Celine

by Peter Heller

  Now, on the dock beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, warmed from a breakfast cooked by the man she loved most in the world, Celine listened to Gabriela and could not countenance the image of the child on a step stool at the stove, age eight, alone, stirring herself a pot full of ramen or minestrone. Taking it to the table, pouring it into a bowl, eating it, alone. Alone alone alone.

  “Okay,” Celine said finally. “Tell me the rest.”

  “There’s not a lot more to tell. That’s how it was. Danette tossed the photo of my mom on the ferry into a drawer where I retrieved it and hung it up over my bed. Right where some people hang a crucifix. Pop traveled a lot and the witch and I settled into a mistrustful détente. She kept me fed and clothed and walked me to school when Dad was home and too hungover. I think she was afraid that I would get bigger in some growth spurt and wreak unimaginable revenge. I don’t know. She treated me like a dangerous reptile, with respect and wariness. She was all hip sway and boobs at the school and she flirted with the young dads outside, and I don’t know for sure but I sensed that she had affairs with a few of them. Anyway, when I saw how they responded to her I wanted to kill her.”

  “Right.”

  “The years passed. Pop traveled and I heard rumors that he did work for the government, clandestine work, but he always laughed it off. I’m still not sure, but there was one thing—” She stopped short, shook herself off.

  Celine raised an eyebrow. “One thing?”

  The girl shivered. “Nothing. Sometimes I think my imagination runs away with me.”

  Celine let it go. She knew when and when not to press.

  Gabriela said, “He and I developed ways of communicating that circumvented her rage. Like when he gave me one of his favorite new photographs in a little frame—of a horse, a Chilean cowboy, a regatta—he always slipped another picture behind it. Hidden in the frame, behind the backing. Of Amana. Of the three of us camping or in a canoe. I don’t know where he had these stashed, but it was his way of saying, ‘We are still a family. Don’t forget.’

  “Or maybe he was trying to tell me that somewhere inside him was my old father and that one day he would be back. I don’t know. Anyway, I hung them up in plain sight, knowing that Amana, that our real family, was behind them and they gave me strength.

  “You know I went on to boarding school at St. George’s. I got kicked out for doing acid, but they let me back in after I wrote a long letter of contrition and described my circumstances. Makes me shudder now, those lies. I was not contrite at all, but I could not go back to Danette. I did more drugs later, but was more careful about getting caught. Jesus. Got into Sarah Lawrence. Being away at school was like five-star, to me, after life at home. I already knew how to live on my own. The hard thing was that I was away from that open window, the one by my bed that opened onto the gardens. Because what if little Jackson decided to come home one night while I was gone? What if he jumped up onto the sill and the window was closed and I was nowhere near to hear his meows. I almost ran away several times in the first year and a half. Of course I realize now that missing Jackson was—that he was a surrogate for something else.

  “One day at college I called home to tell Dad that I had gotten an honors in photography. Danette said that he’d taken an assignment to Yellowstone to document the grizzly bears and that no one was picking up at the motel or at the biologists’ center in the Lamar Valley, she’d tried. And I tried and tried both numbers anyway. And he never came home from that trip.”

  “What?”

  “He never came back.”

  Celine was standing at the rail looking across the East River to two tall ships, square-riggers, docked at the Seaport. The current seemed to be flowing faster now and kicking up waves under the bridge. At some point in Gabriela’s story she had closed her eyes for a moment and lifted her nose to the river and the harbor where she always went to get her bearings. The wind had picked up and it came from the open ocean and it smelled of salt.

  “Where’d he go?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Like, you never saw him again?”

  “No. I never saw him again.”

  Just when she thought Gabriela’s story couldn’t get any stranger or more sad.

  “Did he die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t you talk to the biologists or park rangers or whatever they were?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “He drove into Cooke City one night, just out of the northern boundary of the park. Said he was going for more batteries and bourbon—his words. It was a rainy early-October night, the rain turning to snow. They found his truck at the Soda Butte Creek bridge, just off the park boundary.”

  “You’re not joking. Of course you aren’t. I mean—”

  “No.”

  “Give me a sec.” Celine turned her back to the railing and leaned against it. She labored for breath. It was like a hot flash. She broke into a sweat and her head throbbed. At the same time, the harbor breeze raised goose bumps along her arms. Better. What was it about the story? Had what happened to Lamont struck in Celine some deep primal fear? She didn’t think so. It was that Gabriela had lost her mom, and her cat, and then her father. And in each loss was some further exile. Celine wondered just then what the word “home” must mean to her. Probably a space within the relative safety of her own skin.

  “Is that a sec?” Gabriela said after what may have been several minutes.

  “That was, like, twenty-odd years ago, right?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “And nothing’s surfaced? There was no investigation, no findings?”

  “Of course there was an investigation. It made the news and everything. All the evidence pointed to a bear.”

  “A bear. A grizzly?”

  “Yes. Pop had that Invincibility Gene. He took pictures of wildlife no one should ever take—with no zoom lens. He was crazy. Nobody should take a portrait of a wild hippo with a twenty-eight millimeter lens. He said he could sing to crocodiles. When I ask myself if he really loved me, those dangerous wildlife pictures go in the No column. He was that careless with his life.”

  “Huh.”

  “There had been a big boar grizzly marauding right in town, in Cooke City, that very week. Locals told tourists that if they went out on the town at night—ha! there’s one main street—to go in pairs and bring defense. To a local that means at least a .44 Magnum, what they like to call the Bear Minimum. To a tourist it means pepper spray or more probably a cell phone and a scream.”

  “My son, Hank, had a .44 Magnum once. Told me the same thing about Bear Minimum. Sounds like you’ve been there.”

  “Three times. I didn’t have a last name up there. It was Gabriela Whose Dad Disappeared That Time.”

  “That Time? Was there more than one?”

  “Two or three people disappeared like that.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Over, like, fifteen years. If it was a bear it was one ornery old SOB.”

  “Huh. Were there any signs, signs of—”

  “A struggle? Robbery? A note? Suicide? Nothing. His keys were in the ignition. His wallet was in the glove box. Along with a handmade hunting knife he always carried. He took his down sweater and his Carhartt. He was an outdoorsman. If he’d been planning on being out in the woods any length of time in the snow he would have worn a Gore-Tex shell or something, not a canvas work coat. It’s like he stopped to pee, or check out an animal.”

  “How about tracks? Up there they must have all sorts of Grizzly Adams tracker guys.”

  “His name is Elbie Chicksaw. He’s like half Blackfoot, half mountain lion, half pine bark, half quartzite. He’s like five two and his card says Tracking, Hunting, Spirit-Travel. Not joking. But he’s pixilated. His spirit animal or totem or whatever is a guppy. He had one in an aquarium growing up in Teaneck.”

  “The
tracker grew up in New Jersey?”

  “Yep. His mother was Blackfoot, she was a traveling nurse. Like Danette, but I bet a lot nicer.”

  “So there must have been tracks.”

  Gabriela nodded. “So Pop was supposed to meet the bear biologists at daybreak on the road at a spot just below Druid Peak. When he didn’t show up they figured he was hungover. He had a bit of a reputation. When he hadn’t appeared by midday they got a little concerned. One, an Ed Pence, ran into Cooke City in the afternoon on a mail run and saw Pop’s truck just off the road and radioed the cops. Cop. Who called the State Police. Who waited a day and initiated a search. The weather did not cooperate. It had been raining, and the night he went missing it got cold and snowed. By the time Chicksaw got there he was looking mostly for signs like scrapes and broken twigs. He did find grizzly tracks, drag marks, blood, but no Pop.

  “It’s a story, huh?” Gabriela said.

  “I don’t know. It seems stranger after all the rest of it.”

  “You mean the way I was brought up?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know. It’s not like life gets less strange.” Gabriela reached back with both hands and pulled her ponytail free of the band. Her thick hair fell to her shoulders and she shook it loose. It reminded Celine of something but she couldn’t say what. “It’s why I called you.”

  “It is?”

  “Nothing about Pop’s disappearance has ever sat right with me. There was a sheriff up there, a man named Travers, who was very kind to me, and I’ll never forget how he looked when he surveyed the scene. It didn’t seem to sit right with him either. When I saw that story in the alumni magazine about the Prada PI, I thought about calling you. The story mentioned your friendship with Dean Renato, whom I knew, and I called him instead. When he said you were maybe the best anywhere at solving cold cases—I came to Brooklyn.” Gabriela stopped. She was looking north, under the bridge, away. “I have a son,” she said. “He’s eight. I’d love for him to meet his grandpa.” She didn’t turn around and Celine thought that Time Does Not Heal All Wounds, not by a long shot.

  FOUR

  It has almost never happened that a grizzly bear kills more than one man. Or woman. If they do, it’s usually in the same incident, a mama bear’s rampage protecting cubs or, as in the terribly sad incident featured in Herzog’s movie Grizzly Man, a furious attack on a couple in their camp by what was probably a gaunt and desperate boar arriving at the end of the salmon run and wild with hunger. The history books are not replete with serial grizzly man-eaters. Pete checked it out after listening closely to Celine tell Gabriela’s story. There was the famous vengeful Old Two Toes, who killed and partially ate at least three men in Montana, and was probably responsible for two more deaths, but that was in 1912. In Alaska, in 1995, a pissed-off boar grizzly attacked and killed one hiker, then his friend, but the incident was a response to being surprised on a moose carcass—a crime of passion so to speak. The incidents of premeditated, or habitual, serial assaults were very rare. No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

  Once, in northwest Montana, up near Glacier National Park, Pete had flown into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for a three-week backpacking trip with a legendary backcountry pilot named Dave Hoerner. Hoerner had told him how a very large boar griz had been disrupting camps on the Middle Fork of the Flathead, and had been shot with a tranquilizer gun and captured. It was Hoerner’s job to move the bear from a mountain airstrip called Schafer Meadows. Hoerner flew a Cessna 185 single-engine workhorse, and the tranquilized bear was so big that when the Forest Service crew loaded it into the back of the plane it stretched through most of the airframe and the huge head lay against Dave’s right hip where he sat in the pilot seat. In his lap was his .44 Magnum. Hoerner taxied back to the downwind end of the strip and was ticking off his run-up checklist when he looked down and saw the monster griz’s mouth twitch. Holy crap. He pulled back to idle, set the brakes, ran around, threw up the cargo door, and hauled on the bear’s legs and paws with all his might. The bear hit the grass with a thud and got to his feet and wobbled. By then Hoerner was back in his seat and throttling forward and the last he saw of the animal it was glaring back at him and striding toward the woods. Damn. Imagine if all that had happened five minutes later at two thousand feet above the ground. Mayhem.

  Pete got a kick out of that story. But the fact remained that grizzly bears, like most predators, were smart enough to know that tangling with humans in any way was a bad idea. It was very hard to believe that one bear might have killed and vanished three people over a fifteen-year span. But not impossible. One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary, really.

  He and Celine talked about Gabriela’s case over several nights, and Celine wondered if she had the strength. The last year had taken its toll. Pete was more concerned than she was. When she was upset she struggled to breathe, and he watched her with concealed alarm. One night over Wicked-Good Green Chili—her name, not his—he reached across the café table and put his hand on her arm. “Maybe this is one to let lie,” he said. “We’d have to travel, probably for more than a few days.” Her lips compressed. She was annoyed. She picked a piece of broccoli out of her stew. What was broccoli doing in chili? He was always trying to sneak something in.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “The reasonable thing is not usually the right thing. Why is that?”

  Pete had not fallen in love with Celine Watkins for her timidity. He dutifully picked up the discarded broccoli and ate it.

  There was something in the case she could not relinquish, and the more she mulled it over, and the more she thought about Gabriela’s shadowed life, the more energized she became.

  On September 19th, Celine called Gabriela in San Francisco and told her that she would try to find her father. Or confirm that he had died. Gabriela would have to prepare herself. The young woman answered as Celine knew she would: with relief. She had money, she said, and insisted on paying expenses and the going rate of New York PIs. Celine could tell this was nonnegotiable and she did not object.

  Next Celine called Hank in Denver and asked if they could borrow his truck and camper for maybe three weeks; could they fly out to Denver in a few days to pick it up?

  “And Hank,” she said, “the little Glock 26 I gave you for your birthday that time? Can I borrow it, too? I’d rather not fly with mine. I have to declare it and everyone can see, and I’m always terrified it will get stolen by some baggage handler. Like that time Bruce Willis made such a fuss.”

  She made Hank laugh. That time was a family legend. She had been struggling with her bags through LaGuardia when a hand had joined hers on the handle of the carry-on and a voice had said, “Allow me, ma’am,” and it was the movie star himself. He eased away the roller bag, too.

  That was good enough for a good story. But then they had arrived at the check-in counter together and she had pulled the little lockbox out of her checked bag and declared the Glock, and Mr. Willis had cracked his signature smile—the warm one, not the one before he blows you away—and he’d become enamored with Hank’s mom. It was a few weeks before the New York City Police Department was to switch over from revolvers to the Glock, and so several curious airport cops came over, too, and autographs were signed, and when Willis heard Mom was a PI he gave her his personal card with an assistant’s phone number. He said, “I wish you were my mom,” which always made Hank a little jealous. Willis said that if she and her husband were ever in L.A. to please look him up. Maybe he thought her story would make a good movie.

  Anyway, when she arrived in Maine to solve the case of Penobscot Paul, which became another favorite story, her treasured Glock was missing from her luggage. She always attributed it to the fuss and bother famous people leave in their wake. She c
onsidered fame to be a terrible and irresistible trap. Once she told Hank, “Hank, if you are going to do something—say, writing—do your very best, and if it happens that you also become the best in the world, that’s wonderful, but try not to let too many people know about it.”

  But what made Hank happier when she called him was to hear the new tone in her voice. There was vigor there, a contained excitement he hadn’t heard in a while. And he knew that it was because she had committed again to do the work she was born for. He told her she could borrow both the truck and the gun.

  Celine hadn’t ever really needed to carry a gun. The type of investigative work she did rarely involved dangerous perps. She had tried that and didn’t like it. After working for a detective agency that mostly handled domestic matters—yuck—and learning her trade and getting her PI license, she was almost immediately contacted by the FBI. The bureau, it seemed, did not have many agents who were comfortable moving in the milieu of the investment banker–Fishers Island crowd. Well, Celine had spent every summer there for most of her life. The bureau needed an associate who could call someone in the Connecticut Blue Book and ask delicate questions, and who would be trusted—the two families might even know each other, perhaps they were even second or third cousins. They were going after a man who had perpetrated a very large fraud on the Bank of New York, and they thought he might be in the environs of his family in Old Greenwich or Darien.

  No one realizes the power or extent of the aristocracy in America; it exists and holds enormous sway despite the inroads of all the techy, sneaker-wearing New Money. Celine was born into it. Fourteen of the governors of the Plymouth Colony were her ancestors, and their families had continued to consolidate and expand their power for more than three centuries. They summered on Nantucket and Fishers and Islesboro, Maine; their sons and daughters attended Ivy League colleges and had careers with Big Banks and Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve; and the most daring and radical of their children became artists and filmmakers or worked for the Nature Conservancy, and these were everyone’s favorite cousins and nieces and were endowed with a certain mystical reverence—they were not so much the black sheep of the family as special children who were indulged like the shamans of other cultures who only walk backward. Celine was one of these. Perhaps even farther afield than most. She was not exactly an outcast, but she had deliberately stepped out of the fold, and so she could see it with an outsider’s perspicuity.