A Dark Path #3
I walk past Tomasetti and stand next to the tree in question. Ten feet away, the ground is disturbed, grass and weeds trampled, the mud beneath exposed. I go to it and my beam illuminates the shiny spill of blood.
“The mauling must have happened here,” I murmur.
He comes up beside me and kneels. “Ground is torn up.”
I drop to one knee, study the ground. “Any tracks? Paw prints?”
“Nada.” He shines the beam in an arc. “Looks like deer came through at some point. Tracks there.”
He gets to his feet, then squints into the endless fog and dark. Around us, the woods pulse with life. The drip of condensation from the branches. The sound of frogs from the creek. The gurgle of water over rock. The hoot of an owl. All of it tamped down by the dank hush of fog.
“Anything big enough to do that kind of damage to a man’s leg had to have left prints,” Tomasetti mutters.
Training my beam on the ground, I sweep it left and right. “There are no prints, aside from deer. No hair. No trail. No droppings.”
“We know Bambi didn’t attack him.” Fifteen feet away, Tomasetti does the same with his flashlight. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“If this is where it happened.”
“You saw the blood.” He sighs. “A two-hundred-pound Sasquatch would have left prints.”
I laugh, but his attempt at humor doesn’t quite dispel the uneasiness slinking up my spine. “You’re not a Bigfoot aficionado, are you, Tomasetti?”
“I’ve been known to dabble in cryptozoology,” he says, his expression deadpan.
I stare at him, not sure if he’s kidding.
I’m about to fan out when I hear something rustle in the brush. Twenty feet away. Too close for comfort. I jerk my beam that way. Tomasetti’s beam blends with mine. The light illuminates an ocean of trees, the spaces in between thick with raspberry and bramble. White mist billowing all around.
“Tomasetti,” I whisper.
“I heard it,” he snaps.
“No more talk about Bigfoot.”
“Or Chupacabra.”
In the periphery of my vision, I’m aware of him reaching beneath his jacket for his Kimber .45, moving closer to me.
The crack of a twig sounds. The crunch of dry leaves. The heavy breathing of something scant feet away.
“Something there.” I ease my .38 from its holster.
“Eyes open.” Tomasetti signals for us to advance. “Two o’clock.”
A guttural sound ahead and to my right. The quiver of tall grass.
He shoots me a puzzled look. “What the hell?”
I shrug. “No clue.”
The crack of breaking branches. The pound of feet against the ground. Something moving through the weeds, darting between the trees. Big enough to bend a sapling onto its side.
“Stop!” I know the culprit isn’t human; for safety’s sake, I call out anyway. Always a good idea to make yourself known on the chance some clown is playing tricks.
The thing keeps coming.
I stumble back, my .38 at the ready. “Painters Mill police! Halt! Halt! ”
I catch a glimpse of the topline of a black body. Fur raised. Low head. Small ears. The size of a bear, but not a bear.
“There!” Tomasetti shouts.
I jog toward it, my beam illuminating the back end of a dark form an instant before it plunges into thick underbrush and disappears into the fog.
Then I’m running full out, Tomasetti parallel with me a few feet away.
Beams playing crazily on the trunks and brush and tall grass.
I’ve only gone a few yards when my feet tangle in bramble.
Stickers poke me through my trousers. I nearly go down, regain my footing just in time to keep from falling headlong.
We’ve only gone a few yards when I realize our quarry has outrun us and disappeared into the night.
For a full minute, we stand there, listening, trying to catch our breath, as much from adrenaline as the sprint.
Tomasetti bends, sets his hands on his knees. “I’m getting too old for this.”
“Speak for yourself.” But my breaths are labored. I can’t stop looking at the place where I saw the animal disappear. “Did you see it?”
“I saw something.”
“What the hell was it?”
“Whatever it was, it’s big and fast.” He shrugs. “Might be a good idea to get the game warden out here.”
The crack of my radio startles me. “Chief, I got a ten-eleven out at Isaac Stutz’s place.”
Ten-eleven is the ten code for “animal trouble.”
Tilting my head, I speak into my shoulder mike. “What kind of problem?”
“Reporting party said something went after his livestock.”
“I’m on my way.” I think about that a moment. “Margaret, contact DNR,” I say, referring to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Get a wildlife officer out here. I’m ten-seven-six.” En route.
“Ten-four.”
I look at Tomasetti. “Stutz’s place is half a mile down the road.”
“Why am I not surprised?” he mutters, and we jog to the Explorer.
I make use of my spotlight, which is attached to the exterior of the driver’s side of the Explorer, as I take the gravel lane to the Stutz house, but there’s nothing unusual lurking in the tall grass.
We catch Isaac as he’s exiting the barn.
He’s in his mid-forties with the long beard of a married Amish man.
He’s hatless, wearing trousers with the suspenders over a sleep shirt, which tells me he was roused from sleep and dressed hastily.
He’s got an old Ruger rifle slung over his shoulder, a kerosene lantern in his hand.
“We received a call about an animal problem,” I call out as I stride toward him.
Next to me, Tomasetti keeps pace, eyeing the rifle. “Hello, Ruger,” he mutters beneath his breath.
The Amish man reaches us and stops. “Something tried to get my calves.”
Only then do I notice that he’s visibly shaken. The lantern flickers because his hand is trembling. His eyes dart repeatedly toward the woods behind the barn. “I put the cows in the barn,” he says. “And I asked my son to run down to the pay phone and call you.”
Tomasetti motions to the rifle. “Did you get it?”
The Amish man grimaces, shakes his head. “It was too foggy and dark. It ran into the woods.”
“Mr. Stutz, what kind of animal are we talking about exactly?” I ask.
He stares at me, sheepish, and shakes his head. “Well, I didn’t get a very good look at it.”
His reluctance to give a straightforward answer tells me there’s more coming. “It was dark, you know,” he adds. “The thing was moving fast.”
The thing …
I recall the creature that approached Tomasetti and me when we were at the covered bridge. Is it the same animal? Or are we dealing with more than one?
The Amish man’s brows knit. “This animal … Chief Burkholder, I’ve hunted my whole life and I can tell you this beast was like nothing I’ve seen around here. It wasn’t tall, but large. Thick bodied, you know. Two or three hundred pounds. And quick.”
Merle Beachy’s description of the animal that mauled him scrolls in the backwaters of my mind.
… the size of a young bear …
“What do you think it was?” I ask.
He shakes his head, then forces a laugh. “Spuk Butzemann.” Haunted Scarecrow. The quip falls flat. He’s embarrassed because he doesn’t know how to answer my question. Because he doesn’t want to appear a fool. Because whatever he saw frightened him.
Tomasetti tosses me a puzzled look. “Spook what?”
“Spuk Butzemann,” I tell him. “According to Amish folklore, it’s a scarecrow that transforms into an animal at midnight. It sneaks into farmhouses and eats children who don’t obey their parents.”
“To think that some kids are afraid of clowns,” he mutters.
“Mr. Stutz, can you show me where it happened?” I ask.
“This way,” he says. “Kumma.” Come.
The Amish man takes us to a small pasture—a couple of acres—located behind the barn. Flashlights in hand, Tomasetti and I spend fifteen minutes looking for tracks or any sign of the predator. But the ground is muddy and trampled by the cattle; we find nothing.
Back in the Explorer, I hail Dispatch. “Margaret, did you reach ODNR?”
“A wildlife officer is on his way, Chief,” she replies.
“ETA?”
“He’ll be here in about an hour.”
I pause. “Have there been any calls put out about the escape of an exotic animal?” I ask. “From a hunting ranch? Or zoo?”
“Not that I’ve come across,” she tells me. “Do you want me to check with County?”
“That would be great, Margaret. Thank you.” I rack the mike and look at Tomasetti. “So, what weighs three hundred pounds, bites, and looks like a bear?”
He shrugs. “And isn’t a close relative of mine?”
I smack his shoulder. “And no Sasquatch cracks.”
We sit there, our minds working over the possibilities. Then Tomasetti shoots me a sideways look. “If there’s an exotic on the loose this time of night, it’s possible the owner isn’t even aware of the situation.”
“Which means there may not be a report at all.”
“Exactly.” He looks out the window, toward the barn and the woods beyond. “We have a little time before the wildlife officer gets here. What do you say we cruise around, see if we can spot that wayward scarecrow?”
Rolling my eyes, I put the Explorer in gear. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Ten-year-old Danny Hochstetler couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so excited. He loved to fish more than anything in the world and night fishing was best of all. Tonight, he and his older brother, Samuel, finally got permission from their parents to camp out.
According to Datt, the crappie were “biting like mosquitoes” because of the blood moon.
Even Mamm liked crappie. Not only did they taste good, but they were small enough to fit in the pan.
Danny didn’t know anything about frying fish or what the moon had to do with fishing; all he cared about was dropping his hook in the water and pulling out that first big one.