Chapter Five
The next day the doctor released me and I said good bye to my nurses. Kathy came by to give me a ride home. The nurses got a kick out of that. She wasn't in her police cruiser. She had her personal vehicle. A Jeep. She said, if I was well enough to leave the hospital, I should be well enough to climb up into her Jeep. I passed the test. She drove me home to my camper.
She helped me inside and told me she had asked the guys not to come to work until Monday. That gave me another weekend to rest. I thanked her for her help and suggested she didn't have to go to all that trouble. She said it was no trouble and then she kissed me. A long, full kiss. Like in the movies. Not just for dramatics sake, but to release a passion that had been flirting with breaking the surface. I returned her kiss with the same passion and desire and she responded by holding me all the tighter.
Nothing. Nothing had ever felt so good in my entire life. If my life ended at that exact moment, I would go to heaven feeling I had done everything in life worth doing. Love had sprung. It had exploded. And we tore at each others clothes like teenagers in the back seat of a car, parked in the dark along some deserted lane. She matched my fervor move for move. We were already one in thought before we became one in body.
Kathy stayed that night and took the next day off to spend it with me. We stayed in the camper. Sometimes we talked about my episode. Little by little I shared every detail I could remember about it. I left out the previous encounters with the strange figure, my ghost. She seemed intensely interested in helping me decipher what was going on in my head. But she always suggested a little energy releasing recreation in between our talks, which I was totally in favor of.
Premarital sex might not get me closer to God but it sure brought us closer to each other. Not just in body. Our talks grew out of our shared moments of blissful coupling. We were sharing everything about our lives with each other and compacting years of getting to know each other into a couple days. It had started in the hospital. We were taking it to its logical conclusion now that we were alone. She wanted it. I wanted it. We wanted each other. Wholly and fully. Forever. We didn't say it. We just knew.
Unexpected. A new life. I never expected to be including someone else in my life this soon. I thought it would take more time. More practice. But here she was. A woman who not only captured my attention but also wanted me to capture hers. Mutual.
Sunday morning we awoke in each others arms. I was definitely feeling like I was in some happily ever after storybook. But I didn't care. She was here with me and that was all that mattered at the moment. I could not imagine moving on with my life in any way that did not include her. It was like she had become part of me overnight and now I could not believe in any existence that did not have her by my side.
I had heard of love at first sight but never placed much stock in it. And this was not that. It was more like we had come to a particular crossroads in life at the same juncture of time and then decided to travel onward together. She wanted to go the same direction I was going and I wanted to go with her. It was not magic but choice. Suddenly I wanted my choice and her choice to be the same. And it was.
We had breakfast, some eggs and toast. She was a pretty good cook. Not just anyone can cook an egg over easy without breaking the yolk. I thought mom would approve of that. My mom judged women according to age old guidelines that included being able to cook a good meal for her man.
After breakfast we ventured out of the camper for the first time in two days. I wanted to see the area where she found me. Actually, I wanted to find the dead thing in the woods I thought I had fallen on. It had to go. I said nothing to her about it and just suggested a walk and maybe seeing where she had found me. She thought it might help if I returned to the scene, too.
We walked out past the worker's campers and topped a rise beyond. At the top she pointed down the road and said I was standing in the middle of the road about halfway down the hill. I remembered again my mother's warning to never stand in the road. When we arrived at the spot, Kathy pointed back up the hill and explained that she barely got her car stopped when she came over the hill. She had driven in to my camper but the door was wide open with the light on and I had not answered when she called out and sounded her horn. That was why she was proceeding further into the campground where she came upon me in the roadway.
I thought back to that night and the lights coming over the hill toward me. A shiver grew up my spine and I could not shake the feeling that more than just a car had been approaching. Somehow Kathy had scared off what was initially coming for me. I knew it but I could not share it. It was unreasonable. It seemed silly in the light of day. But the sunlight did nothing to change how sure I was that I was supposed to die that night. I could sense the displeasure of the campground around me. Its plans had somehow been diverted. I don't know why. There is nothing solid to hang my knowledge on. I just know that somehow, Kathy managed to change what was supposed to happen that night. Her being there changed something.
I recalled what details I could of my dream and checked my position. Kathy watched me as I went through the motions of rebuilding the events from that night. It was five days ago but the adrenaline trying to spurt through my veins was reminding me how close it really was. This was the place of my dream. But it was not a dream. I had actually been here. That meant...
Something dead was just off to my right somewhere. That was the way I had come in my dream. I stepped off the road and headed into the woods. Kathy followed. Something in me wanted to ask her to stay behind but I could not justify it to my own sense of logic. I continued on about the number of steps I remembered taking in my dream. I couldn't tell anyone what I had for supper that night but I remembered how many steps I had taken in the woods in a dream.
I arrived at the place where I remembered falling on the whatever it was. The stench of decaying flesh was overwhelming in the closed in confines of the trees and undergrowth around us. We both looked at each other and wrinkled our noses at the stink that assailed our olfactory senses.
I rounded a tree and found the source of the smell. Immediately my head started to reel. I felt like my knees were going out from under me and wondered if I was going to wake up in a hospital again. Kathy's gasp as she joined me drew me back to reality and a sense that I needed to regain my composure to protect her from the grizzly sight before us. I fought back to gain a grip on my own sense of reality and forced my mind to focus. Not on the ground but on Kathy. I would not leave her out here alone with that...that...whatever it was.
We grabbed at each other and made our way back to the road. We didn't speak. We just walked. Fast and away. Distance was what felt right. Every step further away felt better and better. She shared my feeling and we helped each other get further away. It was a need that welled up from the deepest recesses of our psyches. The living did not want to be around death. We were living out that need.
We had to walk to the front office to get to a phone. Neither of us had cell phones and my only phone was there. Kathy made the call. She talked to whoever it was she had called and gave them the pertinent information. Then she hung up the phone. She turned to me.
Silence felt awkward and deathly but it also felt necessary, somehow.
“I wonder who it was?”
Her words hung in the air as we both stared at each other.
For two days the detectives from the Sheriff's Department grilled us over and over about the events leading up to the discovery. They did not suspect us of any wrong doing. Yet. They were confused by my story and how all these events led up to finding a dead body in the woods. They were looking for details I could not give them and finding my story hard to believe. Join the club.
After telling it so many times I was finding it hard to believe myself. Kathy and I discussed it at length and came to believe amongst ourselves that something strange was happening but we had no idea what it was. I was impressed that she handled the uncertain aspects of my mysterious story so easily. A week ago I would have run scre
aming into the night to get away from anyone spouting such drivel. But, whatever was happening, it was messing up our ability to get on with our lives. We needed to solve this. I needed to know. Still, I could not believe Kathy was not running away as hard and fast as she could. She kept telling me she was in this for the long haul. We barely knew each other but we knew one thing. This was not going to defeat us. As much as we both wanted to be together and figure out where our relationship would go, we also refused to be deterred by this strange situation. Our combined passions for each other and not being thwarted by circumstances held us together in a bond that was half love, half mystery and all youthful stubbornness.
Day three of the investigation was a day of interesting and traumatic events. In the morning the two detectives came back with an identification of the body I had fallen on. They wanted to know if I had ever heard of the child. Of course, I had not.
He was a thirteen year old missing boy. He had been missing for three months. He had been dead for about a week. He had died from exsanguination. His blood had leaked out until he had died. It had been murder. A long, slow, painful torture that had ended with his throat being cut among other things.
Someone had been murdered on my property. Or at least dumped there after being murdered.
The thought chilled me. Not just that someone had been murdered on my property but that someone else was murdering on my property. A murderer. A killer. On my property. And somehow they were drawing me into their atmosphere of death. I could feel it. It was not just a murder. It was something more. That figure I had been trying so hard to get out of my mind had something to do with the murder. It was pulling me in. Maybe the campground was not trying to kill me. Maybe it was drawing me into its secret. Whatever that was. My sense of logic was failing me. Nothing was making sense any more.
Day four, the two detectives searching for answers, were back. Kathy had gone back to work. I had called the guys who worked for me and told them work was postponed until the police finished their investigation. Their responses made me wonder if any of them would be back.
The questioning this time dealt with the dirty sock and old shoe I had found on my deck. They questioned me several times about how the items got there. They asked me over and over if I had ever seen them before or knew who they belonged to. They came at me from so many angles that I was beginning to understand how good a person had to be to stand up under interrogation and not spill the beans. I was not so sure I would make a good spy. Patience was not my virtue.
They left without telling me why they were questioning me about the items on my deck. I asked but they avoided the question with more questions of their own. “We are asking the questions,” was their predominant answer.
Kathy swung by after work and told me why. The old sock and shoe were encrusted with dried blood. Neither sample matched the other and neither of them matched the dead boy we had discovered. My logic kicked in. Two new blood traces. A second and third possible dead body. An unmistakable chain of evidence leading to three bleeding victims with at least one of them dead. Evidence found in my trash can and a story that defied plausibility as my explanation. They had questioned my workers who told them I was very adamant about knowing when they came and went. Like maybe I was hiding something I did not want them to see or discover.
If I was a cop, I would arrest me.
“Why have they not arrested me, yet?” I asked her.
“No proof?
“Well, in that case I will stay free. Can't find proof where there is none.”
“Don't be so sure,” Kathy smiled worriedly. “Circumstantial evidence has a way of bending to whatever story or scenario the investigator uses.”
“But I am innocent.”
“Of course you are. But innocence does not mean evidence can not point at you. As long as it does and there is no better scenario available, then the obvious conclusion is they have the right guy.”
“Me?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Thanks for cheering me up,” I tried to laugh but it came out more like a strangled giggle.
“Look,” she pulled me closer. We had not known each other long enough for any closeness to be old, familiar ground. I immediately felt a stirring at being so close. “The best way to prove your innocence is to get to the bottom of this.”
“How?” She always smelled so good.
“With my help.” She smiled one of her good smiles.
“Thanks.” I meant it.
She snuggled up close to me and nuzzled her face up under my chin.
“I'm off tonight,” she offered.
“And I don't want to be alone.” I smiled down at her.
“A match made in heaven.” She spoke for both of us.
It was four in the morning according to the clock on the shelf in the living room area. I had heard a sound outside. It woke me up or at least got my attention if I was not quite asleep. I could not be sure. I had been dozing in and out of sleep, not really sleeping. I had spent an hour watching Kathy sleep, envying her for her peace and thankful that my unrest was not affecting her.
I checked the windows. Nothing in the darkness. The sound did not repeat itself, whatever it had been. I was not sure what I had heard, only that it was not part of the normal nighttime sounds of my campground.
My campground. Seemed a hollow phrasing, now. Obviously it was someone else dumping ground or killing ground first. I was struggling with the three month thing about the boy who was missing three months. Dead a week. Was he here for the entire three months? Or had he been dumped here after the killing?
My head still swooned with the idea that there was a dead body on my land. What if they found more dead bodies? What if my land has been a dumping ground for a serial killer or something? Wild thoughts raced through my head as I looked out my windows. No logic or real reasoning. Worst case scenarios maybe. Definitely the strangest scenarios my mind could conjure up. Briefly I wondered if my mind was really conjuring up strange ideas or had I read about them somewhere. I wondered if I was capable of having such forbidden and destructive thoughts about murdered people or had they been planted in me by something I had come into contact with. Then I thought about the strange figure I had been in contact with. Had he planted something in my mind? Was he the one who planted the dead boy in my woods?
A clicking, scraping sound flashed quickly through the relative silence of the night. That was it! That was the noise I had heard. It had gotten my attention and pulled me to full wakefulness. I listened without moving. I could not discern the direction of the sound. It had been too brief. I was not as focused then as I was now.
Clicking, clacking, scraping, grinding, clicking.
There it was again. Loud but quite a distance away. The worker's campers, I assessed.
I looked in on Kathy sleeping soundly and began to dress. I was quiet. Part of me wanted her to wake and stop me, or go with me. Part of me wanted to keep her as far away from whatever was happening as possible. She did not even stir as I finished dressing, grabbed my coat and headed for the door.
Silently I turned the knob and unlatched the door. Out side, I was just as careful latching and locking the door in silence. The cold, darkness surrounded me. I regretted not turning on the outside light but was comforted when my flashlight with its new batteries and bulb sent a beam of bright light across the campground landscape. A bright light to scare off the darkness. At least I hoped it would. I hoped it scared off other things too.
I tramped down the steps and up the road towards the place I assumed the sound had come from. The gravel crunched beneath my feet. My steps felt quick and purposeful. My breathing was regular and smooth. My heartbeat was normal. I felt good. Physically, I was happy with my approach to this fear that had gripped me. Emotionally the jury was still out on whether or not I was handling anything.
I topped the rise and stared down the length of my flashlight beam to the campers beyond where we had been digging. I played the
light back and forth a couple times seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Then the beam landed on a dark figure at the left of the campers and against the blackness of the woods close by. Not a form really. A flash of darkness, if such a thing can exist. There one second and then moving away the next. Not disintegrating but actually moving with direction. Into the woods.
I followed the figure with my light but he disappeared into the woods all the same. The darkness beyond the roadway swallowed up the light and returned nothing but more blackness. As quickly as I had seen something, it was gone.
Steeling myself for what I knew was not going to be one of my better choices in life, I walked the trail of the flashlight beam down the hill to the very spot I had seen the figure only moments before. There was nothing. No sign of anyone having been there. Like before, no footprints. Nothing.
I shone the light into the trees. A few feet and then deep blackness. Even the tree trunks became blackness inside the woods off the roadway. I was lamenting the fact that it was not day. Daylight would have made a search of the woods easy. The darkness, on the other hand, made finding anyone in there almost impossible. And if they did not want to be found the darkness was the perfect ally. I could not even find the flashlight beam after a few feet.
Then an anger boiled up from some deep place in me where I had never been before. Born of injustice and bred of deep resentment of those who tried to manipulate others, I suddenly knew a crushing truth. No one was going to take this land from me. No one. Not even a dark figure that I could not even describe, let alone identify. This was my campground. And it was going to become a campground, too. No one or no thing was going to stop me. God help whoever or whatever got in my way.
“John!” I heard Kathy yelling my name. Sounded like she was back at the camper still.
“John!” Louder. More worried.
I figured I had about five minutes before she got dressed and came running or driving over that hill. Five minutes to solve this thing. That figure, he had the answers. The answers I needed. The answers Kathy would want. The answers that made the police know that I had not killed anyone.
“John?” It was almost like a question. A plea maybe.
I turned and trudged back over the slight hill of the roadway toward the camper. Kathy had gone back inside. Dressing, I assumed. I made my way hurriedly back to the camper, checking the trail behind me every so often as I walked.
Stepping up on the first step to the deck, I noticed a shovel leaning against the deck. I was pretty sure it was not there when I came out. I had followed the figure away from the camper. So, who had put the shovel against the deck? Why?
I picked it up. The blade was still damp with clinging dirt. More muddy sand than actual dirt. Nothing any decent farmer would try to plant in. The same clinging, damp mixture of leafy debris and sandy mud the boys and I had been digging through for months, now. Unmistakable. Someone had just recently been digging in the dirt around here.
I opened the camper door and stepped in.
“Were you just digging outside?” I asked Kathy.
“Digging?” She looked up from tucking her shirt into her jeans. She already had her shoes on.
“”Yeah, there is a shovel against the deck with wet dirt on the blade.”
“Wet dirt?” She was not following my train of thought.
She finished tucking in her shirt despite my arrival. Once started. She stared at me like she had forgotten what she was doing.
“You went outside to get a shovel?” She asked.
“No.” I laughed. She gave me her, it's-too-early look. I was glad to recognize it. I had never had anyone since my mom who gave me looks I could recognize. It meant we were getting closer. I wanted that. I found I really needed that. As much as I tried to tell myself I needed my alone time, I was a product of my raising. I had never been alone before. Mom was right. It is not good for man to be alone. Alone is a compromise with circumstance. If I have no one, then I convince myself that I must need no one.
“Where'd you go?”
“I heard a noise and went out to see what was up.” I debated telling her, a police officer, that I saw someone down by the worker's campers.
“Find anything?” She asked.
Easy question to sidestep. She didn't ask if I saw anything. The word FIND denotes seeing something I could touch. I was being as literal as I could without lying. I did not want her to leave. I did not want her to call the police.
“Didn't find anything.” I chose my words carefully. “Except that shovel leaning against the deck when I got back.”
“Shovel?” Her words sounded like before, but her eyes were brighter this time.
“Against the deck as you climb the steps.”
“I was just out there. I don't remember a shovel. I must really be groggy with sleep.”
She went to the door and poked her head out to see the shovel. She pulled her head back in and closed the door.
“No way.” She shook her head at me.
“What?” I smiled.
“No way that shovel was right there when I was outside. I stood right there and looked up over the hill yelling for you. There is no way I do that and not notice a shovel handle in my face.” She was adamant and shaking her head, too.
I smiled. She looked at me.
“You put that shovel there?”
“Why would I do that?” Surely she didn't believe I would do that.
“I'm telling you. That shovel was not there. I might have been half asleep yelling for you in the dark, but I am not nuts. A shovel handle sticking up in my face would have been annoying as well as out of place. Remember? I am the one always teasing you about how all your tools are always in their places after a days work?”
She was right. She had teased me many times about my almost obsessional need to put the tools in their storage places after each day's work. When she did find something out of place, once, she made a big deal out of how I had missed one. A shovel leaning against the deck would have been like a red cape to a bull. She being the bull.
“Where'd it come from?” I asked no one in particular.
“Careful.” She moved to my side and wrapped her arms around my waist pulling me close for warmth as much as protection. Opening the door had let a lot of cold in. The little heater would need a few minutes to catch back up.
“Careful?” I asked, kissing the top of her head affectionately.
“Yeah. When you ask a question like that knowing I do not know the answer, you ought to be careful you're not inviting someone else around here to answer it.” She giggled, making fun of my ghostly form in the darkness.
I thought again of the black shadowy figure I had been following just a few minutes ago.
“We're the only ones out here,” I tried to sound certain. I think it came out more like a question.
“As Sherlock Homes would say, That is a question that is entirely still within the confines of the unanswered, seeing as how a shovel has moved and the two people known to be here did not touch it.”
I feared she was making sense. Worse, I feared the timing because I believed her when she said the shovel was not there when she was outside. That left only a couple of minutes between her being on the deck and my coming back to the camper for someone to have put it there.
“Given the timing of the event,” she continued in her best Sherlock Homes impersonation. “If the shovel was not there when you descended the deck and made your nocturnal visit to inspect things down by the worker's campers, and the thing was not present when moments later I stood practically on top of it, yet it was surely in its present placement by the time that you returned from your inspection walk, it can only be assumed that whoever moved the shovel there did so in the span of only a few brief minutes between my being on the deck and your returning to it.”
She summed up the situation in as long winded an explanation as I had ever heard.
I stretched and yawned in mock animation of someone waking up.
; “You finally get through that explanation?” I joked. “I was,” fake yawn, “about to go to sleep trying to follow you, there detective.”
She punched me in the side good naturedly.
“The point is,” She returned to her own voice and demeanor. “Whoever did this had to have been out there watching me on the deck when I was out there.”
That thought sent a shiver through our backbones that had nothing to do with the cold. She was right. It was not just about me having a visitor or, as I now was thinking, maybe more than one. It was about our safety. Her safety. What if the person out there had attacked her with that shovel? Maybe she needed to know.
“I thought I saw a shadow down by the worker's campers.”
She looked at me with a suspicious gleam in her eye.
“Thought you said you didn't find anything?” Her question was more an accusation.
My not lying was more like a lie when she said it than when I said it. Funny how that works.
“I didn't.” I knew I was on thin ice. “I thought I saw a shadow.” I hedged.
“Thought?” She was in full interrogation mode. Damn police training.
“I saw something.” I admitted. “Everything I see now becomes a shadowy figure in the dark.” I tried to reason away my sighting.
“Down by the worker's campers?” She searched for details.
“Yes.”
“Just before I called you? When?”
“Just before you yelled.”
“So, whoever put that shovel there could not have been whoever you saw out there?” She was not asking me to answer her.
“There has to be two people out here.” She looked questioningly at me, defying me to come to a different conclusion. I could not.
“Or two somethings,” I added.
Whatever, whoever it was, the reasoning was clear. It was the motive that was still murky. A sock. A shoe. Now a shovel. What was going on?