“I was thinking the same.” I said, though I thought of his parents and how afraid they must be. Because it was Glacier, after all, where it was not uncommon for hikers and climbers to go astray or to slip off a boulder into a raging stream. Anyone could let their imagination roam to the terror of sharp-clawed predators, crashing streams, and jagged cliffs.
But I’m an optimist, probably borne from my less-than-Leave-It-to-Beaver family life. I grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother, an alcoholic father, and an abusive older brother. As basic as it sounds, I survived by coming to rely on the predictability of things: the recurrence of the seasons, the sturdiness of the mountains I loved to wander, the start of a new, blue-skied day, and the eventuality that I would pull off good grades and pass exams each time I’d thought I’d underperformed.
“But if we haven’t located him by the time the excavation is complete, we’ll probably need your help.”
“Of course,” I said. “And I’ll keep you posted on how the dig goes.” I signed off, hoping they’d find the boy soon.
3
* * *
Gretchen
ON THE WAY to work, I turned the music on the radio up and tried not to let my mind wander too much.
Up until that one horrific night when I changed my family’s life forever, and became Marerittjente—Nightmare Girl—my sleepwalking was a source of amusement: something comical rather than a condition to be treated. It meant that I did things that were annoying or funny—like the time I almost peed in the chair in the sitting room (fortunately, my mother was still watching TV and stopped me beforehand) or the time I exited our front door and trudged down the street in the middle of winter. Thankfully, a neighbor was coming home from his railroad shift and saw me in my pink pajamas trudging through the snow in bare feet in what is called a state of parasomnia—the condition of being both asleep and awake at the same time.
The very first time I walked in my sleep, my parents thought there had been an intruder in the house. I was nine. I woke up on a Saturday morning and heard them murmuring in low voices. My mom stood in the middle of the room with her short, silky bobbed hair, one arm folded across her waist. My mom, tall and elegant, generally moved in a calm, relaxed manner, and rarely startled, but she looked a little more wide-eyed than usual. My dad was checking the windows and the doors to see if they were all securely locked.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
My mom turned and tucked her blond hair behind an ear—a graceful gesture that I’d seen a thousand times. “You’re up early. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“What’s Dad doing?”
“Nothing, really, just wondering who rearranged the furniture and the books.” I looked around the room to see two of our dining room chairs pushed over to face the front windows. Books that were normally in the bookcase were neatly stacked on the coffee table. Another pile of encyclopedias was stacked by the door and two more by the fireplace.
“Were you in here last night playing?”
I shook my head. “Nie, Mamma.” No, Mom. I didn’t remember anything, but a thick feeling of guilt washed over me, and somehow I sensed that I had, indeed, played some role in rearranging things. When my brother got up, he suggested that maybe we had a ghost in the house, and my parents laughed, saying they were certain there was a much more reasonable explanation and that we should go into the kitchen and have some brod and gjetost. Bread and goat cheese. We sat eating, oblivious to what would happen six years later.
My phone rang, jerking me out of my reverie. I turned down the radio and hit the speakerphone hooked up to my cell.
“Gretchen here.”
It was Monty Harris with Park Police in Glacier National Park. Monty and I had become friends during a case in Glacier involving two dead bodies discovered in a ravine. Monty was careful and seemed safe—the type to drive the speed limit with two hands on the wheel, to change his oil when the sticker on the windshield said to, and to shave every day, even though he sometimes forgot if he got really busy and absorbed in a project. And most important, he was the type who didn’t care about what others thought of him; he just wanted to get the job done right, for his own sense of order and justice. That part I could relate to.
He was calm and methodical, and he moved that way, his muscles corded and sinewy like an Olympic runner. He had gone through a divorce over a year before and other than the possibility of him still being on the rebound, I knew he was free as a bird. But none of that made any difference at all. We would just be friends. Even though I was only thirty, I was certain there would be no more men in my life. I had told myself a long time ago that I’d never let myself get close to anyone, ever.
I’d already been married once, after graduating from the University of Washington. It’s how I ended up in the Flathead Valley, where Jim’s family lived. I met Jim—tall, thin, and an odd mixture of charisma and bookishness—before I transferred from my school’s business program to the forensic science department. But it wasn’t the romantic story most people imagine: boy meets girl in college, boy walks girl to class, girl walks down the aisle. It was a simple transaction, a practical decision between friends. We both knew that when school was over, I had only one year to work before my visa expired, but that if we married, I could stay forever. We were just friends, and he did me a favor.
So yes, I’m the kind of girl who will get married to someone she doesn’t love just to stay in America. In all fairness, though, Jim knew I wasn’t interested in a close relationship or married life, and he didn’t care. He enjoyed showing me around Seattle, around Washington and the rest of the Pacific Northwest and Canada. We took road trips to Vancouver, Victoria, Olympia, Portland, the Columbia Gorge. . . . We even drove all the way down U.S. 101 to Los Angeles and went to Disneyland. He insisted I would never understand America without going on the Tower of Terror and told me a story about how his uncle was one of the four engineers who’d designed the ride. And most important, he never questioned the fact that I wanted two hotel rooms, and not just because I wasn’t romantically interested in him. He’s still the only one in America, besides a handful of doctors, who knows about my condition.
When he decided he wanted to go to Montana for a year or so before finding a real job, I went with him too. But I didn’t follow him because of our marriage. A position with the county’s forensics department had opened up around the same time and I threw my résumé into the mix. I interviewed and was surprised when the detective division leader called me and told me I got the position. After we moved, we officially divorced. A year later, Jim moved to San Francisco to manage a financial firm—his real job. We still emailed each other occasionally.
“We’ve found some buried bones,” Monty told me over the phone. “In fact, a skeleton near Essex, near the fire.”
“A grave?”
“Yeah, I think we’re going to need you or an FA down here to excavate and remove them quickly.”
“We don’t usually handle excavations, Monty,” I said. “An FA named Lucy Hayes, who teaches at MSU in Bozeman, does contract work for the Crime Lab in Missoula as needed and has worked several cases for the Division of Criminal Investigations.”
“She’s in Bozeman?” Bozeman was in the southwest, a five-hour drive to the park.
“Yeah.”
“Not enough time—the fire’s too close. We need someone nearby, someone who can excavate the skeleton quickly.”
“That close?”
“Afraid so. Can we just do it ourselves and send the remains to her?”
“Hmm.” I paused to consider our options. A proper removal was time-consuming—chiseling the remains out slowly, getting soil samples, running metal detectors over the surface area. “Monty,” I said, “you know that an excavation should be performed by someone who really knows their stuff.”
“Ideally, yes, but I’m afraid we don’t have the time t
o wait for an expert. The crew is trying to stay ahead of Ole and Sheep and keep them both from charging down the canyon and into Essex. Right now the wind is from the southeast, but the head of ops says the wind might change by evening and then they’ll need to pull out.”
I paused again before answering.
“Gretchen?” Monty asked.
“I’m here. I’m thinking.”
“Okay,” I finally said. “Given the circumstances, let me call my division leader and see if I can get the go-ahead.” Commander David Ridgeway was the detective division leader, my supervisor, and I was the lead crime scene investigator for the Flathead County Crime Scene Team. “I’ll try and reach Lucy as well . . . get some tips. I’ll be there as soon as I can if he okays it, but it’s going to take me at least an hour and a half to get there. I’ll let you know after I speak to Ridgeway.”
“I need you to use your siren to speed things up. Like I said, we’re probably good until the evening,” Monty said. “But we need to hurry.”
“Will do.”
“And Gretchen,” he added. “Thank you.”
“Thank me later after you see what kind of a job I do.”
• • •
Getting into Essex didn’t take as long as I thought because all the cars were heading in the opposite direction to evacuate. I recruited Ray Jones, one of the three members available from my forensics team, and we loaded up the County CS van with equipment and headed toward the Great Divide, which normally jutted majestically upward into a blue summer sky that stretched forever, but was now obscured by curtain upon curtain of smoke. The other two from our team were working a robbery involving medications stolen from a dental office. Plus, Ray hadn’t worked the firefighter scene the day before, so he was rested up.
When we passed West Glacier, I saw a temporary camp set up for evacuees, and something about their displacement reminded me of the cold morning I was sent to an inpatient psychiatric hospital called Sandviken Sykehus in the city of Bergen on the southwestern coast, a port city surrounded by mountains and high, sharp fjords.
I remembered standing in my bedroom, the base of my window covered in a web of ice crystals, unsure what clothes to pack and whether to take my small worn panda or leave him behind. After all, I was fifteen, technically too old for stuffed animals. But Panda, with his worn, matted cream-colored fur and bent, ripped ear, was the one object I could cling to that would be a link to home. One of his eyes had gone missing somewhere along the line, but you could hardly tell because of the teardrop black patches surrounding them. But I knew it was gone, and in that moment I felt that lost eye must have been some kind of an omen. Panda was my comfort, with his large round belly, his one-eyed gaze that communicated unconditional acceptance and was so unlike my mother’s anguished, accusing stares.
I still don’t deal very well with the details of my actions that night long ago, but I make the best of it. I take my medication, am as careful as I can be, and basically live for my job. I try to do it well.
“Look at all these people,” Ray said, jarring me out of my daydream. “I hope they don’t lose their homes.”
“Me too.”
We drove in silence while Ray sipped from a can of Red Bull and tried to catch fire updates on his phone until we ran out of signal and eventually reached Essex. We drove along the southern border of the park, passing green pools of river water, barely visible rocky escarpments veiled by smoke, and stone-built tunnels where the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railcars normally snaked in and out, but were no longer allowed under the conditions. Monty had instructed me to go past the firemen’s base camp and across the bridge and park at the ranger station to save time hiking to the area. We pulled into a turnout where other park and fire work vehicles sat. I looked toward the northeast and Ray followed my gaze. Through the dark, dense smoke, you could see the orange inferno looming over the ridge.
“Damn,” Ray said, running a hand through his thick sandy hair, which he wore bushy around his ears, seventies-style.
I stared momentarily at the angry flames, my heartbeat speeding up, before looking back to the road curving through the canyon and the parking area ahead.
“Double damn,” Ray whispered again.
Monty and another woman I assumed was Tara Reed were walking toward us. Monty held a bottle of water as he strode over, medium height and lean as ever, his dark hair cut short. He gave me a sincere, closed-lip smile that, when combined with the play in his eyes, communicated an odd mixture of matter-of-factness, slight mischief, and a tinge of bittersweetness, all at the same time.
I saw him last at an annual fund-raiser, a banquet thrown to raise money for the local search and rescue helicopter operation. I was wearing your standard little black cocktail dress and Monty had taken me in from head to toe almost as if I weren’t wearing anything at all. Not that I had minded. It was a long time since I’d gotten that look from a guy, at least from one I bothered noticing.
I knew he felt a certain loyalty toward me because I had assisted him during the investigation in which the body of the biologist he knew was found. I could tell it had brought stuff up for him, so I had met with him a number of times to discuss the case. By the end, something emotional had passed between us. We’d never discussed it afterward, mainly because I made myself scarce after realizing we were getting a little too close. He didn’t push it because he had a separation, and later a divorce, to deal with.
Monty stopped a few feet away from me as I opened the back of the van to unload our gear. “Hey,” he said. His face looked all business at first, but then he gave me a crooked smile. I couldn’t tell what it meant exactly. He had a way of not being intrusive when he looked at me, as if he was simply wondering what it was like to be walking around as a blond, blue-eyed Norwegian-American crime scene investigator with a slight accent.
“Hey,” I said back.
“Thanks for coming so quickly. This is Officer Tara Reed. She was on the scene first, after the fire crew found the bones.”
“Nice to meet you.” I held out my hand and we shook. Then I introduced Ray to them both. Ray crunched up his can of Red Bull, threw it in the trash in the back of the van, then smiled his broad grin, and shook with them both. Ray was always affable and easy to work with.
I have to admit I was a little nervous about getting the excavation right. It had been a long time since I’d been on a case involving skeletal remains. The first one was during an internship for the Seattle Police Department’s CSI Unit. Some teens had broken into an old shipyard for fun on Halloween night and discovered a rotting corpse in an abandoned schooner. Apparently some aged drifter had decided to make it his home. I remember the sounds of rats scurrying around and the reek of mold, rotting wood, and dust as we collected evidence and labeled bones, but at least no excavation had been necessary.
I was well aware that this was a different matter and that the deteriorating effects of soil would need to be reckoned with. And I was also well aware now, as I was then, that the remains had once been a human body—that there could be a family out there still clinging to the hope that they would someday discover what happened to a missing family member. The worst, always—no exceptions—was the not knowing. It was the one thin prospect I could console myself with over the years—that in my case fifteen years before, there’d never been the agony of the unknown, just the cold, hard definitive blow of disaster. I refocused on Monty’s dark, serious eyes, then Tara’s green ones, and told myself not to be nervous. I was working with competent people.
“Thanks for coming,” Tara repeated to us.
“You’re welcome. Sounds like an interesting case. I’ve got everything we need here,” I said, pointing to the back of the van.
• • •
We hiked toward the intense heat to the shallow grave, the hot, chalky air enveloping us. Monty had handed me a hard hat, which I obediently put on. The temperature s
truck me and took my breath away. I had been near it the day before to work the scene where the young firefighter was found, but not this close. My team had been a good two miles from the blaze.
Tara had been coughing on and off as we walked, and suddenly she started hacking so hard that she stopped, hunched over at the waist, and covered her mouth. Monty, Ray, and I paused and looked at her. Ray, who was chewing on a toothpick, shoved it into his pocket, his hazel eyes intense. As a CSI, he knew better than to drop anything on the ground, ever.
“You sound bad,” Monty said to her. “We’ve got this.” He motioned to the three of us. “You should go back.”
“No.” She snuck out one last cough, cleared her throat, and managed to contain another. “We’re running out of time. You’re going to need all the help you can get.”
She was right, of course, and I could see Monty weighing it out in his mind. She was carrying some of the equipment—just a bag and a folding shovel that we could easily take ourselves—but it wasn’t supply-hauling help that we needed. It was setting up grids, getting soil samples, and the meticulous scraping and sweeping of dirt that would be time-consuming.
Normally, the discovery of a hidden grave would bring Sheriff Walsh on-site, but he—along with Monty’s boss, Chief of Park Police Joe Smith—both had their hands full with helping the evacuations under the Incident Command Unit that had come in for the fires. As I suspected, when I called Walsh, he had suggested I consult Lucy in Bozeman, which I did. She threw as much procedural information as possible my way, and I had put together a to-do list. I already knew that great care must be used in recovering remains from a grave, since the exhuming itself destroys the context within it. She reminded me of just how precise we needed to be in recording all the layers of soil.
I wouldn’t typically need Monty’s or Tara’s assistance, but given the urgency, I appreciated the extra hands. From working with Monty before, I knew he could handle himself around a crime scene. Tara seemed smart and careful too, so I was glad she wanted to stick around.
The Weight of Night Page 3
