“But I gotta run this place,” Dad protested. “I’ve got boats to get ready, firewood to cut. Place like this doesn’t run itself, you know.”
“You’re not gonna be putting any weight on that ankle for a few days,” Dr. Heath said. “Longer, if it’s broke.”
Dad closed his eyes and grimaced. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s just great.”
The words were coming out of my mouth before I realized it. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll look after things. Until you’re better. I can get a few days off.”
His eyes settled on me, weighing this offer. “It’s a lot of work,” he said. “It’s not sitting around on your ass in front of a computer all day.”
Well. He likes my offer so much, he’s going to butter me up to make sure I don’t withdraw it.
I ignored the comment and instead returned his stare, waiting for an answer. He drew in air quickly, like the ankle was flaring with pain, and looked away.
“Fine, okay,” he said.
“And I’ll come to the hospital with you.”
“No, no, no, stay here. I’ll just be sitting around for hours down there. You look after things here, I’ll give you a call when I’m done, you can pick me up.”
I nodded my assent as they put Dad in the back of the ambulance. They said that once they had Dad admitted they’d come back for the body, which they’d now been cleared to remove, the coroner having had a chance to give it the once-over. The light on top was flashing, but the siren was off. We all watched as it went up the hill and went round the bend in the driveway.
“Well,” I said, standing next to my new friend Chief Thorne. “I guess that just leaves one thing.”
“What’s that?” said the chief.
I pointed back into the woods at the body. “Who the hell is that?”
4
AS IF TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION, we all decided, like some collective alien intelligence, to return to the woods for another look. The one Denny’s Cabins guest who’d introduced himself, Bob Spooner, Tracy the reporter, the seemingly inept Chief Orville Thorne, Dr. Heath, who’d chosen to stay here rather than accompany Dad to the Braynor hospital, and the portly but well-dressed guy with the Caddy.
The older couple were still in the woods, standing by the once-again-covered corpse, watching us approach. We were walking all over the place, matting down grass under our feet, making a mess of what might, under other circumstances, be considered a crime scene, but Thorne didn’t seem all that concerned. How much evidence did you really need to convict a bear, if it was, in fact, a bear that had done this, and not a band of rabid chipmunks?
I felt more up to it this time, since I now knew that the dead man under the tarp was not my father. Thorne gingerly took hold of the corner of the tarp and pulled it back, much farther than before, revealing all of the body this time, instead of from head to waist.
The woman in the kerchief glanced down again, not as repulsed as I would have expected, as if she was not unaccustomed to death.
“Tell them,” I heard her husband whisper to her.
“Not my place,” she whispered back, turning away. If anyone else heard their brief conversation, they gave no indication.
“I’m going back to the cabin,” she said, loud enough now that anyone could hear.
“I’ll go with you, lovey,” the man said, and they slipped away quietly.
A second look didn’t offer much more in the way of information. The man—as torn to shreds as the body was, its size and form did seem to indicate it was a male—looked about six feet tall. Much of his face was chewed away, as well as his neck, and his torso had been chewed at by something with considerable enthusiasm. Only his legs, below the knees, seemed largely untouched. The corpse wore a pair of black lace-up boots and camouflage-pattern pants. That didn’t necessarily make this some military guy, considering that kids were buying camo-style pants off the rack these days.
“I don’t know, Orville,” said Bob Spooner. “There’s not much there to look at, is there?”
Thorne said, “You come up here a lot, Bob. Doesn’t look like anyone you’ve ever seen?”
“Don’t think so.”
“And it’s nobody from here, we’re sure about that?”
Bob nodded. “I’m in two, cabin three’s unrented right now, the Wrigleys,” and he nodded his head in the direction of the couple who’d walked away, “are in four, this gentleman here,” and he pointed to the well-dressed heavy guy, “you’re in five, right?”
“Yes,” he said, agreeably. “I’m up here alone,” he said to Thorne. “Fishing, and checking out some property for a project I have planned. I’ve got my eye on thirty acres just up the shore a bit, planning to put in a big resort for sport fishermen that will—”
“Yeah, whatever,” Thorne said, holding up his hand as if he were halting a car in traffic. “So, that’s everyone.”
“Yup,” said Bob. “I’ve been up here for three weeks now, gotten to know everyone who’s up.”
“And no one was expecting any visitors?”
Everyone muttered no under their breath. “Well, that’s a puzzler,” said the chief.
“What about up there?” I said, pointing up the road, where the farmhouse, hidden by trees from where we stood, sat beyond the gate with all the warning signs.
“I don’t think it would be anyone from up there,” said Thorne.
I thought, Huh? But I said, “How can you know that? Twenty minutes ago, we thought this was my father.”
“I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s anyone from up there,” said Thorne. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
This was a baffler. A cop who didn’t want to make every effort, consider every possibility to learn the identity of a guy who’d been mauled to death? I kept pressing. “At least you should go up there and talk to whoever lives there.”
“Orville,” Bob said softly, “you’re going to at least have to ask them a few questions.”
“What’s the deal?” I asked. “I don’t understand. Why can’t you go up there and talk to them?”
Bob smiled sympathetically. “Last time Orville talked to those folks, they hid his hat on him.”
“They did not!” Chief Thorne said, putting his hand up to the top of his hat and shoving it down more firmly onto his head. “We were just horsing around, that’s all, no harm done.”
“Orville, no one blames you. They’re a weird crew. Listen, I find them kind of intimidating, too. We can go up there with you. They won’t take your hat if there’s a bunch of us there.” Bob tried to say this without a hint of condescension, but it still came off as a bit patronizing.
Even so, Thorne was mulling it over. It was clear that he didn’t want to go up there alone.
“Okay, Bob,” he said. “Why don’t you come along, too.”
“I want to come,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s really necessary, Mr. Walker,” Thorne said, glancing at me, and there was something in his eyes then, just for a second, that looked familiar to me. It was the second time since I’d arrived that I felt I knew him from someplace.
I wanted to ask him if, by some chance, we’d met before, maybe when I’d been up to see Dad here before, but instead said, “This body’s on my father’s property, and in his absence, I think it’s appropriate for me to know what’s going on.”
This was, of course, bullshit. Thorne was the law, and he could take, and leave behind, anyone he damn well pleased. But, evidently, he wasn’t aware of that.
“Okay, fine then,” he said. The three of us started walking up the lane. No one spoke for a while, until Thorne said to me, in a tone that bordered on the accusatory. “So, you’re from the city.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Thorne made a snorting noise, as if that explained everything. Bob Spooner gently laid a hand on my back, then took it away. “Your father’s told me a lot about you,” he said.
“Really?” I said.
“Says you’ve w
ritten some books, whaddya call it, that science fiction stuff. Spacemen, that kind of thing.”
“Some,” I said. “But not so much these days; I’m a feature writer for The Metropolitan.”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, he told me that, too. Good paper. Don’t see it all the time, but when I do, there’s lots to read in there.”
We were coming round the bend now, approaching the gate decorated with its numerous warnings for trespassers.
“I guess they don’t like visitors,” I said.
“They don’t like much of anything,” Thorne said.
The three of us stood at the gate, Bob resting his arms atop it. About fifty yards away stood the two-story farmhouse, and it didn’t look much the way I’d remembered it from when my father first purchased the property. Back then, the shutters hung straight, there wasn’t litter scattered about the front porch, there weren’t half a dozen old cars in various states of disrepair, the lawn out front of the house was cut, the garden maintained. Now, none of that was the case. There was an old white van up near the barn, a couple of run-down pickups and a rusting compact out front of the house. There was an abandoned refrigerator shoved up against one side of the building, a rusted metal spring bed leaned up against it, a collection of hubcaps hanging on nails that had been driven into the wall, half a dozen five-gallon red metal gas cans scattered about.
“Has my dad seen all this?” I asked of either Thorne or Bob. “The place is a dump.”
“It is a bit of a concern to him,” Bob said. “And by ‘a bit’ I mean huge. But he doesn’t exactly know what to do about it.”
“How many live here?” I asked.
Thorne said, “It depends on the day, I think. But right now, I think there’s the old man, well, he’s not that old, but he runs the family. Timmy Wickens.”
“Timmy?” I said.
“And Timmy’s wife, Charlene, and they’ve got a couple of boys, early twenties. Arlen tells me they’re her boys, from some other marriage. I think their last name is Dunbar. And there’s a daughter, Timmy’s actual daughter, she must be about thirty, thirty-two or so. Her name’s May. She’s got a boy of her own, he must be about ten, he lives here, too. I think she’s got a boyfriend, lives here with the bunch of them, but I’m not sure. And they all got their like-minded friends, dropping in now and then.”
“What do you mean, like-minded?” I asked.
Thorne shrugged. “They just don’t like mixing with everybody else. I mean, look at the signs.” He pointed to the ones we were leaning up against. “They think the world’s out to get ’em, I guess. And they’re not what you’d call fans of the government, large or small. They’ve had a few run-ins with other locals over things. Pissed so many people off the last place they moved that they had to come here. Sometimes, it’s just easier to leave them alone out here than have to deal with them.”
“Why would my father have rented to them if they’re a bunch of whackos?”
Bob said, “I don’t think he had any idea. Timmy came to see him when he saw the house was up for rent, all cleaned up, looking respectable. Wasn’t till afterwards that your dad saw what he’d got himself into.”
“Oh man,” I said, still surveying the landscape. I spotted an old washing machine beyond the fridge. “So, are we going in?”
“Why don’t we just try calling them,” Thorne said. He straightened up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Hello!” He waited a few seconds, then again, at the top of his voice: “Hello? Mr. Wickens? Hello?”
The house remained quiet.
“Can’t you just go up to the door?” I suggested to Thorne.
He pointed to the “Beware of Dogs” sign. “Can you read?”
“I don’t see any dogs,” I said. “And I know you’ve got a gun. Can’t you defend yourself against some puppies?”
Thorne said, “Let me try calling again.” He took a breath. “Hello!”
Still no sign of action at the house. No one at a window peeking out. Nothing.
“If you’re not going to go, I guess I will,” I said. I had my foot on the bottom board of the gate, the other foot on the board above it, then a leg over the top in a couple of seconds. “I’ll go knock on the door,” I said. I was feeling a bit wired still. The discovery of the body, the drive up, the mistaken identity, it all had me a bit rattled, and I was eager to get some answers. Also, there was a part of me that was enjoying showing up Chief Thorne in a way I found hard to explain.
“Mr. Walker, I think you’re making a mistake,” Thorne said. But I had both legs over now, and had hopped down to the other side.
I had taken maybe a dozen steps in the direction of the house when, up by the barn, I saw two brownish-gray blurry things heading toward me. Blurry, because they were moving so quickly. They were low to the ground, galloping, coming at me like a couple of torpedoes, and as they closed the gap between us, I could hear their rapid, shallow breathing and deep-throated growling.
The sign was right. These were dogs.
“Yikes,” I said, stopping for maybe a hundredth of a second, then turning back and bolting for the gate. Never did such a few steps feel like such a great distance.
“Hurry!” Bob shouted. “Don’t look back!”
I leapt at the gate, had my arms over the top, my legs looking for a purchase. My chest was over the top as the two dogs threw themselves at the gate, a combined frenzy of snarling and barking. I looked down, only for a second, saw one brown beast, one black, a bristly ridge of fur raised along each of their spines.
My leg jerked back as one of the dogs grabbed my pant leg, down by the cuff. The dog must have been in midair as he bit into it, and his own weight dragged my leg back down. I kicked wildly, heard the sound of fabric tearing, and now Bob and Thorne had grabbed hold of my upper body and were pulling me to safety. I fell into their arms, didn’t even try to find my footing on the other side of the gate, then fell out of them and onto the gravel.
The dogs were going nuts on the other side, barking, biting at the wood, slobber flying in all directions as they tried to eat their way through the gate to get at me.
They weren’t even particularly huge dogs—they wouldn’t have come up much past my knee if I’d been standing next to them, which I had no intention of doing. But their boxy heads and ragged teeth seemed disproportionately large compared to the rest of their sinewy bodies. Their ears were short, their eyes large and menacing.
They were jaws on legs.
Thorne offered a hand to help me up, then pointed to the relevant sign again. “I told you not to go over,” he said smugly.
The dogs had accomplished what Thorne’s shouts had not. The front door of the house was open now, and there was a man approaching, followed by another, younger one, stocky with black hair, and then a young woman. She had dirty blonde hair, and the down-filled hunter’s vest she wore over a plain blouse and jeans failed to hide her nice figure.
The man in the lead, late fifties I figured, was about six foot, broad shouldered, nearly bald with a glistening scalp, thick through the middle, 230 pounds, easy. He had the look of a football hero gone to seed. Not quite in the same shape he was thirty years ago, but still capable of doing a bit of damage. He trotted down in black military-style boots, and while not in camo pants like our dead friend in the woods, his pants and jacket were olive green.
“Wickens,” Thorne said quietly.
“Gristle!” he shouted. “Bone! Halt!”
The dogs kept barking, oblivious. As Timmy Wickens got closer, he shouted the names again, and the dogs, hearing him this time, stopped their yapping and looked behind to see where the voice was coming from. At the sight of their master, they became docile and stood, patiently, awaiting instructions.
“Barn!” Wickens said, pointing back to the structure, and the dogs immediately took off, charging back to where they’d come from. “Dougie,” Wickens said, speaking to the young dark-haired man who’d come loping along behind him, “make sure they stay in t
here. Did you not close that door like I told you?”
Dougie looked down. His arms hung heavy and straight at his sides. “It might have slipped my mind. I was doing some other stuff.”
Wickens sighed. “Go do it now,” he said, and Dougie turned and walked off as obediently as Gristle and Bone.
That dealt with, Wickens approached the gate with a relaxed swagger, like having the law and a couple of other men waiting to see him was no big thing. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the three of us, settling finally on Thorne.
“Chief,” he said, a somewhat bemused expression crossing his face. “What can I do for you today?”
“Mr. Wickens,” Thorne said, nodding, removing his hat and tucking it firmly under his arm. Any other time, I might have interpreted that as a gesture of respect, but odds were he just wanted to hang on to it. “How are you today?”
“I was pretty good up to a moment ago when you got my dogs all riled. Who’s this man was about to trespass on my property?”
I let Thorne do the talking. “This here’s Zack Walker, Timmy. He’s Arlen’s son. Arlen twisted his ankle, has been taken to the hospital, and Zack here is trying to help out. And you may know Bob here, he’s renting one of Arlen’s cabins.”
The woman—I guessed she was the daughter, May—inched forward, holding back a step or two behind her father.
“Is this about Morton?” she asked. “Has someone found Morton?”
Timmy Wickens turned and said, “Just hold on, May, and let me see what this is all about.”
“Is someone missing?” Thorne asked. “Who’s Morton?”
“My daughter’s boyfriend,” Wickens said, not yet appearing concerned about anything but my going onto his property, which, when you thought about it, it really wasn’t. This was all land rented from my father. “Morton Dewart. He’s been gone awhile, doing a bit of hunting.”
“What’s he hunting for?” Thorne asked.
Wickens ran a hand over his bald head, paused a moment as if to collect his thoughts, and said, “Well, there’s been a bear out there he’s been looking for. It’s been nosing around the house, Morton’s been saying he wants to teach it a lesson, make sure it don’t come around here no more. My daughter, she’s got a young son, Morton wants to make sure it’s safe for him to play outside. So he grabbed his shotgun and said he was gonna go looking for it.”