Chapter Fourteen
It’s dusk when we find that scent marker, and when dark falls, we’re still tracking.
It’s not that Storm spends that long finding the trail.
It’s that there are too many trails to follow.
We end up turning in for the night and then heading back out at dawn.
Storm follows the scent back to where we met Gretchen, east of their camp site.
Then to the camp site. Then on multiple short detours into the forest.
She also follows the trail to where Blake died. It goes to the creek, right in the spot where he’d been. From there, Storm snuffles around and then heads out. I call her back to see if she can find a trail north, where Blake’s body was dragged.
She does not.
“We can’t read too much into that,” I say. “There’s a lot going on here.”
Dalton nods. “And if Gretchen did drag him, the smell of the tarp might overpower her scent.”
I agree. Still, I make a mental note. Storm did follow the trail to the water, where we know Blake died. Yet … well, it’s water. That could be why Gretchen went there.
I tuck all that in my pocket and take Storm back to the main trail.
From there, she gets confused. Or maybe I get confused.
It’s hard to tell sometimes. She returns to the campsite, which could mean she was only retracing Gretchen’s steps or could mean Gretchen went from the creek to the camp, which would also make sense.
This is where they’d have been washing up and gathering water.
Storm walks around the campsite a few times … and then continues west to the point where we’d stopped her before.
Is she following Gretchen’s exit trail or her entrance one?
We let Storm continue on that way for nearly a kilometer. At that point, we have to stop her.
Did Gretchen leave along the route we gave her? Or is that an old trail?
This is what happens when a non-scent dog is trained by someone getting their own training from books. We’ll never progress beyond this state, where Storm can follow simple trails, which is all we usually need.
Blake and Gretchen had camped in this area. They’d gone back and forth on this trail. Beyond that? We don’t know.
We’re about to give up when Storm catches a scent on the ground. We’re heading back toward Haven’s Rock, still on the path Gretchen had taken. Then Storm stops and looks south for the first time. She snuffles the ground right at the spot where a thin game trail branches off this one.
Dalton moves past her and examines the undergrowth.
“Someone came this way,” he says. “Broken twigs on the bushes.”
He backs up to let Storm lead. It’s hard going for her—the trail isn’t wide enough to accommodate her bulk, and the branches keep snagging her thick fur.
“I can do this,” Dalton says.
Storm and I back out to the larger trail. After a few moments, he says, “It’s wider here. Bring her on through.”
I’m doing that when I hear a voice. I stop, my hand lowering onto Storm’s back. She waits. I carefully edge around her and then move to catch up to Dalton.
“You hear that?” I whisper.
He nods. His gaze is trained east, in the direction I heard the voice.
It comes again. All I can make out is that it’s male. Another male voice answers.
I back up to Storm and ask her to stay. Then I regroup with Dalton and follow him toward the voices.
We go maybe twenty feet before they come clear. Two men, talking in that way guys sometimes do when they think no one can overhear. Loud joking and teasing about sex.
“See, the problem is that women up here have their pick of guys,” one is saying. “So you can’t be choosy. Find one who’ll be grateful for the attention, make sure she’s liquored up … and then turn off the lights and pretend she’s hot.”
That’s the least offensive thing they say.
It seems one of them is about to go on leave in Dawson City.
His companion is giving him advice, which starts with getting women “liquored up” and ends with suggesting he find alcoholics and offer them money because there are “lots of boozers up here, and you wouldn’t believe what they’ll do for a C-note. ”
“Miners?” I whisper.
Dalton only grunts, and the more I listen, the more I feel as if I’ve been transported back to the gold rush days, guys with a pocketful of money, looking for sex in the metropolis of Dawson City.
The important thing is that they didn’t hear us. They are, however, heading our way. Directly our way. I glance back toward where we left Storm.
Do we acknowledge that we’re here? We’re on neutral ground.
We haven’t met any of the miners, though, and Rogers has made it clear that he would prefer his workers not to realize there’s another settlement nearby.
I agree, especially after hearing that conversation.
One of our fears is that the miners will discover there’s a town …
with women and a bar. From what I just heard, that worry isn’t groundless paranoia.
Dalton motions for us to move north and get out of their path. From there, we can link back up to that larger trail and quietly retrieve our dog.
We start in that direction. The two men are making enough noise to scare off anything, and it easily tells us where they are.
They keep talking, having now moved to stories of sex with drunk women.
And, if I’m understanding correctly, sex with passed-out drunk women.
I block it out. Nothing I can do except resolve even more strongly to keep our two settlements apart.
When we’re about thirty feet away, the men pass perpendicular to us, and I glance back to take a look. Considering what they’re saying, I’d like to commit these two faces to memory. I ease left so I can see them and, with a jolt, I realize I’ve met them. Both of them.
They’re not miners. They’re guards. I’ve been making a more concerted effort to distinguish them, mostly so if we have a problem with one, I can identify him. One of these two is about thirty-five, with light hair and a mole on his jaw. The other is the dark-haired one we saw just the other day.
So it’s not the miners talking about getting women drunk and having sex with them. It’s the guards … who already know about Haven’s Rock.
“Fuck,” Dalton mutters beside me, and I nod in agreement.
The one saving grace here is that no one has attempted to come to Haven’s Rock, despite knowing there’s a nearby settlement with women.
That’d be Rogers’s doing. I hate to give the guy credit, but he runs a tight ship.
I suppose that’s one advantage to the paramilitary nonsense.
Rogers uses it to keep the guards in line.
I can only imagine that they’ve been told what the penalty is for crossing onto our territory, and it’s steep enough that no one is breaking it, even for sex.
I turn to head back to Storm. While I would prefer not to bump into these guys, I’m not as concerned as I had been when I thought they were miners. We told Rogers we’d keep looking for signs that hikers hadn’t left, and that’s what we’re doing.
I only get one step, though, before Dalton touches my arm. He’s looking deeper into the woods, and when I go still, I pick up the tramp of footsteps.
“Moore!” a voice snaps. “Rico! What the hell are you doing out here?”
If it wasn’t for the profanity, I’d have presumed it was Rogers. Then the man says something I don’t catch, and I realize he has a British accent. Definitely not someone we’ve met.
I back up to where I’d been and peer through. The two guards have stopped. A third man joins them. He’s maybe mid-forties, with light brown hair, tall and wiry. I frown and glance at Dalton, who shakes his head, confirming it’s no one we’ve seen.
“Sorry, mate,” the light-haired guard says, affecting an accent himself. “We were just out for a ramble. Heading over to the pub—”
“I’ll ask you one more time. Where do you think you’re going?”
“We’re off duty, mate.”
“You might be, but you passed the boundary a half mile back.”
The light-haired man screws up his face. “Did we? Huh. Guess we missed the signposts.”
“If you have a problem, take it up with your boss, and somehow, I get the feeling, he’s going to tell you to go fuck yourself. Now turn around and go back.”
The light-haired man grumbles and shoulders past the younger one, but he does as he’s told. Dalton and I watch the newcomer as he stands there, peering around. Then he turns on his heel and stalks off.
“You’ve never seen him either, right?” I say.
“Never.”
“But he seems to be management. Second-in-command, maybe? At least that encounter tells us one good thing.”
“That the guards have a boundary they aren’t supposed to cross.”
I glance up at Dalton. “Two things, then. They have boundaries even off-duty and on neutral territory. But also they weren’t looking for our hikers. They’ve given up that search.”
“Seems so.”
We return to Storm, who has lain down to wait. When we approach she rises, ready to continue. We get her to where, as Dalton said, the forest opens up, and then we let her take over tracking Gretchen. She follows the trail for another hundred feet or so before stopping in a clearing.
“Huh,” Dalton says, when Storm lies down.
He starts searching the perimeter of the clearing. He’s looking for signs of where Gretchen might have exited. I focus on what she was doing here. If Storm is lying down, that means Gretchen stopped here—that her scent is all over this clearing.
I look first for debris, but Gretchen seems to be a seasoned hiker, and we didn’t find a single scrap of trash at the campsite.
Could she have camped here? It’d be an odd choice. Murder your husband. Hide the body. And then set up camp less than a kilometer away. You know, to rest. Moving a body is hard work.
And as I’m thinking there’s no chance I’ll find signs of an actual encampment, I spot one.
A divot in the ground. Only it’s not quite a divot.
It reminds me of my very rare golfing excursions, when I had a habit of hacking the ground.
That’s what I’m seeing. A spot where the “turf” seems to have been lifted.
I take a stick and prod under it. There’s no real sod here where the ground cover can be sparse. But what I lift is the closest approximation—a layer of hardened soil held together by root systems. I take hold, and it peels back in a square about thirty by thirty inches.
By now, Dalton has seen what I’m doing and come over. He frowns at the piece of sod. I dig around all sides of the open square, but it was just that one section.
“Something buried?” he says.
“I think so.”
He takes out the collapsible shovel, but I motion for him to hold off. I bend and start clearing with my hands. I lift out handfuls of dirt. Then my fingers brush something and I stop. I take a deep breath and gently clear away dirt to reveal hair. Light brown hair.
“Gretchen,” I murmur, sitting back on my heels and exhaling.
Dalton crouches at the hole. “Buried standing up?”
“Seems that way.”
“Fuck. That takes some work.”
“Less soil disturbance, but yes, much trickier to dig the hole.” I exhale slowly. “Since she didn’t put herself in there, I’m going to need to get her out. And we need to figure out how to do that.”
In the end, the only real solution is to dig a bigger hole. Go in from the sides and loosen the soil enough to extract her body.
Dalton has his collapsible shovel, but that’s not really meant for this kind of work. We’re going to need to go back to town. Still, Dalton makes a start at it, and as he does, I kneel to brush dirt from her head. And two minutes later …
“Eric?” I say.
He stops, wipes sweat from his brow, and grunts. Then he looks over. “What the hell?”
I have the top of the head exposed up to the brows. Now I clear lower on the face, revealing thick brows under a heavy brow ridge.
“That is not Gretchen,” Dalton says.
I keep clearing. The rest of the face comes clear. A man’s face. He’s maybe in his thirties. Light brown skin seems to be the result of a tan. He has dark blond wavy hair and a short beard.
Dalton stares down at the man. “Did we just…?”
“Find another corpse in the forest? It seems so.”
“Fuck.”