanently shutting down, and we’d never know they were starting up elsewhere.”
I look at Émilie.
“I’m not privy to their plans,” she says. “They insist there are no plans. But Eric is, I fear, correct. However, you’re also right, Casey. It’s entirely the wrong reaction. Think of this as a chemical spill.”
I nod. “They’re trying to close shop and move on without cleaning up.”
“Correct. I believed there was more to it, so I began to dig, and that’s when . . .” She trails off. “More on that in a moment. For now, let’s just say I discovered something that drove my mind back to that collaboration with the European firm. I decided to speak to the two researchers they sent. Bribe them, that was my plan. Make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“No, they never returned from the Yukon.”
“They decided to stay?”
There’s no incredulity in my voice. People come for work or vacation, and they decide to stay. Not in the wilderness, but in Whitehorse or one of the smaller towns. As someone who’s been seduced by this place myself, I understand their choice.
A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel Page 28
