Mortal Fall (16 page)

I knew exactly where in the park it was taken because I recognized the boardwalk leading up to Hidden Lake from the top of Logan Pass. Two early-summer scruffy mountain goats stood in the background and Phillips, with short, wavy dark hair, a prominent nose, and a crooked, half smile kneeled down to get closer to his son’s height for the picture. Devlan looked maybe six or seven, big grin, with thick unruly hair flopping over his ears. I took the photo with me.

Yes, I vaguely remembered what Mark Phillips looked like and
could see him in my mind standing on the wooden deck at Glacier Academy, barking orders at one of the students who was sweeping the deck for him.
Do as tell you or I’ll . . .
Of course, I’m not sure what he actually said, but that’s what was ringing in my ears for no particular reason.

Several bestsellers like
Lonesome Dove
,
The Da Vinci Code
,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(not the whole series),
Shutter Island, Carrie, Misery,
and Michener’s
Alaska
and
The Covenant
stood on the shelves, but mostly gave way to nonfiction:
Glacier Park’s Best Hiking, Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, Northwest Montana Hikes
, and some books on random topics: astronomy, the cosmos, evolution, eating right, afterlife experiments, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

“Okay, so you read a little, but you mostly like to learn something when you do,” I whispered to myself. “And you like to hike.”

In the kitchen, the cabinets were full of cereal boxes—one completely empty, but still on the shelf, a box of reduced-sugar instant oatmeal, peanut butter, cans of soup and black beans, refried beans, and green beans. Stray Cheerios and Special K flakes scattered across the shelves, unlined with paper to protect them the way Lara always did when we moved into a place. Sticky-looking stains and more bits of food lay on the counters and when I opened the fridge, a foul smell sprang forth, telling me he’d been away long enough for something to be going bad.

But even without the milk and meat going bad, he seemed sloppy, maybe lazy in certain ways—except for the hiking—and something inside me instinctively prickled, telling me I wouldn’t have liked Mark Phillips if I had ever gotten to know him.

His bookshelves were nothing like Wolfie’s, crowded and showing a deep thirst for knowledge. I didn’t begrudge his curiosity, but there was something about the smattering of these that seemed like a façade, as if Phillips wanted to dabble in some ideas, but didn’t want to dive too deeply into any one subject. Of course, this was pure speculation and probably more than a little judgmental on my part. “Why are you not
liking this guy, Monty?” I whispered out loud to the empty room again. I wondered if it was simply because he represented Glacier Academy, the place that was supposed to have been Adam’s salvation. But things are never that easy. Plus the fact that he and my brother had been in a fight grated on me. There was no reason I should care about that. My brother and I hadn’t spoken in over four years.

Maybe he simply reminded me of Adam.

Ill-tempered, volatile, and quick to express his not-so-kind beliefs, Adam and I made no music together. We were opposites, not only in build and stature, but in pretty much everything: dress, demeanor, tidiness, thoroughness, religion, and if our politics happened to line up, it was for all the wrong reasons. Basically, all those years ago, I was a snitch, and Adam never forgave me.

About a year after the Nathan Faraway incident, Adam began getting into more and more trouble, getting into fights after school, drinking, and taking speed. I told on him, and when my dad found out that it wasn’t just pot and booze, that it was speed and some stronger stuff too (I overhead one of his friends say heroin, but I was never sure), he’d sent Adam to Glacier Academy, relying on the school to help solve Adam’s problems—to come to the rescue when his wife couldn’t and he had a job to go to each day.

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 nicotine 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.