An unforgiving place, p.1
An Unforgiving Place, page 1
AN UNFORGIVING PLACE
A NATIONAL PARKS MYSTERY
CLAIRE KELLS
For my parents, who instilled in me a love of mysteries
PROLOGUE
FOR KELSEY GREER, rock bottom was the day she walked out of the Spruce Street Fertility Clinic with an overdue bill in one hand and a crinkled ultrasound photo in the other. The sobs in her throat were choking her, mocking her. When Tim embraced her, his familiar arms felt like lead on her shoulders. This burden was hers to bear, but maybe it shouldn’t have been.
They climbed into the back seat, which smelled faintly of fried food. Kelsey dropped her gaze to the faded gray carpet in the footwell. She felt a tear roll down her cheek. She was so damn tired of crying. More than that, she was tired of feeling like a failure when the doctor had made it clear that, well, she wasn’t. Tim was the one with the issue.
He just refused to admit it.
It was selfish, she knew—this stubborn fixation on bearing her own child. But Kelsey had confronted death before, starting at the age of six, when she was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. The chemo had banished the cancer, but Kelsey had spent most of her life since then fearing its return. The mental burden of almost dying didn’t come until much later.
Her leukemia was almost thirty years behind her now, but as she endured the failures of trying to conceive, she once again felt like she was living on borrowed time. The only way to escape the burden of her own mortality was to have a child of her own, to give life to someone with a clean slate. In her heart, she really believed this to be true.
Of course, Tim felt differently. He wanted to be a dad for the same reason most men did, she supposed: to have a playmate, a buddy, a coachable kid. Sometimes Kelsey thought about what would happen if they did have a child—would her husband take on the responsibility of being a single father? Kelsey had entertained adoption more than once, but in her darkest moments, she often wondered if he’d stand by a child that wasn’t his. He had told her before they married that he didn’t need to be a dad, but if they had a kid, he’d raise it and do his best. He’d do it for her.
Well, those days of “casually trying” had long since passed. At some point, it had to end.
What if that day had come?
The Uber dropped them off at their compact brick house on a tree-lined street in South Jersey. It was drizzling, the remnants of a summer hurricane. To afford the IVF treatments, Kelsey and Tim had taken out a second mortgage on their house, knowing that one day they would be grateful they’d stayed in this perfect little neighborhood. But at that moment, it didn’t feel perfect at all. It felt vindictive, as a herd of elementary school–age children tore down the street on their way to the pool.
“What if …” Kelsey trailed off as she nibbled on her cuticles. Tim was not going to like having this conversation again.
“What if what?”
“What if we tried a sperm donor—”
“No,” he said. “No. You know I draw the line there. It wouldn’t be my child, Kelsey. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone.”
“I know, but—”
“They said IVF can work, Kelsey. We should just stick with what we know.”
His face tightened with the muscle memory of a thousand arguments. Kelsey hated talking about his “sperm issue,” but she also wished he’d at least come around and acknowledge it existed. Tim was the youngest of eight. Every time she saw his parents, she felt like they were judging her—like they viewed her as a failed biological vessel of their future grandchildren. After all, they knew about her cancer and the fact that the chemotherapy all those years ago could have impacted her fertility. It was easier for them to blame her.
“Blame” was the wrong word, Kelsey knew. Not just the wrong word, but a dangerous one. If she kept blaming Tim for their failure to be parents, those feelings would eventually deteriorate into resentment. She had to let it go.
As they walked inside the house, Kelsey tried her best to look on the bright side. She was a cancer survivor, after all, and like most cancer survivors, she didn’t wake up every morning thinking about what she didn’t have. On her good days, she saw every day as a gift—something ninety percent of people diagnosed with her type of cancer never got. She had beaten the odds. It was time to be thankful for what she had.
The problem was, becoming a mother was her lifelong dream, and she couldn’t just let it go. It was the cancer, the loss of her dad, the deep-seated yearning to be a parent—all of it made her feel like having a child of her own would somehow soften the sharper edges in her past, the sting of grief and loss. It was all she could think about.
While Tim went to hop on a Zoom call—he’d missed so much work for these appointments that his boss was always threatening to fire him—Kelsey went into the bathroom with her computer and sat on the edge of the tub. This tiny little room was the only place she could go to seal herself off from the rest of the world. Tim didn’t even use this bathroom. He preferred the one with the updated shower and the faucet that didn’t leak.
Although a hot bath probably would have served her better, Kelsey checked all of the websites she went to daily—infertility forums, cancer survivor forums, blogs, social media. She went through her emails, her direct messages …
And saw something on Twitter—a direct message from a user she vaguely recognized. Kelsey rarely logged onto Twitter since she didn’t tweet and had no followers except a couple of bots. She was a consumer, not a user—or at least, that’s how she described herself when Tim caught her online. She lurked on Twitter and a half dozen other social media platforms looking for help, support, a miracle—anything that might help her convince Tim to try sperm donation. Over the years, she couldn’t even remember all the leads she’d tracked down, all the quacks she’d interacted with. This message was probably from one of them.
The user’s name was @pittailiniq, which she assumed was a random assortment of letters until she typed the word into Google. Pittailiniq was the Inuit word for pregnancy taboos—practices and behaviors meant to inform a healthy pregnancy and birth. Kelsey, heart pounding, opened the message, which read:
67°42'01.1"N 150°56'47.3"W. exp. July 2
It felt like spam, especially since the username had no public tweets associated with its account. But when Kelsey typed the coordinates into Google, she immediately dismissed that possibility. The coordinates took her to a dropped pin in northern Alaska. Her heart fluttered.
According to internet lore, a man named Zane Reynolds was up in the arctic somewhere, recruiting infertile couples to his “retreat” and sending them home pregnant. Some women who shared her predicament were among them. Unfortunately, Reynolds had no online footprint except for his cryptic social media accounts.
Kelsey had tried, of course, to learn everything she could about him. The closest she’d gotten was a Word document containing a collection of old blog posts authored by a woman named Amy Shortbeck, who had chronicled her whole fertility journey before abruptly taking down her website three years ago with no explanation.
Later, though, Amy had turned up on Instagram—same name, different vibe. This time, Amy’s focus was on her young daughter. The only reason Kelsey had even heard about Amy’s new account was that the online infertility community couldn’t stop speculating about one Instagram post in particular. The caption read: My sweet Pinga Koyukuk—light of my life, girl of my dreams. The accompanying photo was of a cherubic baby girl clutching a stuffed lamb.
It wasn’t long before some of the women on those online forums started talking about going to Alaska, desperate to unravel the truth surrounding Amy Shortbeck’s baby and the forces that had made her a reality. One woman—whose husband was a private investigator—actually tracked down Zane Reynolds to an area near the Koyukuk River. The @pittailiniq Twitter user didn’t have a photo associated with the account, but the PI had amassed other clues to identify him. He concluded that Reynolds was operating a “fertility group” of some sort in the Gates of the Arctic National Park—and that, yes, he seemed to be targeting couples with “reluctant male infertility,” as he called it.
That was two years ago, and now, seeing this message in her inbox, Kelsey’s first instinct was to question it. She’d fallen for scams before—herbs and medicinals and creams, the psychics and the naturopaths, the zealots and outright criminals. But Amy Shortbeck was a real person, and so was her baby. Her infertility journey, too, was real—like Kelsey, she was a cancer survivor. It was how Kelsey had found her blog in the first place. So for a woman like Amy Shortbeck to travel to Alaska, delete her blog, and then turn up a year later with a baby in her arms—the whole thing was stranger than fiction. And that’s why it had to be true.
There was, of course, one small caveat to this hopeful story. Amy Shortbeck had made no mention of her husband in any of her social media posts since her daughter was born. Had her Alaskan sojourn ended their marriage for good? What, exactly, were Reynolds’ “miraculous” methods? Kelsey tried not to think too much about that for the time being.
She went back to the message. What did “exp. July 2” mean? Kelsey figured “exp.” was an abbreviation for “expires,” which filled her with dread. Today was June 29th. If the coordinates expired on 11:59 PM on July 2nd, that gave her less than three days to get to some remote outpost in Alaska. She’d have to be on a plane tomorrow to have any hope of getting there in time, and that was assuming the weather cooperated.
Tim would never go for it. He was on the verge of losing his job —and besides, he would never go for something that put the onus on him. If she went to him with this Twitter message, he’d resent her for even bringing it up. Because it was crazy; of course it was crazy. To hop on the first plane to Alaska—Alaska, for God’s sake!—and run off to some middle-of-nowhere spot in one of the remotest parts of the continent was quite simply the definition of insanity. Forget the expense—they could die. Kelsey had never been outside of the tristate area, had never even seen a real mountain. She didn’t know the first thing about camping either.
But her gut told her that this was it—this was her path to motherhood. It would be natural too—an escape from the doctor’s offices and procedures and miserable fertility treatments. Maybe Zane Reynolds understood men like Tim in ways Kelsey did not. After all, she was never going to convince him that he had a sperm problem. Even the experts couldn’t convince him of that. But maybe Zane Reynolds could.
At the very least, it would be a new beginning for them, a chance to start over. Just her and Tim and the wilderness, and Zane Reynolds too, although Kelsey couldn’t prove that these coordinates had come from him. She knew they had, though. She could feel it in her gut.
For the first time in months—years, even—she felt a strange emotion surge inside of her.
Hope.
CHAPTER
1
THE OLIVE GARDEN was a far cry from my current assignment in Denali National Park, but I was trying to make the best of it. The salad was crisp, the breadsticks fresh. I liked the cheerful colors of the booths and bicycle-themed wall art.
But for the most part, my sojourn into the Anchorage suburbs had been a disaster. The snot-nosed toddler in the booth behind me kept tugging on my hair. Our waiter had dropped a tray of sodas on my lap. And my date—well, what could I say about Orin? He was a dentist who didn’t believe in modern anesthesia. I was starting to get a bad vibe.
Then the gods smiled upon me: my cell phone rang.
Orin frowned as he watched me reach into my pocket. “Are you going to get that?”
“Sorry.” I glanced at the screen. On the display was a caller ID that brought mixed emotions: Ray Eskill. I could have sworn I’d filled out all the proper paperwork and sent all the necessary emails to confirm that I was, in fact, cleared to take vacation during my current assignment at the Investigative Services Branch, but my superior wasn’t the type to care about that sort of thing. He didn’t really believe in vacation either.
Ever since my return from medical leave, I’d done all I could to get back into my groove—reviewing case reports, taking online classes, adhering to a physical therapy schedule that bordered on obsessive—but it still felt like I’d lost a step. My last case in Sequoia had ended with a satisfactory result from an investigative perspective, but from a personal one, not so much. The bullet in my shoulder had thrown me for a loop, to say the least. I was still rattled by that whole debacle. So far, my tenure in Alaska hadn’t brought nearly as much drama as Sequoia had, but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Seeing Ray’s name on the display now, I wondered if that time had come.
I moved the phone away from my ear and said to Orin, “Do you mind if I take this? It’s my boss.”
“Right now?”
“He only calls if it’s an emergency.”
Orin frowned. “Okay, I guess.”
I went outside and walked around the corner of the building. Once the coast was clear, I hit the redial button. Ray picked up immediately.
“Harland?” His voice was gruff. “What are you up to?”
“Hello, sir. I’m … uh …” I looked around the parking lot. “Nothing.”
“It’s Saturday night. You must be up to something.”
I cleared my throat. “Is there something I can do for you, sir?”
“Look, I know you’re on vacation, but I’ve got a time-sensitive issue here. The chief ranger in Gates of the Arctic found two bodies on a river up there.”
“Gates of the Arctic?” Even after a few months in Alaska, I hadn’t yet seen the state’s second-largest national park. “Has ISB ever worked a case up there?”
“Not in recent memory. But he says he’s got two victims on the Alatna River, and he wants our help—thinks it looks suspicious.”
The truth was, I had only a passing knowledge of Gates of the Arctic National Park, which was above the Arctic Circle and, therefore, many miles off the grid. It was the remotest and least-visited national park in the United States, with about ten thousand visitors each year. Yosemite, in contrast, averaged between four and five million. It was hard to imagine a murder in place that saw so little human activity.
“What else did the chief ranger tell you?” I asked.
“Not much. He’s got their wildlife biologist up there too. He says there’s evidence of some wolf activity at the scene, but he’s never had a wolf-on-human attack in the park, that he’s aware of. Bears, sure, but not wolves.”
“The wildlife biologist should be able to sort that out, though.”
Ray grunted. “There’s more to it than that—something about where the victims were found, the condition they were in. But, look, his sat phone connection was cutting in and out, and I missed most of what he was telling me. All I can say for sure is that he wanted somebody from ISB to come up and have a look, ASAP.”
I couldn’t help but think about my older sister, Margo, who was expecting me in Seattle tomorrow night to help with the preparations for her fortieth birthday party next weekend. Our sisters were flying in, too, and I hated letting her down. After all, it was Margo who had put me on a path to becoming a federal investigator.
However, if a seasoned ranger was calling us from a scarcely visited park, it meant he really needed help. The chief rangers in these remote parks saw their fair share of lost hikers and hypothermia, but they didn’t call ISB for things like that. It was only in the event of a possible crime that they requested our assistance.
Maybe I could still make this work. Assuming Ray found me a ride up there, I could fly to Gates of the Arctic tomorrow, have a look around, and be in Seattle by next weekend. Margo will understand, I reasoned, even though I knew she probably wouldn’t.
“Are the rangers up there still on the scene?” I asked.
Ray coughed loudly into the phone; he always seemed to be fighting a cold or an asthma attack of some kind. “Yup. They’re waiting on you.”
In a way, this was welcome news. I usually arrived on the scene long after Mother Nature had destroyed most of the evidence, which made it that much harder to sort out what had happened. Knowing the bodies were still there gave me hope of cracking this case pretty quickly.
“I’m in Anchorage,” I said. “And Hux is still in Denali. I can’t get up there till tomorrow at the earliest.”
“I figured. If you’re picking up Hux first, then the fastest way to get there is a charter from Fairbanks to Bettles. There’s an outfitter in Bettles that can get you a bush plane to the Alatna River, or pretty close.”
“Hux is on administrative leave this week.”
Ray barked a laugh. “Tell him he gets a pass.”
“Sir, he needs it for his training—”
“Give him an extension, then,” Ray said, a note of sarcasm in his voice.
I looked around, at the pickup trucks and SUVs and minivans. Teenagers loitered in intimate groups, entranced by their cell phones. Young moms and dads wrestled their children into strollers. An old guy popped the hood of his truck and unleashed a slew of obscenities that would’ve made any sailor blush.
I felt a little out of place here, but then again, I felt out of place just about everywhere. I was a thirty-three-year-old, widowed, female federal agent specializing in wilderness crimes. There weren’t many of me, that was for sure.
“So, I’m canceling my vacation, then,” I said, hoping that my resigned tone made him feel a tiny bit guilty about it.
“Nah,” he said. “I bet you can wrap this up in a couple days.”
“Not if it’s a double homicide,” I said.
“It’s probably just the usual—two amateur hikers who got in over their heads and died. Just go up there and see if you can help the chief out.”
