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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 she 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?”