When Wanda regained consciousness, she was none too happy. And now she wasn’t pleased to be handcuffed to a pole, a handle, something like a reinforced towel rack, on the side of Gril’s desk. There were no holding cells in Benedict. Gril sat in his chair and I sat in one like the one Wanda was occupying, though I was on the other side of Gril’s desk, out of her potential reach, and I wasn’t being held against my will.
“You’re under arrest for lots of things,” Gril said when she was completely coherent. “Want an attorney?”
She glared at him. “No, I’ll tell you everything.”
“Well, that’s refreshing,” Gril said. “Go ahead. Start at the beginning. I’ll jump in if I have questions.”
Wanda nodded as she sent me a look that could kill. I sent her one back just as full of murderous intentions. I could have killed her; I knew it. She knew it. We could have killed each other. I was done with people like her, and I was probably more like my mother than I wanted to admit.
“When I first came here, came to this empty world, I just knew I couldn’t stay. It was all such a shock. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to civilization.”
Gril nodded once. “You were here for how long before you came to these conclusions?”
“Two weeks.”
“That’s not very long.”
“It was long enough.” She sighed. “I told Randy I was leaving, that I wanted a divorce. He didn’t even fight it. He loved it here from the beginning, loved being far away from all those people. We still had a home in New York. I was just going to go back. We didn’t have any kids, so no harm, no foul, really. He’s quite a bit older … anyway, it just didn’t need to be the way it was and there was a fix for it that really wouldn’t hurt anyone, at least not too badly. You don’t even remember me, do you?”
Gril looked at her a moment. “I don’t, but there’s a reason for that.”
“Exactly. You weren’t here for the two to three weeks I was part of the community. Your wife had died and you were out of town. I wanted to talk to someone in an authority position, but back then, you didn’t have any help—no park rangers filling in as deputies. Viola, the woman who runs the halfway house, was the closest thing, and I knew pretty quickly I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t like her at all.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here. What did you want to talk to me about?”
Not long ago, Gril had told me his wife died several years ago, but it sounded like it was less recently than that. I could still sense his pain, but now wasn’t the time to express my sympathy.
“I … something felt off about Paul and Audrey,” Wanda said. “I wanted you to keep an eye on them, on their girls. I was leaving and I knew Randy would be working all the time.”
“Did you tell Randy that you thought something was off?” Gril asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Until the morning after I told him I was leaving, I didn’t have any proof, and then … it was all too late.”
“Go on.”
“That morning, Randy went to the mercantile, and I went over to tell Paul, Audrey, and the girls, Jenny and Josie, goodbye. I was going to take the ferry back to Juneau and then figure out how to get home from there. My plans were pretty fluid. I just knew I had to leave. I never booked a flight or anything.”
“We couldn’t find your name on any passenger manifests.”
“Exactly. Anyway, I knocked on Paul and Audrey’s door, but they didn’t answer. I heard noises from inside, and they sounded … wrong, like people were rushing around, maybe talking quickly. I simply opened the door and went in. That wasn’t unheard of; it didn’t take but a day or two to realize we wouldn’t need locks on our doors out there. We were the only two houses in sight. In those two weeks, we’d just walked into each other’s houses a number of times. This time, though, I didn’t announce myself; something told me to be quiet. I walked toward the back of the house, where I thought the noises were coming from.” Wanda stopped talking and her head bowed. She looked at her hands on her lap.
“Wanda, what happened?” Gril asked a moment later.
She looked up at him. “Jenny was dead. Audrey had killed her. Audrey and Paul were trying to figure out what to do with her body.”
“Hang on. How had Audrey killed her daughter?”
“Threw her from the loft.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Without looking at me, Gril lifted a hand to tell me to hush. I hushed.
“How did you know that’s what happened?” he asked Wanda.
“I … I ran to her little body, but it was too late. I freaked and started yelling, ‘What did you do? What did you do?’ Paul told me what happened as Audrey sat on their couch, in a daze, and just listened. And, then I couldn’t stop myself…”
“What do you mean?” Gril asked.
“I pounced on her, jumped on her and strangled her to death.”
“Why didn’t Paul stop you?”
“He helped me,” Wanda said as tears filled her eyes. “Right there, in front of Jenny’s body and as their other daughter, Josie, watched—she was so upset—Paul helped me kill his wife.”
My stomach was sick, but I swallowed hard. I needed to know the rest of the story.
Wanda leaned toward Gril. “Listen, it was all so unreal, and happening so fast. Even now, I look back and it doesn’t seem like time moved appropriately—it’s like time kept folding over itself and things just kept getting worse, and I don’t understand much of any of it…”
“All right. I get that,” Gril said. “But we still need to know what happened.”
Wanda nodded. “He wanted to get rid of Audrey’s body, so we drove it out to an ice cave they’d visited the week before and dumped her in there. He was just going to say she wandered off. Someday, someone might find the body, but people would think she went into the ice cave on her own and just died. He thought he could make that work.”
“Was she dressed?”
“Yes. I undressed her later, just recently. I…”
Gril interjected, “Why not Jenny’s body, too?”
“He thought that would be too suspicious—both of them dying in the ice cave didn’t seem as possible as just Audrey. And he thought Jenny should get a decent burial. He wanted to give her that. It was July, the ground would have allowed it, but we never got to that point.”
“Where was Randy?” Gril asked when she stopped talking and fell into thought again.
“Randy was at the mercantile. We dumped Audrey’s body and were back at their house by noon.” She shrugged. “No one saw us do any of it. No one.”
“But you didn’t bury Jenny’s body?”
“No, Paul told me that he would not tell the authorities what I’d done to Audrey if I helped him dig a grave for Jenny and then just left, just got out of there. He didn’t even know that I was coming over to tell them goodbye. He never even knew.”
“But he helped you; you killed Audrey together,” Gril said. “He would have been in trouble, too. He couldn’t have gone to the authorities without being in trouble, too.”
“I know, but you have to understand the way things were happening—time was moving funny, we didn’t see anyone else. I was caught up in the horror of it all, but by the time we got back to his house, I just wanted one thing: Josie.”
“Okay?”
“I didn’t want that little girl to be raised by him. I told him to leave, that if he just left, I’d take care of Josie. He didn’t want the little girl anyway.”
“So he did that, just left?”
“Yes, he did, but it wasn’t easy to convince him. He fought me some, but I didn’t give him much choice.”
“But he did leave?”
“I told him to go back to Texas, back to family that Randy didn’t know well. I told him to tell Randy that he and Audrey just couldn’t take their loss so they had to leave.”
“The loss of the girls? So he set fire to his house to make it look like the girls died in the fire?
” Gril said.
“No. Not exactly. I mean, yes, the loss of the girls was their loss.” Wanda frowned at Gril. “But I set the fire. He couldn’t figure out how to make his own disappearance work, make it feasible, so I set the fire, told him to leave, that I’d take Josie and take care of her. He shoved me into a burning curtain.” She put her hand up to her cheek. “I got hurt, but then I got away with Josie. Back then, the last I saw of Paul was him trying to get out of the fire. I took that girl and ran.”
“The authorities would have talked to him, would have wanted to talk to Audrey,” I interjected.
“You mean after the fire?” Wanda asked me.
“Yes.”
“The fire died out on its own. No authority even looked through the house until two days later. Jenny’s body wasn’t found until then. Paul was gone. I assume he finally talked to the authorities on the phone and told them Audrey was with him—that’s what I told him to do. You don’t understand; this world is ignored out here.”
“No, it isn’t,” Gril said.
“It was then. You were gone. You had no help back then.”
“But Randy?” I said. “He would have wondered about everything—where had his cousin and his family gone? Why was there only one girl’s body found?”
“As far as I know, Paul handled everything over the phone with Randy, too. Ask Randy. All I know is what I told Paul to do. I left and never looked back; well, not until recently.”
Gril and I were silent for a long moment. Did what she said make sense? Almost anywhere else in the rest of the world, no, it didn’t. But here, when Gril was gone and he had no help, maybe it could have happened the way she was saying. It wasn’t an impossibility.
Gril sat back in his chair. “You took Josie to Brayn.”
“I did.”
“With another little girl?” I said.
“Yes. I was walking through the woods with Josie, trying to figure out what I was truly going to do.” She laughed one phlegmy laugh and then wiped her arm under her nose. “I’d come to the conclusion that I was just going to go back to Randy and have him help, but then … I came upon another child. She was there, amid the gore of what must have been her mother’s brutal death. She was crying but with no sound. It was so strange. I didn’t even give it a second thought, but I picked her up too and just kept walking. I didn’t even know where I was going. I was being somehow guided, and I just went with it. I came to Brayn and stopped in the post office. I turned over the children and hoped they’d be okay.” She blinked at Gril. “And they were! They were well taken care of!”
“You’ve been hiding in the woods since then?” Gril said.
She laughed again. “Yes. I think it must have been the trauma of everything that happened, but I stayed. I survived one night, and then another. I could sneak into Randy’s house, my house, during the day. I eventually befriended a man named Lane who taught me how to trap.”
“Where did you sleep during the brutal winters?” I asked.
“I made a camp. I’ll show it to you. There are other caves out there, not all of them made of ice. I was going to watch the girls from across the river, but shortly after I dropped them off a mudslide cut off easy access to them.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with the mudslide?” I asked.
“No, I wouldn’t even know how to create a mudslide. It just happened.”
“But you still stayed?” Gril said.
“One night turned into another, one year into another. I thought I would die every night, but I didn’t. I woke up and just kept living, kept finding a way to eat, ways to keep warm. I just kept surviving,” she repeated as if she herself was surprised.
“How did you get Paul to come back up here so you could kill him, too?” Gril asked.
“Eventually, I figured out how to break into the library at night. I used one of the computers and emailed him. He still had the same email.”
“Okay, why did you want him to come back? What did you say to get him to return?”
“I told him I would turn him in to the police for murdering Audrey and abandoning his daughter if he didn’t help me move Audrey’s body.”
“To the shed? Lane was sure it hadn’t been there even a week ago.”
Wanda shook her head slowly. “No, I didn’t really want Paul’s help. I just wanted to get him here. I told him to meet me by the tourist boat dock, at night. Again, no one was around. Trees even cut off the view from the lodge. I got him there and I killed him.”
“Why?”
“Because he shouldn’t have been allowed to live. If my time here has taught me anything, it’s that the bad guys shouldn’t get the breaks. I’d somehow given him a break. I wasn’t willing to let it continue.”
“That is wicked,” I said.
Wanda looked at me. “I see the way you look at me. You could kill me. When I hurt that man Orin, you wanted to.”
I didn’t say anything, but I’d already acknowledged that fact to myself.
“So you moved Audrey’s body by yourself?” Gril asked.
“I did. After the latest mudslide, I could get through to Lane’s more easily. I made a sled and brought her over. I took her clothes, burned them, just in case there was any evidence. I kept hoping her body would be found, but it wasn’t.”
“Why did you want her found so badly?” I asked. “She might have stayed in that cave forever.”
Wanda shrugged. “No. The mudslide exposed the way to the cave. People would have found her. Maybe even the girls. I didn’t want it to happen that way.”
“So you put her body in Lane’s shed?” Gril asked.
Wanda shrugged again. “After I got to know Lane, I realized that it was his daughter that I took. You have to understand that when I realized what I’d done to him I was devastated. I wanted to put things right, but there simply was no way to do it. I didn’t intend to leave her body there—I just knew he wouldn’t be visiting the shed for a while. I was going to move her over to Randy’s house at some point, but then I lost track of the girls when they were out checking traps with me … and things spiraled from there. I never got her moved.”
“You burned the shed?” I asked.
“I did. I had the girl with me. It felt like the right thing to do, burn away the past.”
I wanted to point out how that wasn’t normal but I didn’t. I looked at Gril. “Didn’t Randy identify the body?”
“He said he didn’t recognize her,” Gril said. He looked at Wanda. “But wouldn’t he have recognized her? You two had matching tattoos, right?”
Wanda twisted her wrist inside the handcuff, exposing her tattoo. “We did, but Randy didn’t know. One of my first days here, we escaped over to Juneau, had too much to drink, and got these done. Randy never even saw mine—that should tell you even more about our marriage.”
“But he would have recognized Audrey?” Gril said.
“You’ll have to ask him,” she said. “Chief, I just wanted to put things right. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I thought Randy should know about Audrey. Once that became clear to everyone, I was sure the authorities would figure out that Paul was the man stabbed on the shore. But then Audrey’s body was found in the shed, which really threw a wrench into everything. I decided I needed to do something else to make things right, so I decided I would just get Lane’s daughter back to him. That’s what I was going to do when you found me. This was all just me making things right.”
“Why now?” Gril asked.
I thought she might say she was sick or she wanted to leave Benedict and needed to do these things before she left.
“It was time,” she said. “I know you won’t believe this, but I was traumatized. I’ve only recently felt like I was coming out of it, feeling better. It took me the time it took.”
I hoped it wouldn’t take me as long to get over Travis Walker.
“Six years?” Gril said.
“You keep saying that. I’m not sure how long six years is suppo
sed to feel, but it doesn’t feel that long to me. And, when this mudslide happened and I could see the girls, watch them from across the river, I was shocked by how much they’d grown. Six years is nothing, a blink or two, but those girls had grown so much. It’s simply how I got better.”
“I’m not sure I would call this better.”
“I can’t explain it any other way.”
“The paper on the loft window?” I asked.
“That was Annie’s. I thought Randy might actually notice it; maybe it would mess with his head a little. Did he see it?”
Gril and I looked at each other but didn’t answer.
“So, not just make things right, but mess with your ex-husband, too?” Gril said.
“We’re still married.”
“Randy might have helped you find a way to save the girls.” I said.
“I can see that now, but back then I just couldn’t, and you have to remember that my suspicions weren’t confirmed until after Jenny had been killed. It was all too late, too ugly.”
“You put an animal trap inside the ice cave. Where did you get it?” Gril asked.
“It was right outside the cave when I retrieved Audrey’s body. I know some trappers etch their names on their traps. It was just another way to try to divert the police—I knew it wasn’t Lane’s, and I didn’t want anyone to think he’d done anything wrong.”
“It belongs to the girls’ father, the man who has raised them,” I said.
Wanda’s eyebrows rose. “Well, that’s ironic.”
“You caused him some trouble,” Gril said.
“Didn’t mean to,” Wanda said unapologetically.
“The baby clothes were for a boy,” I interjected.
“They were just baby clothes, no thought given to gender. Lane took me to the shed a couple of years ago and showed me. He was still torn up. It was very sad.”
Gril officially booked Wanda and then made another call to the Harvingtons. Gril was going to need the plane again. It was finally time for Wanda to leave Benedict. For good.
Two Weeks Later
It was so cold. I probably shouldn’t have been running outside in those temperatures, but it wasn’t snowing. I didn’t want to miss the window of somewhat milder weather. I’d tried the exercise equipment, but that had been torturous, each treadmill minute feeling like twenty real ones.
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