Chapter Twenty-Three
Anders, April, and I head back to town with Storm. Dalton and Kenny stay behind with Gretchen. I have no idea how Dalton intends to handle her, and I don’t really care.
We get Storm to the clinic, and April sets to work, with both Anders and me assisting when we can and standing ready the rest of the time.
While April has worked on Storm and Raoul before, she’s obviously not a veterinarian, and when she snaps more than usual, I know that’s anxiety.
Fortunately, what she’s seeing isn’t much different than what she’d see in a human, the procedures the same.
The punctured lung isn’t as grave as it seems. It just requires immediate attention, and after some examination, April declares that the attention it requires is surgery, because the rib is still poking into the lung.
It’s a relatively minor operation. The whole rib hasn’t gone through.
It’s not even completely fractured. It’s a splinter that’s gone in, and once that’s removed, April tests to see whether the lung will remain inflated on its own.
It mostly will, which means a small repair, and the rest left to the body’s ability to heal.
April uses ultrasound to check for internal bleeding.
There is some, but Storm’s blood pressure is strong enough that April will only continue to monitor it.
An X-ray shows those two broken ribs, and nothing else.
Her spine doesn’t seem damaged, which is a huge relief.
Now we just need to wait for her to wake up from surgery.
I don’t leave Storm’s side. Dana brings Rory for me, and I sit with her in April’s exam room, where Storm sleeps with her heart rate and breathing monitored.
I know things must be happening with Gretchen, and any other time, I’d be fretting about that, but I don’t care.
Dalton can handle this. He can always handle it.
Anders goes to help him, and I stay with Storm.
It’s a little over an hour before Storm starts to rouse. Rory is sleeping in her portable crib, and I’m right there at Storm’s side, petting her and whispering to her and reassuring her.
I call Dalton to let him know she’s awake.
While I’ve been ignoring the situation with Gretchen, I have not been ignoring my husband.
Technically Storm is my dog. He got her for me, as a gift.
But any couple who have a dog know actual “ownership” is an absurd concept and insulting to the pet.
This is our dog. Our pet. Our companion.
He’s stepped away during this crisis only because one of us has to look after Gretchen, and he’s acknowledging Storm’s original “ownership” in that. It doesn’t mean he won’t be anxiously waiting to hear from me. Ten minutes after I call, he’s at the back door, out of breath, coming to see her.
As she rouses, we continue petting and reassuring her. She’s groggy and confused, but she’s a patient and trusting dog who accepts that if she’s waking up on a table feeling strange, we know what we’re doing and everything’s okay.
Once she’s ready, we take her down so she can try standing. That’s what I’m waiting for—making sure she can stand and move and seems aware, if woozy and disoriented. When she stands up, a little shaky, and licks my face, I burst into tears and Dalton’s arms go around both of us, hugging us close.
Storm is sleeping again. We’ve brought her bed to the clinic.
Any other time, April would grumble about a dog—with endlessly shedding fur—in her exam room, but now she’s the one who insists we leave Storm there.
Today’s patients will need to accept a large dog sleeping—and snoring—during their appointments.
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 turned her 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?”
“My story?” 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?”
She scowls.
“Obviously there is no easy way of getting you a lawyer,” I say. “And we have zero legal obligation to help you.”
“What?”
“Moral obligation, yes, but not legal. We tried to help you yesterday. You attacked me and took off. Today, we saved your life—and our dog nearly lost hers in the process. Yet you still tried to run.” I wave around us.
“Run to what? Yesterday, you claimed you were being stalked. Hunted. That someone wanted to kill you, and you thought it was us. But we just saved you from a grizzly. We wouldn’t do that if we wanted you dead.
In fact, letting that grizzly kill you is better than killing you ourselves.
Death by misadventure. Yet afterward you still ran. ”
Silence. Then her gaze slides to the side. “I didn’t think it through.”
“We had to tie you up to stop you from running because we don’t want to keep risking lives saving you. Where the hell were you going, Gretchen? What was your grand plan? Just keep running in circles until something kills you?”
“I heard voices. I was trying to figure out whether there might be regular people out here, people who didn’t murder my husband.”
“You heard voices when? And where?”
She seems to relax a little. “First, on the day Blake died. He shouted, and I came running and saw someone dragging his body into the trees. He was obviously dead. I took off. Once I got away, I didn’t know what to do, so I just …
hovered. I should have fled, but our pick up was still six days away and I wanted to see who killed him.
The next voices I heard came from near the mountain, followed by an ATV that sped off before I could see anyone.
Then there were two men talking, and I crept up to see them leaving a clearing. I went into it, but it was empty.”
“You said you saw someone dragging Blake away?”
“A man. That’s all I know. I could tell Blake was dead and I…” She sucks in breath and looks away. “I panicked and ran.”
“And the two men you heard talking? Can you describe them?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t close enough. I heard voices, hurried in that direction to spy on them, and then saw them from the rear as they left the clearing. They looked and sounded male. That’s all I know.”
I’ll return to that and press harder. I just don’t want to get too far into the weeds yet.
“Go on,” I say.