He nods and asks, and as she answers, his frown deepens. After she stops, he pauses.
“Jay?”
“I … I think she’s really confused, and I don’t know how much good any of this will do.” He clears his throat. “Rockton is for victims, right? I’m guessing there are women here running from men. My sister…” Another throat-clearing as his gaze ducks to the side. “My sister died at the hands of an abusive ex-boyfriend. It didn’t matter how many times she reported him, no one listened. We did, too—her family—but…” He shifts in discomfort. “It wasn’t enough.”
“The system, frankly, sucks, and yes, obviously there are women here to escape what happened to your sister.”
“Right, so what I’m saying is that I think we might be dealing with a past trauma here, one that’s returned after a head injury. If there’s any chance it involved an attack in the forest, that might be what we’re hearing here.”
“Can you just tell me what she’s saying? Please? Unfiltered. Unedited.”
Color touches his cheeks. “Sorry. I’m interpreting data. That’s what I do for a living. Occupational hazard. She’s saying that she and her partner were hiking in the forest, which I know you don’t allow here.”
“Just tell me what she said, Jay.”
I finally get the whole story, and part of me thinks I should have just cut through the bullshit and told him the truth, which he’ll probably find out soon enough. On the other hand, this gives me Sophie’s words without him making the assumptions he might if he knew she really was a hiker who’d been attacked in the woods.
According to what he says, Sophie is indeed a tourist, one who’d come from Denmark with her partner and two friends to fulfill a lifelong dream of hiking in the Canadian north. They’d been dropped off by a bush pilot a week ago, and they’d been having the adventure they’d envisioned when she’d woken to the wild man in the forest attacking them. From there, everything is a blur. She isn’t sure how long ago the attack happened. A day? Two? Three? She only recalls running for her life through the forest, and the next thing she knew, she ended up here, in a hospital bed, back in Dawson City.
That’s where she presumes she is: Dawson. Which could mean either her opinion of Canadian health care was extremely low or her mind is still addled enough that she hasn’t noticed she’s in a wooden building, being treated by people in T-shirts and jeans. Scandinavian medicine has a reputation for being top-tier, so maybe this primitive building is what she expects in the Canadian north. I fear, however, given her lack of questions, that she’s still feverish and mentally confused. Confused about the part where a wild man from the forest attacked them, though? No. Her description is impossible to mistake for anything else. Her hiking party was attacked by hostiles. And either she’s the only survivor, or there are people in that forest who need our help even more than she does.
SEVEN
I end up telling Jay that the woman isn’t from Rockton. I must. If he’s going to translate, I can’t keep pretending she’s a local and expecting useful information. I keep it to the basics. We presume she’s a tourist who seemed to have been attacked in the forest, and we’re trying to help. I ass
ure him that we’ll handle all security issues arising from her being here, but he dismisses that. Helping her is the important thing, and he’s happy to do that.
* * *
I’m in the police station. Dalton’s sitting at the lone desk and staring at a hand-drawn map. I’m perched on the desk with Storm at my feet.
“Read it again,” Dalton says as he balls up the map and pulls over fresh paper.
I could just hand over my notes, but this works better for him. I read Sophie’s description of the area where they camped, and each time he draws it, he adjusts the parts she leaves out. Her description is full of landmarks that I’m sure seem as clear as signposts to her, but out here, telling us she camped near two pines growing together and a huge boulder covered in black moss is like telling a city dweller that you live on a corner lot with a basketball net and a weeping willow.
She’s given us what she remembers in terms of mountains and bodies of water, as well as the unusual landscape markers, but it’s a hodgepodge. “We camped in an old burn area near a lake with a mountain behind it.” Was the burn area north of the lake? South? How far were those mountains? Snow-topped or tree-topped? A single peak, double, triple? I’d tried to get more, but she wasn’t able to provide it.
What Dalton’s doing now is taking the significant parts and rearranging them. Put the lake here and the burn site here and the mountain there. Does that look familiar? No? Okay, what if …
One might say we should just get off our asses and go look. And whoever said that would have zero concept of the sheer scale of land we’re dealing with. This isn’t a state park with three small lakes and a single mountain peak. Even “burn site” means little. Forest fires are part of the natural cycle.
“I need Jacob,” Dalton says finally, pushing the paper away.
I figured he would. The problem is finding his brother. Last year, Jacob met a woman from Rockton, and that went as those things often did. Having failed to lure his brother from the forest, Dalton grumbled when Nicole managed it, but he’d been pleased. It was a lonely life, and even if nothing came of the flirtation, it portended a day when Jacob might not be alone.
Something did come of the flirtation, and Nicole had announced she was planning to spend the winter with Jacob, joking not to give away her apartment, because she might not last a week. She’s been gone ever since.
Having a partner means Jacob isn’t swinging by as often as he used to. We’ll need to look for him, and that’s why Dalton is trying so hard to solve the map puzzle on his own. The time we spend hunting for Jacob is time we’re not hunting for three missing hikers.
He sets his pencil down with a snap. “Fucking tourists. They should need to pass an exam before they’re allowed out there. You have to take a test to drive a car, fly a plane, do all kinds of dangerous shit. But you can just walk into the fucking wilderness dressed in your fucking fancy clothes, without a fucking satellite phone or any fucking common sense.”
I let him vent. This is the guy whose cardinal rule for newcomers isn’t “Don’t cause trouble” or “Pull your own weight.” It’s “Stay out of the fucking forest.”
You want to explore the wilderness? That’s great. No, seriously, that is fantastic. We have ways for you to do that. Hunting teams and harvesting teams and fishing teams and logging teams.
You just want to enjoy nature? We have guided hikes and boating and even spelunking.
You know what all those things have in common? An armed guide who will take you in and bring you out and keep you safe, and if you think I’m the world’s biggest asshole for not letting you go for a walk on your own? Then I’m the world’s biggest asshole. Now go join a team or shut the fuck up.