I didn’t regret leaving Lane’s house the night before. I wasn’t going to apologize to him. If I ran into him again today, on or near his own property, I was more than prepared to behave with zero shame. I’d been bothered and I wanted to leave—I didn’t need to explain myself.
I was still curious, though. This time, I left a message for Viola, letting her, letting someone, know what I was doing: that I was driving out toward where the mudslide had occurred.
I had snowshoes in my truck. I had enough winter gear that I wouldn’t freeze to death. At least not right away. This time I wasn’t going to go inside the shed, because there would be no shed to go into; it was in shambles. I wouldn’t go inside any structure I came upon.
As I drove my truck past the places I had passed by more times over the last few days than in all my days before in Benedict, the snow began to fall again. Big, sticky flakes that accumulated quickly. I looked toward the Petition, and then Randy’s house. He wasn’t home; he might not have made it back from Juneau yet. I was glad the body wasn’t his wife’s, but who in the world was she, this woman who’d been strangled and then hidden away in a frozen grave before being deposited in an old trapper’s shed?
And where was Wanda? Just because the body found in the shed wasn’t hers didn’t mean she wasn’t out there somewhere, buried or frozen. Lots of bodies got lost in Alaska.
It was an odd setup inside Randy’s house, but that could mean nothing at all. It could just be the way Randy lived, like Gril said. Maybe he slept in the loft sometimes because it was warmer up there. Maybe he alternated between all the beds and three different toothbrushes, two of them pink. We all had our habits and rituals.
Even if he didn’t learn about my trespassing, I wondered if I’d be able to look Randy in the eyes again. Would he sense that I’d invaded his space? Would Gril or Donner tell him? Gril might not be done talking to me about it. I felt guilty.
Mill wouldn’t feel guilty. She wouldn’t be bothered at all. She would say something like, “I just looked. I didn’t touch or destroy anything. I just fucking looked. No harm done.”
I continued through the snow, and my tires cut a fresh path down the old logging road. I stopped the truck near the collapsed shed and left the engine running again. If Lane wanted to come talk to me, he could. I wasn’t going to hide from him.
I stepped out of the truck, slipped on the snowshoes, and made my way, awkwardly, toward the gravestones. I realized quickly that the snowshoes might have been overkill, but I needed practice walking with them anyway.
I’d gotten in better shape, but I wasn’t in snowshoe shape. You’d think that something used to make walking through snow easier wouldn’t require an extra dose of energy. But by the time I made it to the graves, I was breathing heavily, and warmth had spread underneath my heavy clothing. I slipped out of the snowshoes and dropped to my knees next to the stones. All Lane had said was that family was buried here; it looked as if there were three graves. There were three different stones, the tallest jutting up from the ground a couple of feet. I dug away about seven inches of snow to expose the front.
All three stones were as is; the edges hadn’t been carved or rounded or shaped, and only the front of one was remedially engraved with sparse information.
The middle stone read “Beloved Wife.” The left stone didn’t have any visible carving, but the right one did. It read “Together forever.”
“Who’s together forever?” I said aloud. If this was Lane’s wife, did the epitaph mean that he would be buried here, too, when he died?
I studied the stones a long time, making sure I wasn’t missing anything important, but found nothing else.
I looked up and around. There was nothing peaceful about this small cemetery. Nothing violent, either. Only sadness and loneliness, desolation. The ground would freeze solid in the deep winter. I’d heard someone mention that sometimes bodies had to wait until the spring thaw to be buried. Had the body in the shed not shown signs of strangulation, I wondered if that conclusion would have been reached—that she’d been someone who passed in the winter, and for whatever reason, she hadn’t been able to get a proper burial.
I looked toward Lane’s house but couldn’t see it.
When I heard a snap that sounded like a twig breaking, my head jerked around and I looked into the dark woods. Hemlock and spruce trees packed in tightly. I squinted and scanned.
At first I didn’t spot anything unusual. I slipped my feet back into the snowshoes. I wasn’t sure if I could move more quickly with them or without them, but I didn’t want to try to carry them.
Just as I stood straight up, I saw something—the same color and shape I’d seen three other times.
The last time I’d seen it—just this morning, seemingly looking at me though my bedroom window at the Benedict House—I’d panicked. I’d had to call my mother. This time, I swallowed some of that same panic. Whoever was out there, it wasn’t Travis Walker. It simply didn’t make sense. Mill had pointed that out, and she’d been right.
She’d said something else that rang through my mind. She’d been talking about my reactions to people who might recognize me, but it applied to everything now.
Own it. Own your own life, Beth.
I wasn’t going to fall apart. Not again. At least not now.
I had spied quite a few bears in the wild over the past few months, but I didn’t know when they went into hibernation. Why hadn’t I asked someone? I sniffed, but didn’t smell the stink that came with a nearby wild animal.
The dark mass was about fifty yards away, its back to me. It was moving, but not like a bear. I took one step closer to the woods.
“Hey!” I yelled.
The creature stopped and began to turn around, but then moved away, as hurriedly as the snow probably allowed, moving with much more stability and grace than I could have managed.
I opened my mouth to call out again but thought better of it. I turned and hurried back to the truck. I looked out to the woods one more time, but I couldn’t tell if the creature was still there.
I started the truck and sat a long moment. Finally, I switched into gear and continued to Lane’s house. Without the snowshoes this time, I trudged along the path leading to the house. Walking was somehow both easier and more difficult without them; I slipped more, but now used less energy.
There were no prints around the front yard. I knew where the hole in the ground was, and a quick glance made me realize Lane still hadn’t reset the trap, but I was still careful and stayed back from the front porch far enough that my visit couldn’t somehow be misconstrued as threatening.
“Lane?” I said loudly.
A few seconds later, the front door opened.
“Help you?” Lane said as he filled the space. He crossed his arms in front of himself and frowned deeply. “I see you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. I needed to get home.”
Lane shrugged. “I wasn’t keeping you prisoner.”
“I know,” I said.
Lane’s cheeks were ruddy, but he wasn’t wearing a bearskin coat.
“What can I do for you, Beth?”
It was a genuine question. He didn’t ask it with impatience.
“Were you out in the woods a few minutes ago?” I said. “Out there over by your shed?”
I watched him closely, and I saw a split second of honesty in the set of his shoulders right before he lied.
“That was me,” he said as his shoulders loosened some and he ran his hand through his hair quickly. “I was on my way home. I tried to say something to you, but you were too far away.”
I nodded again. It was an obvious lie, but why? In fact, if I really thought about it, I would realize that it wasn’t truly feasible he could have made it back—was it? Was he able to move that quickly in the snow? Had my journey down the road and then the walking path taken longer than I thought?
“Okay.” I paused. Was I going to accuse him of lying? No, but I was so thrown that for an instant I couldn’t formulate what I wanted to say next. “Who is buried out there?”
“Family. I told you.”
“Your wife? Who else?”
“I’m going inside. Do you need anything else? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I stared at him, wanting to say something to keep him talking, but not coming up with the right words.
He turned and made good on his threat—he went inside.
Riled up but not willing to knock on his door, I accepted defeat for this round. I went back to the truck and once again took the road back to town. It wasn’t difficult during the daytime, but it still wasn’t easy. My mind whirled as I drove.
Who was buried there? Was there a child next to Lane’s wife—and had that child been theirs or someone else’s?
I couldn’t let go of this new idea—one of the Hortons’ girls had disappeared. Her remains hadn’t been found. Where was she? Was she still alive and with Tex, or dead, perhaps buried on Lane’s property? I couldn’t piece together how either might have occurred.
Perhaps her body had burned away to ashes that had either been overlooked or not found, but I was convinced that the other two options needed more exploration before I could give real credence to the last one.
While Gril was in Brayn, checking on the freezer and hopefully coming to understand the girls’ background, their mother, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the baby clothes and the gravesite. Losing a child is the worst thing imaginable; maybe Lane couldn’t bring himself to discuss such a tragedy.
Nevertheless, a child had gone missing six years earlier. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that she had burned to unrecognizable or ignored ashes. I believed that, though maybe no one had meant to be negligent, someone had done a hurried and sloppy investigation. There was a child out there somewhere—dead or alive—and it was time the truth was uncovered.
The mudslide was trying to tell us something. I was trying very hard to listen.