“Things changed?” I say. “They changed?”
“If I hesitate, it is uncertainty, not evasion. They disappeared. At first, we assumed they’d gone hunting. It was summer, and they’d mentioned traveling farther afield. When we didn’t hear from them by winter, we grew concerned, but by then, if they’d died—as we feared—it would be too late to help. We could only fret and grieve. It was two years later before we saw them again, and by then…”
She shifts on the log. “By then they were not the people we remembered. Only one was still from our settlement and she was … not open to communication. The elders met. I wasn’t one of them at the time, so I can’t speak to the specifics. I only know that after two days of meetings, the elders decreed that our brethren had ‘rejoined nature,’ shedding the restraints of civilization to live closer to the divine. We needed to understand they had undergone a spiritual transformation, and we had to respect their ‘otherness.’ Respect their obvious wishes, too. Don’t communicate with them.
Don’t interfere with them. Allow them to live their lives as they see fit.”
“You never had any violent encounters with them?”
“Yes, but that came much later, and by then, the doctrine regarding the wild people was entrenched. They were like wolves or bears, and if we had a negative encounter with them, the fault was ours, for stumbling onto their territory.”
She folds her hands around her teacup. “The fault was always ours.”
* * *
On our hike home, I tell Dalton what I learned. When I finish, he says, “Fuck,” and doesn’t speak for a few minutes, as we walk in thoughtful silence. On the way here, I’d told him my theory. That’s something we’ve had a problem with in the past. When I’m considering a new direction or a possible link in a case, I’m much more comfortable saying, “Hey, Eric. Do you mind if we go chat with some people from the Second Settlement. Why? Just … because.”
Hold my cards to my chest until I can confirm—or refute—a potential theory, and if I’m wrong, well, there’s no reason to tell him what I’d been thinking, right? Save myself the embarrassment. Which is a shitty way to treat a law enforcement partner, and if mine had acted like that, I’d have been looking for a new one.
But Dalton isn’t just my partner. He’s my boss, so I want to impress him. He’s also my lover and my friend, and both of those also mean I want to impress him. Except he’s my junior investigative partner. My mentee. I’m supposed to be teaching him detective skills.
It’s unconscionable for me to make him follow blindly so I can pull a rabbit from the hat and look brilliant. I’m only lucky that when he did call me on it, he was gentle, and he knows me well enough to realize it arose from my fear of looking stupid rather than deliberately cutting him out of the process.
So before we’d reached Lynx Lake, I’d shared my wild theory, and he’d added his thoughts, which helped me solidify the idea in my mind.
“You were right, then,” he says when he speaks again.
“There’s no proof—”
He lifts a hand. “Let me rephrase that. You did not disprove your theory. You accumulated additional evidence to suggest you may be looking in the right direction. Is that equivocal enough for you?”
I squeeze his arm. “Thank you. Yes, this does suggest I’m not as far off base as I feared. It also means … Shit. I’m not even sure where to go with this right now.”
“Then let’s talk.”
We do that, walking with Storm and talking. As for my theory?
It goes back to being in the station, jokingly offering tea to Edwin. He said they don’t drink it, which I knew. But then later, after hearing his story, I’d thought that the council was probably glad the Second Settlement had the tea. They were the peaceful settlement, the hippie commune, its people happily bonding with nature and drinking tea that kept them calm and content with their lot.
What if the Second Settlement didn’t just randomly invent that tea? What if someone took advantage of their New Age ways and gave it to them to keep them docile?
Yes, it was a wild idea, and it made me feel even more like a conspiracy theorist. First, I think the council is responsible for the hostiles. When I’m proven wrong, I can’t just admit that I was mistaken. I need to concoct a new theory that implicates them.
It’s the tea that ultimately created the hostiles? Well, then, the council must be responsible for the tea.
Even if they are, that doesn’t mean the council knowingly “created” hostiles. They gave the Second Settlement a mildly narcotic tea that it uses recreationally. The ritual tea was an accidental formula that Hendricks cautioned them about and, again, the settlers have been responsible with it.
The problem is that a splinter group left the Second Settlement, exactly as I’d hypothesized. They took the tea recipe and tinkered with it, and that led to a dangerous increase in potency. Yes, that’s speculation, but it’s also a logical extension of the facts.
What does all this mean for the crimes I’m investigating? On the surface, nothing. I suspect hostiles attacked the tourists. No answer to the evolution issue would change that. This doesn’t shed any light on who killed the settlers, either. It may, however, help resolve the problem of the hostiles in general.
The council refuses to do anything about them. Not their problem. If I’m right, though, it is their problem. They gave the commune settlement the tea. That tea, in turn, brought about the hostiles. So, in attempting to ensure that the Second Settlement remained peaceful, they actually created people who posed a greater threat than Edwin’s settlement. I’d see the irony in that, if I didn’t also see the tragedy.
Hendricks seems to be a plant. His story is too odd otherwise—he stays in Rockton only a couple of months, gets introduced to the commune by Rockton’s leadership, and then stays there just long enough to create the tea before being allowed to return home, far short of his two years.
The council sent Hendricks to the Second Settlement to formulate a tea from local ingredients. The question is whether the entire council was involved or …
Wait. There hadn’t been a council at the time. There’d only been a few administrators and the board of directors.