Backcountry Read online

  But maybe it was just as well that they were apart. Chase would not approve of the activities she had planned for the next couple of days.

  Troy drove to the Wilderness Quest office. Maya and Aidan deserted them in the parking lot.

  “Showers, then party time,” Aidan told Sam. “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger!”

  “No, pizza!” Maya argued, then turned to wave from the window of Aidan’s silver Subaru Forester as they drove out of the lot. “See you day after tomorrow!”

  Sam watched her two peer counselors vanish down the road, something about Aidan’s car tickling her memory. But silver Foresters were nearly as common as squirrels in Bellingham.

  “Maya’s still bunking in the staff house, I take it,” Troy observed.

  “Guess so.” Whatever was bugging her about Aidan’s car refused to come into mental focus. She wearily picked up the pack at her feet.

  “Our summer rental house closes down after this expedition,” Troy warned.

  Maya would be unemployed and homeless. Again.

  Troy unlocked the door of the office and held it open for her. “How’s the expedition going, Sam?”

  “Slowly.” She followed him, curious about why the building was vacant until she remembered it was Sunday. Troy led her into the company break room, where Sam plopped down at a round table, grateful to sit in a chair for a change. He pushed a bottle of orange juice into her hands. She eagerly opened it.

  Troy helped himself to a cup of water from the filter gizmo attached to the faucet. On the counter between sink and refrigerator rested a large bouquet of pink carnations and daisies. Behind that, a photo had been taped to the wall: a fish-eye portrait of Kim and Kyla, standing side by side, smiling in their jeans and tees. The glittering water of Pinnacle Lake filled the background. Kyla’s arm extended off to the left side of the photo. The selfie.

  Suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room. Sam sucked in a painful breath.

  “I know.” Troy slid into the chair across from her, blocking her view of the photo. “I wouldn’t let the staff put it in the public areas, but they really wanted to have something in here.”

  “That’s where...” she began, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “I figured. Kyla sent it to me on the day.”

  “She sent it to me, too.” She leaned to the left to study the happy photo again. Kim and Kyla had such an affectionate relationship; mother and daughter had truly enjoyed each other’s company. Sam ached with the knowledge that her own mother hadn’t lived to see her grow up. They’d never had happy times as adults, never had a photo like this. In fact, she barely remembered any days before Susan Westin became an invalid.

  This was not the time or place for self-pity, she reminded herself, straightening in her chair and focusing on Troy. The poor man seemed thinner than he had ten days ago, and the lines across his forehead were deepening into crevasses.

  His gaze was on the cup of water in his hands. “We have to remember that Kim and Kyla were friends with all the staff, too.”

  She nodded, afraid that her voice might crack if she tried to talk.

  He took a sip of his water. When he set the cup down, he met her eyes. “Everyone here in the office thinks you’re doing a fantastic job, Sam.”

  She almost choked on a swallow of orange juice. “Really?”

  “Really. We listen to all your recordings, you know, and read your reports.”

  “As you know, there have been a few ...” she struggled for the right word, “...incidents.”

  “There are always ... incidents,” he said, imitating her cadence. “There’d be no need for this business if these were well adjusted kids. It’s amazing how well your group seems to be getting along. We especially appreciated the poetry. Were the haikus your idea?”

  She shook her head. “I’d love to take credit for that, but the crew came up with poetry night on their own.”

  “Even more amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing.” He stood up and rolled his shoulders back. Vertebrae cracked, and he raised a hand to the nape of his neck. “Well, I’m sure you’re anxious to get home.”

  “Oh no, you don’t!” She grabbed at his arm. “What the hell’s going on, Troy? Start with Chris. You know he came up to tell me about his guns and ask me to vouch for him?”

  “I know; I told him it was okay.”

  “And then how about this Klapton thing?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, about Chris and the investigation.”

  “What’s all this about Detective Greene?”

  “She’s tenacious, I’ll give her that. Unfortunately, she seems to be the only one. I get the feeling that nobody knows what to do with this case.”

  Those comments were not reassuring. “You don’t believe Chris could be guilty of anything, do you?”

  Troy crooked an arm toward the hallway. “Come with me to my office.”

  Orange juice in hand, Sam followed him down the hall. After she was seated in his guest chair, he handed her the news section of a local paper. An article on the front page featured a grainy photo of Troy and Chris perched at a tall table in a dimly lit bar. In front of them were half-filled beer glasses, along with one empty beside Chris’s elbow. At the side of the photo was a server with a tray, dressed in a crop top and skimpy shorts that showed an abundance of cleavage and long legs. The two men appeared to be staring at the scantily clad girl.

  “I think the original photo was focused on the singer on stage.” He pointed to three-quarters of a woman sitting on a stool with a microphone in hand. He was right, it looked like the photo had been blown up and cropped; the texture was coarse and the singer’s right side was missing.

  The article text was brief, but questioned why the murder victims’ husband and boyfriend had been out ogling girls at a bar a month before the women were killed.

  “I still can’t believe this.” Troy shook his head. “We weren’t ‘ogling girls,’ for chrissakes. We were talking. I picked that place because it was close to the marina where Chris was working, and I asked him to meet me there.”

  She waited.

  Troy raked his fingers through his hair, making it spike out on one side of his head. “This will sound like it’s coming from the nineteenth century, but I wanted to know his intentions toward my daughter.”

  Sam drained the last sip of juice from the bottle.

  “Kyla adored Chris, you know,” he said.

  “I know.” Kyla had made Christopher Rawlins sound like the ideal man.

  “She hoped to marry him. But I knew he hung with rough company sometimes on the fishing boats, and I just wanted to make sure he was on the up and up.”

  “Plus, he had a record.”

  Surprise froze Troy’s features.

  “The police told me about a couple of charges,” she lied. Troy didn’t need to know she was checking up on everyone through Chase.

  “I know about the bar brawl in Alaska, five years ago,” Troy muttered. “Like I said, he hangs out with some tough characters.”

  “You don’t really think that Chris had anything to do with Kim and Kyla’s murder, do you?”

  He slumped in his desk chair. Sliding his fingers under his glasses, he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to think anymore, Sam.”

  Sam squirmed, feeling an unexpected pang of missing her crew kids. At least she might be able to help them. She didn’t have a clue what to do to help Troy. The only thing she could think of was to locate this Detective Greene and find out what the woman knew. She stood up. “I’ll go in a minute, Troy. I’m sure everyone would appreciate it if I took a shower. And I’m so looking forward to clean socks.”

  “I’ll bet.” He wearily let his hand drop to the desktop.

  “But first, what about that Klapton note? Seemed like it put you in a panic.”

  He leaned forward. “Did you bring it?”

  “I found all of these in Kyla’s tent.” Sh
e unzipped the outside pocket on her pants leg, fished out the broken earring and the two curls of paper and handed them over.

  He set the earring aside on his desk, then unfurled the fortune and read aloud, “You will meet a stranger who will change your future.”

  “Good Lord.” He scrunched the tiny Chinese scroll into a ball and tossed it into the wastebasket beside his desk.

  “You don’t want to keep that?” The idea that it might be some weird sort of evidence crossed her mind.

  Troy lifted an eyebrow. “A fortune from a commercial cookie? Kyla was addicted to those things. She always had a box of those cookies in her cupboard and fortunes in her pockets.” He used his fingernails to roll out the other piece of paper.

  Sam had read about people blanching before, but she’d never seen it until now. The blood simply drained out of Troy’s face. He stared at the note in his hand as if it were a scorpion. “My God. I was so hoping...” His voice trailed off into silence.

  “Who is Klapton?” she asked.

  “When did you find this?”

  “Yesterday morning. In my tent. At first I thought it was a joke of some sort, or maybe just an old note that got stuck to Kyla’s equipment.”

  He turned over the receipt and moved it into the pool of light under his desk lamp, squinting behind his glasses. Then he pulled open a desk drawer, removed a magnifying glass and held it over the note, reading the printed receipt. “No date,” he murmured to himself.

  “Who is Klapton?” she asked again.

  Troy returned the magnifying glass to the drawer and then scrubbed his hand across his bearded chin for a long moment before saying, “Klapton is Erik Heigler. My nephew. My sister’s son. We...I haven’t seen him for nearly ten years. We assumed he died in Mexico or Central America or some Third World drainage ditch.”

  Sam flinched at the callousness of Troy’s last statement.

  He locked his hands together in front of his chest and rocked back and forth a few times. “Oh God, please tell me this is not true.”

  An alarm buzzed in Sam’s head. “What’s not true?”

  “Erik’s been an addict for as long as I can remember. Meth, coke, heroin. Buying, using, selling.” Troy stared sadly at the crumpled receipt on his desk. “He burned through the whole family before he left the country.”

  She waited for the rest of the story.

  “He’d be around thirty now. When he was nineteen, Kim convinced me we could rescue him.”

  “That sounds like something she’d do,” Sam said.

  His gaze bounced up to connect with hers. “Erik stole our debit card and emptied our checking account. We would never have gotten Wilderness Quest off the ground if I hadn’t had a regular paycheck at the time.”

  It was a disturbing story, but one that happened a long time ago. It seemed improbable that this character could be haunting her in the mountains. “Why would Erik come to our camp?”

  “He might be looking for Kyla.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Troy.”

  He shook his head. “Kyla was too young at the time to grasp everything that Erik was up to. He did have a certain slick charm, and he played a mean guitar. Hence the Klapton. With a K, to match the K in his first name. Kyla thought her cousin was cool. When I threw him out, she was devastated.” He swallowed hard. “So if Erik decided to show up again, he might visit her instead of Kim or me.”

  It still didn’t make sense. “But Kyla’s been...gone...a while.” More than a month had passed and she still couldn’t say it.

  Troy considered for a minute. “Erik might not know about Kyla and Kim. I doubt he watches the news or reads the papers.”

  How could Kyla or Kim have never mentioned this guy?

  Troy answered her unspoken question. “We believed Erik was gone for good ten years ago.”

  “Does Detective Greene know about Erik?”

  “I’ll make sure she does.”

  Sam pointed to the note. “It could just be a coincidence, couldn’t it? Anyone could write that. I sort of suspected Aidan did it.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Aidan?”

  “He acted kind of funny when I showed it to him.”

  “Well, you have to admit it’s an odd thing to be asking about.”

  That was true, but still... “You said you’d known Aidan ‘forever’?”

  “The Callahans live a few houses away from us. Aidan mowed our lawn when he was in high school. He’s always been a good kid.”

  “So he was in the neighborhood when Erik stayed at your house?”

  Troy picked up the shred of paper again. “Nobody outside our family knew about the Klapton nickname.”

  Sam suspected that Troy might be a bit naïve about what his daughter had shared as a teenager. But if Aidan knew about Erik and the Klapton nickname, why would he hide that information from her? Troy was right, unless Aidan was pretending to be Klapton for some unknown reason, the idea that he would sneak the note into her tent seemed far-fetched.

  “Maya told me Kyla talked about Klapton contacting her.”

  Troy’s head jerked up, his glasses reflecting the overhead light. “What? When?”

  “The last day of their last expedition, in the locker room here. Maya said it was a Facebook message and that Kyla didn’t know what to do about him.”

  Troy pulled at his beard. “Oh, God! I always told her Facebook was dangerous. She’d ‘friend’ anyone who asked.” He used air quotes to enclose the word “friend.” “Oh, damn. I’ll tell Greene to look for that on Kyla’s phone.”

  He focused on the note again. “This does look like Erik’s handwriting, at least what I remember of it. He always printed in block letters; I used to wonder if he’d ever learned cursive. But the truly damning factor is that, after I threw him out, we’d find notes just like this, in the mailbox, stuck behind a windshield wiper, pinned to the back door.” He shuddered.

  “Creepy,” Sam agreed. “But do you really think he could have tracked my group down in the north Cascades?”

  Troy sucked in an audible breath, thinking. “Erik’s not stupid. Kim was starting this company at the time he was staying with us. If he was skulking around here again, he might have phoned the office and asked for Kyla. When you called yesterday, I realized I’d never changed her name on the schedule because the client parents all had a list of the crew leaders and I didn’t want to upset them with our ... last minute change. We use an answering service after hours, you know. If asked, the evening operator would probably say Kyla was out in the field with a crew.”

  He rocked a couple more times. “Our website says we take our groups into the north Cascades.”

  “That’s a whole lot of territory to get lost in,” Sam reminded him. But then her brain seized on the train of thought that was likely rocketing through Troy’s brain. “You always tell the Forest Service and the Park Service where your groups will be, and when.”

  He nodded. “It’s a safety issue, with hunters and forest fires, and we never know when we might need their help to evacuate a sick or injured camper. Anyhow, that’s why I relocated your crew.” Using a pen, he slid the note to the side of his desk and placed his stapler on top to hold it in place. “I’ll call the sheriff’s office and make sure they get this.”

  “What does Erik look like?”

  “He’s about my height—five ten or so, with black hair. Last time I saw him, he was rail thin, like most addicts. It’s likely that he’ll be unkempt, needing a haircut and a shave.”

  The hunter came to mind. Thin, long dark hair. She made an effort to relax her jaw, reminding herself that description could fit thousands of men in the immediate area. Still, the coincidence was frightening.

  “Women say he’s good looking, and pretty much everyone thinks he’s charming. He could always worm his way into all sorts of deals.” Troy raised his arms and raked both hands through his hair, his eyes unfocused. “Oh sweet Jesus, did Erik kill my wife and daughter?”

  “
You mean... You think he might be the one?” Sam pointed out, “Ten years is a long time to wait for revenge.”

  “Don’t assume he’s operating in a logical manner. He has racked up at least two convictions I know about, one for assault and one for armed robbery. The night we threw him out ... correction, I threw him out, Kim didn’t want me to ... he threatened to kill us both.”

  Lowering his hands, Troy chafed his upper arms as if he had a sudden chill. “I can’t think of a better way for him to hurt me than killing my family.”

  Sam picked up the orange juice bottle again, but it was empty. She couldn’t argue with that logic, but Troy’s scenario didn’t make sense. “But if Erik was responsible for ... that, then he wouldn’t be wandering around the north Cascades looking for Kyla.”

  He grimaced. “I don’t want to think he might go after some of my employees, but I can’t discount the possibility.”

  A homicidal maniac might be stalking her crew?

  “But you’re safe now,” Troy tried to reassure her. “I instructed the whole staff, and our Forest Service and Park Service contacts, not to give out any information about your field trip. And now the authorities will be looking for Erik.”

  As she drove back to her house, Sam wondered what other secrets the Johnson family had hidden from her.

  At home, she tossed her clothes into the washing machine, then slipped into a hot bath. Her cat Simon perched on the tub rim to keep her company until she pressed the button to start the motor. She rarely used her whirlpool tub, but today the jets of water felt luxurious. The ring of dirt left behind when she pulled herself out was mortifying. She scrubbed it off before emerging from the bathroom.

  Simon insisted on sitting in her lap and head-butting her arm as she mangled a text message to Chase, asking him to check into Erik Heigler’s background. From the moment she’d arrived home, the cat had followed her around the house. She gently rubbed his silky ears. He purred and closed his eyes as she stroked a fingertip down his brown nose and scratched his chin. She was already feeling guilty about leaving him the day after tomorrow to return to the mountains.