Mortal Fall (48 page)

“Will,” I said. “My brother was sent to Glacier Academy too.”

He froze for a second. “You’re lying.”

“No, no. I’m not. His name is Adam, and he was hurt by Phillips too. I just found out—just like you said you did—that things did not go well for him there.” I had Will’s attention. I could see his head tilt with curiosity in the diffuse moonlight. “You know what he said? You know what he said when he found out that Phillips was dead? He said he deserved it. Said it served him right.”

Will was looking at me confused, trying to tell if I was making it up or not.

“I swear, man. I’m not lying. Phillips and his gang—they took him out to the woods, had him tied up. They did stuff to him. I can understand you wanting to hurt him. When I found out, man, if he wasn’t already dead, I would have wanted the same. But this stuff, it was years ago.”

The anger was falling away from Will’s eyes, and they got large and sad, full of a thick, palpable despair, the kind I’d only ever seen before in my mother’s. “He was my twin,” he mumbled. “You have any idea what it’s like to lose your twin? It’s like half of you is ripped away. And Phillips, he did shit. He hurt him. I found the letters.”

“What letters?”

“From his girlfriend, telling him how sorry she felt for him because of all that Phillips did. How awful it must have been. I found ’em after it was too late. In his stuff in his apartment. And after he lost his job working for those researchers, he got severe. He got”—Will shook his head—“unreachable. But it wasn’t the researchers’ fault. Phillips made it all worse, so much worse. If he’d gotten treatment when he was young instead of getting abused . . .” Will’s eyes pleaded for me to understand as his voice trailed off.

“I can imagine,” I said. “Why weren’t you at the camp?”

“Me?” He looked confused for a moment to be asked such a personal question, as if it was fair game to talk about everyone but himself, but then he answered. “I was fine back then. I was normal growing up. It was my brother who was depressed and moody. He’s the one who started doing drugs, talked about suicide, skipped school all the
time. . . . My mom and stepdad thought it would help him. And it should have. That’s the whole point.” Will’s voice began to rise again.

“I understand, Will. I do. My brother, he was there because he was a bully and messed up on drugs too, but he didn’t deserve that either.” It was important for me to diffuse the hate and the zealotry behind his eyes that would justify the shove. “He was there for treatment, but he got very little of that,” I continued. “I can understand
wanting
to hurt a guy like Phillips—even kill him—get a guy like him off this planet so he doesn’t hurt others.”

Will gave me a solemn nod, listening, captivated by what I was saying. The coyotes still called in the far distance, their yips growing fainter. They were moving away from the park, away from wolf territory. “Wolfie,” I said. “I can see that that was just collateral damage—a bad thing that wasn’t supposed to happen, but bad things happen in this world, Will. Right? Bad things happen?”

“That’s what I said. That’s exactly what I said. But now it’s too late, and another bad thing
has
to happen.” What I could make out of his expression in the darkness appeared transformed into something distorted and unrecognizable. In the force of his voice, I could sense righteousness straddling on his sadness and fear. On some level, Will felt justified that he had made the world a better place by killing Mark Phillips.

“No, no, it doesn’t. You can still have a normal life.”

“Don’t be talking to me about prison. Don’t even say it.” He shook his head emphatically side to side.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “It would just be for a while. You’d get out. People get out; they lead normal lives again.”

“No, no, no, no, no . . . ,” he muttered, still shaking his head rhythmically. “In prison, they’re all like Phillips. No, no, no, no, no . . . ,” he kept murmuring.

“Will, you need help.”

“No,” he screamed at the top of his lungs, ceasing his murmurs. His voice sliced the already chilled night like a blade of ice, echoing
off the mountain ridges that reared up like humongous humpbacked monsters circling us, watching us. His voice rebounded back, streaking into me. An electric pulse burst through me, but I forced myself to stand still.

“Okay, okay.” I held both my tied hands up. He was losing it. I knew I needed this conversation to end—the whole scene to change. In one swift move, I jammed my forearm and elbow up into his hand. The 9 millimeter catapulted through the air and to the side. I dived across the ground to grab it but felt prickly bushes and rock instead. Panic cut through me as I frantically began patting the rocky, brushy ground with whatever speed and agility I could manage with my hands tied.

Will fell to his knees beside me as I continued to search. All bets were off if Will got to it first. He shoved me to my side, toward the cliff’s edge, and I fought to get back, pushing off my elbows, then onto my hands and knees and when my hand hit the ground below me, I felt the cold metal of the barrel. I instantly pulled it up and aimed it at him. “Stop,” I yelled. “It’s over.”

Will froze in the dark, a silhouette on all fours like an animal.

“Will. It’s over. I’m going to need you to lie on the ground and place your hands behind your head.”

Will slowly stood up and I repeated my command. “Will,” I yelled. “Get back on the ground on your stomach and put your hands behind your head.”

Will’s panting seemed to surround me, loud and expanding. His dark shape began to back away from me. I yelled, “Stop right there. Get on the ground, Will.”

Will took two more steps back. He was right on the edge.

“Will,” I heard my own voice like it wasn’t mine. It sounded shrill and separate, like something that was part of the land, a tinny, fleeting breeze moving through the mountains. “I need you to stop right there. Got it? Stop right there. Look, I’m putting the gun down.” I started to bend my knees, reaching for the ground with my tied wrists. I had no intention of letting it out of my hands, but I did not want Will to go
over the edge. He killed two people, and I did not want to be the third. I kept my eyes on him and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not, but I could almost see his pale skin and the whites of his eyes in the dark. “Okay?” I said as smoothly as I could. “I’m going to put it down.”

He was shaking his head again rhythmically, and there on the edge, although I knew he wasn’t, it seemed to me that he had become Adam—his frame tall and sturdy, his shoulders broad, his person a split image—someone searching, wanting, and frail; but at the same time, someone solid and tough moving away, distancing. Jumping, falling. My mother’s car hurtling down a ridge, steel slamming against rock, and the vehicle crashing into the river flashed in my mind for a split second.

“It’s over,” he whispered.

I almost didn’t hear it, but then I saw his dark shape slide back. He took another large step backward, his body slipping over the rock, sliding back and over, his scream filling the night and becoming one with the faint call of the coyotes. I shot forward, flinging myself to the rock ledge, trying to catch some part of him—anything—an arm, a leg, his hair, but my hands caught nothing but the cool, pristine air and wet skunkweed. I stared at the edge, my chest heaving into the hard-edged rocky ground below me. I pushed myself up and scurried quickly to the side to try to see him, but I couldn’t make out his body in the dark below. It was too far down and too steep.

I wildly untied the ropes around my ankles with jerky movements and ran back to the car, my legs feeling suddenly free without the binds. I tripped and catapulted over exposed roots and partially protruding rocks on the trail since my hands were still bound, and I couldn’t use them for balance. I took gigantic gulps of the cool air as I ran, somehow managing to stay upright and making it to the parking lot without flailing face-first into the ground again. I opened the car, the artificial light flooding my eyes, which had become one with the pale and dim blue-white of the night. I instinctively squeezed them shut for a moment, then opened them and looked around. My cell
phone, my keys, and my gun lay on the passenger seat. I found my MagLite in the glove box.

I picked up the phone and held it in my shaking hands and tried to call for help, even though I knew better. There was no cell reception in the heart of Glacier, and I had left my radio at the office. I ran back out to the spot Will went over without even turning on my flashlight. My eyes had readjusted to the meager blue light of the partial moon in the night within seconds. When I got to the spot, I turned the flashlight on and moved the beam over the ridge and to the ground below. All I could see was scree, rocks, and brush swaying in the breeze, but no Will. I ran over to another spot to get a different angle and tried again, but he had been right. There was no good vantage point to see below. Nobody would spot someone without knowing they had fallen. Nobody would have spotted me.

I felt a shiver run through me. I gulped the cold mountain air and repeated to myself that it was for the best—that he was a tortured soul and couldn’t have lived with what he’d done. But I couldn’t stop hearing the sound of Will’s scream as air had blasted through his lungs and how all had gone silent except for the scuff of body and bone against hard rock, once, twice.

Then I heard a different howl, not the high strident coyote call, but an anguished moan—much closer and slowly rising, reverberating through the mountains, pitching up and up, corralling in my ears, pouring into me and expanding. I stood still listening to the wolves, my body quivering, my vision still a little blurred, and suddenly, as the wails became more numerous and lengthened, as they stretched and grew, I felt my chest well with pain—pain for Will’s brother, for Will, for Adam, for Lara, for my father, for my mother, and for myself.

It wasn’t just the ancient pull of sadness that had been with me since I was a boy, a sense that tragedy was never too far away; it was a lack of hope—something new, something I never let in. For me, no matter the dysfunction, there had always been an essential order to things, like the rise of the sun, the fall of the first snow, the budding
leaves of spring, the start of another school day, another workday . . . and in that order, there was always hope that things would work out. But now something heavy as wet sand sifted through me and washed away the veneer I’d always shielded myself with, made me sense that maybe things didn’t really work out after all.

My legs buckled beneath me, and there among those unflinching mountains, with the wolves howling their haunting, mournful song, tears came to my eyes.

48

I
WALKED BACK TO
the car and collected my thoughts for a moment, figuring I would need to walk the nine miles down to Lake McDonald Lodge. Then I remembered that I had recently put the spare keys I usually kept at home in my console because I wanted to keep them at the office instead of my dorm since I now lived alone. I opened it up and saw them, let out a sigh of relief and with great trepidation since my wrists were still tightly bound, drove the dark and curvy, Going-to-the-Sun Road to Lake McDonald Lodge, where I rousted the front-desk help sleeping in the back office and called for emergency services.

• • •

Ken gave me a ride back up and we watched the Search and Rescue helicopter make its way up Lake McDonald and through the mountains, its bright beams slicing across the dark mountainsides, turning swaths of trees blue and flattening the bear grass and other wild foliage. There was a very small chance that Will was still alive and injured at the bottom of the ravine, but I didn’t hold out much hope. The wolves had stopped howling, and all was still but the raspy, choppy and obnoxious roar of the helicopter.

I was ordered to sit on the hood of my car, while a medic swabbed my face and told me I’d probably need stitches, and was not allowed to help in the retrieval even though I wanted to. Four other men performed it under the bright floodlights, just as Ken and I had done for Wolfie under the piercing sun two weeks ago. Two of the county officers, Walsh’s men,
were sent up to debrief me, get my statements, and go through all the formalities as soon as my wounds were cleaned and dressed.

Gretchen had called my phone numerous times when I had not called her back as I said I would. She had dressed and gone to Will’s apartment after looking up his address, but didn’t find my car. So after calling me several more times, she called the city police in for help. They had put out an APB for Will’s vehicle and encouraged the police and local sheriff to stay on the lookout for my car, far away from the quiet, enveloping solitude of Glacier. When I called her back from the lodge after calling Ken and told her where I was and that Search and Rescue was on its way, she drove up.

“Are you okay?” she said, coming over to me while the medic, a guy named Warren, finished inspecting my eye. He smiled at Gretchen, then went a few yards away to grab some supplies.

“Yeah, I’m good. You shouldn’t have come all the way up here.”

“I wanted to,” she said.

“Why?” I asked sincerely. It was clear we were becoming friends, but this woman had no obligation to me. She’d been my guardian angel through the whole case, and I had the sudden urge to know why. I wanted honesty. I didn’t care that Warren was in earshot.

She looked away, then lifted a shoulder. “Gives me one more reason to say, ‘You owe me,’ Harris.”

“I guess I’m racking up a long list of those.” I was too exhausted to push it further.

“I guess you are.” She gave me a smile that said she knew that whatever went down wasn’t easy to witness. A pale-blue light was spreading a soft wave of early dawn over the mountaintops. The world was continuing on—the order of things forming again around me and in my mind.

I patted her hand. “Your smile,” I said.

“What about it?” She brought her hand to her mouth, embarrassed.

“It’s, well, it’s luminous. Just as I remembered,” I said, the emotion of it thick in my chest.