Don't Look Back - Chapter Three

Claire Willamette was a young, thin, willowy woman, and Cooper resisted the urge to put her hand under her nose as Claire lifted a third cigarette to her lips. She seemed uncaring about her disheveled appearance, the limpness of her ash-blonde hair falling loose from the bun at the back of her neck, or the stained tank top and sweats hanging off her limbs. Her hand shook with an almost imperceptible tremor, and Claire blew out the smoke in her lungs, willing her nerves to settle.

She couldn't figure out what had possessed her to send that email. Cooper Whitley had been all over the news last year, but Claire didn't pay much attention to the news anymore. She'd all but checked out of real life. But last week, at the pharmacy picking up another pack of smokes and her Prozac prescription, Claire had caught a bit of conversation that made her blood run cold.

"William got an email from that woman last week. She was asking about hunters that might've been at Teton last year. You know, when the girl went missing. It was only a matter of time, honestly."

Claire pretended she wasn't listening, and the two older women speaking Shoshoni had likely assumed she didn't understand what they were saying. She thought of that saying about assumptions.

The older of the two clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "She should mind her business before she gets hurt. People go missing in those mountains all the time."

"I heard she witnessed it," the first one said, and there was a tense pause between the two.

Claire's heart had stopped at that. She and Mato had still been together this time last year when he went on the hunt with the others, and even if she didn't know everything, Claire knew enough. She knew enough to destroy her marriage, because she couldn't get over the things she'd seen or heard. The things she knew Mato had done.

Now that the shock of the women's conversation had passed, and she was sitting with the journalist, Claire regretted ever inviting her to come. Claire still lived on the reservation in a singlewide that she was able to buy with her tiny divorce settlement, and that was less out of a desire to be there than it was her fear of Mato's elders. Still, inviting Cooper here had been reckless and stupid, and even hundreds of miles away, it was like they were here, watching her.

Cooper could feel Claire's unease as it permeated the air, so she kept herself as relaxed as possible. With slow movements, she pulled the recorder out of her bag, switched it on and placed it on the dirty coffee table between them, delicately pushing empty beer bottles and a full ashtray out of the way as she did.

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate you meeting with me," Cooper said with friendly professionalism, "As I mentioned, this meeting is completely confidential. Anything you say will say here will stay between us."

"And you're not gonna mention my name at all?" Claire couldn't even hide the desperation in her voice, and she grimaced. Her Southern drawl was more pronounced when she was anxious.

Cooper smiled and shook her head. "Not once." She clicked her pen, adjusting her notepad on her lap as she got more comfortable, and finally adjusted to the intense smell of nicotine around her. "So, what can you tell me who was on the mountain that night?"

"I'm sorry, but before I give you what I know, I need to ask you first what you think you saw that night." Claire took another drag and exhaled deeply. There was no point in going through all this if there was a chance she was wrong about Mato's involvement.

Normally, Cooper didn't go into detail about that night. People already thought she was crazy, if they didn't think she was guilty, but this was the closest Cooper had gotten to getting information on any one of the men that had hunted her and Iris through the woods, and she wasn't willing to gamble Claire backing out of the interview.

Starting at the beginning, at Cooper and Iris being woken from sleep by the sound of the dogs, Cooper regaled the tale to Claire, and with every word, Claire's stomach sank further. Dammit, she was right. She wished so hard that she was wrong, but there was no way that what Cooper detailed was a coincidence. As Cooper described the tall stranger who'd pulled her daughter from her arms, Claire's spine snapped straight with a sort of supernatural premonition, and she immediately stamped out her current cigarette in one of the ashtrays on the table.

Cooper finished telling her story, fully prepared for scorn from the young woman whose blue eyes were far more calculating and observant than she'd expected, and Claire leaned forward, clasping her hands in front of her.

"I'd bet you've probably done a lot of research on Native American culture in the past year," Claire guessed, and Cooper nodded. "I'd have been surprised if you didn't. But what Google ain't gonna tell you is that while most tribes were being westernized way back when, a small percentage of them reverted to more extreme practices. Practices most decent folks woulda put someone in jail for." She said this with raised eyebrows at Cooper, and the hair on Cooper's arms lifted.

"What kind of things?"

Claire paused for a moment, glancing outside through the thin drapes drawn over her mother's front window, her fingers twitching. Finally, she gave in, grabbing another cigarette. The nicotine hit her lungs and brought with it a small reprieve from her panic-driven anxiety.

"The best way to describe it would probably be a cult, like witchcraft type of thing, but also not," Claire explained. She thought back to the content's of Mato's shed with a shudder. "Rituals. Chants. Drugs and hallucinations. Animal sacrifices. Real hinky shit." Cooper's pen scratched across her notepad with jerky movements, and every so often, she glanced up to find Claire staring unseeingly out of the window. She recognized the look as one she expected on her own face at times: Watching memories like the recordings of a movie reel playing out on a white screen. "My ex-husband is Bannock Indian, one of the tribes of the Northern Shoshone. He's the youngest member of one of those extremist groups who escalated tribal traditions when the tribes settled onto the reservation. We met at a horse auction in Boise a few years ago, hit it off right away and I moved in with him a few weeks later. It was small stuff when we first got married, just like weird things he'd say. It made me uncomfortable in that way you kinda feel in the soles of your feet, you know what I mean?" Cooper did know what she meant, and she nodded when Claire looked to her for confirmation before she went back to looking out the window. "When we'd been together for about six months, he came home one night with blood painted on the top half of his face and in patterns on his chest. Freaked me out when I saw it, but he said it was a tradition the tribe had about that time of year, nothing serious and the blood was fake, and he just forgot to wash it off before he came home, blah, blah, blah. The next day, I was leaving for work and looked into the back of his truck, and there was a bunch of bloody tools and a bloody bucket, and you can tell real blood from fake blood by how it browns when it oxidizes. Looks kinda like rust a bit. Well, I could tell the blood was real, and that really freaked me out, but then I saw the hair. It was long and brown, too long to be any sort of animal on the reservation, and not course or thick enough to be from a horse. That's when I started to get scared." Claire lifted her bare feet from the floor and curled her legs under her onto the couch. A self-comforting action most people didn't recognize, like a less obvious way of curling into a fetal position. Cooper noted it with interest, but continued writing without commenting. "I never brought it up, and he never mentioned it, but he started being less careful about that weird stuff when I was around. There'd be blood or paint on his clothes. Sometimes he'd come home stoned out of his mind but he wouldn't smell like weed or nothing, and his eyes would be real big. He'd be talking nonsense and take off all his clothes and run around the house naked. One night, he came home smelling like... well, like another woman to put it polite. And after that, when we were intimate, he'd start chanting. I learned Shoshoni to surprise him, but that was right before all the crazy stuff started, so I never got a chance to tell him. But when we were together, he'd start chanting all these weird things, and it'd sound like he was saying something sweet, right? But I knew what he was really saying, and he was talking about like 'mating for the pleasure of the earth' or 'producing a fruitful bounty for the maker' or something like that. Like we was having sex as an offering. It made me sick to my stomach." Claire's hands shook, so she snubbed out another cigarette and tucked her folded hands in between her knees. "All of it started to be too much for me. I quit my job, I was coming here to visit Mama whenever I could. I almost left him plenty a' times, but every time I came back home, he'd be him again, you know? Normal and happy and smiling at me like I was his whole world." A wistful smile toyed with Claire's lips, and for some inexplicable reason, she felt the need to cry, but she just took a deep breath and looked back out the window. "He went out hunting last year, about this time, and he went hunting every year, but this was different. The elders were coming by our house all the time. They started off bringing pheasants, then turkey, then rabbits, groundhog, skunk, deer, coyotes. Hell, if they could kill it, they'd bring it, and they took it to this shed he had off the far side of our property." There was a pause, and Cooper looked up from her notes to see Claire was chewing on her nails as she studied the curtains. "We all got animal instincts in us, Miss Whitley. I was a coward, because all my instincts told me there was something really wrong happening, and I just pretended it wasn't. Right before the hunt... I went down to the shed." Claire's eyes closed, and she took a shaky breath. "It wasn't just the carcasses on the walls, or the symbols written on every surface in blood. It was the gap on the wall with the Native American symbol for 'eternal life' and the diagram of a child below it." She looked at Cooper with guilty and haunted eyes that made Cooper suck in a sharp inhale. "They do this hunt every year... And Mato's the youngest. My guess is that last year was his first year hosting the hunt, but someone does it every year, one way or the other. I'm sure that if they'd managed to catch you and your daughter before you ran into that man in the lake, whatever happened to her would've been worse, and I don't think you'd be alive." She paused. "I think you need to look into other disappearances in the Tetons over the last thirty years."

There was nothing but a resigned confidence in her voice, and Cooper didn't doubt her sincerity, though nothing about Claire's confession made her feel any better. It was her experience as a journalist that kept her from being sick over the things Claire was describing if there was truth to them. Cooper's heart was racing, but she kept her outward appearance calm, uncrossing her legs and crossing them the other direction before nodding. "Can you describe your ex-husband to me? Any of the other men?"

Reaching into the bag she had resting on the floor next to the couch, Claire withdrew a worn photo book. Her fingers traced the cover of it, her heart aching with thoughts of the memories, both good and bad, that lay inside it. She handed it to Cooper after just a moment's hesitation, and Cooper took it eagerly.

"All the members of their group are in there," Claire whispered.

Steeling herself, Cooper opened the book, and the first face to greet her was almost as familiar now as her own. It was one of the two young hunters of the seven from her nightmares and visions, and all Cooper could feel was numb. It was too much, too fast. A year of searching had brought her here to this woman who didn't have just one, but the identities of all seven men, and their unusual association with Iris' abduction. She couldn't be angry, or sad, or excited, she simply flipped through the photos with a cool sort of indifference. The dozens of photos Cooper went through were of him, of him and Claire, of him with the other young hunter, him and the other six all together. There was even a picture of him kneeling on the ground with a string of ducks and what looked like the two hounds from that night sitting on either side of him.

"That's Mato Willamette," Claire explained, leaning forward. She pointed to the men in a group shot on the next photo. "These are the other men from the tribe. The older two are Eagle Hunter and Ahote, the elders. The three in the middle are Chu'a, Mahkah, and Honovi. The other one Mato's age is Little Bear. Ahote is Mato's grandfather, Chu'a is his father, and Honovi is his uncle. Little Bear is Mahkah's son. You recognize them?"

Cooper nodded, studying each face with a stoic intensity. "They were all there that night, at the lake." She glanced up at Claire, who was lighting another cigarette. "Do you know anything about the man in the water? He's not in these photos." The way Claire immediately wrung her hands together was a tell Cooper took curious note of.

"I don't know him. He don't sound familiar."

Neither woman really believed that, but to voice their mutual fears was a gamble neither one was willing to take.

Lost in her thoughts, Cooper stared out the plane window on her way back to New York, only coming back to herself when the captain came on over the intercom announcing their imminent landing. The last face she expected to see when she made her way off the plane and past the baggage claim at JFK was her ex-husband's. His dark, curly hair was longer than it had been the last time she'd seen him. Was it four weeks ago? His blue eyes were cool, but they warmed marginally when he spotted her, and Cooper raised her eyebrows in question.

"Do I even want to know how you knew where and when I was getting in?" She asked him as he grabbed her roller-bag and took up a steady pace beside her.

"Dan," they both said at the same time, and Evan repressed a smirk.

"He knew if you made it home before someone caught you, we wouldn't see you for another whole week."

Cooper rolled her eyes. "You guys don't have to babysit me. I'm a grown woman, Evan."

"I'm well aware of how grown up you are, Coop, but I'd argue that you very much need a babysitter." His smirk faded. Leading them out of the airport to where his Tesla was waiting, Evan stowed Cooper's bags and rounded the car to the driver's seat. When they were married, he'd open her car door for her, and she'd always wait for him, but those days had been over for awhile now. The door closes behind him, and Evan took a deep breath. "Listen, I'm going to cut to the chase. Detectives showed up at the paper a few hours ago," he said, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "You were in Georgia interviewing a Claire Willamette yesterday, right?"

Cooper's eyes widened, and her heart began to race. Oh, God, no, she thought helplessly, intuition telling her exactly where this was going. She asked anyway. "I was. Why?"

There were equal parts questions and concerns in his eyes.

"She was found dead this morning."