Chapter Two
Two
I start across the thin strip of grass that separates the edge of town from the edge of the forest, and Sheriff and Jonah the Deputy fall in right behind me.
Just before we step into the trees, I glance up toward the highest point on the tallest mountain in these parts, up toward Moonlight Crag. Even when the hills and the woods around town seem black as pitch, that pale rock outcropping glows bright over the valley. And behind it, the three-story glass windows of the lodge blaze with a warm yellow light that makes the dark down here seem less scary.
For a minute, I let myself dream about being all snuggled up in one of those fancy rooms with their high thread count sheets and their memory foam mattresses—a bowl of Swiss chocolates on the nightstand beside me and a bottle of French champagne chilling in the ice bucket—but then I pull my head out of my ass and get moving.
Because the dead boy’s getting louder.
More insistent.
And Sheriff’s right. The only cure for it is to find him.
Sheriff and Deputy Jonah both have their flashlights out, but the night still swallows us up once we find the trailhead and step into the trees to start our climb toward Riley’s temporary resting place.
The Aux-Arc Trail is one of the most popular hiking paths in the country. The beginning, over in eastern Oklahoma, isn’t that rough, but then it winds and twists its way across northern Arkansas like a copperhead, skirting deep lakes and climbing up and up and up the whole time before finally snaking into Missouri, where it ends just a few miles shy of the corny country music jamborees, neon-lit mini golf courses, and all-you-can-stuff-yourself-with breakfast buffets of Branson. And the last half of the trail is a doozy.
Most people who hit the AAT are out-and-back day-trippers, but every year a few thousand or so serious thru-hikers do the whole thing. The very best of them can make the full trek in just under three weeks, but that’s still an awful long time sleeping rough in the woods, eating shitty rations, and washing in streams.
Lucky for them, Lucifer’s Creek sits right at the midpoint of the two-hundred-mile thru-hike, the only town they’ll encounter along the way. Our one-and-only street, Mud Street, is actually designated as part of the trail. The Ozark Mountains spit hikers out west of town, at mile marker 101, and they’re always fall-on-their-knees grateful to see the little coffee shop. Not to mention Morning Glory Bed and Breakfast, with its hot showers and real pillows. And Bite-Size, the tiny diner serving up heaps of fresh scrambled eggs and bacon. Mostly, though, they make a beeline for Donny Blue’s, a hole-in-the-wall Irish pub with real live fiddle players and frosty pint glasses.
So they spend a couple of nights enjoying all that and browsing the half-dozen or so antique shops and folk art galleries that take up the rest of Mud Street, picking out treasures to have mailed back home. Daddy’s stained glass birds. Handmade quilts and wreaths crafted from dried wildflowers. Jams and jellies and local honey. Beautiful things to remember their adventure by. As if the blister scars won’t be enough. Then they step off this end of town, the east side, and head up even higher into these mountains for the last hundred miles of their journey.
We don’t have nearly that far to go tonight, and I’m grateful, because with every step, that unheard music of the dead gets more violent, until it’s swirling inside me like the climax of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
A feeling that feels like music. That’s the way I described it to Nana when I was little. Like all my bones are humming.
She nodded and kept wrestling my messy, dark hair into neat braids. Like somebody’s playin’ your bones like a flute , she told me. That’s the way it used to feel to me and your mama.
And that’s it, exactly. Not the sound of the flute. Just the vibration of the notes. That relentless, thrumming energy from somewhere up on the dark mountain is like a rope dragging me uphill.
Pulling me toward Riley Alden.
Or whatever’s left of him after almost two months in this heat.
We’ve been hiking maybe thirty minutes, and my calves are starting to burn. I hear Sheriff and Jonah huffing and puffing behind me, but there’s no way in hell they’re gonna tell me to slow down. Their delicate man-egos won’t let them admit they can’t keep up with a seventeen-year-old girl.
The trail is getting really steep now, and my tennis shoes slip on a loose rock. “Shit.” I reach out and grab onto a scraggly branch to keep myself from going down hard, but my palm snags on the thorny brambles that have taken over the pitiful tree. I hiss like a pissed-off cottonmouth and rub blood on my sweatshirt front. “Goddammit.”
“You kiss your mama with that mouth?” Deputy Jonah says, and the grin on his face makes it clear he’s real proud of himself, until Sheriff and I both glare at him. “Aw, dang,” he mutters. “Sorry. Shit. I didn’t think—”
“How much farther you reckon, Dove?” Sheriff takes off his hat to mop sweat from his forehead with a yellowed handkerchief. Underneath, wet hair is plastered to his scalp like a helmet.
I stop for a minute, letting the melody of the bones wash over me like water over rocks in a stream. Thanks to Jonah and his big mouth, I’m trying not to think about Mama. How she just took off one day and left me on my own here, like I never mattered to her at all.
It’s okay, though. I’m an expert at not thinking about Mama.
I push her out of my head, and Riley comes rushing back in to fill the empty space. He barrels into me with the force of an avalanche rolling down a mountain. Every bone song is different, but Riley’s is all crashing cymbals and screeching strings. “Not far,” I tell them, and I point up the hill a bit. “He’s lyin’ that direction. Off the trail a ways. To the right.”
Sheriff sighs and shoves his handkerchief back in his pocket. The hat goes back on his head. “Best keep movin’, then.” I turn to start hiking again, but not before I catch him giving his mouthy deputy a look that clearly means Keep your big trap shut from here on out .
We’re really climbing now, and that fire is already back to burning in my calves. But at least I can breathe a little better. That minute or two of pause did my lungs some good.
We’re getting really close to Riley, and I’m trying to find a place to exit the trail and head into the woods. I peer into the flashlight-lit tangle of trees and vines, looking for a path through the undergrowth. But there isn’t one.
This is the worst part of these treks. It’s not so bad dragging myself up the hiking trail. The Aux-Arc is well maintained. Pretty easy to travel. But once you step off into the woods, it’s like being pulled at by a million thorny fingers. Grabbed and taunted. Pinched and poked. Ripped apart.
There’s tree roots to trip you up and jagged rocks to rip your palms to shreds when you fall, not to mention deep ravines that open up wide out of nowhere like yawning mouths, leaving you skittering backward right at the edge, almost before you even see the drop-off.
Sheriff pulls a machete out of the sheath he keeps strapped to his thigh. He’ll go first for now, hacking our way in according to my directions.
He’s about to lift his blade for the first swing when a piercing sound slices through the heavy night air. It’s almost like the bugle of an elk mixed with the scream of a peacock. Strangled and high-pitched.
Animal in the beginning.
Too human for comfort at the end.
We glance around and the sound comes again, closer this time. It cuts into us like we’re made of butter, and we freeze as some primal instinct rises up from our collective memory. Don’t move , it whispers. Even Jonah is still for the first time all night.
We wait, not breathing, but the cry doesn’t come again.
Sheriff raises his machete to take a swipe at the vines blocking our way. “Elk,” he tells us. “Or coyote, maybe.” And the spell is broken. “Come on,” he mumbles as we step off the trail and into the close embrace of the trees. “The boy’s family is waitin’ for word.”
Riley Alden isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this part of the Arkansas Ozarks. Not even close. And I’d bet a million dollars he won’t be the last. People get lost. They have accidents. I’ve been finding bodies in these woods since before I knew my shapes and colors. It wasn’t a regular thing, though. Not back then.
Not like now.
Everything changed three years ago when I found the first hiker. Emberlynn Kemper out of Memphis. Her bone song had been frantic. Panicked and erratic. A shrill wail that jumped and skittered like a terrified rabbit behind my rib cage. She’d stepped off the trail to pee and never rejoined her girlfriend. Nobody saw her again until I found her planted shallow in the black earth at the base of a towering pine tree, all covered up with needles thick as one of Nana’s quilts.
Over the three years since, the knocks on our door have come steady. Six, sometimes seven a year. Sheriff can’t find the bodies. Even the teams they drag in from the state police don’t turn up a damn thing.
But I always do, because sooner or later, their bones will start to sing. Sometimes it takes a while for that song to get loud enough to hear.
A few weeks. A month.
Two, even, for some of them. Like Riley.
He’ll be number twenty-four for me since this business with the hikers started. Since Emberlynn Kemper. I chart the number on a yellow legal pad tucked away in my desk drawer. Twenty-three little slash marks in red ink. I used to remember the names of all the murdered hikers, but I gave up on that a while back. Because they just keep coming.
That strangled noise comes again, sharp on the night wind.
“The Ozark Howler’s on the prowl,” Jonah the Deputy whispers in my ear. Then he lets out a long, low howl of his own before he grins at his own joke. I don’t remember him being such a cut-up in school.
“Shut the fuck up,” I hiss. “That’s a bunch of bullshit and you know it.” The sound of his voice is like barbed wire against my eardrums. “Have a little respect for the dead.”
He’s forgetting that this is a recovery mission.
Jonah mumbles something I don’t catch, then he shrinks back and lets me move on ahead of him. It strikes me that he’s probably nervous about being out here in these woods way past midnight. Not with the made-up Ozark Howler.
But with me.
The real-life Human Cadaver Dog of Lucifer’s Creek.
Sheriff looks back to make sure we’re coming, and Jonah puffs up like a bullfrog, trying to act all tough. Like I didn’t just hand him his ass on a plate. I roll my eyes and reach up to push the next branch aside.
It’s slow going, moving through the thick tangle, especially in the dark. Thorny blackberry brambles demand blood sacrifices under the moon, and climbing milkweed seems intent on strangling the life out of us. I walk face-first into more than one enormous spiderweb.
It takes an hour or so of fighting our way, inch by inch, before we come to the spot, and by then we’re all covered with deep scratches and bugbites and grime, not to mention so sweat-soaked it looks like we stopped for a midnight dip in Lucifer’s Creek.
“This is it,” I tell them when we finally reach a little clearing. I can barely spit the words out. My teeth are knocking together hard enough to make my heart hurt, and my hands are trembling something awful. The soundless music of the dead is reverberating off the trees and echoing off the hillside so loud that it just about shakes me apart. It feels like my own skull might pop off any minute and go rolling, and I’ll have to chase it across the grass.
“You okay?” Sheriff asks me, and I nod, because I know he doesn’t want to hear the truth. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m used to this misery.
There’s a big rock jutting out of the ground. Wild mountain violets grow from a crack in its center. I move around the boulder, slow and careful, until I find a place to one side where the earth looks different. Uneven and lumpy.
The rattling inside me gets even more violent—more desperate—and I clench my jaw tight.
“Riley.” I drop to my knees and lay my quivering palms on the little mound to whisper the name like an incantation, even though what I do isn’t magic. “Riley Alden. Let’s get you home.”
“Amen,” the sheriff murmurs behind me. That’s his own kind of magic, I guess. But I’m not a believer in religion, either. That’s why you won’t find me Sundays enjoying the potluck lunches at Lucifer’s Creek Community Church. Not anymore. No matter how good the fried chicken and Jell-O salad are.
I’m an equal opportunity skeptic. I don’t buy any of it.
Not Bible stories.
And definitely not spells or magic words and charms.
Lo does. He made me a protective amulet once. Something to keep me safe on these midnight hikes. My initials stitched in blue thread onto a red felt heart. Even though I didn’t put any stock in it, I wore it on a string around my neck until it fell apart, and it always made me feel safe. Not because it was magic. Because it came from him.
But I don’t believe in Lo anymore, either.
He left me. Just like my mama did all those years ago.
The sheriff coughs and I wonder how long I’ve been staring down at the ground.
Time to get to work, I guess.
No shovels. I gotta do this part by hand. Fingers in the dirt. That’s the only way to feel it. To know I’m digging in exactly the right spot.
It takes me twenty solid minutes to unearth the remains of a torso inside a moldy Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt.
A mop of dirty-blond hair falling away from an exposed skull.
Deputy Jonah turns and vomits into the leaves when the stench hits him, and I can’t help but feel like he deserves it.
All I really notice is that the bones have stopped singing. Everything has gone all still, and the night sounds of the woods suddenly feel so loud.
I glance up at the sheriff and he’s watching me with the same mix of amazement and horror as always. “Good work, Dove,” he tells me. But I see the revulsion in his eyes and hear it in his voice.
He looks away from my face, at something behind me, and I glance back over my shoulder to see a single dim light burning in the distance, through the trees a ways, on up the steep hillside.
Suddenly I know exactly where we are. I used to play in this clearing when I was little. I hadn’t been paying attention before, with all the rattling going on in my head. Or maybe I just hadn’t recognized it in the dark.
“Could finally have us a witness,” Sheriff says. He jerks his head in the direction of the flickering light, and the tumbling-down cabin we all know is hidden in the shadows. “We’ll have to get up there come mornin’. Ask some questions.”
“Don’t waste your time.” The smart-ass tone of Deputy Jonah’s voice makes my palms itch to slap him. “Since Lowan took off, ain’t nobody up at the old Wilder place but Granny Pearl.” He laughs. It’s a cruel and dismissive sound, one I’m more than familiar with. “And she’s blind as a damn bat. Plus senile to boot.”
My head whips back around, and now I think I really will slap him.
“Watch that goddamn mouth,” Sheriff snaps. “I’m sick to death of your yappin’.” Jonah zips his lip real quick, and I have a moment of deep satisfaction before Sheriff adds, “And Lowan Wilder ain’t gone. Not no more.”
“Lo’s back?” I jerk my head up and the beam from Sheriff’s flashlight hits me square in the eyes. “When?” I can barely make my mouth work. “I didn’t—”
“Got back a few days ago,” Sheriff says, and he lowers his flashlight. But it doesn’t matter. I still can’t see. Everything in my whole world has gone black. I can’t even think how to respond. “I figured you’d heard.”
Lo came home.
Those are the only words I know, and they echo so loud inside my skull that I don’t even realize I still have the finger bone of a dead boy clutched tight in my hand.