The Wild Inside (34 page)

“A flower?”

“Nope. You?” He pointed at Monty with the twig.

“Let me see it again,” Monty said, and Lewis drew it two more times.

“A guitar?”

Lewis smiled a gap-toothed grin and nodded excitedly. “How about this?” He drew a different one.

“How about you finish answering Agent Systead’s questions and then I’ll guess again?”

Lewis glanced at me, and I asked again: “Did Victor ever hurt you?”

He looked down and shook his head.

“Did you ever hear of anyone talking about hurting Victor?”

“Nope,” he said and drew another shape. “What’s this?” he said to Monty.

“An airplane?”

Lewis smiled and nodded again.

• • •

When Heather returned after feeding the horses, I was waiting for her. The door to her house was unlocked, but I stood outside politely, watching her out in the field. She was carrying a large bale of hay and setting it down for a mule in an enclosed area near the barn. When she finished, a dog trotted crookedly beside her as she walked up a gravel road from a faded barn. It was evening, and the sun’s rays shot under the chrome-colored cloud cover, illuminating Heather’s hair and turning the hay field stretching away from the wooden fence along the road golden.

When she spotted me standing there, she cocked her head to the side, her blond mane falling to one shoulder. I could tell she was squinting, trying to make out who I was. I held up my hand. “Hello,” I called out. “It’s Systead.”

She nodded but didn’t change her pace as the dog, which I could make out was a type of border collie, black and white with a little brown on his pointy snout, ran toward me with a pronounced limp, but its tail wagging.

“I saw your car here.” I held my hand out for the collie to smell, then pet the crown of his head, knobby under my palm. “So I knew you must be around.” She was tall, maybe five-eleven, and I could see she was muscular from hauling hay, working the land, teaching martial arts.

“Welcome to my place.” She pushed her hair off her shoulder and smiled a small, nervous smile as she came closer.

Suddenly the same shyness I felt at Joe’s washed over me, so much so that I felt the need to look away for a moment. I glanced down at the collie. “What happened to him?”

“Got in the mule’s area. Learned his lesson not to taunt her.”

“I guess so. Poor guy.” I knelt down and stroked behind his ear.

“Fractured his spine. He couldn’t walk for a few days, but he’s doing better and better. Swimming helps a lot. The doctor says to keep him moving.” She pushed some hair behind an ear. “How can I help you?”

I refocused on why I’d come. “I thought I’d swing by to ask you a few questions about your sister, you know, just to try to cover all angles regarding Victor Lance.” I stood back up, and the collie scratched my leg with his front paw for more attention. Heather snapped her fingers. “He’s okay.” I scratched behind his ear again. “I spoke to your mother earlier today, and she mentioned that you and Leslie are fairly close.”

Heather shrugged. “As close as you can be to a lying addict. But yeah, I suppose. She’s my sister after all. Would you like to come inside?”

“That’d be nice.” I took off my cap and peered across the stubby hay field to a line of tall pine and cottonwood trees in the distance that I knew stood by the bank of the Flathead River. “You own up to the river?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be hard work.”
For someone on her own
, I thought but didn’t say and thought of her mother smiling and saying that she dated once in a while.

“I manage all right. The horses graze the field. The winter’s tough, keeping them fed and exercised. Sometimes I hire a little help if things get crazy. I need help with harvesting the hay, and keeping the weeds back in the spring and summer gets to be a full-time job.” She walked up the porch steps and opened a sliding glass door that led directly into a small mudroom off of the kitchen. Open shelving stood on one side and was cluttered with tack, tools, different-size rucksacks, water bottles, flashlights . . . “Sorry about the mess.” She removed her heavy boots, her jacket, and told me that it was fine for me to keep my shoes on.

The house, an old farmhouse, was modest with old, dated linoleum countertops, oak cabinetry, and a tiled kitchen floor that looked as if it had been redone more recently. She motioned for me to sit at the kitchen table and asked if I’d like something: tea, a beer, coffee. I told her I had a late lunch and didn’t need a thing. She grabbed herself a beer, took a seat across from me, and pushed more blond strands of hair behind her ear again.

“You’ve lived here long?” I asked.

“’Bout five years. I lived closer to Columbia Falls before that. After my divorce, I was happy to get some acreage and the horses.”

“Similar to your folks’ spread?”

“I guess so, yeah. It’s what I grew up with. I like the space.”

I was deciding whether to ask about her marriage or about Leslie, but a part of me simply wanted her to talk about her life, to let her take the lead and fill me in about living alone near the Flathead River with a dog and horses and a couple head of cattle. But she didn’t say anything, just stared at me with her green, unreadable eyes and dark eyebrows. I thought I noticed tiny flecks of gold reflecting in the light. “This business with Victor Lance,” I said, “did you ever spend time with Leslie and him?”

“I was around them a few times. Sometimes they’d bring Lewis over to hang out with me while they’d go to do something.” She began picking at the corner of its label.

“Lewis. He’s a sweet boy.”

Heather nodded. “He’s a good kid. Deserves better than the mom he got, but she’s doing her best to stay clean, and I think things are going pretty well. He’s doing better in school now that things are a little more stable. How did it go with him?”

“Oh fine. Perfectly fine.” I gave a half smile. “Was he not doing so well before?”

“He struggled for a bit, as you’d expect with a mom who goes through stages of not being very”—she shrugged—“present or tuned in to her child’s needs. Leslie’s does her best, but she’s sick. Call it narcissism, addiction, or bipolar disorder—I don’t know what the hell the label is. She’s been called it all. All I know is that when you get hooked on drugs when you’re a teen, in my opinion, it seems to screw up your chemical makeup forever. Warps your mind, makes you immature, unable to cope well, always putting your own needs first like a teenager.”

“You spend a lot of time with Lewis?”

“A bit. I try to help out as much as I can. I don’t want to enable her, but I like to be in his life. I try to provide as much stability as possible.”

“Enable. That’s what your mom said too.”

Heather chuckled. “Hang out with addicts for a bit and it doesn’t take long to speak the psychobabble.”

“Leslie went through treatment?”

“For a month. At a local inpatient facility in Kalispell.”

“Before, during, or after her involvement with Victor?”

“About seven or eight months before Victor. She’d been doing really well.” Heather looked down, her eyes heavy, and when she looked back up she appeared more tired than I first noticed when she walked up from the barn with her cheeks flushed from the cold. Now I could see faint dark shadows under her eyes, and I wondered how difficult it must actually be to hold down a farm on your own with little help. “She did okay with Victor for a while and even influenced him some, got him to settle a bit, but eventually, it just got out of control.”

“Out of control?”

“Well, come on, two meth heads having a relationship?” She lifted her brow to me. “A little here, a little there until both were using pretty regularly about three months into their relationship.”

“What made her break it off with him?”

“He was abusive, and it got worse when he was using.”

“She told you that?”

Heather nodded. “She didn’t need to.” She took a sip of her beer, and I wished I had accepted the offer to have a drink. “She’d show up with a hurt arm or a bruised eye, always making excuses, saying she bumped into something. You know, classic behavior for that kind of shit.”

I was slightly surprised she swore; she seemed too poised for that, but she also seemed tough and not afraid to say what she wanted. “And she had the wherewithal to get out?”

Heather stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You sure you don’t want anything?”

“Actually, I’ll join you for one of those.” I pointed at the bottle in her hand.

She fetched one out of the fridge. “Would you like a glass?”

“Bottle’s fine.”

She grabbed the opener off the counter, opened the bottle, handed it to me, and sat back down. “She broke it off with him more than once. I’m actually speaking of the first time, back in, oh, I don’t know, I guess it was January. It took lots of questions and prodding before she opened up, but one night, it got really out of hand and she brought Lewis to me because she was getting afraid. After Lewis went to sleep, I pinned her down, wouldn’t let her leave without telling me what was going on.” She took a swig of beer, then licked both of her lips. “So she agreed to tell me only if I didn’t say anything to Mom or Dad. I agreed and she spilled her guts about his temper. I did my best to help her. In large part for Lewis’s sake.”

“How did you help her?”

“It’s a long story.” She ran a hand through her hair, raking it away from her forehead and letting it fall back down in a golden wave.

“I’ve got time and”—I smiled my signature half smile and held up my beer—“I’ve got a beverage now.”

“First step was simply supporting her, getting her to wean off the meth, and getting her to open up. Once she cleared her head”—she looked toward a hallway, which I assumed had a spare bedroom—“she stayed here for a bit. Anyway, once she saw the light, I simply supported her in the breakup, which she did much better and stronger than I imagined she would. I was guessing that the year of counseling was paying off a bit because once she decided that she would get out of the relationship, she held pretty strong, at least for a month or so.”

“Only a month?”

“Maybe a month and a half or even two. It’s kind of a blur, but yeah, probably more than a month. He was pretty pesky and hard to get rid of, and he kept coming around, so after several weeks of that,
I convinced her that we needed to go through the correct channels, through the police to get a restraining order placed against him. But that got messy because my sister is on record with social services for being a user and let’s just say, she didn’t have a lot of credibility with the system, and . . .” Heather tore the label even further off and started scratching at the remaining thin film of glued paper.

“And?”

She shook her head with a disgusted look. “She got back in the relationship before we even fully looked into the matter.” She stood and went into the kitchen again and tossed her bottle in the trash. I thought she might grab another from the fridge, but she didn’t. She simply leaned against the counter by the sink and folded her arms in front of her as if she was done with our conversation.

I stayed seated but turned sideways in my chair to face her. “And that was in February?”

“Near the end of February, I guess.”

“And she stayed with him until summer?”

She nodded, her face blank but serious.

“And he continued to abuse her?”

“I think he was on his best behavior for a while, but then it started again, and I’m assuming that is why she ended it the second time, although, as I told you at headquarters, who really knows why. I’m sure it didn’t hurt matters that she got interested in Paul, and who knows who was in his life at the time.”

“And you like Paul?”

“Yeah. He’s much, much better than Victor. Leslie’s doing really well with him.”

“Is he a user?”

“No, thank goodness. Not that I know of anyway.”

“And Lewis?”

“What about him?”

“Did Victor hurt him?”

Heather glanced at the ceiling, then back at me, her arms still crossed before her. “I’m not positive, but I don’t think so. He doesn’t say much when I ask him.”

I got up and went into the kitchen and leaned against the counter on the other end. “Do you know of anyone who would do this to Victor?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you, Mr. Systead.”

“Please, it’s Ted. You know, I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

“I know.” She looked down again as if she was shy, at the floor. “You’re from the area.”

I nodded.

“He speaks highly of you. But, as far as Victor is concerned, he was a real asshole. A lot of people might have wanted to hurt him, but I don’t know who actually would.”

“Paul?”

“No, I can’t imagine. Why? Is he a suspect?”

“No, not really.”

Heather looked out her kitchen window toward her barn. “I have a sick mare with a swollen ankle that’s not eating,” she said, and I felt a sinking sensation at being dismissed. I fought back the idea that my motives were not completely professional, that I really wanted to stay longer to get to know her better. “I was actually coming back to the house to grab her antibiotics,” she said. “If you don’t have any more questions, I’d like to get back out to her before it starts to get too dark to see if I can get her to eat with her medicine.”

“Oh, no, that’s good. Sorry to keep you.” I drank the last of my beer and motioned that I would throw it in the trash under the sink, but she stayed where she was and held out her hand to grab it. “Thanks,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll need your number in case I think of anything else.”

“Of course.” She began opening a drawer for a notepad and wrote her number down for me. And when she handed it to me and gave me the same small, nervous smile as she did earlier, I felt shy all over again.

19

T
WO DAYS BEFORE
my twenty-fourth birthday, I read a front-page story about a grizzly attack on two men in a backcountry Yellowstone Park campsite. I know exactly where I was when I read the news—in a coffee shop in Missoula near the university surrounded by the buzz of the early fall semester energy. In fact, I always remember precisely where I am and what I am doing whenever I hear about a grizzly attack, the way people recall their whereabouts when they heard about Kennedy’s assassination or 9/11.