Timothy
Old Bob meets me at the main entrance of Black River Park as the afternoon is growing dim, and I give him the details I have.
He doesn’t say much, just offers a nod and a grunt. Then starts walking toward the trailhead, up into the park. I follow.
Our footfalls crunch on the path and all around me the trees whisper. I am aware of the scent of wood smoke probably coming
from the chimney of a nearby house, the light odor of wet and rot.
I still can’t shake that feeling of being watched. The woman in black, disappearing on the trail. Who was she? Maybe no one.
Just a jogger. A curious onlooker.
And then there’s Ana Blacksmith. On the app, she called herself Jinx, an obviously fake name. Not that it matters; that particular
app is not for people looking for long-term relationships. What matters is that I was disappointed when she snuck out the
back, and that she’s been on my mind since. And now, she’s the ex-girlfriend of a murder victim. Bad luck? Bad karma? Something
else? Bad in any case.
“Are you with me, Detective?” Old Bob has stopped in his tracks and is giving me a look, like the sound of my thoughts is
annoying him.
“I’m here. One hundred percent.” Not really.
He’s a strange one. Gulf War vet, covered in ink.
On his back is the tattoo of a crossbow, expanding across his shoulders and down his spine.
I happen to know this because he works out occasionally at the youth center gym where I volunteer with some at-risk kids, teaching them about the value of exercising yourself into exhaustion, teaching them to box and weight train.
There’s a Buddha inked on Old Bob’s enviably hard middle.
A study in contradictions, there’s also an AK-47 rifle up his right arm with text in cursive: Go ahead.
Try to take it. He’s wiry, smallish, but he works the heavy bag like it insulted his mother.
We continue the trek. And I try to be more present. When Old Bob walks, his breathing gets slow and deep, his eyes moving from the path to the sky, into the trees that surround
the trail. There’s no chitchat, no discussing the case. He seems to listen to the air around him, every so often stopping
to bend to the ground, examine this branch or that one, touch something with the toe of his boot.
I let him walk ahead of me, keeping my distance so as not to distract him. He cuts an odd figure on the trail with his long
gray hair, dark, deeply wrinkled skin, a fleece-lined denim jacket, red cap, work boots, torn cargo pants. He lives in a shack
off the grid. Sometimes you don’t see him all winter; then maybe he’ll come riding into town on his snowcat to get supplies,
disappear again until the spring thaw. He does have a cell phone, though. And when I call he never fails to respond.
We hike the three miles in total silence to where Paul’s body was found by the hikers. And I’m hating on myself a little less
than I did on the walk up from the road, because this trail is fairly level, and I don’t feel like I’m going to puke by the
time we see the yellow and black of the crime scene tape. I’m not in the worst shape, right? I work the kids pretty hard, but during that time I’m mostly standing around. I need to get in the ring more.
It goes on like this, the mental chatter.
Finally, we stand at the edge of the scene, the crime scene tape flapping. With the light fading, it’s not the best time to track. But the more hours pass, the less evidence, if any, there will be. When the snow falls, even less.
Bob circles the grave site, bends down and takes a deep breath. I don’t smell anything, maybe just that faintest aroma of
wood smoke lingering. For some reason I can’t name, the scent always makes me think of my mother. When I think of her most
often, she’s in her garden where she grew herbs and flowers, kept a beehive on our modest expanse of property. She sold teas
and honey for extra cash; my dad was always sick with the lung disease that eventually took his life. They struggled to make
ends meet. But there was always laughter in our house.
“When we lose ourselves in memory, we fail to see what’s right before us,” Old Bob says, reprimanding me again, maybe intuiting
that I’d once again left the present moment behind to time travel.
“Point taken,” I say, even though I’m not the tracker. I’m a thinker, a puzzle solver, a student of human nature. Thoughts
are my thing.
A stiff wind bends the branches. Old Bob ducks under the crime scene tape and starts to walk straight along the path I took
up. He bends down when we come to the place where I scuffed my boot against the root.
“That was me,” I say, embarrassed. I should have let him walk it first, shouldn’t have been tramping around like an idiot.
He gives me a look. “I know.”
We walk a while longer; he moves slowly, touches trees. Is he whispering? Hitch, my old partner, absolutely hated Old Bob,
said he was like an old witch casting spells. Gives me the creeps.
My mother used to say that nature holds all of our secrets, all the cures to what ails us. The plants and trees, they’d talk
to us if we would only listen. Maybe that’s why I like Old Bob. He’s listening in the same way my mother did.
“Here,” Bob says. “They dropped him.”
I see the scratch on the tree, the way the debris has been swept away. There’s a tiny tear of fabric on a low broken branch.
He points to the ground. It’s hard and frozen, so the impressions there are light. But now that he shows me, I see them. One
looks like the edge of a treaded boot, the other smooth and pointy. I snap pictures with my phone; they’re not the best. I
pull gloves and an evidence bag from my pocket, retrieve the fabric. It looks like black denim, consistent with what Paul
was wearing.
I tie crime scene tape around the tree.
“Two people?” I ask.
He points to the ground, and I see another tread. A sneaker maybe. “Three.”
I nod. Carrying a body is hard work. Three people could do it better than two.
We keep walking, Bob pointing to this broken branch, this disturbed area of path, so obvious now that he’s here to point it
out. At each point I tie off a bit of tape, marking the trail. We come out at the road about a tenth of a mile north from
where I had parked earlier. Not bad, but just wrong enough to miss everything.
We look around the shoulder for tire treads and nothing is apparent.
Then Old Bob stops suddenly, eyes on the ground, and kneels at the edge of the trees.
“Gloves,” he says, and I hand him a fresh pair from my other pocket. All my pockets are filled with gloves and evidence bags.
Which one ex-girlfriend found odd enough to list as one of the (many) reasons she wanted to break up with me. It’s gross, Tim. It’s just—weird.
When he stands again, he’s holding what looks like a bunch of sticks tied together.
But as I get closer, I can discern arms and legs, a torso, a head with dried leaves for hair.
Around the neck, a twist of barbed wire.
Old Bob hands it to me and I shine the light from my phone on it.
I can see that entwined with the twigs and branches there’s hair, fabric, dried flowers, a small black feather along the spine, tiny black beads sewn in for eyes.
Loathe as I am to admit I feel a tingle of fear.
“Is it—a doll?” I ask.
Old Bob nods.
“A voodoo doll.”