Lending a Paw(94)

The trail wound around the trees, zigging for an occasional monstrous maple, zagging every so often for a large rock, zigging again for a fallen tree, but always trending in the same direction. South, I was pretty sure. Another thing Eddie should have suggested was to bring a compass. Not that I owned one, but I could have downloaded a compass app to my cell.

On through the greenish murk I went. Every so often I lost the trail and had to circle around to find it. Every so often I’d be fooled into following a deer path that would peter out to nothing, and back I’d go until I again found the moss dents.

At one point I stopped to drink some water and glugged down half of it before sense came into my brain. I didn’t know how much farther there was to go; drinking all the water now would be worse than dumb.

I capped the bottle and started walking again. Intent as I was on following the moss trail, I didn’t notice the bush with the very sharp thorns until I was in the middle of it.

“Ow!” The stinging pain flared up hot. Muttering to myself about the stupidity of city folk who like to pretend they know what they’re doing out in the woods, I used the flashlight to push the branch this way and that, trying to loosen its thorny grip. I stepped back, oh so carefully, gritting my teeth at the scratches, then came to a sudden stop.

There, right in front of my eyeballs, was a cluster of long threads. “Huh,” I said. Someone else had been caught by the clutching bush. And there, down at my feet, was another denting impression of quad tires.

A clue!

I wiggled my way out of the bush, then tucked the flashlight into my armpit, unzipped the backpack, and took out my cell phone.

Tempting though it was to pull off the threads and take them with me to dangle in front of the detectives, I didn’t want to mess with the chain-of-evidence thing. So I clicked off a few pictures, the phone’s flash lighting up the trees and sucking up battery power. E-mailing pictures to the detectives wasn’t as good as dangling, but it would have to do.

Pictures taken, I reshouldered the backpack and went back to following the trail.

How far I walked, I wasn’t sure. My normal walking pace (3.4 miles an hour, according to the last treadmill I’d been on, back in graduate school) was worth nothing in this situation. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been walking—the sky gave no hints and my cell was on my back.

Flashlight searching, feet moving, I made my way across the forest floor. The sky was so dark that when I at last emerged into open ground, I almost didn’t notice. What tipped me off was the moss fading away to nothing and the grass coming back.

I looked up, and out. Far, far out and away. Miles of river valley to the left of me, miles to the right, and straight ahead, distant over the wide valley, was another rise of hills.

A USGS quadrangle map was in my back pocket, but I didn’t need to pull it out to know where I was. This was the Mitchell River Valley, hundreds of acres of state land dotted with the occasional private property. There wasn’t a paved road inside the entire valley, just gravel roads and an extensive trail system.

Plus the new little trail I was following, now twin paths of bent grass going down down down the hill.

I stared at it, then hitched up the backpack. Well. This was what I’d come out here for. Not much point in turning back now.

Down I went, following the curving trail around the side of the hill, picking my way across the wet grass, trying not to fall on my behind, trying not to think how I’d get back to my car in the dark.

The farther down the hill I went, the quieter I tried to move. Somewhere up ahead there was a house or a barn or a something that the quad had come from. I was pretty sure that ownership of a quad could be traced. The police would find out if the owner had a connection to Stan. Would find out if the owner had a reason for murder. Then, Stan’s voice would stop whispering in my ear, Holly could get some sleep, and Aunt Frances would stop eating herself up with guilt.

Down and down the hill. My ears strained to hear a car, the voices of strangers, anything, but the only thing I heard was my own footsteps.

Then, finally, around another curve and down a little more, there was a small house tucked into the side of the hill. The slope was so steep that the uphill roof almost touched the ground. A storybook house, if it weren’t for the decaying shingles and peeling paint. If this was Gunnar’s hunting cabin from the days of yore, it had become something else in the interim.

I turned off the flashlight. No lights were on in the house. And no lights on in the large weather-beaten barn standing to the side and slightly behind the house. The tracks led to a door in the side of the barn. I took one step forward. Stopped.