We’re at the clinic, having come in the back way. April has made sure it’s empty, and I ask her to stay in the front room, in case anyone arrives. Maryanne and I walk in to find the dead woman on the examining table. Maryanne takes one look and stops midstep. I resist the urge to jump in with questions. I can see mental wheels turning, and I don’t want to do anything to put on the brakes.
Maryanne walks to the table. She looks down and whispers, “I’m Ellen.” She looks over at me. “That’s what she said. I’m Ellen. I met her…”
Maryanne looks around, and I push over a chair. She eyes it, this simple object that would once have been so familiar. Then she gingerly lowers herself onto it.
I pull another chair from the next room and sit in front of her.
“‘Met’ isn’t quite the right word,” Maryanne says. “I encountered her. It was…” She shakes her head. “Time is difficult to judge. I remember it was warm that day. It might have been last summer. It could even have been the one before. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”
“That’s fine.”
“We were gathering berries. If you need the exact time of year, that could help. They were crowberries. I was with the shaman and the two other women from our group. She”—Maryanne gestures toward the dead woman—“came out of the woods. Carefully. I remember that. She made enough noise so we’d hear her, and she had her hands raised so we could see she wasn’t armed. She did everything right.”
“And?”
“The shaman tried to kill her. It was like the men with Eric. He’d be an asset as a worker, as a fighter, but all they see is competition. Our power, as with most patriarchal tribes, came from our mates.”
“Fewer women means more opportunity to snag a powerful man.”
“Yes, and I would strongly suspect that freeing Lora was the shaman’s idea. Lora was young and strong and pretty. If she’d survived, she could have taken the best mate, become the most powerful woman, possibly even become shaman. This woman”—she nods at the body—“wasn’t young, but she’d still be competition. The shaman ran her off and tried to get us to hunt and kill her, as a supposed threat to the group. We were in a down phase, though, so myself and the other women pretended to give chase but didn’t put much effort into it. She got away easily.”
“Do you know what she wanted?”
“That’s what I’m struggling to remember. She spoke to us, but while I would have understood her at the time, the memory faded quickly. What I remember isn’t the conversation but the gist of it. She wanted to help us. I was confused at first, because she said something about help, and I thought she needed help, but that wasn’t it. She wanted to help us.”
“But before that, you didn’t know her. She wasn’t from your tribe.”
Maryanne shakes her head. “She was a settler, not a hostile.”
“Could you take a look at this?”
I rise and fold back the sheet to show the woman’s—Ellen’s—upper-chest scarring. Before I can say anything, Maryanne sucks in breath.
“Oh!” she says. “That’s … Yes, that’s the other group.” She looks at me. “There are two tribes in this area. I don’t know if there are more farther afield, but we only had contact with this other one, and as little of that as possible. It was like two wolf packs, equally matched in size, with enough territory that they didn’t need to cross paths. My feeling is that the two groups had been linked at some point.”
“One initial group that split,” I say. “Like Rockton and the settlements.”
“Yes, but that’s just my presumption. It wasn’t as if we sat around talking about our tribal history. I don’t know if it was the drugs themselves or the result of living that way, but everything was very focused on the now. Any discussions we had were the simple exchange of information needed in the moment. The fire is too small. We need more kindling. Hey, that’s my meat. Even things like hunts or gathering expeditions were very in the moment. We’re running low on meat, so we need to hunt. It’s blueberry season, so we should pick blueberries. When someone died, we buried him and divided up his things, and rarely referred to him again.”
She takes a deep breath. “And that’s the very long way of saying that there were two tribes, but we didn’t interact, and if there was any connection between the two, no one ever mentioned it to me.”
Maryanne runs her fingertips over the woman’s raised scars. “This is definitely their work. When I met her, though, I had no sense she was a hostile. If anyone had suspected she came from the other tribe, that would have been far more worrisome, being so deep into our territory.”
“My guess is that she’d been a hostile and left them. She has facial markings, too, which she covered with dirt. The chest ones seem unfinished, but they aren’t fresh.”
“Left her tribe to become a settler. That would also explain why she’d reached out to us as a party of women. Like an ex–cult member trying to help those still drinking the Kool-Aid.” A wry twist of a smile. “Or, in our case, the tea.”
She steps back for a broader view of the woman. “If she did leave her tribe and stumbled onto them again, that might have explained how she died. They would have killed her. I see you’ve shaved part of her head. I’m guessing that was what did it? A blow to the skull?”
“Is that a common attack method for hostiles?”
A humorless chuckle. “Their murder modus operandi is ‘whatever gets the job done.’ They have knives, but they’d grab a rock if that was closest at hand.”
“She did suffer blunt-force trauma,” I say. “But cause of death was a shotgun pellet.”
“Well, then that’s not the hostiles. Some use bows and arrows, but no one would ever get access to a gun, much less ammunition.”
So I have a name for the woman. The fact that she’d tried to help Maryanne and the others gave me some small insight into her. While she could have stolen this baby for herself, I’m leaning harder now toward other possibilities.