Page 6 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
“We should run that by Mathias and Isabel, too,” I say. “My Psych 101 interpretation would be that it was some kind of traumatic hallucination. All the bogeymen in that poor kid’s life have been human.”
“He sees the bear, gets spooked, and flashes back to the shooting,” Anders says. “He thinks he sees human eyes. That makes sense.”
“Except for one thing,” I say. “It wasn’t just the eyes. He said the bear was moving fast on two legs.” I look at Dalton. “That’s not possible, right?”
Dalton tilts his head. “Bears rear up to look, sniff, or intimidate. They can walk on their hind legs, but not well and not fast. I have seen one approach on two legs. It reared up and kept coming like that because it was facing off against a human. It moved at what I’d call walking speed, and it wasn’t far—maybe ten feet?”
“So, not normal behavior, but not impossible either, right?”
“Yep. I’d like to keep looking. Then we’ll head back to town and come up with a plan.”
* * *
Dalton finds two more pieces of evidence. One is a very clear impression of a bear’s front paw, in a softer section of the dried-up streambed. The other is more fur caught high above ground level.
We have a grizzly less than a mile from Haven’s Rock, and it’s stalking our residents. That’s a problem. A huge one. But our hidden, off-the-grid town is deep in the Yukon wilderness, hundreds of miles from the nearest community. Wildlife is going to be a concern, just as the environment itself can be, and if that’s all we face up here, we’ll count ourselves lucky.
Haven’s Rock is our Rockton 2.0. The first version had been around since the fifties, when it’d been intended as a sanctuary for those fleeing political persecution. It morphed into a town for anyone in need, anyone who needed to escape something down south, get away for a few years, recalibrate and let the threat die down before they returned.
Obviously, one class of people who need to escape are criminals. Rockton wasn’t for that. Not on paper anyway. Okay, fine, yes, they’d admit to letting in white-collar criminals who paid dearly for the privilege. That seemed fair. Those people had stolen money, so let them repay it by financing the residencies of real victims. Only the board in charge of Rockton hadn’t stopped there. They’d let in violent criminals, and when things went wrong—whether with the criminals or the regular residents—they’d blocked every solution that might cut into their profits. A sanctuary for the persecuted became an investment for the rich.
When we pushed too hard for changes, they dismantled Rockton. So we built Haven’s Rock. Yes, there’s still an outside investor, but she’s one of the earliest Rockton board members and the only one who’d been on our side. She doesn’t need money—she’s an elderly billionaire—so we trust her as much as we can trust anyone.
The only problem Émilie poses is that she’s a little too invested in Haven’s Rock, in an ideological way. We’d planned to spend the first year with our own crew, acclimatizing to the new area and preparing the town for residents. But we’d put Émilie in charge of finding and vetting arrivals, and we discovered she’s too damn good at it.
Building hadn’t even finished before she had an urgent case—a couple and their teenage daughter. In the end, that fell through, but by then we’d agreed to admit a few others—since we were already opening early—and we couldn’t change our minds. That was this past spring. We now have twenty-four residents, including Max’s family.
Rockton didn’t allow children or couples. We wanted to change that. We still believe in our decision, but we are quickly seeing how much easier it was when every newcomer was a lone adult, a stranger among strangers. Easier for us, that is. But they’re the ones who matter, so we’re the ones who need to adjust.
When we return after looking for the bear, we consult with Isabel about Max and Carson. Mathias is there, but Mathias being Mathias, his advice is less than stellar.
“Tell them whatever you like,” he says in his French-Canadian accent. “It will not matter. If the children wish to go into the forest, they will go into the forest. If they are traumatized by what they encounter there?” He shrugs. “It will teach them not to go back into the forest.”
I glare at him.
He throws up his hands. “You asked for my advice.”
“I asked for your professional opinion. As a psychiatrist. Not as a serial killer.”
He waggles a finger at me. “Nothing has been proven, and if I did kill anyone, they deserved it.”
Mathias’s response may suggest that we’re doing this “fresh start” thing all wrong. But if you took our core staff and removed those who have committed murder, we wouldn’t have enough people to run Haven’s Rock. That includes me.
At nineteen, I took a gun to confront a guy whose actions had put me in a coma. I just wanted to scare him. He wasn’t scared, and he blamed me for the beating that put me into that coma. So I pulled the trigger. While I hadn’t gone to prison, I’d sentenced myself to a mental one for a very long time, unable to get past the guilt. I won’t say I’m past it now, but I’ve come to terms with the mistake I made, and I hope what I’ve done with my life compensates in some way. That’s what Rockton—and Haven’s Rock—was really about for some of us. Not escaping our past but confronting it and doing better.
“Doing better” really isn’t Mathias’s thing. He was a criminal psychiatrist who killed criminals in creatively appropriate ways. He’s not a textbook serial killer, driven to murder. He just doesn’t mind killing when he thinks it’s warranted. He’s also a good psychiatrist and a really good butcher, so we let him join us in Haven’s Rock. And because no one dared tell him no.
We also have a diagnosed sociopath in town. Twenty-one-year-old Sebastian, who murdered his parents at the age of eleven and spent the next seven years in jail. In jail and in therapy, which doesn’t always work for sociopaths. Sebastian learned to accept his diagnosis and, under Mathias’s mentorship, might be the resident least likely to commit murder. Unless they really need murdering, and then he might be the most likely. Right now, though, he’s back near Rockton with Mathias’s dog, Raoul, and his girlfriend, Felicity. That’s Sebastian’s girlfriend, not the dog’s.
I look from Mathias to Isabel, our former psychologist turned bar owner. We’re having this meeting in the Roc—a reincarnation of our former bar, which now also serves as a coffee shop during the day. It’s late afternoon, and we closed the coffee shop early for our meeting, which consists of me, Dalton, Anders, Mathias, and Isabel.
Isabel taps her manicured nails on the wooden table. In this kind of town, no one should be able to keep their nails like that. Isabel manages to maintain an aura of glamour even in hiking boots.
“Mathias has a point about the impossibility of keeping the boys out of the forest,” she says. “Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Will? You should speak to their mother. Dana is most comfortable with you. We don’t want to put them on house arrest. Particularly Carson, who might have no interest in the forest but will go there just because we forbid it.” She glances at Mathias. “Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Mathias says. “The boy is exceptionally angry. I want to teach him to throw knives.”
I look at him.
