Mortal Fall

by Christine Carbo

  And when my mom died four years ago in a car accident, Adam and I managed to get into it. He had accused my dad of not caring, of not keeping the car keys well hidden. In an attempt to ward off an all-out fight between Adam and my dad at the small reception at our house following the funeral, I’d simply pointed out the obvious: regardless of what occurred, it was a difficult situation—trying to facilitate the leading of a seminormal life . . . letting her drive a car to have some independence, versus trying to keep her safe.

  The fact that I was sticking up for Dad sent Adam through the roof, and Adam’s way of dealing with his anger was always to pounce, especially when it came to me. Some of Dad’s friends pulled Adam off. Right then and there, utterly embarrassed before the few friends my parents had, I made a promise to myself that if I could avoid it, I’d never talk to the guy again.

  I left Phillips’s kitchen and went into the office, where it was even more haphazard, littered with bills, torn envelopes, and papers. Crumpled sweatshirts and a pile of jackets that he hadn’t bothered to hang in the coat closet slumped over the desk chair. I had already checked the mailbox. Mark Phillips had quit bringing in his mail five or six days before. I wrote this in my notebook.

  On the wall hung a large, framed beautiful topo map of Glacier, with the east side of the Divide in a calming salmon color and the west side in pale green. Other warm tones of yellows, oranges, and burgundies were woven into the terrain to denote the changes in elevation. It was a meticulous work of art and, recalling what Devlan said, I was certain Mark had made this map. The attention to detail and the beauty of it was completely incongruous with the disorder of his house, and I thought of what Mark’s ex-wife, Lisa, said: all or nothing.

  I opened the top drawer of the desk to see more papers in disarray, pens and pencils, a plastic calculator saying Compliments of Forever-Clean Carpets. I lifted up some of the papers and saw his mortgage payment book. He had yet to make June’s payment, but had made May’s. The second drawer contained paper clips, a plastic water bottle, some old plastic key chains, boxes of matches from various nonlocal bars, a stack of folded topo maps of Glacier, the Bob Marshal Wilderness, the Mission Mountains, and the Swan Range. An old tube of some kind of hydrocortisone cream lay in the corner and in the very back, behind the stack of maps, sat a shoe box.

  I pulled it out and lifted the top to find more odds and ends: a poem written on old, yellow-tinged paper about love being deep like a river. It was signed with the name Diane—perhaps a girlfriend from years back—in faint cursive at the bottom. I turned the paper over and saw a sketch drawn lightly of a young woman with long hair standing behind a man seated in a chair. Her hand rested on his shoulders, but her fingers were close to his collarbones so you couldn’t tell if she was lovingly resting them or closing them around his neck. A cartoon bubble coming from the man said, “Honey, that’s too tight.” . . . I neatly folded the paper and carefully put it in my pocket.

  As far as I knew, Mark Phillips lived alone and the place showed it. A box of more books, these on cartography, sat on the floor next to his desk collecting dust, several old cameras in leather cases sat next to the box of books, and a plaque a little bigger than the size of a hardback from a cartography association was propped against the wall next to the cameras, supposedly waiting to get hung on the wall. I wrote the name of the cartography association from the plaque in my notebook, tucked it back in my shirt pocket, and walked out to find Ken in one of the bedrooms, looking in the closet.

  “Anything interesting?”

  He shrugged. “Not really, a few old, very dated suits, and some regular pants and button-up shirts. Some flannel. I don’t get the feeling the guy cared all that much how he looked.”

  “No, not himself or his house.” I glanced around the room, sterile and unadorned with art or knickknacks that might warm it, but still cluttered. More clothes lay strewn across the floor and some ratty T-shirts and jeans draped over a single chair in the corner by the only window in the room. Some blue used towels lay near the chair as if he’d showered and just dropped them by his pile of clothes when he dressed. A laptop sat by his bed and was plugged into an outlet. I unplugged it and tucked it under my arm.

  The bathroom was not very clean, old toothpaste, hair, and soap scum everywhere. Ken said the other room was used for working out as I stepped around the corner and peeked in. It was empty of furniture and just held some free weights, a bench press, a CD player and speakers, and a lone crocus plant. Nothing much to consider except that the plant was not in good shape, and Mark Phillips was not taking good care of it.

  On the floor, off to the side of a small mudroom leading to the back yard where the garage sat, were several sets of the same-size man’s boots in all types: work, snow, and hiking boots and some pretty beaten-up trail runners. On the wall, several coats and two hiking packs hung on hooks. One pack had capsaicin spray still attached to the waist strap. I pulled both of them down and gave them to Ken to carry since my hands were full.

  • • •

  On our way out into the chilly day, I paused on Mark Phillips’s porch with the guy’s laptop tucked under my arm, the poem and note folded in my pocket, and the picture of Mark and his son. Ken had the two packs and the capsaicin bear spray. The temperature had dropped even further and it felt close to midforties. Snow in June was not unheard of, and the gunmetal sky goaded me. The air smelled of grass, fir needles from a nearby spruce, and the sharp tang of offending sleet or snow at the start of summer.

  The gloom echoed the weight of the case, not only that now there were two deaths to investigate, but that I had an odd sensation that it was somehow nudging up against old memories. One particular memory flashed in my mind: my brother standing on the porch steps of our childhood home on Fifth Avenue in Columbia Falls, angry and worked up, yelling, “You pussy, don’t you know it’s been me who’s taken care of you all these years? And this is how you repay me?”

  I had stood in the doorway in my favorite Seahawks jersey thinking my mother was still asleep and wouldn’t do anything anyway even if she was awake. My dad was at work and wouldn’t be home for hours, and when he did come home, he’d have already downed a few beers and would go straight for the fridge for more. I figured Adam would rush at me to hit me, and I was prepared to bolt to my room and lock myself in, but instead, he turned his angry, flushed face away and stomped off across the lawn, calling me a fucking wimp. I watched him leave, not sure whether to feel guilty or relieved.

  18

  * * *

  I HAD MY REASONS for feeling fairly confident my brother was capable of pushing someone off a cliff when I sat before Smith in his office the previous day. You have to understand Adam. And to understand Adam, you have to understand what happened to Nathan Faraway.

  Nathan, Nathan Faraway. I guess we all have defining moments in our childhood, some more dramatic than others, and some so profound that they alter your path, send you reeling in a different direction or spinning in one place forever. Nathan Faraway was my childhood friend through elementary and middle school. We were both on the small side with dark hair, and people used to think we were brothers. He was the friend who made my boring school days better, the one who made me laugh by making stupid faces, but who had a higher IQ than most of the other kids in my class. But because he was brainy, the kids liked to pick on him. Tease him about getting one-hundreds in math and science.

  The night my brother insisted Nathan and I go along with his and his buddies’ plans was the night that would tilt the world for me because it was the night the worst happened. I thought the worst was my family—that life couldn’t go down from there. But it did.

  My recollection of the events often came in a menagerie of disjointed scenes and senses, like a spotlight moving on a stage illuminating one scene, then another. That particular fall night, my brother had come to me the day before and woken me up. I remember feeling cold and noticing the frost on the outside of the window and his breath smelling of nic
otine and beer. “Monty, Jesus, wake up. I’m talking to you.”

  “What?” I rubbed my eyes.

  “The boys and I,” he whispered, a hissing voice in the dark. “We’ve been talking. We need your help.”

  “My help?”

  “Yeah, yours and Nathan’s.”

  I squinted at him in the dark.

  “Perry. You know Perry?”

  I nodded.

  “He really, really likes Nathan’s sister.”

  I held up my hand. “Stop, Adam. This is just another prank.” My insides instantly felt shaky. Any trick played by my brother involving the boys was never an innocent or remotely enjoyable experience. Since I was small, his pranks involved things like debagging, Indian burns that made my arm red and chafed, titty twisters that went on too long and hard, leaving me sore and bruised, to more elaborate schemes.

  One time, he’d invited some lonely kid to come hang out with him and his buddies after school and told him to meet by a 7-Eleven a few blocks away. I know this because I overheard my brother hatching the plan the night before with his friend Todd. I convinced Nathan to walk to the store after school and saw the guy standing outside by a post waiting, his shoulders lifted to his ears in the cold, his hands buried in his pockets, his breath pluming before him like wishes in the air. He was much older—in tenth grade. We were only in sixth, but after painfully watching him stand there for a bit, we went over as if I thought I could save him. I told him Adam wasn’t coming. When he didn’t say anything, I asked if he wanted to come hang out with Nathan and me instead. He still didn’t answer, just lowered his head in embarrassment, and left. In retrospect, it would have been mortifying for him to come hang out with two sixth-graders.

  No, his coming to me for help was not very believable at first.

  “I swear. No trick. I promise. It’s just for Perry, for Halloween. He really likes her and just wants to spend some time with her.”

  “Molly?” I thought of Molly, her long brown hair, her curvy body, her fruity smelling bubble gum. Sometimes she watched TV with Nathan and me and she smelled like sweet apples and vanilla. “Nathan’s sister?”

  “Yeah, but we need your, and Nathan’s help.”

  “I’ve already got plans for tomorrow. Nathan and I are doing something.”

  “Bullshit, you’re just being a candy-ass. What? You two going to go trick-or-treating like little boys?” Adam knew good and well trick-or-treating wasn’t something in our history because Mom always seemed to be off her meds whenever Halloween rolled around and never could get it together to help us create outfits when we were little. When she felt pressured by us to do so, she got nervous and weird, telling us that Halloween was a time for bad people to come out, a time when evil people would do harm to us. She’d sit at the window and stare through a part in the curtain looking for those ill-meaning people until she got more and more nervous, took her imipramine or Haldol, then float to some softer, fuzzier place.

  By the time I was old enough to scrape some half-assed outfit together by myself, like the time I borrowed my dad’s overcoat and went as a gangster, I felt too awkward to enjoy going door-to-door and having adults look at me suspiciously, as if I might kick their pumpkins in since I was an awkward preteen and not cute like the little kids.

  “Look,” Adam said. “Just hear me out.”

  I sat in bed and listened while he made his case: Molly had told Perry that she couldn’t go with him because her parents wanted her to hang with her brother while they went to a Halloween party across town. She wasn’t sure yet what Nathan had in mind to do for Halloween, but whatever it was, she was bound to go along and make sure he stayed out of trouble, even though she admitted that he was way too old to have her looking after him. Her parents—Adam said she had told Perry—were just nervous since it was Halloween. “So all you need to do is come hang out with us and then she’ll come too. It’s that simple.” Adam smiled at me.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said slowly. “But I’m not promising anything.”

  “That’s fine.” Adam held up his hand innocently, but his eyes said if you don’t do what I say . . . “All right. You think about it.”

  I wish I’d never even heard the idea.

  19

  * * *

  I SPENT A GOOD part of the afternoon at headquarters finding pieces of information on Mark Phillips, both by reading online and by making phone calls to his colleagues. The dates on his mail confirmed that he’d been missing about five or six days, as had the usage of his cell phone. There were only small bits here and there online about maps he’d worked on. Several were topos of Glacier Park and some of both the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat Wilderness areas.

  I looked up the organization named on the plaque, Montana Association of Geographic Information Professionals, and double-checked that it was, indeed, Flathead County he was contracted under: Flathead County Geographic Information Systems, known as the GIS office.

  Since Ken and I had found the Toyota in Phillips’s garage, I wondered whether he might have a second vehicle that he’d been driving into or near the park the day he died, so I checked his car registration and found that he had the truck in the garage but no other vehicle was registered in his name. Then I checked with his company to make sure they hadn’t issued him one. They hadn’t.

  I had also gotten the West Glacier entrance surveillance tapes for the last weeks and had asked Ken to go through them to look for Sedgewick’s Subaru, Phillips’s truck, or any other signs of either victim entering or leaving the park. Unfortunately, not all entrances have surveillance, and anyone accessing the park through the North Fork could easily go undetected.

  I grabbed my notebook, and Ken and I headed out to visit Beverly Lynde, Mark Phillips’s former significant other. Ken loosened his collar and cracked the window just enough to let in some air but keep out the rain. We were lucky it hadn’t snowed and wasn’t any colder, but it was a biting, raw rain, nonetheless, and it chilled me to the bone. Early summer is like this in Northwest Montana: a series of false starts, like tricks played on us all: at times nice balmy weather—eighty degrees—then, a thirty-degree temperature drop to sometimes below freezing, even in late June. If we were lucky, it was only rain sending us huddling into raincoats instead of snow to our down jackets.

  “You warm?”

  “No, just need a little air,” he said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You hate this work?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. It’s fine.”

  “You wish you were in the park, writing tickets?”

  “Not necessarily. I was just thinking about these guys, you know.”

  I perked up. I knew Ken was loquacious and I had been wondering why he hadn’t said as much as usual in the past few days. I just figured he was perhaps feeling a little out of his league doing investigative work. “What about them?”

  “I don’t know. Just so weird—two of them.”

  “That just sink in or something?”

  Ken shrugged. “No, it’s been bothering me since we visited Wolfie’s wife. I guess it’s harder for you to understand. I mean, you don’t have kids.”

  “No, I don’t. I guess I can imagine, though. I did have parents.”

  “Yeah, well, of course. It’s just, well, hard to swallow how fragile we all are.” He looked down at one arm and I wondered if he was measuring in his mind all the effort to build his muscles, what it meant in the scheme of a physical world—a body—that could be demolished in the blink of an eye.

  We parked and walked up the drive to a small half-wood, half-stucco house in Columbia Falls off Nucleus Avenue, near the Flathead River. The gardens were well maintained and the lawn nicely cut. Ken stood back while I rang the doorbell.

  “Who is it?” The voice from inside sounded high-pitched.

  “Park Police Officer Monty Harris. Looking for Beverly Lynde.”

  A second later the door opened and a slender, sh
ort-haired brunette woman with doe eyes looked curiously at us. I guessed she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore jeans, sandals, and a floppy pale-blue sweater, and her toenails were painted pale green. I couldn’t help but wonder if her feet were cold.

  “Beverly Lynde?”

  “No,” she said. “She’s not here. She’s at work. Can I help you?”

  “You are?”

  She gave a tentative smile and tilted her head shyly to the side. “Marisa. I rent a room from Bev. She owns the place.”

  “I see. Where does Ms. Lynde work?”

  Marisa pushed her hair behind her ear. “In the park.”

  “The park? Glacier?”

  “Yeah, she drives one of the park tourist shuttles. Has every summer for the past few years. You’ve never seen her?” She looked at my badge.

  “No, I guess I haven’t. She’s there now?”

  “Far as I know. Said she works till seven tonight.”

  I thanked Marisa and we drove back to the park, this time past headquarters in West Glacier, through the west entrance pay gates and a few miles down the road to the new Apgar Transit Center where the free bus and shuttle services ran. The Transit Center was built in 2007 and instituted the shuttle service to accommodate park visitors so they could access most destinations along Going-to-the-Sun Road while reconstruction occurred, an attempt to minimize traffic, parking, and exhaust problems. Hikers and sightseers alike quickly took to the system. We asked the ranger behind the main desk to see the shuttle schedule for Beverly Lynde.

  “She’s got number eight.” The woman checking the logbook looked up at me through wire-rimmed glasses similar to mine. She wore the green ranger uniform—army-green pants and a lighter green, almost beige, short-sleeve button-up. “She should be in for a break in about forty-five minutes. Then she has to go back out at the four-thirty run to the Logan Pass visitor center and back. I can call you at your office when she gets here if you’d like, or you can wait.”