Possession (30 page)

"Did anybody find anything last night?" He knew no one had, or the ranger would have mentioned it.

"No—but they got started late. None of her gear's turned up—and that's good, I think. She did have a pack and a sleeping bag? You're sure?"

"Positive. I saw them packing up their truck."

"Good. That's a good sign."

How many times had he placated families with such

220

empty words? He was tainted by his own experience, and he had no guile to fool himself.

But she lived. Just as he had known that Danny no longer lived—long before that awful instant of discovery—he knew that Joanne was alive. There was something about the tree. When they left him alone again, he walked around and around it, studying the broken limbs, the bare spots where pine needles had been skinned off. The scuff along the trunk had come from something wide and flat—a human shoe, not claws. Someone had climbed, fifteen to twenty feet high, and clung there. And then come down. Not fallen down. Sidled down with handholds of needles, sliding feet cracking branches, sliding further. He found a place to start and climbed upward through the trunks and limbs slippery with wet snow. He had not climbed a tree in forty years, but he inched higher until he found a place where the marks on the pine stopped. He looked down and saw the spot where he'd retrieved the vomitus, a straight line below. He knew that it had been Joanne who had hidden here, terrorized into nausea.

It was an old technique. You put yourself in the victim's place and tried to see. He'd never gone as far as the dick in Seattle who talked to corpses in a conversational tone all the while he did a crime scene—but it was a way of going to the source. She had stood here. What was happening when she did?

He turned his head to look downtrail to where Danny had been, everything blanketed with white now. But the spot was hidden by a jutting back of the path. She might have heard the struggle, but she could not have seen it.

He turned too quickly the other way and felt a stinging scratch against his neck. A sharp little nubbin of forked wood and, in it—caught in it—two long strands of fine dark hair. It was hers; he knew he could put it under a scanning electron microscope and isolate it almost absolutely as hers. The top of her head would have extended to 22 1

the twig that scratched him. Her head came exactly to the point of his shoulder.

He leaned back against the thicker spur of the bisected "school marm" tree and tried to think. The branches directly in front of him blurred as he focused beyond them into the woods, catching a glimpse now and then of the searchers moving arms' length apart, their feet shuffling for something that might lie beneath the snow.

He blinked and his focus changed to close up. And he saw it. Green and black, so close to the tree's color that it was almost lost in protective coloration. An impaled triangle of fabric, checked, its threads drifting lazily in the wind.

He reached for it, mesmerized. He had never seen it before. That was the important thing. He had never seen it before. He had never seen the garment it had come from. Danny would not wear green; he found it unlucky. And it was a man's fabric, nothing that Joanne would have worn.

She had not been in this tree alone.

The baggies were below on the ground, stashed in his gear. He braced his back against the trunk so that both his hands were freed, and slid his pack of Marlboros loose from his inside pocket. He slipped the green plaid between the cellophane and paper pack on one side, and the strands of her hair on the other, and climbed down.

She wasn't here any longer, nowhere within the range of the men who searched, but if he told them that, they wouldn't believe him. He was not sure himself how he knew, so how could he convince them with a few strands of hair and a bit of rag?

Danny knew the answer. Somewhere in his disintegrating flesh lay the key to the puzzle.

Sam did not want to leave the mountain, but he could not stay. Danny lay waiting for him. He had no use here; he was the only observer who would know what to look for when they cut into Danny, and how to sort out the false truths.

Sam went down with the ranger in the helicopter, and the snow beneath them disappeared as they left the high elevations,

222

making the winter wilderness scene seem something he had only imagined. While he waited for Ernie to pick him up in the seaplane, Sam paced the Forest Service office.

"You talked to them the day they hiked in?" he asked the ranger, although he suspected he had asked it before.

"Not that morning. The day before when they got off the boat."

"You talk to anyone else that day?" "A lot of people. Let's see—that was the fourth. Right?" "Yeah—the Friday before the Labor Day weekend. How many people hiked in that day? No, let's look at the whole week before and through the weekend."

The ranger slid the ledger across the counter and Sam studied it, pages of unfamiliar names scrawled in a variety of handwriting, some of it almost illegible. The routes varied: Purple Creek Trail, Boulder Creek, War Creek, Rainbow Creek via McAlester, Rainbow Lake, and next to all but a very few of them, the check mark to show that the hiking parties had returned and signed in. "What if somebody just took off and didn't sign in?" "That happens. We don't like that because if somebody got into trouble, they'd be out of luck." "But it happens?"

"I'm sure it does. We can't stand by the trailheads and stamp their hands." "Can I have a sheet of paper?" The ranger handed him a tablet, and looked at him sharply. "What are you looking for?"

"I don't know." He ran his finger down the pages and copied the names with no check beside them. "Vincent party?"

"Oh—them. Let's see. Went up Boulder, transversed south and came back down Purple—over here. They come up once a month maybe." "O.K. Dr. Bonathan and son? No check here." "I know them too. They came back in Sunday night. Had dinner in the Lodge. Forgot to check in." 223

"Steven Curry?"

"He was going over to pick up the Pacific Trail. Young fellow, hippie type, looked like he could do it easily. Working his way up from California to Canada."

"What did he look like?"

"Little guy. Blond beard. Stocky. Smelled like a horse| barn."

"David Dwain?"

"I don't know. What does it say?"

"Rainbow Lake. Did you sign him in?"

"Lemme see. No, that's Ralph Boston's writing. One of' the summer hires."

"Can I talk to him?"

"He left Wednesday to go back east to start school."

"You never saw Dwain?"

"Nope. What are you thinking about?"

Sam equivocated. "He went up there Friday night. My friends went up on Saturday. He might have seen them—* might know something."

"He probably went on over Bridge Creek and into Twispi before they got there. You have a party leaving here even an half hour ahead of another party and they never see each other."

"I suppose so." Sam folded the sheet from the tablet and | slipped it into his jacket pocket. "I'm going down to i Wenatchee. Will you let me know the minute they find her? If you hear anything from Curry or Dwain or—anything— would you give a holler down to the sheriff's office iflj Wenatchee? I don't know where I'll be staying but I'll leave word there. You've got radio contact with them?"

"Yes." The ranger paused. "Is there anyone else I should notify? Any family of—of the Lindstroms?"

Shit. He'd forgotten Elizabeth Crowder. Waiting by her • phone in Natchitat, pacing and calling and calling and calling for three days. He hadn't thought of her. He hadn't even thought of calling the office.

"He's got nobody. She's got a mother. I'll call her from Wenatchee."

224

22

Joanne heard the thick lub-lub-lub of the helicopter's rotor blades long before Duane did. Submerged in his dense, healing sleep, he had seemed to drift in and out of awareness for most of the day, and she had watched over him. She was concerned that he might chill again; he slept so deeply, scarcely moving. She covered him with her own sleeping bag and fashioned a kind of windbreak of their packs between the boulders that already sheltered him. She was awkward with fires, not able to bring back the coals that had guttered and died during the long, long time they had made love, but it wouldn't matter until dusk. The sun was a steady heat in the pewter sky.

She could not get enough of touching him, and she found reasons to place her hands on him; she stroked his forehead free of wrinkles, and held his uninjured hand, her own so small by comparison, so pale against his callused brown palm. She was quite content to stay quietly beside him oblivious of the passage of hours, although she longed to have him waken again and respond to her. The time between dawn and full morning had seemed only minutes as they rolled and heaved together, moving without any definite stopping place from the first climax to the second and, for her, a third. She was tender inside from his thrusting, but hardly satiated. Her desire had seemed to grow with each consummation of the act, and she would have kept him inside her all of the day and into the night if she could have.

She had walked along the narrowed precipice over death, t it actually crumbling beneath her feet, and he had pulled her back. And now she had saved him, and she would fiep him safe. She could not imagine that she had doubted him. He had almost died for her. He had almost died for her. She rubbed his chest gently, but he didn't wake. She 225

rolled on her side and moved her thigh until it covered his. He smiled in his sleep and she traced his mouth with her finger. She couldn't tell if he was awake or gone someplace away from her; she was jealous, even of his sleeping, and lonely. She touched him and felt his penis flaccid and defenseless, a soft tube of flesh in her curled hand. She wanted him again. She stroked him, kneaded him, and felt him swell in her hand. He groaned, but his eyes were still shut away from her.

The sound of the helicopter brought her back to the j present. She listened with stopped breath until she recognized what the noise was. He had never told her exactly what it was that threatened their existence. But there was something. Some reason that he'd trained her to crawl on her belly through the weeds, something that demanded their : stealth and cunning. Something evil intent on destroying them. He'd promised he would teach her how to shoot the guns. That would make her feel safer, and it proved that he had forgiven her and that he trusted her.

She thought that she didn't deserve to be trusted, but it | was only a feeling. Because she could not remember what } she could not remember (and on and on into the black '. vortex), she had to move very carefully around the edges of '. it and ask no questions. He would insulate her from any memory that might torment her. He always had, but sometimes—and so queerly too—when she was the happiest, the most greedy in tasting of him, she was afraid and had to pull away from him until her terror eased.

There were several things that she could be totally sure of > now. No one else had ever loved her this much. No one else would ever love her this much. He would never leave her. He had told her those truths over and over and over until his words made a little rhyming hum, and she could hear ; melody behind them.

And whenever she grew frightened, he told her again.

She could not, of course, allow any harm to come to him. $

She lay beside him and heard the enemy in the sky j looking for them. She put her hand over his mouth so that '.

226

he could not cry out and give them away before he was fully awake, and then she placed her lips against his ear.

"Wake up."

His eyes snapped open and she felt his lungs expand and hold open against her breast.

"What is it?" His words were so muted that she read his lips more than heard.

"Something. A helicopter, I think. Listen."

"Did you see it?"

"No. The clouds came over just before I heard it. I think it's back on the other side—where we were—before."

"We'll have to leave. We've stayed too long here."

"Yes."

"We'll have to be in the forest again when it's dark; we can't wait until tomorrow. Are you afraid?"

She kept her mouth against his ear. "I am never afraid with you. Are you O.K.? Do you feel strong enough to hike out now?" He lifted her on top of him effortlessly, and she felt him still erect against her as he kissed her mouth. He was strong again, reassuring her with his penis and his hands and his mouth of his capacity to survive all things. They made love in the shadows of the rocks and clouds, their coverings blended into the landscape, the dead fire incapable of signaling their location to the intruders who walked the forest on the other side of the pass.

When they had finished and lay, still joined, they heard the craft again, its rotors roaring through the thin air miles away. They could not see it lifting off into the clouds, but they knew it would come again. He explained the new heaviness in the sky meant the clouds were full of snow. They had no choice but to head down away from the threats behind and above them.

Within fifteen minutes they had packed everything, and their meadow was as it had been before, save for the ashes of their fire which could have been left behind by any camper.

227

"Where will we go?" She looked so small under her burden of gear.

"Does it matter?"

"No, not really. We're together."

"We'll stay together. We have always been together, and we will always be together. Do you realize that?"

"Yes—but I—get afraid—not for myself—but for you. I get afraid that they'll try to separate us, that they might hurt you."

"Why should they hurt me?"

"I don't know. The—the people who are looking for you. You've never told me why they're following us. The games we play—wasn't that because someone's looking for us?"

"You don't have to worry about that. I will take care of you. All you have to do is obey me. If I tell you to do something, you will have to do it without question."

"Yes."

"Come here."

She walked over to him, and he took her hand. He slipped his cat's eye ring from his own finger and held it out to her. She saw there was a wedding ring still on her left hand and was surprised. She twisted it off so that her finger would be ready for his ring. His eyes reflected the bleeding sun on the horizon.