“Thank you for coming in.” He holds a hand out to the chair closest to me. “Please, take a seat.”
I glance again at the camera and cautiously seat myself. I place my palms flat on the table, but the urge to escape continues to mount. I feel it as a pulsing, mushrooming pressure beneath the bandage around my skull. Can feel it in the throb of my toes. This claustrophobia, too, is some kind of new normal after my existing in mountains and forests for so many nights and days. In that feat alone, I tell myself, lies real power. I’m powerful now. I’ve done things others could not, and did not.
I survived.
“Coffee? Tea, juice, water?” he says.
I shake my head.
Mason opens his notebook, scans a few lines of scribbled text, tells me that our interview is being recorded, and asks me to state my name for the record. He then looks me directly in the eyes and says, “Would you like to have anyone present?”
I shake my head.
“Are you certain? We can provide you with a victim service worker, or you can ask for counsel—”
“No.”
He studies me for a beat. “Okay. Feel free to ask for a break at any time.”
“Who’s watching?” I ask with a tilt of my chin toward the camera.
“Two RCMP officers.”
“Detectives?”
“Yes.”
I worry my lip with my teeth and nod. My palms are going sweaty on the tabletop, despite the chill inside my bones.
“I’d like to go over again, in detail, what happened after the group left the lodge.”
Another memory flash. The sound of gunshots. A body swinging by the neck. Screams—such terrible screams . . .
“Take it slow,” he says. Friendly. Gentle. Encouraging. “And again, let me know if at any time you decide that you’d like someone present.”
Nine Little Liars thought they’d be late.
One missed the plane, and then there were eight . . .
“Let’s start with the morning of Sunday, October 25—the rendezvous at the Thunderbird Lodge floatplane dock when everyone met.”
I stare into his probing, gray eyes. How can this Mountie ever begin to understand? How can anyone?
We became a group with feral instincts, each of our weaknesses exaggerated and sharpened by guilt and fear and hunger and exhaustion. By the very need to survive. To live. That kind of struggle amplifies aspects of a personality in disturbing ways, ones you might never anticipate. It changed our reality. Perhaps I never understood Reality until now.
Now I know Reality is a fluid and ephemeral thing, and it’s contingent on those around you. And out of context, what you experience might never be grasped by one who was not there. How do you explain that you were taken, within a matter of hours, from the heart of civilization into the dark of the woods, into the black heart of a Grimms’ fairy tale?
I clear my throat. “There were eight of us on the dock that morning,” I say carefully. “Eight including the tour guide.”
THE SEARCH
MASON
Friday, October 30.
Darkness came early in Kluhane Bay at the end of October, especially in the long shadows of the granite mountains. And when it arrived, it was complete. No soft, anthropogenic light haze over the town. Kluhane Bay was barely even a town. It was unincorporated in that it had no municipal status, no mayor, and no town council. Policing fell to a small three-officer satellite detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s North District of BC, which was headquartered in Prince George.
Kluhane was home to maybe six hundred year-round residents who lived in wooden houses that hunkered along the few windblown streets on the shores of Lake Kluhane, one of the largest natural lakes in northern British Columbia. Summers were beautiful, and drew outdoor enthusiasts. But in winter the lake would freeze, and the wind would howl fiercely from the north. There was a small airstrip, a new waterfront promenade, a tiny post office, and some other essential stores and services, including a bakery, a gas station, and a motel with a diner downstairs. Beyond the last streets of town, only logging roads and ATV tracks punched thin access threads into dense, endless forests and craggy mountains. Kluhane Bay was the definition of isolation, and Sergeant Mason Deniaud felt it now as he fisted the wheel of his 4x4 police truck and negotiated a steep and rutted logging road up into a twilight that seemed to close in concert with the trees and clouds behind him.
The call had come a half hour ago.
Two hunters had stumbled upon the crash site of a floatplane. The aircraft had gone down in trees along the side of a ravine that funneled the white waters of the Taheese River down from Taheese Lake. The hunters had managed to radio a friend, who’d called the Kluhane Bay police via landline. No cell service in Kluhane. Nothing for miles and miles. Mason was technically the cop in charge of the detachment, but this was no desk job. One of his two officers, Constable Birken Hubble, was already on scene taking statements from the hunters. His other officer, Jake Podgorsky, was on his day off.
Mason’s headlights lit upon another water bar. The logging road had been deactivated—deep ditches cut diagonally across it at intervals to mitigate erosion. Engaging his four-wheel drive, he approached the ditch at a thirty-degree angle. It lost him traction on the incline. As his leading tire hit the bottom of the trough, he spun his wheel in the opposite direction, then came carefully up and out the other end. But the rear of his truck had insufficient clearance. His exhaust pipe and bumper clunked and scraped against stones. He cursed.
The trees closed in as he climbed higher. Branches and twigs scored the sides of his vehicle like fingernails on a chalkboard. It reminded him of school, and of Jenny and Luke. A vivid image flashed into his mind: Luke with his little dinosaur backpack on his first day of school. Mason’s gloved hands tightened on the wheel as his pulse quickened. He tamped the memory down and checked his GPS reading. He should be near the river. The evergreens around him were bigger now. Fat trunks covered in moss. Mist rolled down the mountain and sifted in ghostly fingers through the branches. It made his headlights look like hazy tunnels through the gloom. Perhaps he’d made the wrong move in taking this post.
Usually an isolated northern posting like this was the preserve of rookies fresh out of Depot Division in Regina. But for Mason—a veteran major crimes cop with twelve years of law enforcement under his gun belt—it had been a Hobson’s choice, and an uncommon one. He’d put in the request himself.
It was either this or digging himself into deeper shit on a road toward disciplinary action. Or worse: dismissal.
Maybe he should’ve just resigned, quit while barely ahead. But something deep down inside Mason urged him to hold on, just for a while longer, to try to buy time to think in a place that was quiet, safe, under the radar. Maybe he’d pull himself right. Maybe after two years or so in these backwoods, he’d be ready to return to a major urban environment and serious crime work. Maybe he’d want to keep living by then.
But the other part of Mason—the destructive part—whispered in his ear that he was deluding himself. He was washed up. Soiled goods. No one was going to want to work with him or trust him again.
This is your last option.
He rounded a steep bend and saw Hubb’s marked SUV ahead, parked beneath the sagging boughs of a Douglas fir, the engine puffing clouds of white into the dusk. The windows were fogged, but Mason could discern the silhouettes of three occupants inside. In front of the SUV was a mud-caked all-terrain vehicle painted in camouflage greens. A blaze hunting vest lay on the seat. Mason pulled in behind the SUV. As he put his vehicle into park, Hubb got out of the SUV and swaggered over to his truck, her arms held out in an unnatural position to accommodate her duty belt. Hubb was short—maybe five two in her steel-toed boots, and the heavy gun belt and bullet-suppression vest under her jacket bulked up an already padded frame. Hubb liked her doughnuts from the bakery across the street from the station. Her nose and cheeks were ruddy with cold, her eyes watery bright.