When I leave the clinic, I keep Rory with me. She’s awake, but quiet, having already had an early-morning play session with Dana and Max. Soon she’ll be too old to just sit and watch Mom work, but for now, if she’s in the right mood, this is acceptable. I have her in my front carrier as I set off to talk to Dalton.
After April had checked out Storm, Dalton had needed to zip off again. Gretchen is still in that clearing where we found her, and Dalton has ignored her there as he worked with Mathias to skin and butcher the grizzly. It’s not great meat, but up here, we use it all, and that will make dog food and sausage.
When I arrive with Rory, Dalton’s gaze immediately swings over my shoulder. He spots Kendra and relaxes.
“No, I didn’t come alone,” I say.
Kendra helps Mathias with the bear. She doesn’t say anything. They’ve turned Gretchen to face the other way, and it’s a testament to my exhausted brain that at first I think they turnedher away from the slaughtering. No, they turned her so she wouldn’t see more people than she already has.
“Is she talking?” I ask Dalton. At the clinic, he hadn’t mentioned Gretchen, knowing I didn’t care until Storm was stable.
“Haven’t bothered trying,” he says. “I figured you’d want to do that, and I didn’t feel like arguing with her.”
I nod and leave him to his work as I walk around to Gretchen. She sits, hands still tied, glaring at me. Earlier, she’d been gagged, but someone has removed that.
“You can’t hold me,” she says. “If I’m under arrest, you need to charge me, and you can’t tie me up.”
“Not a lawyer, huh?” I say. “Police have twenty-four hours to charge you, and if you cannot immediately be transferred to a holding facility, you can be restrained in any way necessary without using excessive force, which we have done.”
“You didn’t identify yourself as law enforcement when we first met.”
I shrug.
Her jaw sets. “There are no communities out here. At least, no permanent communities with RCMP detachments.”
I shrug again. I’ve been very careful. I never claimed to be law enforcement. Never even used “I” or “we” when talking about arrest procedures. Yes, Dalton said she was under arrest for killing her husband, but I won’t repeat that.
I have no idea how we’ll handle this in the long term. She’s seen several of us. She saw the ATV. She knows we aren’t campers. This is where I thank our lucky stars for Émilie, because I don’t need to handle that part. Émilie will, once we have what we need from Gretchen and send her back home.
“I didn’t murder my husband,” she says.
“Husband…” I draw the word out as I bounce Rory. “That was your story, right?”
“Mystory?” Her voice rises.
“You implied you’d been married for decades.”
“Twenty years last spring.”
“Yet his wedding band is new.”
Her eyes snap. “Because he lost his a few years ago, and we just replaced it this spring.” She tries to thrust out her hand, only to realize it’s bound. “Look at mine. It matches. We had a jeweler make a duplicate.”
I move around her and examine her ring. It has the same etched pattern on the gold. Hers is definitely worn.
“He’s my husband,” she says. “We’re legally married. You can check.”
“We’d need your ID for that, which it seems you dropped into a stream.”
She lets out a long hiss of breath. “We dropped the pack that contained our ID, yes, along with our sat phone and GPS. But I can give you our names and you can check them. We have social media accounts. Gretchen and Blake Landry, from Whitehorse. You’ll find us with our photos.”
I make notes. While I can’t check myself, Émilie can.
“Tell me what happened,” I say. “You said he wanted to leave early…”
“I’m not telling you anything without a lawyer present.”
I look left and then right. “Is your lawyer with us now?”
