The McCaskil who held the rifle and the flashlight was a different man than the shifty Lothario Anna remembered. Days alone in the wilderness had had an adverse effect on the city boy. His beard was rough, his hair matted and spiky by turns, his clothes dirty. The biggest change was the eyes. McCaskil was scared, scared to the point of unreason. Even in the dim backwash of the flashlight Anna could see his irises were entirely ringed in white as his facial muscles pulled the lids away. Whatever edge he'd been running toward when he came to Glacier, McCaskil had been pushed over it.
A crazy man, a scared crazy man, with a rifle and hostages. In law enforcement this was what was referred to as a worst-case scenario.
"Out," McCaskil cried in a voice ugly with fear. He swung the rifle toward Rory and Joan, and Anna raised her hands, stepped forward. She never made it into the light. McCaskil was wheeling, screaming, the flashlight raking the trees. He'd not seen her.
"I'm not going to hurt him." His voice became wheedling as he turned. Silence followed, deepened by the darkness and the trees. "Balthazar's mine!" he shrieked and Anna flinched. Whomever he shouted for, it wasn't her. Joan and Rory must have told him they were alone. Anna blessed them for their courage and began creeping around the circle. McCaskil was beyond negotiation even if she'd had anything to negotiate with. Running away was the best option. With the cover of night she could do it easily if she left Joan and Rory.
A gut-numbing roar froze the cowardly thoughts; bear- thebear- close by. McCaskil screamed high and shrill, and the rifle at his side fired, the glare of the muzzle harsh and bright and then gone, leaving a red wound seared across Anna's night vision.
"I'll kill them. You'll have killed them," he screamed into the night. "Like you killed that Van Slyke woman. Butcher. I'll do it."
A great gush of terror brought the contents of Anna's stomach into her throat and she had to fight to keep from retching. The slicer of faces was somewhere in the darkness with her. He, and a great bear that seemed to have an agenda of its own.
Run away, run away,she thought and moved to the next tree, closer to Joan and Rory.
The two of them sat shoulder to shoulder about fifteen feet from the mad McCaskil. Ranting, a second round fired, the thrashing of his booted feet as he made short, aborted dashes at sounds only he could hear, covered the noise Anna made as she moved.
The west-facing slope was dryer than the valleys, and there was little undergrowth, not much in the way of cover but shadow and luck. Behind Rory and Joan, several yards in the woods, Anna parked herself in the shelter of a tree that she hoped was wide enough to hide her should McCaskil's light come back around. Her shirt was gray, her shorts green- all to the good-but in the near-perfect darkness under the pines, should light touch on her bare arms, her legs or her face, they would shine like beacons.
Making herself small in mind if not in body, she wriggled out of her day pack and set it squarely in front of her where probing light would not fire its burgundy hue in a dun and green landscape. Working by feel, Anna groped through it. Her breath was coming in short shallow gasps, audible, panicked. Her scalp was tingling and she was losing sensation in her hands and feet. Hyperventilating,she warned herself. Too scared.Lifting the pack to her face in lieu of the traditional paper sack, she breathed into it, then out. The smells of her short history in Glacier were all there: peanut butter, skunk, sweat, fish guts, grease, dust. The skin on her head loosened, her heart ceased to pound in her ears, her fingers began to feel like fingers. Ten breaths more, counted out over a brief eternity, and she put the pack down again. In her hand were the wire cutters, quicker and more sure than a Swiss army knife dulled from years of promiscuous use.
The light flew erratically past. She waited a moment for the sound of a rifle shot and the sudden blasting away of an exposed elbow or knee, but she'd not been spotted. Further out into the trees, drowned in the impossible ink of a woodland night, she heard the stealthy sound of padded feet moving over duff.
Nothing she could do about that. She pushed it from her mind.
A quick peek let her know McCaskil had turned again and faced away from her. He stopped shouting. In a voice dead calm and more frightening because of it, he spoke to the darkness, "In one minute I will kill the boy. You can save him. Balthazar's life for the boy's. One minute." He began counting down in a loud voice.
Out of the frying pan, Anna said to herself and rolled from the cover of her tree. Ignoring the burst of pain in her injured knee, she moved as rapidly as possible toward the others. In seconds she knelt behind Rory. "Not a sound," she hissed in his ear. She showed him the wire cutters and he understood. Quickly and quietly, he swung his feet around.
Joan's head turned. Without light Anna could not read her expression. She trusted in Joan's good sense. What she could not know was how much of it fear had eaten away. As there was nothing to be done to reassure either the researcher or herself, Anna ignored her.
Closing her mind to the possibilities, Anna felt at Rory's ankles. Thin, hard plastic; McCaskil had bound his prisoners with the disposable cuffs policemen carry as spares. Clearly he'd come prepared. Though virtually impossible to break, he couldn't have picked anything more vulnerable to fence pliers, and Anna was grateful.
"Twenty-nine," McCaskil called. "Twenty-eight."
Snip, snip.
Anna clipped a bit of Rory's flesh along with the plastic and he hollered, "Ouch!" The wretched rotten boy actually said ouch. "Sorry," he whispered too late.
"He's turning," Joan hissed.
"Run," Anna said and pushed Rory to his feet, "run!" She shoved at unidentified bits of boy anatomy as she scrambled to her feet to follow.
A hailstorm of words, shrieked and screamed from what sounded like the throats of a multitude of demons, rained down. McCaskil's threats, Rory's squeaks, Joan's exhortations and Anna's own sailor-like vocabulary of meaningless obscenities. McCaskil's flashlight shivered and snapped. In her mind Anna heard Teddy Pinson, an old college friend, intone, " 'The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!' "
Rory disappeared in darkness followed by a gunshot close and loud, a blow on Anna's eardrums. Cutting through trauma-induced deafness came a scream. Anna's mind folded down in confusion. The metallic swallowing sound of a bolt-action rifle and another round was chambered. Anna'd fallen. Had she been shot and screamed? Had the bullet found Rory in the dark? Before enough time had elapsed to draw a full breath, Anna knew she'd not been hit. Her knee had given out as she'd lunged for the cover of the woods.
"No!"
That was Joan. Anna rolled and the butt of McCaskil's rifle pounded down, not the killing blow to the back of the head he'd intended, but a glancing strike to the shoulder that made Anna cry out.
McCaskil had thrown aside the flashlight. The beam ran along the ground catching up the rust of the needles, illuminating the man's booted feet. Anna bunched up her weight on her left hip and kicked out. The sole of her boot connected with McCaskil's ankle. Fierce pain shot up from her bad knee but she scarcely felt it. McCaskil went down on one knee.
Writhing across the slippery bed of needles, as single-minded as a sidewinder, Anna struck out again, connecting this time with his shin. The man bellowed in rage and fell back on butt and heels. No time to rise and shine. Knowing she had more strength in her legs than her upper body, Anna propelled herself after him. Crablike, snakelike, scuttling like a scorpion, hoping like any low and little thing to strike quickly enough and with enough venom to survive one more day.
McCaskil retreated. He hit the fallen flashlight and the beam spun, a drunken beacon, then stopped, spotlighting the two of them. McCaskil had the thirty-ought-six, a Weatherby, Anna noted from habit, raised to his shoulder, the barrel pointed between his knees past the toes of his boots at her face. Even a madman would not miss at this range.
"Easy, Bill. You're okay, Bill. It won't work. Rory's gone; a witness. You can't do it, Bill. Give it up, Bill."
Joan was talking: smooth, calming as if to a wounded and wild beast. She was doing, saying all the right things, using the man's name, trying to bring him back to himself.
It was too late. Whatever indicates reason, an indefinable inner light in the eye, had gone out in Bill McCaskil. Shadows scraped up from the cockeyed light, making of his nose a mountain that eclipsed one side of his face from the piecemeal sun. His upper lip, long, well formed, the skin darkened with a week's growth of beard, curled up exposing teeth that shone white and feral. With that small movement McCaskil's face ceased to be human and Anna knew he was going to kill her. She did not want Bill McCaskil's to be the face that went with her into eternity. She turned her head, looked at Joan Rand.
A roar shattered the tableau, so close, so visceral, the wild rage of the world and of the mind gathered into a sound so dark and awful, the night itself seemed to have turned on them. Mingling with it were terrible screams and the hopeless sound of a David being torn to pieces by a Goliath of fur and fury.
"Rory!" Joan cried.
McCaskil jumped. The rifle barrel moved an inch off center. Anna grabbed the barrel and kicked at his knee. Bones loosened by the thunder of the bear, McCaskil let go. Anna yanked the rifle from his nerveless fingers. Dragging it, she crawled away in an undignified but necessary retreat. Close fighting was not for the small of frame.
The horrible roaring deepened, intensified, and Anna found herself crouched, gun across her knees like a frightened hillbilly. Breathing past the primal terror, she forced herself to her feet, braced her back against a tree to stop her shaking and to take the weight off her weak knee. McCaskil made no attempt to rise, to run, to finish killing Anna or to be killed by her.
The roaring went on and on pinning him to the ground, Anna to the tree and Joan to the tiny patch of earth her bonds had made her home for too long.
The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. Anna's arms were quivering, the rifle hard to hold. Thin whimpering percolated through the new-made stillness: hers, McCaskil's, Rory's, Joan's- it was impossible to tell.
The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. Anna leveled the Weatherby at the manifestation and waited somewhere beyond fear, just this side of insanity.
Ripples of gold unsettled the shadow, catching the imperfect light of the flash. Out of the woods padded the great grizzly, beside him the crying boy with the smile of a saint. On the bear's other side walked Rory, the same Rory whose screams had indicated he was snack food.
The spinning effervescence of a fairy tale snatched up Anna's brain. This bear was with them, of them, glittering gold protector of babes lost in the woods. A dozen stories of wild things become human, princes enchanted, curses fulfilled, were physically manifest and Anna was ensorcelled, charmed, turned to wood and bark like a recalcitrant wood nymph. Her limbs could not move. Her voice had locked itself away deep in her throat.
"Don't shoot him," the boy said, as if Anna could have destroyed that much beauty even to save her own worthless hide. "His name is Balthazar."
"How do you do?" Anna croaked idiotically. To her amazement the bear raised a single huge paw to shake and she laughed, sounding, at least in her ears, a little on the hysterical side.
Recovering from the bear theatrics-given that Rory's skin was still whole and he was in it, that's what the roaring must have been-McCaskil crawled toward the enclosing ring of darkness. The bear's enormous head swung toward him and an echo of the bone-melting roar rumbled in his chest.
"Keep that goddamn bear off me," McCaskil cried, his voice ragged from yelling.
"Balthazar doesn't like him," Geoffrey said. "When we were little he used to tease us something awful."
We. The boy and the great bear had grown up together. Staggered by the unreality of the scene, Anna found herself wondering if they were brothers.
Enough of her training survived this onslaught of otherworldliness that she continued to watch McCaskil with one eye and half of a reeling brain. He feared Balthazar more than he feared her or the Weatherby.
"You can't let that bear come after me," he said. "That's illegal."
Anna said nothing. Should the bear eat William McCaskil, her greatest concern would be for the animal's digestion.
Her head hurt, her knee was killing her, she was very tired. Overriding these fleeting discomforts was a bear of legend not ten feet from her. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, play with him, listen to the stories he might tell. It crossed her mind to let McCaskil go. His nerves shot, his rifle taken, he was of little threat to a party of five souls, particularly when one of them weighed over a thousand pounds and came from the factory equipped with an astonishing arsenal of edged weapons.
Ruick would pick McCaskil up in the frontcountry or the Montana state police would nail him eventually. Maniac turned craven, the man actually looked rather pathetic oozing toward the woods and temporary freedom. Being captured by a crippled-up lady ranger would only add to his humiliation.
That thought brought with it the tug of petty revenge that pulled Anna back to a sense of duty. "Stay," she ordered McCaskil.
"You can't shoot a man if he runs. Not unless he's a threat to life. I read that," McCaskil said, but he made no move to test the theory.
"You qualify," Anna said flatly. McCaskil had given up. Anna did not think she was fooled. She'd seen it enough times: the deflation as the tension of keeping up the fight, or the lie, or the act was given over. Still, she did not lower her guard. Cleverer people than she had been tricked, and died because of it.
Rory found the wire cutters and freed Joan. Joan held the flashlight and Anna the rifle while McCaskil bound his own hands and feet with more of the plastic disposable cuffs Geoffrey found in his pack. Balthazar, the great golden bear, sat on huge haunches, ancient eyes watching like a primitive god.
The sense of unreality was such Anna felt giddy and could not stop herself from being flippant and cracking jokes. Tension still on but terror fading, the others, with the exception of William McCaskil, caught her mood and the dark between the trees took on a mad-tea-party feel.
Checking McCaskil's bonds, Anna had to force her discipline, school her mind to pay attention to detail, to take seriously the business of catching and keeping a felon.
When their makeshift camp had been made as safe as plastic ties could make it, Joan righted McCaskil's stove and boiled water for hot drinks. Anna would have traded her boots for a good dollop of brandy to give her tea backbone but was grateful for the beverage even without it.
Given the homely activity of serving tea and cocoa, normalcy might have been expected to return but for the fact that a huge bear sat among them, his dark eyes following their puny movements, his pale golden belly round and Buddha-like under paws the size of serving platters.
We'll talk," Anna said when the rushing of the stove was silenced and she'd once again checked on McCaskil, cuffed and chained to a tree with the links that usually served as Balthazar's lead.
"Your name is not Mickleson-Nicholson, but Geoffrey Micou, isn't that right?" she asked.
The boy sat with his arms around his knees looking weary and relieved and terribly sad. He wasn't as old as Rory, maybe fifteen. The silky brown hair was greasy, flattened against his skull by a ball cap that Balthazar had gotten hold of and was in the process of dismembering with delicate nips of his inch-long canines.
"I'm Geoffrey Micou. I just-just made up that other name."
"Carl G. Micou was your dad?" Anna asked and he looked surprised. The line about old age and treachery winning every time came to her mind. Geoffrey was at an age where he could still believe each and every one of his thoughts was new, unique to the world. He had yet to learn that all the stories have already been told. What remains is to choose the story one likes best and live that.
"We found your truck and trailer-your dad's truck-" Anna explained. "The tags were registered in the name of Carl Micou."
"Oh." Geoffrey sounded disappointed, magic losing its charm once the trick is explained. "That was what we used to move Balthazar. Dad had it made over."
"I know," Anna said. "The ranger found omnivore food in it." She didn't add that, until recently, they hadn't known it was omnivore food. It served her purposes to appear omniscient. Besides, it was fun.
"He fucking stole him." McCaskil dripped his acid into the circle. "That bear's mine."
Joan turned to him. In lieu of her traditional campfire candle, they had put McCaskil's flashlight butt-down in their midst, needing the security of watching their prisoner and, for Anna at least, the unending awe of watching the bear. In the dim fallout, Joan's face was hard, its customary softness hidden away from the man chained to the tree.
"Don't talk," she said. "We don't want to talk to you. We don't care what you think or feel." Her voice was so devoid of humanity Anna was made cold. McCaskil must have jumped way over onto Joan's bad side when he took a shot at Rory.
McCaskil subsided.
"I did steal him," Geoffrey said with a fond look at his monolithic companion. "Nobody should own a bear like Balthazar. He's not just a thing."
"You're my map boy, aren't you?" Joan asked.
Geoffrey blinked a few times, long dark lashes settling like feathers below wide-set hazel eyes. Then the sense of what she was asking came to him. "Yes, ma'am. I thought if I knew where the food was, I could take Balthazar there and teach him to eat it."
"Reintroduce him to the wild," Anna said, thinking of the looting of glacier lilies, the mining of cutworm moths. "Why the park? There're plenty of places in Canada and Alaska."
"You don't let anybody shoot them in the park," Geoffrey said simply.
"Ah." The logic was indisputable. One does not take a friend to live where murderers are waiting to take his life.
"Why didn't you ask for help?" Years of motherhood and carrying pain for children ached in Joan's voice.
"You'd've said no," Geoffrey answered. "Everybody would have said no."
Neither Anna nor Joan was naive-or dishonest-enough to argue with him. The bear belonged to somebody else. Geoffrey was a kid. He would have been blown off on several accounts.
"That bear's my property," McCaskil felt bound to pipe up. Reassured by the company of others, safe from the bear and, in a strange way, safe within his bonds from the responsibility for decision or action, William McCaskil was recovering his equilibrium. Anna liked him better mute and cowering.
"Can't have pets where you'll be living for the next fifty years," she said.
Anna guessed the bear really did belong to William McCaskil if it was legally obtained as a cub. The brochure had listed the owners of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as George and Suzanne Fetterman. McCaskil had been born to a woman named Suzanne. Anna's bet was Fetterman was Suzanne's second husband, McCaskil's stepfather. Hence the use of Fetterman as an alias. He'd have been grown when Geoffrey was young but evidently visited Mom often enough to torment a little boy and a little bear. McCaskil must have inherited Adventure Trails when old man Fetterman died.
The thought process rippled quickly through Anna's mind. It could be verified easily enough. At present she chose not to speak of it. She didn't wish to give William McCaskil the right of anything.
"Mr. McCaskil was going to sell Balthazar," Geoffrey said.
"I found a home for him, a nice ranch in British Columbia where he would roam free," McCaskil said virtuously.
"Boone and Crockett," Anna snapped. "Balthazar would have been shot as a wild bear by some slob hunter for a trophy. What were they offering? A hundred thousand? Two? That must've seemed a fortune to a small-time fraud like you. Or could you get more because Balthazar would stand and roar on cue, add to the drama? Even charge and attack without any real risk to the hunter. You're ason-of-a-bitch, McCaskil. Be nice and shut up or you will be shot trying to escape." As a rule, Anna refrained from abusing prisoners in her custody. The venom she poured out on McCaskil was tied directly into the loss and outrage she felt looking across the flashlight at the quiet miracle eating a red ball cap and thinking of him destroyed for the sake of a little entertainment and bragging rights.
"Mr. McCaskil told me that's what he was going to do," Geoffrey said. "He said I could visit Balthazar's head after it was on somebody's wall. He said that to me. That's when I took Balthazar. I wrote you from the road," he told Joan. "I've got a laptop and a cell phone back where my stuff's at."
"Does the bear-Balthazar-do whatever you say?" Rory spoke for the first time. Anna covered her mouth to hide her smile. The envy was heavy in Rory's voice. What boy, what person of any age or gender, wouldn't want a twelve-hundred-pound omnivore as friend and backup?
"Pretty much," Geoffrey said. "My dad was Mr. Fetterman's animal curator. They got Balthazar when he was really tiny and I was about ten. We grew up together and I helped Dad train him and we'd do shows together. People liked seeing us, a bear and a little boy. After Dad died, Mr. Fetterman kept me on. I lived in his wife's old sewing room-Mrs. Fetterman had been dead a year or so before Dad went. I took over with Balthazar. He's a trained bear but he's not a pet," he warned and Anna noted he shot her as severe a glance as he did Rory. "He's a wild animal. They've got their own rules and you can't go around breaking them. Balthazar can't be scared or hurt or teased. He doesn't understand it. That's why he hates Mr. McCaskil so much. When he smells him he knows something bad is happening and he goes back to bear rules to save himself."
"Fucking menace," McCaskil growled. Balthazar growled back and McCaskil shut up. "How do you tell him what to do?" Rory asked. "Lots of ways. He responds to a few verbal commands.
He'll sit down and play dead to whistles. Some tricks he taught himself and just does them for fun when he's happy. He likes to juggle-kind of play catch really-with pinecones. Sometimes he just starts in to dance even when there's no music."
"I guess I'll pay closer attention to bizarre bear management reports in the future," Joan said, and Anna laughed.
Geoffrey went on, "For the show, Dad taught him to growl and stand tall and charge by different numbers of raps on pieces of wood. He picked the wood because the noise was natural and it would seem more real."
"We found one of your clacking sticks," Anna said. "After the night you and Balthazar tore up our camp."
Geoffrey looked away, fixing his eyes on the flashlight between them. "I'm sorry about that. I just wanted you to leave. Balthazar got into some kind of trap thing. A tree with wire around. It took me fifteen minutes to get him to leave. He'd got hold of a little thing that smelled like cherry candy up in the little tree and wouldn't stop playing with it, I figured it was one of those traps you'd told me about that day we met. I was afraid you'd find out somehow."
"Ah," Joan said. "And here I blamed the last team for hanging the love scent too low. Who could know?" She smiled.
Geoffrey continued with his story, "I was trying to teach Balthazar to dig lilies around there. We'd tried other places but there were other bears and they scared him. I thought if we did that-you know, to your camp-you'd be scared away."
Joan reached out. She must have thought better of touching Geoffrey because her hand stopped partway. "You can't scare away researchers by letting them know there's a subject in the neighborhood," she said.
"I didn't know that then."
Joan boiled more water. More hot drinks were made. Out of a sense of duty, Anna made a cup of cocoa for McCaskil. When they'd settled again, she said to Geoffrey Micou, "Why don't you tell us about Balthazar killing that woman?"
Rory gasped audibly. McCaskil laughed. "They're going to shoot that killer bear," he said. "He'd've been better off with me. Maybe he'd've run off and lived." Geoffrey covered his face with both hands, a gesture both theatrical and genuine.
"Anna!" Joan scolded her for insensitivity. To Rory she said, "Are you okay with this?"
Anna had forgotten the dead woman was Rory's stepmother. Guilt nudged her but curiosity was stronger and she didn't withdraw the request.
"I'm okay with it," Rory said. Joan looked at him hard trying to see past strange shadows and high school bravado. Apparently she was satisfied.
"The woman who died was Rory's stepmother," she explained to Geoffrey.
The hands over the boy's face crawled up into his hair to become fists, strands of brown spiking out between the fingers. Whatever Micou felt floated to the surface where it could be easily seen by anyone with eyes. Perhaps growing up brother to a bear had denied him humanity's greatest defensive weapon: the lie.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." The words squeezed out through a throat full of tears.
"It's okay," the older boy said. "I've got my dad."
Fleetingly Anna wished Lester Van Slyke had been there to hear Rory say that. Not that Lester deserved it. Realistically it would probably not be long before he compromised his son's respect with another selfassassinating relationship.
"Go on," Anna said.
"Go ahead with your story," Joan repeated, with more gentleness and better results.
"Balthazar and me had done your camp to scare you away. I knew you'd gone off," he said to Rory. "When Balthazar smashed your tent it rolled like a tumbleweed and we knew you weren't in it. That's why I let him play with it. We wouldn't have hurt anybody. Anyway, afterward we were both wired and shaky and ran back to the trail. I thought we should get a ways away before we hid out. We couldn't be anywhere there were people when it got light. Hide out till you guys left and we could come back for the lilies.
"The lady was coming down the trail just as it was getting light and I dove for cover and started whistling for Balthazar but he was up tall and sniffing and growling like she was some big scary something. He's used to people. I've only see him do that when-"
"When Mr. McCaskil is around?" Anna asked.
"That's right. He's scared of him."
"This lady was wearing Bill McCaskil's coat," Anna said. "She took it from his tent before she started out that morning."
"Stupid slut," McCaskil said.
"Watch it," Anna retorted.
"That's it then." Geoffrey turned to Balthazar. "I was worried about you," he told the bear. To the people waiting he said, "This whole thing has been stressful for Balthazar. I mean, I'd never been out of Florida but Balthazar's never been anywhere. The other bears scare him. Deer scare him. He almost ran off that cliff up by the army moth place. He's never been in a world that had cliffs in its floor. I was afraid maybe it was too much for him He'd been off his feed and some of his hair fell out. I thought maybe when he saw that lady he had a nervous breakdown. You're okay, pal," he said to his friend. "She was just wearing Mr. McCaskil's coat."
Balthazar exonerated, he turned back to his human audience. "She started taking flash pictures, pop, pop, pop. He's used to pictures but I think in the low light like that and him being already upset and all-I don't know, maybe it blinded him or something. He started roaring and walking toward her on his hind legs. I know by now Balth isn't himself and I'm out yelling and whistling like mad. This lady keeps popping and getting closer and I'm yelling for her to stop and Balth to stop and nobody's listening to me. Then Balth gets almost on top of her and she pulls out a little can like that stuff you had." Geoffrey nodded at Anna. "She squirted him and he just went nuts-he swung and her head snapped over. Way over. God."
His hands came down out of his hair where they'd been pulling at it during the telling and covered his face again.
The riddle "What was soft enough not to cut but could he swung with enough force to sever a woman's spinal cord" was answered.
"But her face was cut off-" Rory began.
Geoffrey started to cry, silently, the tears working their way through his fingers to paint pale tracks in the grime on the back of his hands.
Anna quieted Rory with a gesture. Joan patted him on the knee to let him know she didn't mean to be so abrupt.
"Balthazar's claws left marks on her face," Anna said.
Geoffrey nodded. "You'd've come looking for a killer bear. You'd've found us."
For a minute Anna sat sipping tea already grown cold. A fifteen-year-old boy dragging the body into hiding then cutting away the flesh, probably with his pocket knife, weeping as he wept now at the memory of it. She doubted Timmy would have gone half the distance for Lassie.
"You put the-ah-clawed pieces in a tree after."
"I didn't want anybody to see or you'd know but I was afraid if I buried it another bear might dig it up. You know, get a taste for it. Then get himself into trouble."
Geoffrey recovered from the tears. Anna suspected his life at Fetterman's Adventure Trails had had its share of life and death. He'd get over Carolyn's. He scrubbed his face until the tears had been smeared around.
"You took her water bottle and the film," Anna said. "I can understand the film, why the water?"
"I didn't mean to. It had fallen out of her pack on the trail. I found it after. I didn't want to-to go back. So I took it. Then when I saw him- you, Rory-and I knew you'd run off without anything. I left it by you to drink."
"You took my sweatshirt," Rory said, sounding more honored than offended.
"I'm sorry," Geoffrey said. "My shirt had stuff on it. Blood. And I'd tore it up to make a rope so I could hang the bag with the… you know. I thought if hikers caught sight of me with no shirt they'd remember me."
"You left me water, too," Anna said. "Up on Cathedral Peak after Mr. McCaskil here tried to kill me."
Geoffrey nodded. "I'd read a person can live a long time without food but not without water. I'm sorry about the bottle. Balthazar got to playing with it. We'll buy you a new one."
He looked across the upward beam of light at Anna, his clear hazel eyes as old as stone.
"What will happen to Balthazar now?" he asked.
"Nothing bad," Anna promised.
"Hah." McCaskil.
"Nothing bad," she repeated. "I swear that on the worthless life our prisoner."