Bear Bait (9781101611548)

by Beason, Pamela

  “Can’t say. I’ll call you later. Be careful.”

  The connection ended before she could say, “You, too.”

  She spent the rest of the day struggling to focus on her management plan and decipher the latest NPS regulations, when she really wanted to head out to Marmot Lake with a hammer and chisel to obliterate those awful numbers from the trees.

  JACK was appalled to find Ernest on his doorstep again, looking pitiful with rain dripping from his ragged graying hair. Now that Allie was gone and her father had decided to dry out, Ernest was around more than ever.

  “That ranger was here yesterday looking for you,” Ernest said.

  “Ranger Choi again? What the hell did he want?” They couldn’t have uncovered anything else about the paintball games or the C-4. Dammit, if King was shooting his mouth off—

  “Not a he,” Ernest said. “That little blond ranger, you know, the one that was on TV?”

  “Westin?” The back of Jack’s neck prickled. Why would Westin come here? It was like she was haunting him.

  “I don’t know her name,” Ernest said. “She told me they’re having a memorial service for that trail worker girl tomorrow, up at Hurricane Ridge.”

  “Yeah, it was in the paper. Look, Ernest, I’m just getting dinner…” He half turned toward the inside of the house. He had a sandwich partially made on the kitchen counter.

  Ernest caught the screen door and took a step closer. “I’m going. Want to ride with me?”

  Now what the hell was this about? “Why would I want to do that? Why would you want to do that?”

  It’ll be a fed roundup, King had pointed out. Good place to do a little demolition work. It had taken Jack twenty minutes to talk the idiot out of the idea. Deferred gratification was a concept King had apparently never heard of. The money was the only thing that finally convinced him.

  “I thought I’d pay my respects,” Ernest said. “Jack, that girl was two years younger than Allie.”

  “Yeah, well, that doesn’t make up for who she was. You wear the uniform, you’re one of them.” Jack crossed his arms and leaned back against the inner door, swinging it wider. “Feds take our land, our money—they sent the whole national treasury to Iraq and Afghanistan, for chrissakes—they spent billions of dollars a week over there, did you know that? So the freakin’ ragheads can have ‘democracy’”—he drew quote signs in the air around the word—“so they can have the right to free speech and the right to criticize their government. But tell the truth about the bastards running our government, and they’ll slap you in Guantanamo—”

  “What’s that?” Ernest interrupted. His gaze was no longer on Jack. He pointed toward the bedroom.

  Shit. Ernest could see the purple moonlight photo through the open doorway.

  “You said you were sending those photos to Allie,” the old man said.

  Jack swallowed, thinking fast. “Ernest, you know how you said you needed those paintings Allie made when she was a little girl?”

  The man’s eyes shimmered with sudden tears. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I decided that I need these photos.” He let the silence hang painfully between them for a minute. “You can understand, can’t you?”

  Ernest’s jaws worked like he was considering an argument, but then he said, “Yeah, Jack, I guess I can. I miss her so much. I sent her a letter at that address you gave me, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”

  “Let me know when you do, okay?” If Jack had to look at Ernest’s sad grizzly face any longer, he’d get all choked up, too. With the sheeting rain, he felt like he should offer the guy a ride home. He knew Ernest’s car was dead and Allie’s was in some impound lot. But he didn’t want to continue this any longer than he had to. Besides, it wasn’t far and the old man was wearing an old Army surplus poncho. “I’m sorry about yelling at you. I know you feel the same way about the feds as I do.”

  “Yeah, well.” Ernest backed up, letting the screen door bang shut between them. “Night, Jack.”

  “Night, Ernest.” Jack closed the door and watched the old man shuffle off through the dripping trees.

  Ranger Westin was sniffing around for him? She was the last person he wanted to show up at his door. Probably the Marmot Lake trespassing thing again; she couldn’t possibly know anything else. She couldn’t have made him from the other night. Still. He turned on his computer and brought up the web page, logged in, and left a message on the bulletin board. Then he turned the machine off, pulled out the hard drive, and replaced it with a new one. After eating his sandwich, he buried the old drive in a plastic bag under his compost heap.

  22

  IT was still raining on Wednesday when Ernest drove up to Hurricane Ridge. The trip took longer than he’d planned on, because he’d been amazed to find a gate across the road and an attendant who wanted a ten-dollar entry fee. Then the young woman embarrassed them both by asking if he was a senior when he was only sixty-one. Finally, she just waved him on through without paying after he said he was on his way to the memorial service.

  The service was already in progress and the single pink rose he’d bought at the grocery store in Forks was wilting in his hand as he limped down the aisle. They’d set up outside the visitor center under a huge portable awning to shield them from the downpour. Up front was a table and a speaker’s stand, and behind that, a chaplain. Just like Jack had predicted, the folding chairs held an army of gray-green uniforms, with only a few people in regular clothes scattered among them. He saw a silver-blond braid in the middle of the pack that might be that little ranger who’d come looking for Jack a couple of days ago.

  He took the first empty folding chair he found, next to a teenage girl with chopped-off red hair. Beside her sat several tough-looking boys. Although their faces and hands were clean, their pants were wet to the knees and stained with mud; they’d clearly been working outside. The girl beside him smelled of sweat and he was glad for the open-air chapel. The dead girl had been part of a trail crew, he remembered. These must be her comrades.

  Up front he could see a photo of Lisa Glass hanging on the speaker’s stand, just above a spray of lilies. She had light-colored hair; that was all he could tell from here.

  The chaplain was going on about how Lisa loved the woods and being outdoors. His speech reminded Ernest of all the field services in ’Nam, where the poor schlub with the cross around his neck was just as confused as the rest of them, but since it was his job to conjure up something nice to say, he talked about how the guy who’d had his guts ripped out by machine gun fire had been a high school football player or loved his dog or something.

  “…and so Lisa chose to work on the trail crew to be close to nature,” the chaplain was saying now.

  “What a crock,” the red-haired girl beside him murmured.

  He glanced sideways at her.

  “She did it for the money,” she told him, wiping tears from her freckled cheek with the back of her hand. “It was the only job she could find. Her family was poor.”

  “Shhh.” A man in front of them turned and glared at the redhead. In response, she stuck out her tongue. She wore four earrings in the ear he could see. He wondered if her other ear had four holes, too.

  “Sounds like Lisa was nice,” he whispered.

  “Not particularly.” The girl’s muscular shoulders lifted, then dropped. “But she didn’t deserve this.”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say. There was a rumor that Lisa Glass had been murdered, and another one that she was drunk and accidentally set the fire. The truth was probably somewhere in between, but the redhead was right—it didn’t really matter, because nobody deserved to die. Not at nineteen years old.

  How old was that poor murdered game warden? Had anyone held a service for her? That wasn’t park service. That would be—he couldn’t come up with the branch of government—but he hoped she had friends and family to honor her memory. God, it was a terrible world, with young women dying all alone in the woods.
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  Then the service was over. Some people slipped out the back and sides while others went up to lay things under the photo of the girl. He followed the red-haired girl toward the front, carrying his flower in both hands so it wouldn’t look so droopy. The redhead placed a big pinecone on top of the pile of stuff under the photo. He laid his limp rose next to it. There were a couple of tiny Beanie Baby animals in the pile. Allie had collected those when she was about ten years old.

  Ernest looked at the picture to see if the dead girl was a pinecone type or Beanie Baby type or a rose type. It was a lousy photo, all in shadow. She was tall and blond and holding a shovel. Under the hard hat she wore, her face looked a lot like Allie’s. They said everyone had a double somewhere in the world, and this girl looked like she could be Allie’s. Squinting hard, he put his face close to the photo to study her eyes.

  It hit him then. More sudden and more excruciating than when the shrapnel had smashed into his leg in ’Nam. A moan started up from somewhere, soft and far away at first and then getting louder and closer. When he realized that he was making the horrible noise, he clapped a hand hard across his mouth. He staggered back from the photo.

  How could Lisa Glass be Allie? Oh God, how could this dead girl be his Allie?

  He felt a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”

  The flowers and Beanie Babies and pinecone swirled like a cyclone, dark and mean, roaring around him, taking his breath away. He thought he might never be able to talk again.

  “You all right, sir?”

  He could barely hear the voice through the awful roar, and he turned to see why the man was speaking so softly. The guy wore a ranger uniform. CHOI, it said on the brass nameplate over his pocket. He had a pistol on his hip.

  “Allie,” he managed to croak. But it couldn’t be Allie. It couldn’t.

  “Maybe you’d better sit down.”

  Not Allie. She was in L.A.

  But she hadn’t said good-bye. And she hadn’t called or written. And that just wasn’t like her.

  Although he had no memory of how he got there, Ernest found himself sitting in a chair in the front row, staring at the photo.

  The Choi fellow was sitting beside him now. Only the two of them were left in the tent. Choi’s slanted brown eyes looked kind. He asked, “Did you know her?”

  Did he know her? He knew the smell of her hair, the crooked tooth she had in front, the scar she had on her knee from when she fell on the garden hoe. He knew she loved art and English and hated math and could take photos as good as any pro. He knew that Cheeseburger Macaroni was the kind of Hamburger Helper she liked best, but she always added mushrooms and green beans to make a balanced meal.

  “Did you say something about an alley?” Choi asked. “Lisa Glass was found injured in the woods, not in town.”

  How could Allie be here and be dead when she was supposed to be in Los Angeles? She’d written him and Jack…But she’d never called. And Jack had kept her photos. Oh God.

  He buried his face in his hands. God no, not Allie. Not his girl. Not dead. I’m getting clean, Allie, so you won’t be so ashamed of your old man, so you’ll come back. I got a job today at the grocery. Just stocking shelves, but you won’t have to work so hard anymore.

  “Did you know her, sir?”

  He knew she worried about her weight and wished she were skinny instead of sturdy. He knew she wanted to go to college. But he didn’t know what she’d study when she got there. Allie had a lot of secret dreams.

  How could it be Allie? Now he really wanted her to be in Los Angeles, wanted her to be anywhere else. But Christ, it all fit. The forest fire was the same night that she didn’t come home. And even when he wasn’t sober enough to know it at the time, Allie had always come home.

  Jack had hung her photos on his bedroom wall instead of putting them in the mail. The bastard had known all along. What had Jack done to his daughter? Ernest sat up and grabbed the ranger by the arm. Choi looked startled, laid his hand on the butt of his weapon.

  “I know her,” Ernest croaked. “I need to talk to you.”

  LISA’S memorial service cast an understandable pall over the trail crew, and the kids were quiet during dinner at the bunkhouse. It was too wet for a campfire, so Blackstock divided them into teams and had them play Trivial Pursuit. Thank heavens they had the popular culture version; Sam couldn’t quite imagine these teens competing in geography and history.

  Sam retired to her room and made a few notes about her morning’s fieldwork and its implications for her management plan. Then, bored, she pulled out her quilt blocks and estimated how many more it might take to make a quilt, trying to concoct various designs for a finished product. Nothing that she came up with was pleasing, and the whole idea was starting to seem narcissistic to her. She didn’t really have the skill to make a quilt. She didn’t have children to pass one on to, either; what was the point in documenting her life in needlework? Still, she thought, running her fingers over her mother’s and grandmother’s embroidery, it would be a shame not to honor these beautiful pieces of art. Maybe she’d just frame them. She shoved them into their plastic bag, tossed it onto the top bunk, and since the boys were all involved in the game, commandeered the bathroom and took her shower.

  When she returned to the room, she found Maya sitting cross-legged on her own bunk, the quilt blocks spread out on the blanket around her. “Sorry,” the redhead said, glancing at Sam, “but I couldn’t resist. These are sweet.”

  “You think so?” Sam slung her towel onto a hook on the wall. A tough girl like Maya, enthralled by embroidery?

  “What are they for?”

  Sam explained the album quilt.

  “Your mom and grandma made these for you?” The girl fingered the square of Sam and Comanche galloping through the fields. “You had a horse?”

  Maya’s tone was so wistful that Sam felt guilty as she nodded yes.

  23

  THE continuing rain made it a little easier for Sam to sit at her desk researching NPS regulations and vocabulary and finessing her management plan all the next day. She was headed north on 101 back to the trail crew bunkhouse, when she just happened to look in her rearview mirror in time to catch the flash of white turning east on Forest Service Road 4312. A big pickup.

  Not Garrett Ford’s—his neighbors told her his was black. Only this morning she had cruised his house to see if by any chance there was a wreath of bear claws on his front door or a pool of blood leaking out of the garage, but nobody was home and his truck was gone.

  Road 4312 was the one from which the illegal track took off to infiltrate the Marmot Lake area. There were no campgrounds along 4312. It was dusk. Odds were that the occupants of the white truck were up to no good.

  She stomped on her brakes, hydroplaning a little, and then made a U-turn. By the time she got back to the turnoff, the vehicle was nowhere in sight. She drove down the dirt road, checking pullout areas and side roads. She saw only piles of rubbish dumped by yahoos too lazy or cheap to drive to the county dump.

  She reached the beginning of the illegal track. The brush that rangers had piled across the track had been heaved aside, and new tread marks embossed the mud. She parked, checked her watch—Joe was on duty for another fifteen minutes.

  He didn’t sound thrilled to hear her on the radio. She gave him her location; told him that it looked like they had activity on that illegal track into Marmot Lake.

  “Are they in the NPS area?” he asked.

  “I’m just off 4312—I can’t tell. I can’t see them from here. I’ll check.”

  His “no!” was loud and definite, even over the staticky radio connection. “You’re a civilian—stay out of there.”

  A loud crack resounded through the dripping woods. Sam’s heart leapt into race mode. “I just heard a gunshot, Joe. I have to see what’s happening.” Sliding the pickup into four-wheel drive, she started down the track.

  “No! Stay put! I’m on my way.”

  “But Raider—
”

  “Remember Caitlin Knight.”

  That brought her up short. Hikers had found the poor woman’s torso, still dressed in her uniform, this morning along the beach out where the river emptied into the Pacific. Her arms, legs, and head were missing. They couldn’t be sure of the actual cause of death without the rest of her body parts, but the bullet hole in the back of her USFWS uniform shirt left no doubt that she’d been murdered.

  “She died on the job. Just like this, Sam.”

  “Okay.” She took a deep breath, put the truck into park, and turned off the lights. She tried to take comfort from the fact that she’d heard no more gunshots. Maybe the prey had gotten away. But then again, maybe the first bullet had been sufficient.

  Joe arrived seven minutes later. She climbed into his truck. There was now a wide swath cut around the rock trap she’d devised, and they took that detour, too, crashing through the brush. “They’ll hear us a half mile away,” Joe groaned.

  A few hundred feet from the end of the track, he parked and shut off the engine. He took a key from his belt and unlocked the overhead rack, pulled down a rifle. As he reached for the door handle, he said, “Stay here.”

  “Like hell I will.” Sam slid out.

  They crept through the woods, one on each side of the track, trying to keep sight of each other in the growing darkness and sheeting rain. Sam’s entire body prickled with dread.

  The clearing held two pickups, one black and one white. No men in sight. There was a steel cage near the tailgate of the black pickup, with a huge lump of black fur lying motionless inside. Her heart in her throat, Sam heard Joe’s hissed “no” from the nearby woods, but she rushed to the cage, anyway.

  It was Raider. His once-lively black eyes were filmy, his tongue lolled out of his mouth, lifeless. Rage flooded her veins.

  “Goddamn it!” She slammed a fist on the cage frame.

  “Come on out, guys,” Joe yelled from his position. “You’re not going to get away. We have your license numbers; I’ve already radioed them in.”