Chapter 10
He was on the road by five-thirty.
He'd told himself three times since the alarm went off that he wasn't doing this.
That he was going to make coffee, sit on the deck, and spend his Saturday like a normal person.
That a painting in a gallery window didn't mean anything.
That a sketch in a cold case file didn't mean anything.
That the fact they matched didn't mean anything either.
Gabriel’s Road was potholed county blacktop.
Plow trucks chewed it up every winter and the county patched it every summer with tar that melted in August. Old farms lay on both sides, some working, some not.
His gaze caught sight of a barn with half its roof gone.
A field of hay already knee-high was off to his right.
The trailhead lot was empty when he arrived.
Gravel and dirt, room for maybe eight cars, a brown DEC sign half hidden behind a stand of ferns.
He pulled in and killed the engine and sat there for a moment listening to the tick of the cooling motor and the first tentative notes of something singing in the treeline.
The trail started at a yellow metal gate and ran south, straight, and wide enough for a small vehicle.
It was the old Chateaugay railroad bed. They'd laid the tracks in the 1880s to move iron ore and charcoal, and now the rails were gone and the ties were gone and what was left was a raised gravel path cutting through the bog like a levee.
On either side, the ground dropped away into wetland.
For the first quarter mile, the trail was hemmed in by balsam fir and white pine and the occasional birch, their trunks close enough to brush your shoulders if you drifted off center. Then the canopy opened and the bog appeared and Noah stopped walking.
It was enormous. He'd known that intellectually.
He'd looked at it on satellite, read the descriptions.
But standing at the edge of it was different.
A thousand acres of flat, waterlogged nothing stretching out in every direction.
There were black pools between hummocks of sphagnum moss.
Stunted trees rose from the muck like things that had tried to grow and given up halfway.
Mist threaded through it all, low and slow, turning the distance into a gray wash that erased the horizon.
The silence was what got him. Not true silence. There were birds, insects, the faint sound of water moving somewhere below the surface. But the silence of open space. The absence of anything man-made. No engines, no voices, no road noise. Just the bog breathing.
He pulled out his phone and opened the photo of the painting. He held it up.
Nothing matched. The angle was wrong, or the light was wrong, or he was too close to the treeline.
Whiteface should have been visible on the eastern horizon but the clouds were low this morning and the mountain was buried in them.
The railbed was right, dead straight, elevated, but every stretch of this trail was the same. He kept walking.
Every hundred yards or so he stopped and held up the phone again.
Tried to find the composition. The Y-shaped water.
The leaning tree. The mountain. Nothing came together.
The bog was the same in every direction.
He thought about the investigators who'd held the original sketch five years ago and understood why they'd given up on it.
This was nowhere. This was everywhere. A sketch of this place was a sketch of nothing.
He almost turned around at the half-mile mark.
The mist was thicker here, the trail narrower where vegetation had crept in from the edges.
Mosquitoes had found him. He slapped his neck, feeling them suck at his skin.
His boots were wet from brushing against the overgrown sides of the path and there was no bridge in sight.
He kept going.
At just under a mile, the trail emerged from a stretch of close-growing spruce into the widest open section of the bog he'd seen.
The wetland spread out on both sides like a dark table, the water black and still between green-brown mats of moss.
And there, low and plain across the path, was the bridge.
It was smaller than he'd expected. A simple wooden span, planks laid across beams, wide enough for a snowmobile, maybe twenty feet long. It crossed a channel of dark water that was wider than the other channels he'd passed. He walked to the center of it and stopped.
He looked down.
Beneath the bridge, two channels of water curved toward each other from opposite sides and merged into one. A Y-shape. Exactly like the painting.
His pulse moved up a notch. He raised the phone.
The Y-fork was there. The railbed behind him, straight and true.
He shifted left a few feet and there it was, a single tamarack, taller than the surrounding brush, its needles just coming in for the season in pale yellow-green, its trunk leaning slightly to the left as though the saturated ground had shifted beneath its roots sometime in the last century and it had simply adjusted.
Then the clouds on the eastern horizon thinned for a moment and Whiteface was there. Low, off-center to the right, its profile as familiar as a face he'd known his whole life.
He took the photo. Lowered the phone. Looked at the screen. The painting and the landscape were the same place. Not similar. Not reminiscent. The same.
He stood on the bridge for a long time. The mist was lifting now, the sun finding its way through.
The bog was changing color around him, the blacks warming to brown, the greens brightening, the water picking up fragments of sky.
It was almost beautiful. It was also, he thought, one of the most desolate places he'd ever stood.
He still didn't know why the sketch was in the file. He still didn't know who Seraphine Maddox really was or what she'd been doing at sixteen years old drawing a landscape that ended up stapled to a cold case. But he knew this was the place she'd drawn. That much was settled.
He turned to leave.
He was three steps off the bridge, heading north, when something at the edge of his vision made him stop.
Off to the right, where the raised railbed dropped away toward the bog mat near the convergence of the two channels, the ground looked wrong.
Not dramatically wrong. Not obviously wrong.
Just wrong. A section of the sphagnum mat had heaved upward, pushed by water from underneath, and in the torn seam where the mat had split, something dark was visible that wasn't peat and wasn't root and wasn't shadow.
He told himself it was a log. Waterlogged wood, half buried, pushed to the surface by the same beaver-driven flooding that had turned sections of this trail into a swamp every spring. That's what it was. That's all it was.
He stepped off the trail.
His boots sank immediately, four inches, six inches, the cold water flooding over the tops and soaking through his socks.
The ground wasn't ground. It was a floating mat of moss over black water, and every step compressed it and sent dark liquid welling up around his feet.
He moved carefully, testing each step, keeping his weight low.
Ten feet off the trail. Fifteen. The shape was clearer now.
A dark curve, smooth and taut, breaking the surface of the bog like the back of something that had tried to rise and couldn't. The color was wrong for wood.
Too uniform. Too... he didn't have the word for it.
His brain was reaching for the word and some part of him was refusing to let it arrive.
He got close enough to see the texture and the word arrived anyway.
Skin.
The acid in the water had darkened and hardened the skin to the color of old leather. He was looking at the curve of a human back. A shoulder blade pressed against the surface from underneath like a hand pressing against a window from the other side.
Noah didn't move. He stood in six inches of black water and felt his chest go tight in a way that had nothing to do with exertion.
Then he looked to the left, further along the channel where the two brooks merged, and saw another shape.
Smaller. Partially submerged. Hair, dark and long, fanning out in the still water like something planted there.
He looked to the right. A third.
He backed up. Carefully. One step at a time, following his own footprints in the compressed moss, until he was on the railbed again.
He stood there breathing harder. The bog was silent around him.
The mist was almost gone now. The sun was warm on his face and the birds were singing as he stared at the dead bodies in the water.
He pulled out his phone. His hands were steady.
He took photographs, wide shots from the trail, close-ups at maximum zoom, the GPS coordinates visible on the screen.
He didn't go back out there. He didn't touch anything.
He didn't need to. He'd been doing this long enough to know what he was looking at, and he'd been doing this long enough to know that the next group who stepped into that bog needed to be wearing gloves and carrying evidence bags.
He called dispatch.
"This is Noah Sutherland. I need a forensic unit and crime scene out to Bloomingdale Bog trail, Gabriel’s Road lot. Point nine miles south on the trail, at the bridge over Two Bridge Brook. I've got what appears to be human remains. Multiple. It's a cold case connection. I'll brief on scene."
He didn't say how he'd found it. He didn't mention the painting or Seraphine Maddox. When they asked how he'd ended up there, he'd say he was reviewing old files and cross-referencing geographic features. It was almost true.
He stood on the bridge and waited. The bog spread out around him in every direction, holding its dead the way it held everything, silently, and for as long as it wanted to.