Mortal Fall

by Christine Carbo

  Our wedding photo as well as other pictures of us on various vacations—Kauai, Banff, and Napa Valley—were still on the fireplace mantel. Ellis came sauntering down the hall, meowing at me and rubbing against my leg. When I went to scoop him up, he stretched, then pushed his head toward me so I could scratch it. I scooped him up, and I felt a slight ache sink into my chest as he began to purr when I rubbed my thumb behind his ears. “Yeah, yeah, I know, you miss me, buddy boy. I miss you too, but I’m in a hurry,” I said, and put him back down and headed for the kitchen where the door to the basement was located. I resisted the urge to go upstairs and check our bedroom, part of me expecting to find some strange man’s clothes draped over the chair in the bedroom’s corner.

  When I went into the kitchen, I smelled the candles Lara liked to light for dinner, a blend of sandalwood and lavender, and I felt that melancholy ache grow bigger, tugging at me, but then I saw two empty wineglasses beside the sink. I checked the recycling bin and an empty bottle of pinot noir from the Willamette Valley lay on top. That stung. Lara and I had spent our fifth anniversary visiting Oregon’s wine country. I pictured her with some guy, no—actually, if I was to be honest—I conjured an image of her with not just some guy, but a particular man—Adam. She and Adam sitting on the couch in the living room, giggling and enjoying a bottle of wine from Oregon’s wine country. I shook my head, practically laughing out loud. “Dude, you’ve got issues,” I whispered to myself as I headed down the creaking wooden steps to the basement. “And you’re getting an overactive imagination to boot.”

  Downstairs, beside the litter box against the right wall was a stack of shelves holding old boxes full of things we no longer needed, but felt we should keep anyway: old pictures, spare camping gear, college books, the first set of dishes we’d bought, but replaced several years later . . . I found the box I was looking for on the far edge under a plastic bin full of pictures from Lara’s childhood. I pulled it out, set it on the gray concrete floor and looked inside. Ellis had come down to join me and rubbed against the side of my right hip as I squatted beside the box.

  It was emptier than I thought it would be, containing my high school yearbooks, which weren’t very large anyway, my diplomas and graduation tassels, and an ivory elephant paperweight Aunt Terry had given me when I graduated from high school. A picture of my mom, Dad, Adam, and me when I was a little over a year and Adam, five, lay on top of the yearbooks. We were in front of our old fireplace. I had no idea who took the photo, probably Aunt Terry.

  My mom looked beautiful, semifaded and delicate with her fine cheekbones and large, haunted eyes. Her hair looked lustrous and full though, not the way I remembered her in her last years before she died, her auburn hair always scraggly and ratty behind her ears.

  She was only fifty-four when the accident occurred. It had always been a struggle to get her to take her meds, and she got increasingly worse about it in her early fifties. I was twenty-eight and still living in Choteau with Lara when we got the news. She’d been convinced that her medicine was poison and had been flushing it down the toilet. My dad thought she had skipped a few doses, but claimed to have no idea she’d been avoiding them altogether.

  One November evening while he was late at work, she began to think that someone was breaking into the house and called him. He told her to stay put, that he’d be right home. He called the couple next door that sometimes helped in a pinch, to see if they’d go sit with her, but they weren’t home. When he arrived, she was gone and so was her car.

  He figured she searched the house until she found the keys that he usually kept hidden in a jar in the kitchen when he sensed she wasn’t quite right, and drove off in a panic. She was last seen heading east out of Columbia Falls, up the treacherous Marias Pass in icy conditions, her car spinning out of control and shooting headfirst over the edge, tumbling some two hundred and fifty feet down to the Middle Fork River. The people who saw her go over tried to help, but she was too far below. They reported the vehicle had completely submerged and that all they could see were the headlights continuing to eerily glow under the river water while they made calls and waved others down for help.

  I’ve quit trying to wonder what she might have been thinking as she headed east, whether she had any idea where she was going, and whether she meant to go over the edge. But I can still picture those headlights. I see them as if I was there. They shine just under the surface into the frigid, crystal-clear water as if to communicate more than the tragedy of the accident, shining past the whole of her sad adulthood to some other dimension, some place where she’s content and looks like she does in the photo.

  Afterward, amid the grief, a modicum of relief eventually rose in me that she was finally released from the burdens of her own misfiring brain. In the photo, there still seemed to be a small glint of hope and happiness in her blue eyes. I had a hard time recalling that spark as the years piled up, her depression crushing her—each year comprised of one weighted day stacking upon the next.

  Below the picture, I found what I was looking for: an old dog collar, black with white paw prints traveling down the length of it. It had a plastic clasping mechanism, just as I remembered. I pulled it out carefully and inspected it. I put it to my nose and took a whiff, half expecting to smell the dried weed and horse-hide scent of dog fur, but it only smelled like the cardboard it had been kept in all these years.

  I could still picture him—a scruffy tan-and-white pathetic thing with droopy ears that wanted to stand up like a German shepherd’s, but folded and fell sideways part of the way up. Adam and I had been walking home from school and stopped at the local park on the way and played for a while. It was winter, so the playground was deserted, and out of nowhere, the dog appeared, skinny and unkempt. Adam went to it, saying he was lost and that we should catch him, so we tried. We called him, but he was jumpy, and ran when we got close.

  “I have an idea,” Adam said. “I’ve got some money that I was supposed to give to the office for a field trip, but I didn’t. Let’s go to the hardware store.” He pointed south, where we knew one was several blocks down. “We can get a collar and a leash, and I know they have dog treats there, because I’ve seen ’em on the counter.”

  Adam took off running without even waiting for my reply and I followed, my small legs pumping faster and faster to try to catch him and my lungs sucking in the frigid air. When we came out of the store, the dog wasn’t far away. He had followed us. We held the treats out for him, grabbed him, and slipped the collar on him.

  I don’t know why I kept the collar when I packed my things to move away for college. It wasn’t anything special really. We didn’t even get to keep the dog. We had brought him home, walking him and stopping to pat the top of his head and tell him that he was a good boy. Adam had already picked out a name by the time we got to our driveway. Reggie—that’s what he said he wanted to call him. And when I said, You know dad won’t let us keep him, Adam had frowned and gotten angry. Yes he will; he’ll have to. The poor thing needs a home.

  But Dad came marching right out before we even got to the front door, stumbling slightly with half a bag already on him. He wagged his finger back and forth at us, “Oh no, you don’t. Whatever you boys are thinking, you can forget it.”

  “But, please, Dad,” Adam had whined. “He’s really good, and Monty and I will take care of him.”

  “Yeah, right you will.” He’d laughed. “A dog, no goddamned way.” The swearing came out more when he had had a few.

  “But, please, Dad. Please.” Adam elbowed me hard in the ribs to chime in, so I did.

  “Please, please, Dad. We’ll take care of him. We will, really.”

  “Yeah, right. You’ll buy him dog food, walk him, and clean his shit out of the yard?”

  “We already bought him a collar and leash,” Adam said.

  “With what? You use the money I gave you this morning for that?”

  Adam looked down.

  “Christ,” he mumbled. “Can’t trust
you with anything.”

  “Can’t we please keep him, Dad? We really will take care of him.”

  “What are you? Crazy? Can’t you see it’s way too much? Shit, your mom, she can’t even take care of the two of you.” He gestured meanly at us. “Can’t even take care of herself, can’t even take the medicine the doctors give her,” he said loudly. “How’s she supposed to handle a damn dog, for Christ’s sake.”

  Both Adam and I said nothing, just stared at him.

  He shook his head when he realized what he’d said, maybe had seen the expressions on our faces, and looked at the ground as if he recognized that he’d shared too much, even if what he was saying wasn’t anything we didn’t already know. Can’t even take care of herself. But to hear it from him—that was a different matter. We were six and ten years old.

  “Tell you what, we’ll keep him tonight.” He looked back at us. “But tomorrow he goes to the shelter. Understand?”

  Adam wouldn’t reply, but I said, “Yes, sir,” and Adam glared at me for doing so.

  That night, Adam and I doted on the dog. We called him Reggie anyway and walked him around the block several times out in the cold after Dad made some mac and cheese. I took him in to show Mom—thought petting him might make her smile—but she was stone-asleep and wouldn’t wake. Reggie slept on Adam’s bed at his feet and the next morning we got up early on that Saturday and took him out and fed him part of our ham and eggs. Mom had gotten up and made us breakfast and she did smile at the dog, thought he was cute, she had said. But Dad wouldn’t listen to Adam’s pleas when he stated that, See, even Mom likes him. Eventually, with Dad and Adam arguing, we put a quivering Reggie in the car and took him to the animal shelter. Adam wouldn’t speak to Dad for days.

  Still kneeling over the box, I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket and dropped the collar in it. I knew why I had kept it; it was the last time I remembered my brother being human. “Game on, Adam,” I whispered into the dim basement, then let out a big, drawn-out sigh. I petted Ellis one more time, stood up and left Lara’s house.

  When I got to my car, I called Gretchen and asked her to run fingerprints for me on all the box traps that Wolfie had used in the South Fork area. Sam Ward had gathered them for me and Ken would deliver them.

  “Not you?” she asked when I told her that Ken would swing by with them later in the afternoon.

  “No, as much as I’d like to see your gorgeous smile, I’m a little too busy,” I said, but I felt relieved that she’d asked.

  “How many elimination prints do you think we’ll have to run?”

  “Well, there’s Sedgewick, Pritchard, Ward, Kaufland, and Bowman. Those are the only researchers who have handled them.”

  “Okay,” Gretchen said. “I’ll see if I can get my latent print examiner to put a rush on it.”

  “I’d greatly appreciate it. And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve got another item I want you to run prints on. I’ll send it with Ken. The item’s over twenty years old, but it’s been well kept. It should have two sets on it. One will be an elimination set: mine.”

  40

  * * *

  IT WAS TWO weeks into the investigation, and Ken and I finally met Rick Phrimmer, assistant superintendent of Glacier National Park, for lunch at the West Glacier Café. Personally I had the feeling it was a waste of our time. We went because Dr. Pritchard had thrown out our own assistant super’s name, Rick Phrimmer, as someone potentially unhappy with Wolfie because his wife and Wolfie dated years ago. Apparently, Phrimmer felt he came in as second choice. I wasn’t considering him a real suspect, but if I wanted to be thorough, I needed to follow up on the information.

  I thought about sending Ken by himself, but I knew that was a copout, unfair to Ken, and totally not my style. I was getting better at delegating and not feeling the need to do everything myself, but if I needed to question one of our own higher-ups, I had to do the dirty work.

  Phrimmer had been in DC arguing against cutbacks of federal funds for the national parks and had just returned the day before and agreed to meet. He had a beak of a nose and a full mane of reddish-brown hair, giving him the appearance of more the artistic type than rugged outdoorsman, but both Ken and I knew that Phrimmer probably spent more time at a desk and in council meetings than out in the field anyway.

  We ordered from Carol, who was happy to see me, telling me that I hadn’t been in enough lately. I told her I’d been busy, but planned to get back to my more regular eating schedule soon. When she sashayed back to the kitchen, I turned to Rick. His eyes were yellowed and bloodshot, and he looked tired.

  “Long trip?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, always a pain in the ass to hit DC. It’s all about the economy and jobs right now. No one wants to hear about our precious wild lands, about the air we breathe, about the complexities of our planet. It’s all about cuts, cuts, cuts. So yeah, I’m a little jet-lagged and grumpy. But what’s this about? What do you need from me for your investigation?”

  “Just some general stuff. Did you know Sedgewick?”

  “Yeah, yeah, of course I did. All of us knew Wolfie around here.”

  “Were you involved in any way with his research?”

  “Me?” Phrimmer rubbed his eyes as he considered the question. “Sorry,” he said. “Not much sleep the past few days,” he reiterated, then added, “Me involved?”

  “In terms of press, administrative funding, or anything?”

  “A little. I mean, I discuss all of our projects at length with a lot of people when I’m in DC and elsewhere, but especially in DC. The wolverine project is an important keystone study to present to politicians. Makes them get how crucial Glacier is that it’s one of the few places left where you can find such a special animal that so readily exemplifies how the loss of our snowfields affects animals, and in general, upsets entire ecosystems. Plus I’ve had discussions with NRDC to help coordinate efforts for the park studies. But mostly, no, I don’t have a lot to do with the actual program. Wolfie and Sam and all their other helpers did a pretty good job of keeping a tight ship.”

  “So you were actually interested in keeping the studies going?”

  “It’s complicated. There’s only so much money to go around. We’re forced to prioritize what we fund. But in general, yes, I’d say the wolverine studies have been a priority.”

  “It was my understanding that you weren’t interested in continuing the studies.”

  “Whoever you heard that from, it’s not true.” He stared at me blankly.

  “Did you like him? Get along?”

  “Me and Wolfie? What does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. I heard that your wife used to date him at some point.”

  “Some point is right.” He looked at me incredulously. “Some point long ago.”

  “I figured. Just asking. It can be a very small world around these parts.”

  “Yeah, it can. And quite frankly, I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’m shocked that you would even bring something so trivial up.” He pulled his chin in.

  “Just covering all territory.” I cleared my throat. “Did you know Mark Phillips?” I plowed ahead, changing the subject at the risk of irritating him further.

  He laughed with disbelief. “I knew that the park had contracted Phillips to do some mapping projects, but I didn’t know him well. Maybe met him once or twice around at some function or other.” He scratched his scalp and looked up. “Maybe it was the spring for a Glacier fundraiser at McDonald Lodge. That’s where I think I was first introduced to him. And, no, my wife did not date anyone that Phillips was involved with. At least, not to my knowledge. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He stood up and threw some cash on the table. “I have a lot of paperwork to do.”

  I looked at Ken, who had a closed-lip smile on his face. “Nice try,” he said.

  I nodded. “A waste of time maybe, but necessary.”

  • • •

  Since
I seemed to be chasing lost causes, I went to see my dad even though he’s not easy to talk to, complains a lot, and sees no reason to take any advice, even if it might help him or make him feel better. But it’s my nature to not let things just sit and plague my conscience, and Adam had mentioned that Dad had thrown his back out. Basically, I’d end up guilty as hell no matter what I told myself if I didn’t eventually check on him.

  My dad lived in the far eastern part of the valley in the foothills in a small timber-framed house he’d built after my mom died with the remains of the money he made from selling his construction company, Harris Construction. Eventually, he struck up a relationship with a woman named Tracy whom he met online and she moved in with the rest of her family—her thirtysomething pot-smoking, on-disability son, his wife, and their two children, a boy diagnosed with ADHD on Ritalin, and a younger girl named Gracie. My father never could say no to a woman, and when Tracy said her kids and grandkids needed a place to stay for just a month or two, he opened his arms and his house. Later, when a month or two extended to a year, he couldn’t broach the subject of kicking them out without thoroughly pissing Tracy off. And I couldn’t broach the subject of how things would be better if he didn’t enable them and made them go make their own way in the world without pissing him off thoroughly. But my father was chronically unhappy and that gave him an excuse to continue drinking.

  Tracy, who perpetually smelled like cigarette smoke, handed me a beer to take over to my dad who was propped up in a La-Z-Boy recliner with an extra pillow or two behind his back. She offered me one too, calling me honey and setting her hand on the small of my back. It made me cringe. She was always hugging me a little too long, and when she kissed my cheek hello or good-bye, her lips would always aim for the corner of my mouth even as I tried to turn my head. It made me feel ridiculous and like a little boy squirming away.