Bear Bait (9781101611548) (30 page)

“That’d be too easy.”

“The descriptions here sound very antigovernment, too.”

“Most white supremacists hate all forms of government.”

“But Joe’s a ranger. And he’s Korean.” Now
she
was sounding racist. “Korean-American, I mean. What I really mean is that Lili’s dad is a federal officer and she’s a quarter Korean—how can she be in a white supremacist group?”

“They adapt, Summer, just like all other groups. Maybe
they’re taking partly brown people with law enforcement relatives now, figuring they can breed out those impurities.”

She groaned. “Hate never dies, does it?”

Arnie came out of his office. On hearing her words, his expression brightened with curiosity and he sauntered toward her desk. She pressed a key on her laptop to activate her screensaver, and then swiveled in her chair, turning her back to him.

“You’ve got that right,” Chase replied. “I’ll do some checking around on known hate cells in your area. But don’t say anything to anyone, Summer. We don’t want to flush any quail out of hiding before we’re ready to shoot them. Or at least net them.”

She felt Arnie hovering behind her. “You mean your organization would do that?”

“Is someone in the room with you?”

“Yes,” she answered. “That’s right.” She heard Arnie remove his rain jacket from the rack on the wall.

“Hate groups are FBI business. I’ll get someone on this.”

Arnie walked out the door, which thumped closed behind him.

“He’s gone now,” she told Chase. “But I can’t figure out how Lisa Glass and Lili Choi both ended up spouting the same sort of drivel. They both have…had…the same tattoo. Lisa was from back East somewhere. I’m sure Lili doesn’t know her.”

“These groups are often nationwide. Maybe Lisa Glass came out there to meet up with someone.”

“Maybe.” She’d look at everyone with suspicion now. Jeez. Illegal hunters in the woods, murderers roaming the river banks, white supremacists all over the place?

On the poster, Caitlin Knight had long black hair. She asked Chase, “Was that murdered game warden Native American, by any chance?”

“Good question. I’ll have to check. Ethnicity could be a possible motive.”

She wanted to call Joe, drive to the reservations to warn members of the Quileute, Hoh, and Quinault tribes. Oh God, there were the Ozettes and Makahs up north, too. This was like finding a cockroach under the sink; it made her want to spray the whole area with insecticide.

“Remember, Summer, don’t flush those quail. Don’t talk to
anyone
.”

“How can you read my mind like that?” It really was disturbing.

“We’re kindred spirits.” She heard voices at his end of the phone, then he said, “I’ve got to go. Are you sleeping at the bunkhouse?”

“With the rest of the delinquents.” She liked the way he laughed at her jokes, even when they weren’t that funny. “Where are you off to?”

“Can’t say. I’ll call you later. Be careful.”

The connection ended before she could say, “You, too.”

She spent the rest of the day struggling to focus on her management plan and decipher the latest NPS regulations, when she really wanted to head out to Marmot Lake with a hammer and chisel to obliterate those awful numbers from the trees.

JACK
was appalled to find Ernest on his doorstep again, looking pitiful with rain dripping from his ragged graying hair. Now that Allie was gone and her father had decided to dry out, Ernest was around more than ever.

“That ranger was here yesterday looking for you,” Ernest said.

“Ranger Choi again? What the hell did he want?” They couldn’t have uncovered anything else about the paintball games or the C-4. Dammit, if King was shooting his mouth off—

“Not a
he
,” Ernest said. “That little blond ranger, you know, the one that was on TV?”

“Westin?” The back of Jack’s neck prickled. Why would Westin come here? It was like she was haunting him.

“I don’t know her name,” Ernest said. “She told me they’re having a memorial service for that trail worker girl tomorrow, up at Hurricane Ridge.”

“Yeah, it was in the paper. Look, Ernest, I’m just getting dinner…” He half turned toward the inside of the house. He had a sandwich partially made on the kitchen counter.

Ernest caught the screen door and took a step closer. “I’m going. Want to ride with me?”

Now what the hell was this about? “Why would I want to do that? Why would
you
want to do that?”

It’ll be a fed roundup
, King had pointed out.
Good place to do a little demolition work
. It had taken Jack twenty minutes to talk the idiot out of the idea. Deferred gratification was a concept King had apparently never heard of. The money was the only thing that finally convinced him.

“I thought I’d pay my respects,” Ernest said. “Jack, that girl was two years younger than Allie.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t make up for
who
she was. You wear the uniform, you’re one of them.” Jack crossed his arms and leaned back against the inner door, swinging it wider. “Feds take our land, our money—they sent the whole national treasury to Iraq and Afghanistan, for chrissakes—they spent billions of dollars a week over there, did you know that? So the freakin’ ragheads can have ‘democracy’”—he drew quote signs in the air around the word—“so they can have the right to free speech and the right to criticize
their
government. But tell the truth about the bastards running our government, and they’ll slap you in Guantanamo—”

“What’s that?” Ernest interrupted. His gaze was no longer on Jack. He pointed toward the bedroom.

Shit. Ernest could see the purple moonlight photo through the open doorway.

“You said you were sending those photos to Allie,” the old man said.

Jack swallowed, thinking fast. “Ernest, you know how you said you needed those paintings Allie made when she was a little girl?”

The man’s eyes shimmered with sudden tears. “Yeah.”

“Well, I decided that I need these photos.” He let the silence hang painfully between them for a minute. “You can understand, can’t you?”

Ernest’s jaws worked like he was considering an argument, but then he said, “Yeah, Jack, I guess I can. I miss her so much. I sent her a letter at that address you gave me, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.”

“Let me know when you do, okay?” If Jack had to look at Ernest’s sad grizzly face any longer, he’d get all choked up, too. With the sheeting rain, he felt like he should offer the guy a ride home. He knew Ernest’s car was dead and Allie’s was in some impound lot. But he didn’t want to continue this any longer than he had to. Besides, it wasn’t far and the old man was wearing an old Army surplus poncho. “I’m sorry about yelling at you. I know you feel the same way about the feds as I do.”

“Yeah, well.” Ernest backed up, letting the screen door bang shut between them. “Night, Jack.”

“Night, Ernest.” Jack closed the door and watched the old man shuffle off through the dripping trees.

Ranger Westin was sniffing around for him? She was the last person he wanted to show up at his door. Probably the Marmot Lake trespassing thing again; she couldn’t possibly know anything else. She couldn’t have made him from the other night. Still. He turned on his computer and brought up the web page, logged in, and left a message on the bulletin board. Then he turned the machine off, pulled out the hard drive, and replaced it with a new one. After eating his sandwich, he buried the old drive in a plastic bag under his compost heap.

IT
was still raining on Wednesday when Ernest drove up to Hurricane Ridge. The trip took longer than he’d planned on, because he’d been amazed to find a gate across the road and an attendant who wanted a ten-dollar entry fee. Then the young woman embarrassed them both by asking if he was a senior when he was only sixty-one. Finally, she just waved him on through without paying after he said he was on his way to the memorial service.

The service was already in progress and the single pink rose he’d bought at the grocery store in Forks was wilting in his hand as he limped down the aisle. They’d set up outside the visitor center under a huge portable awning to shield them from the downpour. Up front was a table and a speaker’s stand, and behind that, a chaplain. Just like Jack had predicted, the folding chairs held an army of gray-green uniforms, with only a few people in regular clothes scattered among them. He saw a silver-blond braid in the middle of the pack that might be that little ranger who’d come looking for Jack a couple of days ago.

He took the first empty folding chair he found, next to a teenage girl with chopped-off red hair. Beside her sat several tough-looking boys. Although their faces and hands were clean, their pants were wet to the knees and stained with mud; they’d clearly been working outside. The girl beside him smelled of sweat and he was glad for the open-air chapel. The dead girl had been part of a trail crew, he remembered. These must be her comrades.

Up front he could see a photo of Lisa Glass hanging on the speaker’s stand, just above a spray of lilies. She had light-colored hair; that was all he could tell from here.

The chaplain was going on about how Lisa loved the woods and being outdoors. His speech reminded Ernest of all the field services in ’Nam, where the poor schlub with the cross around his neck was just as confused as the rest of them, but since it was his job to conjure up something nice to say, he talked about how the guy who’d had his guts ripped out by machine gun fire had been a high school football player or loved his dog or something.

“…and so Lisa chose to work on the trail crew to be close to nature,” the chaplain was saying now.

“What a crock,” the red-haired girl beside him murmured.

He glanced sideways at her.

“She did it for the money,” she told him, wiping tears from her freckled cheek with the back of her hand. “It was the only job she could find. Her family was poor.”

“Shhh.” A man in front of them turned and glared at the redhead. In response, she stuck out her tongue. She wore four earrings in the ear he could see. He wondered if her other ear had four holes, too.

“Sounds like Lisa was nice,” he whispered.

“Not particularly.” The girl’s muscular shoulders lifted, then dropped. “But she didn’t deserve this.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say. There was a rumor that Lisa Glass had been murdered, and another one that she was drunk and accidentally set the fire. The truth was probably somewhere in between, but the redhead was right—it didn’t really matter, because nobody deserved to die. Not at nineteen years old.

How old was that poor murdered game warden? Had anyone held a service for her? That wasn’t park service. That would be—he couldn’t come up with the branch of government—but he hoped she had friends and family to honor her memory. God, it was a terrible world, with young women dying all alone in the woods.

Then the service was over. Some people slipped out the
back and sides while others went up to lay things under the photo of the girl. He followed the red-haired girl toward the front, carrying his flower in both hands so it wouldn’t look so droopy. The redhead placed a big pinecone on top of the pile of stuff under the photo. He laid his limp rose next to it. There were a couple of tiny Beanie Baby animals in the pile. Allie had collected those when she was about ten years old.

Ernest looked at the picture to see if the dead girl was a pinecone type or Beanie Baby type or a rose type. It was a lousy photo, all in shadow. She was tall and blond and holding a shovel. Under the hard hat she wore, her face looked a lot like Allie’s. They said everyone had a double somewhere in the world, and this girl looked like she could be Allie’s. Squinting hard, he put his face close to the photo to study her eyes.

It hit him then. More sudden and more excruciating than when the shrapnel had smashed into his leg in ’Nam. A moan started up from somewhere, soft and far away at first and then getting louder and closer. When he realized that he was making the horrible noise, he clapped a hand hard across his mouth. He staggered back from the photo.

How could Lisa Glass be Allie? Oh God, how could this dead girl be his Allie?

He felt a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”

The flowers and Beanie Babies and pinecone swirled like a cyclone, dark and mean, roaring around him, taking his breath away. He thought he might never be able to talk again.

“You all right, sir?”

He could barely hear the voice through the awful roar, and he turned to see why the man was speaking so softly. The guy wore a ranger uniform.
CHOI
, it said on the brass nameplate over his pocket. He had a pistol on his hip.

“Allie,” he managed to croak. But it couldn’t be Allie. It couldn’t.

“Maybe you’d better sit down.”

Not Allie. She was in L.A.

But she hadn’t said good-bye. And she hadn’t called or written. And that just wasn’t like her.

Although he had no memory of how he got there, Ernest found himself sitting in a chair in the front row, staring at the photo.

The Choi fellow was sitting beside him now. Only the two of them were left in the tent. Choi’s slanted brown eyes looked kind. He asked, “Did you know her?”

Did he know her?
He knew the smell of her hair, the crooked tooth she had in front, the scar she had on her knee from when she fell on the garden hoe. He knew she loved art and English and hated math and could take photos as good as any pro. He knew that Cheeseburger Macaroni was the kind of Hamburger Helper she liked best, but she always added mushrooms and green beans to make a balanced meal.

“Did you say something about an alley?” Choi asked. “Lisa Glass was found injured in the woods, not in town.”

How could Allie be here and be dead when she was supposed to be in Los Angeles? She’d written him and Jack…But she’d never called. And Jack had kept her photos. Oh God.

He buried his face in his hands. God no, not Allie. Not his girl. Not dead.
I’m getting clean, Allie, so you won’t be so ashamed of your old man, so you’ll come back. I got a job today at the grocery. Just stocking shelves, but you won’t have to work so hard anymore.