The Last Woman in the Forest Read online

  She tried to speak calmly. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to help each other out,” he said. “You help me, and I will make sure you get on your way.”

  When the truck stopped, she struggled to turn her shoulder away from the man. She reached for the door with both hands, but the man was quicker than she. He’d shut off the engine and whipped his right arm over her head and around her neck, the knife still in his hand, and pulled her away from the door. Now his left arm was free, and he wrapped that arm around her as well. He pulled her across the seat toward him. She screamed and kicked her feet against the glass.

  “Shut up!” he yelled.

  She tried to bite his arm, but he was still wearing the denim coat and leather gloves.

  He dragged her out of the truck, kicked the door shut behind him, and pulled her around the vehicle, his left hand now held over her mouth. She smelled the rust from the chain he had held earlier and the cold air and her own fear. She tasted blood from her mouth from where she had bitten down on the inside of her cheek.

  As he hauled her downhill into thick woods of Douglas fir, her cowboy boots carved deep gullies through the mud and snow. One of her boots caught on a rock and came off, sliding her wool sock down to the arch of her foot. Then the man stopped. All around them were dark evergreens and a few cottonwoods whose trunks and branches looked like bones. Natasha thought she could hear a river close by.

  “If you try to run I will kill you,” the man said. His breathing was heavy.

  Ever so slowly he released the tight clasp of his arms around her. He held the knife in front of her face.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  Natasha listened for the sound of vehicles, but she knew it was after one o’clock by now, and this road was mostly used for forest access. Even if someone were to drive by, the person would not be able to see this far into the woods and over the sloping decline. Nor would the person be able to hear her screams through the driver’s rolled-up windows and heater and radio and the sounds of the nearby stream.

  Natasha was cold and trembling. She unzipped her gold coat, a layer of thin down.

  “Take it off,” the man said.

  She removed her jacket and handed it to the man. She didn’t know when she had begun crying, but she became aware of the tears dripping off her cheeks and landing in the snow.

  “Leave it,” he told her.

  Natasha dropped her jacket. “Please,” she said. “Please don’t do this.”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Natasha continued to remove her clothes one item at a time. She continued to plead, her voice and skin and throat raw.

  The man still held the knife. He stepped behind her. Again he wrapped his arms around her body, this time his mouth close to her ear so that she could feel his breath. The denim of his coat sleeves pressed against her stomach and her neck, and the cold metal buttons of his jacket dug into her back. Her bare feet tingled and were becoming numb.

  “Please. I’ll do anythin—”

  His arm was quick, the pressure sharp. Her eyes widened. She could not breathe.

  1

  PRESENT

  July 2017

  MARIAN

  Bull River, Montana

  It’s a terrible thing to have loved someone and not know the extent to which you’d been deceived, and a more terrible thing still to love someone and not know if you’d ever been loved in return. There is something shameful in that prospect, the kind of shame that can reduce a person to someone she no longer recognizes.

  These were Marian’s thoughts as she waded into the outer edge of the Bull River in Montana on that hot afternoon in July, as she carried a coffee tin poised in the crook of her left arm, which Marian thought ironic, as Tate didn’t drink coffee.

  It was a beautiful spot, the river wide enough to let in a nice expanse of sunlight. Tate had chosen this location, had sat on the rocky outcrop a few feet from where Marian stood now, had pressed the river rock against her palm and asked her to remember.

  That was before the story Marian had believed in, the one she’d been certain had been written for her, had begun to change, like a kaleidoscope. Turn the cylinder one way, and the pieces shift, and a new image appears, as if each of her memories were a shard that could be rearranged to fit whichever story she chose to believe, and she wondered if truth existed at all. The only thing she could be certain of was that each day forward would carry the past.

  “It will get easier,” people had told her, well-intentioned people like her mother and her father, who had each lost a parent and had lost friends. “You will always miss him, but in time the pain will become more remote.” But they didn’t know. How could they? Her grief was a complicated one. It was a mystery as addictive as her love affair had been. There were nights as she prepared to turn in, as she peeled a shirt from her body and lifted it over her head, that she imagined removing the memory of Tate from her skin. She’d step toward her bed and crawl beneath the covers. But no matter where she slept or whichever air she breathed, she felt his presence, this man who’d told her they were cut from the same block of wood, like a giant sequoia, and had she ever seen a sequoia tree, and Marian had told him she hadn’t. Only two weeks had passed since Tate had died, and now as she prepared to scatter what was left of his remains, she thought this was her crucible—all of it: her relationship with Tate, his death, the events that lay ahead.

  Marian hadn’t worn waders. She didn’t own a pair. But she’d pulled on her Muck boots before she’d left the vehicle. Besides, the water wasn’t deep in these parts, eighteen inches or a little more, and yet she knew from what Tate had told her that if she waded out any farther, the river could be well over her head, forty feet in some parts.

  The water pressed against her calves and splashed inside her boots. Marian stood still and watched her shadow dance on the surface. “I love you, Tate. I hope you know that.” Then she removed the lid from the tin and reached her hand inside the plastic bag. Slowly she sifted the fine ash and fragments into the water, watched the particles swirl downstream. Heat rose through her body despite the cool water, and her breathing became shallow because she felt everything. Then she shook out the bag and rinsed her hands in the river and returned the bag to the tin.

  Her heavy boots sloshed through the water, and she almost fell but instead extended an arm out to the side to rebalance her footing. She stepped into the reed grass and hawthorn. With an awareness of her body, of its muscle and cartilage and bone, she wrapped a hand around the trunk of a young cottonwood and pulled herself up the embankment. And there might have been a breeze through the trees, cooling her damp skin, as she navigated her way back to the U.S. Forest Service road.

  She’d parked the silver Xterra off to the side, along the ravine. The vehicle hadn’t always belonged to Marian. Tate’s name still appeared on the title. But ever since Tate’s sister had visited to collect his things, Marian had been driving the SUV, eight years old and scratched and dinged and without a working radio, to pick up sundries, to transport one or more of the dogs, to remember the places where she and Tate had been.

  The windshield faced the upper two thirds of the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, its boundaries less than two miles away. Marian set the canister on the passenger seat and opened the glove compartment. Her fingers sorted through expired insurance cards and service records until she found the man’s number that she’d written on a receipt.

  She held the phone in her left hand and dialed the number. And as she waited, she half whispered, “I’m sorry, Tate,” her throat an ache that burned down to her sternum.

  Marian had not thought the man in Idaho would answer. She had thought she would leave a message. But he answered on the fourth ring, and when he did, Marian spoke too fast. She told the man who she was; she told him she was familiar with his work on the Stillwater cases. Eventually s
he told him about Tate and asked if her boyfriend had found one of the bodies of the Stillwater victims.

  “Why now?” the man asked her.

  Marian pushed her hair away from her face and off her sticky forehead. The phone felt too warm against her left ear, so she switched it to the other side. “Because I loved him,” she said. “Because I wanted to believe him.”

  Nick Shepard wasn’t from the West. He’d been born and raised in Detroit, to an alcoholic father and a family that was often on welfare. But he’d escaped the chaos of his childhood by earning good grades and getting a scholarship to college. He’d escaped Vietnam as well, a war he had vehemently protested, by receiving an occupational deferment for his work as an aide at a mental hospital. He was retired and reclusive now; his face appeared weary in his photos, like soft thunder, and Marian didn’t have to know the man to see that he still felt the pain from dreams and childhood and the knowledge of too many disturbed minds. But there were good things in his life: a woman to whom he’d been married for forty-seven years, a grown son who was doing well. Nick enjoyed literature and music, studied the works of the great modernist poets Eliot and Cummings and Stevens. He even gardened some. Marian knew all of these things.

  Marian looked out to the west as if she could see into Idaho, where this man lived, as if the distance between them weren’t the two-hundred-and-something miles that it was. She thought of the images of the crime scenes, or rather the places where the remains had been found, and the pictures of the women’s faces, young women, like Marian. She knew that if Nick Shepard agreed to work with her, she would be reliving her life with Tate all over again. “I need to know what is real,” Marian said. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”

  All the while Marian thought no one could know she had made this call. She would even go so far as to erase it from her phone. There were the others to think about—Lyle and Trainer and Jenness and Liz and Dudley. And now there was Tate’s sister to consider, as well. Yet more than Marian’s concern for the others was her fear that Tate could read her mind, as if somehow he were all-knowing now that he was gone, his presence like breath and oxygen. And there was that lingering hope that she was wrong, that her speculations and misgivings, tentative at best, were nothing more than an active imagination.

  “You won’t tell anyone I talked to you,” she said. She could end this call. She could say she had made a mistake.

  “All right,” Shepard said.

  And so it had come to this. She did not know if she could trust this man, but there was no one else. “Will you help me?” she asked, because she could no longer do this on her own. Because there was no other way to find out the truth.

  Yes, he would help her. He had too much time on his hands. He was interested. He said all of these things.

  Then Shepard asked her, “When was the first time you felt something wasn’t right with Tate?”

  2

  ALMOST SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER

  January 2017

  MARIAN

  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

  When Marian met Tate, she didn’t know that the story of her life was about to change. She didn’t know of northern Rocky Mountain skies and moons that could cut her heart open to the bone or that his cool hands would burn rivers beneath her skin, and that when he’d tell her in so many ways that she’d been everything he’d been looking for, his voice would sound unmistakable and true and she would believe him. She had just flown into Edmonton two days after New Year’s and would be joining a group of field technicians for the next three months on a conservation study. The study would be conducted in the Athabasca oil sands in northeastern Alberta, between Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray.

  Marian passed through customs and stood with one of her duffel bags strapped vertically to her back and the other slung over her neck and hanging crossways in front of her. A messy braid fell over her right shoulder, and wisps of brown hair trailed from beneath her knit cap. She’d told Lyle, the program coordinator, what she looked like and had sent him a picture. He’d told her not to worry; someone would be holding a sign. But she didn’t see anyone holding a sign, so she proceeded to follow the foot traffic that led outside the airport and onto the curb. She held her cell phone in her left hand and was about to check it for a text message or a missed call when she heard a male voice say her name.

  That was the first time she saw him. He was standing against a white pickup truck with a black soft topper. And though he would later want her to recall the moment, to set it apart from all the other moments that had existed for her up until then, no matter how many times she revisited the memory, she would not be able to recall the same kind of specific details as he. It was morning in Edmonton. She had taken a red-eye flight and had slept on the plane. She had not had time to brush her teeth, and the coffee that she had been served before the plane landed was weak and had left her with a terrible headache, and she worried that she had packed too many clothes because the duffel bags felt heavier than she would have liked.

  But she did remember how as soon as she raised her chin and smiled, relieved that she had arrived and that there was a person on the other end to get her where she was supposed to be, she’d heard the barking of a large dog from the back of the truck, and that the man had hurried toward her and had taken the duffel bags off her shoulders. Tate introduced himself and put her bags in the back of the truck with boxes of food and a crate that held an eager Labrador mix who barked and wagged her tail against the plastic housing of her kennel.

  Marian lowered her face to the kennel. “Hi, there,” she said, her voice a fairly high note, as if she were talking to a very young child, as if she were talking to her dog, Deacon, who would be staying with Marian’s parents while she was away.

  “Her name’s Arkansas,” Tate said. “She’s a rescue dog from the Ozarks.”

  “How old is she?”

  “We’re not sure. Maybe five or six.”

  Marian had first learned about K9s for Conservation and that it was seeking applicants for an upcoming study in Alberta that past summer when, as a seasonal employee, she was living with Deacon and a group of other technicians in a small trailer on the north beach of South Padre Island, Texas. Her job had involved rescuing stranded sea turtles, rehabilitating them, and releasing them into safer areas. Marian had been reading through job listings for her next position, preferably one that would allow dogs, when she’d seen the posting for six detection dog handlers and six orienteers with no prior experience required. The job would involve hiking in Alberta in three feet of snow and taking helicopters into remote locations for the purpose of finding wolf, caribou, and moose scat during the winter’s oil explorations.

  The program, a part of the University of Washington, was operated out of a camp facility just west of Whitefish, Montana, and relied on high-energy rescue dogs who would work for the sole pleasure and reward of playing with a ball. The candidates who were accepted for the positions would be expected to arrive in Whitefish in October for two months of training.

  Marian filled out the online application. She mentioned her studies in biology at the University of Michigan, where she had graduated four years before. She listed all of the seasonal jobs she’d held since then, including tagging and tracking brown-headed cowbirds in Illinois, spraying for noxious weeds in Oklahoma, and banding ducks and mourning doves in eastern Wyoming. She wrote about her bulldog, Genius, whom she’d grown up with. And she wrote about Deacon, a forty-pound cattle dog with too much energy whom she’d adopted from a shelter shortly after arriving in Texas.

  But seasonal jobs for field technicians were competitive. Marian was not selected for an interview for the study in Alberta. When her summer employment with Turtle, Inc., ended, she’d been allowed to stay in the trailer through December in exchange for working in the nonprofit’s gift shop. The other technicians moved on to other jobs or went back to school. Marian strung Christmas lights out
side the trailer and drank spiked cider on the beach with the local employees. She’d found a job with a fish hatchery program in Clinton, Missouri, that would begin in the spring, and had decided to move home to Michigan in the meantime, to spend time with her parents and her brother’s family.

  Then she received the call from Lyle. She’d just come in from a run with Deacon and was standing in the doorway of her trailer, the sweat of Texas moving down her body, the lights on her trailer blinking red and green. Did Marian have a DUI, Lyle wanted to know. How soon could she get to Edmonton?

  * * *

  • • •

  Tate told Marian that he was one of the team leaders and that he had worked as a handler for the past ten years. Jenness, the other team leader, who managed the program’s communications, had been with the program six years. “Jenness and I will be running the operations,” Tate said. Marian already knew that Lyle would be staying in Montana at the program’s base camp, or The Den, as it was called, to coordinate and prepare for other studies.

  The crew had arrived in Edmonton three days prior, with ten dogs, four snowmobiles and two trailers, six trucks, and supplies and gear. They’d used the first day to inventory supplies, restock food, and give the dogs some exercise, and had spent all of the next day in a snowmobile operations class taught by a Polaris dealer. They’d checked out of the hotel that morning and were on their way to an oil company compound in the oil sands. The compound, a five-hour drive from the airport, was owned and operated by Pétron Oil, a co-funder and supporter of the upcoming wildlife study. Tate estimated that he and Marian were only a couple of hours behind the others.

  After Tate stopped to get Marian a coffee and the two of them were back on the road, Marian asked Tate about the two months of training that she’d missed. He told her about the fitness exercises, which included Indian trail runs up mountain roads, sometimes twice a day. The runs involved a single-file line, where the last person sprinted to the front, and so on. Tate told her the group would cover three to six miles at a time. Other days the runs were off-trail through dense forests, so that each member was bushwhacking. He told her not to worry. “You look like you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.