Walt studied the door jamb, especially its metal hardware, and then did the same on the broken dog door. He looked into the whistle-clean garage—about the size of the first floor of his house—and its ship-deck-gray paint. He descended the three steps and went down on one knee, getting the light right.
“If she hasn’t done so already,” he said, “have Fiona get shots of the door hardware and some angles of the garage floor.”
“Will do. But why does the insurance care about the garage floor?” Brandon asked.
“You ever been to one of these before?” Walt said.
“Sure.”
“Open your eyes and use—”
“Your head,” Brandon finished for him, quoting a Walt-ism.
“Exactly.”
Brandon studied the door hardware and didn’t have the courage to ask what he was supposed to be looking for.
“Fur,” Walt said without looking back as he kept to the very edge of the garage floor. “Animal hair. A tight space like that dog door, we should have seen some caught in the screws or hinges.”
He worked steadily toward the garage doors.
“Yeah, okay . . .” He sounded confused.
“When was the last time you saw a bear pass over strawberry jam, broken glass jar or not?”
“Ah . . .”
“And since when doesn’t a bear claw a door trying to get it open? It claws the cabinet—in the middle of the cabinet—but not the door?”
“But there are claw marks,” Brandon protested.
“Check out the size of them,” Walt said. “A bear that big doesn’t tiptoe through a door. And he doesn’t go through all the food and get back out without leaving tracks.” Walt indicated the clean garage floor. “A flying bear, maybe?”
“Okay?” Brandon sounded unconvinced.
“Let’s work the evidence,” Walt said. “Chances are this was a two-legged bear.”
“A what?”
“And I’d like to know why he went to all this trouble.”
4
With his suit jacket waiting for him on the back of a chair inside the house, and a Seattle Seahawks apron protecting his shirt and tie, Walt pulled the barbecued pork loin off the grill, Beatrice drooling at his feet. It had been a long, poisonously quiet week. He expected to see Fiona later that night.
“I don’t want dead pig,” Emily said, her arms crossed, her eleven-year-old’s face locked in determination.
“Don’t do this,” Walt said, collecting his wares onto the cutting board. “This is your dinner. You like bacon, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bacon is pork, same as this.”
“Then why can’t I have bacon?”
“It’s the same thing,” sister Nikki said.
“Because this is what I cooked for dinner,” Walt answered. “I thought you’d like it. It’s your favorite.”
“Is not.”
“I like it,” Nikki said.
“You don’t have to eat it, Em. But no ice cream with Lisa if you don’t eat your dinner.”
“That’s not fair.”
Nikki rolled her eyes. She didn’t understand her sister any more than Walt did.
“It is what it is: no dinner, no ice cream. I had planned for the three of you to bike over to Fifteen Flavors. If you’d rather not . . . ?”
He managed to kick open the door while carrying the board. Beatrice, Emily, and Nikki followed, in that order.
Lisa charged through the front door, apologizing for being late. Walt conferred with her about the evening’s rules, including bedtime and the ice cream trip, all unnecessary since Lisa knew more about the girls’ routine than he did.
“You look fancy,” she said, as he got the apron off and the jacket on.
“My one and only suit.”
“It suits you.”
“Ha, ha. It’s the Advocates dinner. Very swishy.”
He hugged his daughters good night, getting barely anything out of Emily, and heaved a sigh as he closed the front door behind him. An early summer evening was a piece of heaven in Hailey, and this one was no exception. The sun tracked surprisingly high in the sky for seven p.m., skirting the tops of the valley’s western mountains, its golden light taking on a magical, ethereal quality. Neighborhood lawn mowers ticked, the smell of burning charcoal hung in the air. Some kids rode by in a pack of speeding bicycles.
As he drove north, Walt composed something to say to Fiona, something to try to break the ice. She’d sent him an e-mail with photographs of the bear damage—no message. He’d called twice on the pretense of a follow-up, but she’d failed to call back. It wasn’t the first time Fiona had gone off-grid—she occasionally disappeared for days at a time, unreachable, unpredictable—but this time it felt personal.
Sun Valley’s Limelight Room, located in the Sun Valley Inn, was a four-star convention hall that had recently undergone