Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘What about Quetico?’ The rangers wouldn’t have any authority to search the Canadian reserve, which extended the wilderness by almost another two thousand square miles.

‘To my understanding, they’re working in tandem with the Canadian authorities and’ – she cut over my attempt to ask another question – ‘we’ll go over this in detail, I assure you, but right now we’re here to discuss Maya Stark, not Josiah Blackthorn.’

I dropped into my usual spot in one of her overstuffed chairs and stared at the moss-eaten trunk of an old oak outside the window. Dead leaves circled the ground around it and its branches curled naked into the sky. ‘There’s not much to say. My boss trusted me with a challenging assignment and it’s taking over my life.’

‘What did you do this weekend?’

I’d spent most of it replaying my last conversation with Lucas over and over to the beat of Jasper’s paws hitting the boards of the lake walk, but she didn’t want to hear that.

‘I went to the hardware store. The nickel handles I put in the bathroom are all wrong. Copper would be perfect with the wood tones and the floor, but then I’d have to get new fixtures, too.’

‘Is it possible,’ she ruminated while pulling out two squatty brown cups, ‘that your fixation on this bathroom allows you to avoid other areas of your life?’

‘Like remodeling the kitchen?’

‘Like making friends. Socializing. Pushing yourself out of your avoidant attachment style and opening up, building relationships and trust. It all starts through meaningful interaction with someone outside of Congdon.’

‘I signed up for three different social media accounts in the last week. My phone’s been going crazy.’ The notification buzzes had made my pocket vibrate all morning. I pulled the phone out and she came over, donning her glasses to examine the screen.

‘ “Stephanie posted to Lucas Blackthorn’s timeline?” “Lake Superior and 5K others liked @therealblackthorn’s tweet?” ’ She handed it back. ‘The lake liked it?’

‘It’s got an account, too.’

‘Of course it does.’ Dr Mehta perched in the chair across from me. Behind her head hung a framed quote that had been in this office for as long as I’d known her. It read, What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Dr Mehta had spent eight years and counting trying to counsel what lay within me.

‘I said meaningful interaction, Maya. I don’t imagine you’re contributing to these conversations, as it would violate HIPAA confidentiality.’

‘No, but some of these people are obsessed. And I’m talking the clinical definition.’ I pulled up one of the apps and scrolled through the comments. ‘They’re reposting all the photos of Lucas, turning them into memes and artwork.’

I showed her a picture of Lucas’s face – captured when they were transferring him to Congdon – superimposed over a forest. Another version showed him half in shadows with the bottom of the frame bleeding into red. Someone posted one last night of Josiah fractured into a broken tile mosaic of greens and blacks, and the amount of detail and painstaking nuance must have taken hours, even days.

‘They’ve divided into camps, people sympathetic to Lucas who are outraged that he’s here, and the others who want him to rot in prison for what he did to the Andersons. They think he killed his father and buried him somewhere in the Boundary Waters.’

The timer beeped and Dr Mehta returned to the tea, stirring in milk and sugar with unhurried strokes.

‘Haven’t you noticed the people outside?’ I peered beyond the oak branches toward the entrance. Something moved near the guardhouse. It was too far away to identify, but the lurkers were out there. I’d seen evidence of them online: pictures of the front entrance and even blurry shots of patients walking through the grounds, which prompted rabid speculation on whether any of them could be Lucas.

‘Yes, the guards are aware of the issue. We’ve temporarily doubled security at the gate. Lucas has accumulated a large amount of fan mail – and some hate mail – as well.’

‘What?’ My spine straightened.

‘Which is all the more reason’ – she brought two mugs over and handed one to me – ‘to get him to talk. The sooner the better. We need him to tell the authorities his story before the public superimposes their own. Eventually Lucas will be rejoining this society and we want him to be positioned to successfully engage with it, not recoil into a protective shell and redo his bathroom for the rest of his life.’

I swallowed the tea without tasting it, but the astringency still puckered my tongue. ‘Someday you have to teach me that trick where people think you’re nice.’

‘Happily.’ Smiling, she inhaled the steam from her cup. ‘How about the day when you don’t try to divert attention to someone else during your therapy sessions?’

When I didn’t reply, she took a sip and settled more comfortably into her chair. ‘Now, shall we discuss your progress in letting yourself form attachments? Or would you rather talk about your fears of the Ely police?’

Shifting, I took another bracing mouthful of tea.

Twenty minutes later the ‘check-in’ was over and Dr Mehta kept her promise to tell me the details of the search for Josiah. The police wanted to talk to Lucas as soon as possible. Once winter came, the lakes would freeze over and any search parties would be fighting subzero temperatures on snowshoe or by dogsled, and without Lucas’s help they’d be searching blind.

I’d been shaking my head long before she finished. ‘He won’t talk to them. He said he’d rot in here before turning his father over. Doesn’t that sound like his father committed a crime?’

‘The police haven’t mentioned any outstanding warrants.’

‘What else could he mean?’

Dr Mehta set aside her cup and laid a hand on my arm.

‘You’re doing a wonderful job with him, Maya – and I know this is frustrating – but you have to focus on reaching Lucas. His health is our priority. Work on gaining his trust, acclimating him, and hopefully we can get him to speak with the police soon.’ She turned back to the window. ‘It seems the path to the father is through the son.’

I left her office, my stomach suddenly calm as I understood what I had to do. If I was going to get Lucas to talk, I needed to uncover what drove them into the Boundary Waters, trace their steps back to that first leap, which brought me to a catch-22. The path to the father might be through the son, but the path to the son was indisputably through the father. To reach Lucas, I needed to know Josiah.

In the following days I didn’t press Lucas to say anything further about his father or the Boundary Waters, which was good because adjusting to his transfer proved difficult. Ward two, the high security common men’s ward, was exclusively used for forensic patients, the ones who’d been sent here by the courts rather than those who sought care of their own free will. Most of their crimes were the logical result of impulse and lack of control – theft, creating a disturbance, resisting arrest, assault – with a few more serious offenses sprinkled in. One man had driven a car into a bus full of children with a homemade bomb that didn’t explode. Another had hacked up his neighbors on Christmas Eve. That guy, a schizophrenic recluse who some of the nurses called the Grinch behind his back, responded well to his meds and had been transferred here from the state security hospital after ten years of perfect behavior. Sometimes he asked me to play Scrabble after I finished up with other sessions. He beat me every time.

Ward two was laid out over one long wing for continuous sight lines. The staff station was encased in glass and always had at least two nurses dispensing medication, herding patients to their scheduled activities, and buzzing them between the common areas and the sleeping areas. The open living room boasted couches bolted to the floor and squishy chairs that didn’t cause major injuries when thrown. Classical music piped in after lunch and dinner and the walls were painted in soft grays and blues, like a cloudy day that might be clearing. I don’t know if the window dressing made much of a difference with this crowd, though. To most forensic patients, Congdon was a prison and they were serving a sentence with no release date.