A Stranger in Town

by Kelley Armstrong

  “Did you get a sense of why he was developing teas with … medicinal effects? Was it a … hobby?”

  She looks at me and then bursts out laughing. “You mean was he the kind of guy who grew weed in his backyard and mushrooms in his basement?” Her dark eyes glitter. “I wasn’t born in the settlement, Casey. I did my share of pharmaceutical experimentation down south.” She catches her niece’s confusion and pats her back. “You missed out on many things, child. For better and worse, and I’m not sure which that is. A little of both, I suspect.”

  Josie turns to me. “You’re asking whether Hendricks was a hobby grower. Maybe even a small-time entrepreneur. My laugh may have answered the question. He was as far as I can imagine from the type. Like I said, he reminded me of a professor. A hot professor.” Her brows waggle. “But a professor nonetheless. Science major with a liberal arts minor. Serious and academic. He would drink the tea to relax, but only sparingly. So why create it? Boredom.”

  She settles back and sips her own tea. “He had a mind that needed constant stimulation. While he insisted that he’d been an office worker, I suspect he was a scientist. I have a couple of degrees myself.” She shrugs. “I was restless, couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. So I know the type, and I know the feeling. He was looking for something he didn’t find in Rockton and didn’t find here. He bored easily and creating teas became his pet project.”

  “You said he created most of your teas—the regular brews and the narcotic ones. Did you feel as if the peace tea and ritual tea were his goal? That he was looking for something more than a soothing afternoon brew? Or did he stumble on them by accident, and it was the community who wanted those perfected?”

  “Hard to say. We might have shared a bed, but Hendricks was not an easy man to read. Nor was he one to share his thoughts. We argued about that. I took offense. Accused him of thinking the color of my skin meant I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough to converse on his level. That wasn’t it, though. We talked about many things, big ideas and esoteric trivia. Just nothing personal.”

  Another sip of her tea before she continues. “I’m not sure whether he intended to create the peace tea, but he seemed happy with it. We had a few residents who wanted to ban it. They worried about reefer madness—the fear that marijuana would turn people into lunatics. He argued against that, with enough facts that told me if he wasn’t a practicing scientist, he definitely had the education for it. The other tea, though? He wasn’t as happy with that.”

  “The ritual tea? The hallucinogenic one?”

  She makes a face, and I hurry on with, “I mean the tea that induces visions.”

  Josie laughs. “My expression didn’t mean I was offended by the use of the word ‘hallucinogen.’ When it comes to our faith … Well, down south, I went to church for the picnics and the luncheons and the singing. The sense of community. My church wasn’t fire and brimstone. It was love and peace and mercy. That’s what I wanted, and it’s what I have here. If there is a force in the world that I think deserves our respect, it’s nature, so I’m good with that. I’m just not … as wrapped up in the specifics of our faith.”

  Nancy nods, and Josie leans against her briefly, murmuring a word or two I don’t catch. A shared moment of understanding.

  Then Josie continues. “Hendricks didn’t like the ritual tea. I don’t think he’d have shared it with us except … Well, the original formulation didn’t affect him in that way. It only caused a stronger euphoria. Others experienced mild hallucinations, so he tried to rescind it, but people already knew the recipe. After he was gone, they strengthened the hallucinogenic qualities.”

  “How strongly did he argue against it?”

  “It concerned him, but not enough to do more than impart educational warnings about the dangers of hallucinogens.”

  “How soon after that did he leave?”

  “Quite soon. He perfected the first tea, tinkering a bit, mostly with the taste. Once it was done…” She shrugs. “He lost purpose. He’d given us several drinking teas and the ritual one, and after that, he seemed at loose ends. Within a month, he was gone.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I ask more questions about Hendricks. I presumed that was a surname, but it seems to have been the only one he divulged. I get a physical description, too. That part confuses Josie. It’s been over thirty years. Am I hoping to find him? No. I just want all the details I can get.

  I have another question after that. One designed to zero in on the genesis of the hostiles. When the “wild people” first appeared, were any of them recognizable former members of the Second Settlement? This is not the first time I’ve asked. The elders avoided my questions with platitudes about how everyone has a right to choose their own path in life.

  This is how their commune views hostiles. These aren’t savage settlers lurking on their borders. They’re just “wild people” with a different belief system and traditions, and we are in no position to judge them for it. It’s a lofty ideological goal. A bit hypocritical, I’d argue, considering their views on homosexuality, but people often argue equality for one group while failing to see how they’re denying it for another.

  In this case, there’s a weird blinkered vibe to it, too. Like knowing your neighbor beats his wife and kids, but not reporting the abuse with the excuse that it may be a “cultural difference.” The settlement adopted a “live and let live” attitude while failing to admit that the hostiles are dangerous and growing their ranks through kidnapping and brainwashing.

  So I ask the question while knowing there’s nothing I can do if they block me. Nancy and Tomas have a more realistic view of the hostiles—having befriended a former one—but that doesn’t mean Nancy can overcome her background to speak where the elders wished silence.

  Nancy looks at her aunt with obvious discomfort. Josie sips her tea, her gaze fixed in the distance, and I think this is my answer. Then she says, slowly, “Some of the early wild people were former members of our settlement. I realize the elders object to you knowing that, but they haven’t forbidden it. Nancy has spoken to me about her friend, pushing me to see that the wild people may be in need of help in a way we didn’t realize. In a way that makes the other elders uncomfortable.”

  Josie sips her tea again before continuing. “Down south, I had a cousin who took his own life, and my family insisted it was heart failure. To admit the problem would be to face our own failure to help him. The same principle applies here. If we are reluctant to admit a link between our settlement and the wild people, it is because we fear we are responsible, if not for creating them, then for treating them as fellow settlers, composed only of willing members, and turning a blind eye to anything that would suggest otherwise.”

  Josie wraps her hands around her cup. “They began as a group of settlers. Three of our own had left peacefully, and we traded with them. Others joined them. From Rockton, I believe. We expected the group would become a third settlement, and that seemed to be their intention. Then…”

  “Things changed?” I say. “They changed?”

  “If I hesitate, it is uncertainty, not evasion. They disappeared. At first, we assumed they’d gone hunting. It was summer, and they’d mentioned traveling farther afield. When we didn’t hear from them by winter, we grew concerned, but by then, if they’d died—as we feared—it would be too late to help. We could only fret and grieve. It was two years later before we saw them again, and by then…”

  She shifts on the log. “By then they were not the people we remembered. Only one was still from our settlement and she was … not open to communication. The elders met. I wasn’t one of them at the time, so I can’t speak to the specifics. I only know that after two days of meetings, the elders decreed that our brethren had ‘rejoined nature,’ shedding the restraints of civilization to live closer to the divine. We needed to understand they had undergone a spiritual transformation, and we had to respect their ‘otherness.’ Respect their obvious wishes, too. Don’t communicate with them.
Don’t interfere with them. Allow them to live their lives as they see fit.”

  “You never had any violent encounters with them?”

  “Yes, but that came much later, and by then, the doctrine regarding the wild people was entrenched. They were like wolves or bears, and if we had a negative encounter with them, the fault was ours, for stumbling onto their territory.”

  She folds her hands around her teacup. “The fault was always ours.”

  * * *

  On our hike home, I tell Dalton what I learned. When I finish, he says, “Fuck,” and doesn’t speak for a few minutes, as we walk in thoughtful silence. On the way here, I’d told him my theory. That’s something we’ve had a problem with in the past. When I’m considering a new direction or a possible link in a case, I’m much more comfortable saying, “Hey, Eric. Do you mind if we go chat with some people from the Second Settlement. Why? Just … because.”

  Hold my cards to my chest until I can confirm—or refute—a potential theory, and if I’m wrong, well, there’s no reason to tell him what I’d been thinking, right? Save myself the embarrassment. Which is a shitty way to treat a law enforcement partner, and if mine had acted like that, I’d have been looking for a new one.

  But Dalton isn’t just my partner. He’s my boss, so I want to impress him. He’s also my lover and my friend, and both of those also mean I want to impress him. Except he’s my junior investigative partner. My mentee. I’m supposed to be teaching him detective skills.

  It’s unconscionable for me to make him follow blindly so I can pull a rabbit from the hat and look brilliant. I’m only lucky that when he did call me on it, he was gentle, and he knows me well enough to realize it arose from my fear of looking stupid rather than deliberately cutting him out of the process.

  So before we’d reached Lynx Lake, I’d shared my wild theory, and he’d added his thoughts, which helped me solidify the idea in my mind.

  “You were right, then,” he says when he speaks again.

  “There’s no proof—”

  He lifts a hand. “Let me rephrase that. You did not disprove your theory. You accumulated additional evidence to suggest you may be looking in the right direction. Is that equivocal enough for you?”

  I squeeze his arm. “Thank you. Yes, this does suggest I’m not as far off base as I feared. It also means … Shit. I’m not even sure where to go with this right now.”

  “Then let’s talk.”

  We do that, walking with Storm and talking. As for my theory?

  It goes back to being in the station, jokingly offering tea to Edwin. He said they don’t drink it, which I knew. But then later, after hearing his story, I’d thought that the council was probably glad the Second Settlement had the tea. They were the peaceful settlement, the hippie commune, its people happily bonding with nature and drinking tea that kept them calm and content with their lot.

  What if the Second Settlement didn’t just randomly invent that tea? What if someone took advantage of their New Age ways and gave it to them to keep them docile?

  Yes, it was a wild idea, and it made me feel even more like a conspiracy theorist. First, I think the council is responsible for the hostiles. When I’m proven wrong, I can’t just admit that I was mistaken. I need to concoct a new theory that implicates them.

  It’s the tea that ultimately created the hostiles? Well, then, the council must be responsible for the tea.

  Even if they are, that doesn’t mean the council knowingly “created” hostiles. They gave the Second Settlement a mildly narcotic tea that it uses recreationally. The ritual tea was an accidental formula that Hendricks cautioned them about and, again, the settlers have been responsible with it.

  The problem is that a splinter group left the Second Settlement, exactly as I’d hypothesized. They took the tea recipe and tinkered with it, and that led to a dangerous increase in potency. Yes, that’s speculation, but it’s also a logical extension of the facts.

  What does all this mean for the crimes I’m investigating? On the surface, nothing. I suspect hostiles attacked the tourists. No answer to the evolution issue would change that. This doesn’t shed any light on who killed the settlers, either. It may, however, help resolve the problem of the hostiles in general.

  The council refuses to do anything about them. Not their problem. If I’m right, though, it is their problem. They gave the commune settlement the tea. That tea, in turn, brought about the hostiles. So, in attempting to ensure that the Second Settlement remained peaceful, they actually created people who posed a greater threat than Edwin’s settlement. I’d see the irony in that, if I didn’t also see the tragedy.

  Hendricks seems to be a plant. His story is too odd otherwise—he stays in Rockton only a couple of months, gets introduced to the commune by Rockton’s leadership, and then stays there just long enough to create the tea before being allowed to return home, far short of his two years.

  The council sent Hendricks to the Second Settlement to formulate a tea from local ingredients. The question is whether the entire council was involved or …

  Wait. There hadn’t been a council at the time. There’d only been a few administrators and the board of directors.

  The board of directors. Which had been Émilie and her husband and their two friends. Were they involved? Or was this something the administrators dreamed up …

  A memory slams into my head. Last winter, when Petra had been shot by an arrow, I’d sat with her in the clinic for days while she recovered. We’d talked endlessly, and one piece rises now.

  It was a conversation about Émilie. About her work with Rockton and the amount of time and money the family had devoted to the town. I’d been saying that was how Rockton should be funded. If residents had money—like me—they should pay for their stay, but the town should also seek donations from wealthy former residents, the way schools do. Émilie was the perfect example of that.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘perfect,’” Petra said with a smile. “It’s not entirely altruism.”

  “She can’t claim it as a charitable donation, though.”

  “Oh, I’m sure part of it becomes a write-off. But while she’s definitely grateful for what Rockton provided…” She shrugged. “There’s guilt there, too. No one donates like big pharma.”

  I must have looked confused, because she continued, “That’s where our money comes from. Profits from the drug trade.” She winked. “The legal kind.”

  Her family’s money came from pharmaceuticals. We talked about that, including her own discomfort with it. Afterward, I realized she shouldn’t have told me this. It was personal information that could identify Émilie and Petra, and for what? A self-conscious joke about the guilt of earning your fortune overcharging for medicine?

  I thought medicine itself had been the reason she overshared. She’d been on painkillers for her injury. It made her loopy, and she’d inadvertently revealed more than she intended. When we never spoke of it again, I hoped that meant she didn’t realize what she’d given away.

  Which underestimated Petra entirely.

  She knew exactly what she’d given me. If called on it, though, she could blame the pain meds.

  Three days before that, she’d been lying on the ground with an arrow in her chest. We’d had no idea how deeply it had penetrated, only that she’d been shot near the heart, and she was bleeding in the snow as I knelt beside her, panicking, trying to assess the damage.

  “Émilie,” she’d whispered. “The … the hostiles … Your … your theory.”

  At the time, I thought she’d wanted me to tell Émilie about my theory. Clearly, Petra had been in shock, not quite making sense, her brain seizing on this meaningless bit of unfinished business as her last words.

  Tell my grandmother about your hostile theory. She can help.

  No, that wasn’t what she’d been saying at all, was it?

  That’s where our money comes from. Profits from the drug trade. The legal kind.

  She hadn’t been tell
ing me to work with Émilie. She’d been saying that my theory might be right … and her grandmother could be responsible.

  Petra had been trying to give me one last gift, in case she didn’t survive. Words she couldn’t say while she lived, not when they implicated her beloved grandmother.

  Don’t give up on that theory of yours.

  Look into my family. Into my grandmother.

  Later, she couldn’t go back and explain her meaning. But she could nudge, couldn’t she? Give me another tidbit, in case I made the connection between the hostile narcotic brews and Rockton.

  If I’m right, I need to confront Petra. First, though, I need to be sure I’m making the right connections.

  I turn to Dalton, who has been walking in silence while I retreated into my memories. Now he slants a look my way, one that isn’t quite convinced that I’ll share my thoughts. I take a moment, running my hand over Storm’s back as I consider how to word it. A distant shout makes me jump, but when I look up, I realize we’re only about ten minutes from Rockton.

  “How much do you know about big pharma?” I ask.

  His brow creases in confusion, and then his face tightens in a look I know well. Like when residents make pop-culture references. It doesn’t annoy him, even if his expression might convey annoyance. It’s pride snapping the shutters closed before anyone mocks his ignorance.

  “Pharmaceutical companies,” I say quickly. “The really big corporations that manufacture prescription drugs.”

  “Ah,” he says. “I know what they are. We’ve had people with that in their background.”

  He relaxes. “Before Beth came, we were looking for someone with medical experience, and we had a person who’d worked for a pharmaceutical company. I made the mistake of confusing that for ‘working for a pharmacy.’ The council set me straight. That resident didn’t know anything about drugs except how to sell them. Which I thought was an odd occupation but…” He shrugs.