Shadow Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  She has left nothing in her room, it is all in her vehicle. Beside the ATV she removes and stows her snowshoes, then moves up to the main doors of the hotel. In the lobby she checks out at the front desk, glancing into the restaurant as the clerk prints out her receipt.

  The hunter is alone at a table. She takes him in quickly. He is in his thirties, dark-haired and mustached, lean and twitchy, with bad skin on his face and tattoos on his wrists. There is something snakelike about him.

  Don’t Tread on Me.

  She steps back from the doorway and moves out of the hotel to wait in her own vehicle in the parking lot, employing the portable heater rather than running the engine.

  When he leaves the restaurant and climbs into the van, she starts the ATV and follows.

  Chapter 85

  Snake River, Montana - 2011

  Roarke and Snyder

  According to Google Maps, the Whitefish turnoff was fifteen miles out of town.

  A promising sign. Jean was willing to talk, although nowhere any locals could see.

  While Roarke drove the winding road to the meeting spot, Snyder phoned in to the Bureau to get details from her employment records. He jotted notes, then reported aloud to Roarke.

  “Jean Lange, age twenty-eight, graduate of Mountain View High, two towns over. Employment history indicates she also works in Glacier National Park during the season, which doesn’t start until June. No criminal history. And she’s married, with an eight-year old son.”

  Roarke glanced away from the twisting road, at Snyder. “Which is why she’s willing to go out on a limb, here.”

  It was reminding him of the Richmond militia case again. A woman who might be under the thumb of her husband, the town, or both, but who’d summoned the courage to say no. Or at least to ask for help.

  “Or maybe she just doesn’t like Strauss,” Snyder said.

  Roarke’s hands tightened on the wheel. I don’t either, he thought.

  Chapter 86

  Idaho - 2011

  Cara

  She drives.

  Out of the park on the Wyoming side, up into Idaho, following the van and the hunter on the road.

  Her anger is back, a slow boil under the surface of her skin, like the hot pools under the ice. She is not surprised to be back on the hunter’s tail. From the moment she heard the wolf-watchers talking, she suspected that the wolves would lead her to the next step. And she is fully aware of the irony. Because what she heard the watchers talking about, what they were in the park to prevent, themselves, was exactly this. Hunters like this one, who cross into the park deliberately, illegally, to hunt the storied wolves. A wolf with a tracking device, one marked for scientific study, fetches a bigger bounty, bigger bragging rights. As if hunting endangered creatures for sport is not enough.

  The predator is now the prey.

  This part of Wyoming’s landscape is flat, so he is easy to follow. It also makes her easy to be seen. It requires total vigilance not to let the hunter guess that he is being tracked in this way. Any time he turns off the highway, she must slow her vehicle and hang back on the road.

  The fact that she is able to do it at all, that she is able to follow without ever losing him or being detected, is more proof that she is being guided. It is almost as if she is invisible.

  And once the roads turn mountainous and forested, it is even easier.

  He stops for the first time in a town called Kellogg, not far over the Montana border into Idaho. He turns into the side driveway of a snowmobile shop and heads around the back of the store.

  She drives past the store to park on the street and walks quickly back toward the shop, skirting the side of the shop building, staying close to the wall. At the back corner she looks around the side of the building into the lot.

  The hunter’s van is gone.

  She scans the back of the building. There are no windows to the shop on that side, just a huge, corrugated, automated warehouse door. It is the only place the van could have gone.

  She steps back, and makes her way back down the side of the building. She returns to her ATV and drives it down the block, out of sight of the shop windows. She parks, and takes a blue tarp and some boxes from the back of the ATV. She ties the tarp on to the ski rack, with the boxes underneath to create a bit of bulk. She has learned that vehicles can be as easily disguised as a person. Now when the hunter looks in his rear-view mirror, it will be the blue tarp he notices.

  After nearly an hour, the van emerges from the side alley. And as the hunter drives out, the van dips, and scrapes the driveway in a screech on the way out.

  It is riding lower to the ground. There has been a pickup of some kind, with weight to whatever the cargo is.

  A cargo of nothing good.

  The hunter drives out of Kellogg, going back the same way he came. She follows as he retraces his route back toward Montana, across the Idaho state line, and continues on 90 North to Missoula.

  He makes a few more stops. In Missoula, a small city in a wide, flat valley surrounded by snowy mountains, it is at survivalist shop. Here, while she waits, she removes the blue tarp and boxes, and locks two pairs of skis into the ski rack.

  The hunter resumes driving, with Cara in careful pursuit. A few miles after Missoula he turns off 90 onto 93, heading due north, and stops off in the next town at a pawn shop. By now it is not difficult to guess what he is buying, or selling.

  As the miles go by, her mind drifts to Richmond, the year of her first journey across the country. Her Encounter with the same kind of man, the same kind of energy. And, she strongly suspects, the same kind of cargo.

  On 93 the towns are small and far apart. She follows the hunter’s van for many miles along the western shore of enormous Flathead Lake. He does not stop again and she relaxes into the drive, savoring Montana’s big sky magnificence.

  The hunter passes through Kalispell, a small city she has been through several times before, en route to Glacier National Park. She follows the van past hotels dating back to the 1800s, bars called saloons, a drug store with an old-fashioned soda fountain.

  Not long out of Kalispell, the van comes to an outpost like so many in these unpopulated states. The town of Snake River. Barely a thousand people, if that. Its wooden storefronts give it a frontier feel.

  As the hunter drives the main street, a man standing outside one of the shops looks toward the van and touches a finger to his cap brim. She has seen it before. In rural counties, there is always a town signal. An acknowledgment of someone who belongs or is welcome, as opposed to a stranger.

  Or perhaps this is something specific to this hunter, this shipment he carries.

  So now it becomes imperative that the hunter not know he is being followed.

  As the van slows mid-block, she stops at the corner, signaling a turn. Ahead of her, the truck parks on the street in front of a store called Snake River Mercantile. The hunter gets out of the truck and walks toward the store.

  Cara moves her ATV forward down the block and parks in another space just short of the Huckleberry Diner, advertising “World Famous Pie.” She has a clear view of the front of the store through the ATV’s windshield. She leans over and pretends to be rummaging in her glove compartment while she watches the hunter through the plate glass window of the store.

  The hunter greets the jowly, goateed man behind the counter with a nod and they exchange a few words. There is a middle-aged woman customer in the shop, and the hunter looks toward her before stepping into one of the aisles to browse.

  The woman brings her purchases up to the counter and the counter man rings her up.

  As soon as the woman leaves the store with her bag, the hunter steps out from the aisle, not carrying any purchases. The two men speak quickly, furtively.

  She has no idea what they are saying. But she doesn’t need to hear them to see the dark intent flowing around and between them.

  The man behind the counter glances out toward the street… reaches under the counter and pr
oduces a handgun.

  The men stand where they are, waiting, watching the window. Cara sits in her ATV watching them.

  In less than a minute, a Range Rover pulls up outside the mercantile and parks at the curb. There is a Sheriff’s Department logo on the side. A bulky, uniformed man sporting a handlebar mustache gets out. He is perhaps fifty. Not a deputy. Cara can see the gold badge on his chest.

  He shuts the car door and walks toward the mercantile, with a revolver heavy on his hip. He opens the door to what Cara imagines as a faint jangle of bells.

  She watches as inside the store, the three men exchange a few terse words. They turn to stare through the front windows of the shop toward the street. Then all of them walk through the door behind the counter, into what must be the stock room.

  Cara sits, absorbing what she has seen.

  The twitchy, tattooed hunter. The potbellied hardware store man with his blank stare. And this sheriff, now.

  There is good law enforcement and there is bad. This one is not good.

  Bad men. Bad cargo. And a bad sheriff to ensure that no one will interfere with their bad intentions.

  Chapter 87

  2011 – Whitefish turnoff, Montana

  Roarke and Snyder

  There were two parking lots at the lookout the waitress had designated, an upper and a lower. Roarke drove through the first one and down to the lower, which was not visible from the highway. Parking there wouldn’t draw attention.

  In the seat beside him, Chuck mused, “I know what we’ve found. There was no thirteen-year old boy reported missing from this area in 2009. But if Strauss is coaching regionally—”

  Roarke knew where he was going. “If he’s going to away games…”

  In his capacity as a coach, there would really be no end of boys available to him.

  Roarke turned off the engine, started to turn to Snyder to speak. Then the view caught him.

  It was a misty afternoon, fog as thick as snow wreathing parts of the mountain range. But there wasn’t enough fog in the whole world to obscure the view. It went on and on, layer after layer of mountain range of dull purple, iron, obsidian, with ivory white caps, silver ribbons of waterfalls in the crevasses.

  In all his years of hiking, wilderness training, backpacking, he had never seen anything so vast. Ancient, deep, eternal.

  The agents sat in reverent silence.

  What would it be like, to just disappear out there? Roarke thought.

  Never to come back to this world. To stay in that timeless beauty and find… something he’d never been able to define. Himself, maybe.

  It felt so close, right now…

  And he was suddenly clear. It wasn’t going to work with Monica. They’d tried. They would keep trying. They respected each other. There was love there. But sooner or later they were going to have to face the truth. She belonged to the city, to big business, to the challenge of corporate life. And he was most himself in these lost spaces. There was something else for both of them—

  He stopped mid-thought, at a glimpse of movement in the rearview mirror. A vehicle driving down from the upper parking lot, a pickup truck with salt splashes along the sides.

  “Here we go,” Chuck murmured beside him.

  And Roarke added silently, Talk to us, Jean.

  Chapter 88

  Snake River, Montana - 2011

  Cara

  She is back on the road again, following some distance behind the van on a winding road. Now without the skis on top of the ATV. She’d taken a short drive to remove them, and re-parked to watch the mercantile from a distance until the Sheriff reemerged from the store and left in his vehicle.

  A minute later the hunter had come out of the store, carrying nothing. He got back into his van and drove on, through the town.

  And Cara had followed.

  Outside Snake River, the road is narrow and winding. Many unpaved roads branch off into the woods. She must brake constantly and hang back on the curves to keep far enough behind the van to avoid detection.

  Inevitably she rounds a curve and finds herself too close to the van, close enough that it is likely he has seen her. She slows at one of the branching roads and turns into it as if that is her destination. She waits there, out of sight, letting the hunter continue.

  After half a minute, long enough for him to get past the next curve, she backs out and continues on the road, driving past a cluster of mailboxes with a chainsaw-carved wooden grizzly bear looming behind them.

  She rounds the next curve of road—

  The van is gone.

  She has an unimpeded view of another long stretch of road ahead of her, and it is completely empty.

  She makes a U-turn, cruises back the way she came, looking out at all of the nearly invisible side roads winding away from the road. Driveways, pathways. Many of them private, gated, or posted NO TRESPASSING.

  The van could have turned down any one of them.

  She drives slowly, considering.

  Perhaps she is not meant to follow him further. There is never any point in forcing the issue. She will be instructed when she needs to be instructed.

  So she accelerates and drives back toward Snake River.

  This time she passes through on the main street without stopping. There is no possibility of staying in the town. Small towns are a kind of trap, especially in the least populous states. Everyone knows everyone, and knows everything about everyone. Outsiders have a spotlight on them. She cannot use her German tourist persona because strangers with accents are doubly unwelcome in this region, and lone women are particular targets.

  And so she takes the road heading back to Kalispell. An actual city, big enough for her not to feel on display. A gateway to Glacier, for tourists who don’t want to camp in the summer or who are looking to ski in the winter. Where the ski rack and equipment on the ATV will explain her presence to anyone who looks twice.

  She has not eaten for some time so she parks on the first main road she comes to, lined with restaurants, saloons, hotels, and a small museum.

  She finds a café and orders hot cauliflower soup and a cheese sandwich.

  And she sits looking out the large plate glass windows to see what the street will present to her.

  The restaurant is warm, with a fire in a river rock fireplace. After her long day of driving she finds herself drifting into a detached haze. She is sure she has not made this day’s drive for no reason. She is willing to wait for the next sign.

  While she is finishing her meal, she becomes aware of teenagers walking the sidewalks, alone, in pairs, in groups. School has let out for the day.

  One girl walking alone catches her eye. She is young, thirteen or fourteen, with short spiky hair and baggy trousers under a thick parka. She stands out for her nervous energy and alert wariness.

  And for something else that makes Cara’s heart stand still.

  The girl is bleeding. Crimson trails of blood in the snow behind her.

  Not real, of course. And real nonetheless.

  The girl is scratched.

  Chapter 89

  Whitefish turnoff, Montana - 2011

  Roarke and Snyder

  The old truck passed by their ATV and stopped in a parking space some distance away.

  “Wait,” Snyder said, from the seat beside him, and Roarke could see his hand was on his weapon.

  The driver’s door opened. Then the waitress from the diner climbed down from the cab and hurried toward their SUV. She was no longer in her uniform, but dressed warmly in jeans, boots and a parka.

  Roarke hit the automatic lock to open the back doors of the ATV and Jean Lange slid into the back seat, pulling the door closed behind her. The vehicle’s temperature dropped with the sudden breeze from outside. But Roarke was sure the pale of her face and the tremor in her shoulders had little to do with the weather.

  Snyder looked to Roarke, with a subtle nod to take the lead.

  Roarke turned in the front seat, opened his credentials wal
let for Lange to see, and handed her their Bureau business cards. “I’m Special Agent Roarke. This is Special Agent Snyder. We appreciate you being willing to talk to us.”

  She nodded, not responding with her name.

  Roarke wanted to start from as general a place as possible, to let her tell the story her own way. “In these situations, time is our enemy.”

  She nodded again tensely, so keyed up that Roarke wasn’t sure she was hearing him. But then she spoke, so low he had to lean in to hear her.

  “When I read that he went missing in the park... it’s got to be connected, doesn’t it?”

  Roarke and Snyder exchanged a glance. Connected to what?

  “It’s not the first time,” she’d said on the phone.

  Snyder’s face was open, encouraging. “That’s why we’re here,” he said. An invitation for her to keep going.

  “I saw the family. They came in to eat at the diner.” Lange’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “And he was watching. Not them—him. The boy.”

  She hadn’t said the name yet, and Roarke didn’t want to say it for her.

  “After lunch, they—the family—went in across the street to shop before they went on out of town.”

  Roarke prompted her, quietly, easily. “You’re talking about the mercantile across the street from the diner?”

  She nodded, barely, keeping her head down. “And next thing, I was reading about the boy going missing.”

  “Who was watching him, Ms. Lange?”

  “Strauss,” she whispered.

  “Abraham Strauss, from the Northwest Brigade?”

  She was instantly wary. More than wary. Frightened. “The… who?” Then more firmly. “No. I don’t know anything about that.”

  Lie, Roarke thought.

  Lange shifted in the back seat. “I’m here because of the boys. There’s nothing I can tell you about any Brigade. Do you understand that?” Her voice was so vehement that the agents were stunned into silence.