Chapter 1 #3
It was maybe two feet wide and it went up out of the shallows and across the gravel and into the trees, and it had been made by something heavy being pulled, and along both sides of it were boot prints.
Two sets. Maybe three.
Liam crouched.
He put his hand next to one of the prints, not on it, next to it, and he looked at the edges of it, and the edges were still sharp.
The rain had not softened them. The tide had not touched them.
This mud was above the high water line and the print was clean and crisp and it had been made recently, within a day, within hours.
"Somebody dragged something out of the water," Isaiah said. His voice had gone very thin. "Somebody dragged something out of the water and up into those trees."
Liam did not answer.
He was following the furrow with his eyes, up the bank, into the gray-green tangle, and about fifteen feet along it he saw a small pale thing lying in the mud where the drag marks passed, and he went to it and picked it up.
It was cloth.
A strip of it, torn from something, four inches wide and maybe a foot long, and it was sodden, and it was gray, and one end of it was stained a rusty brown that the rain had been working on and had not managed to take out.
Liam turned it over in his fingers.
And the cold clear thing came up in him so hard and so fast that he had to put a hand on a willow trunk to stay standing.
"Isaiah," he said.
"What. What is it."
"Look at it." Liam held it out. His hand was not steady. "Look at the ends."
Isaiah looked.
"It's torn," he said. "It's a torn piece of cloth, Liam, I don't—"
"It's torn at both ends and it's stained at one."
Liam's voice had gone quiet, gone flat, gone somewhere down under the grief where it could work.
"That's not a rag that fell off something. That's a bandage. Somebody tore a strip off a shirt and they wrapped it around a wound and it soaked through and they took it off and threw it in the mud and put a fresh one on."
Isaiah stared at him.
Then at the cloth.
Then at the drag marks going up the bank into the willows.
"You don't bandage a body," Isaiah whispered.
"No," Liam said. "You don't."
He stood there in the mud under the silver trees with the cloth in one hand and Tom Darcy's rifle in the other, and something enormous and terrible and bright was rising up through his chest, and he did not trust it, and he could not stop it.
Somebody had pulled Chloe Buck out of the cold water.
Somebody had dragged her up this bank.
And somebody had tended the wound in her while she was still bleeding, which meant that when they did it, there had been blood pressure to bleed with, which meant a heart, which meant she had been alive.
"She's alive," Isaiah said. He said it like a man testing a rotten step. "Liam. She's alive."
"She was alive." Liam made himself say it right. Made himself keep the read honest, because a false read got you killed out here, and hope was the falsest read there was. "Yesterday. When somebody pulled her out. That's all we know."
But he was already moving.
He was moving up the bank, following the furrow, following the boot prints, up out of the wrack line and into the willows where the ground went firm, and Isaiah came scrambling behind him.
The trees closed over them.
They went a hundred yards. Two hundred. The willows grew close and old here, their trunks thick as barrels, and the drag marks became a path, and the path had been used, worn smooth by feet, going somewhere.
And then Liam stopped so suddenly that Isaiah walked into his back.
"What," Isaiah said. "What is it, what—"
Then he saw them too.
They were hanging in the trees.
All through the willows ahead, tied to the branches on lengths of fishing line and twisted wire, hanging at the height of a man's face, hundreds of them, thousands, stretching away through the gray trunks as far as the eye could follow.
Bones.
Small ones. Finger bones and rib bones and the long hollow bones of birds, strung together and hung in bunches, and among them scraps of tin cut into shapes, and shards of window glass, and old bright spoons, and the shells of a hundred sun-bleached crabs.
The tide moved somewhere out beyond the trees and a breath of air came up the path with it, and the whole forest began, very softly, to click.
It was the only sound in the world.
Isaiah made a noise in his throat that was not a word.
Liam brought the rifle up.
He turned in a slow circle, the scope to his eye, sweeping the gray trunks, the hanging bones, the clicking dark, and there was nothing, there was no one, there was only the willows and the sound and the drag marks in the dirt at his feet leading straight on into it.
"Liam," Isaiah breathed. "Liam, what is this place."
Liam did not answer, because at that exact moment, from somewhere deep in the trees ahead of them, far off through the clicking, a bell began to ring.
Slow. Deliberate. Three strokes, and a pause. Three strokes, and a pause.
Someone answering it.
Someone telling someone else that the willows had visitors.
And behind Liam, very close, close enough that he felt the words on the back of his neck, a woman's voice said, softly and almost kindly, "Don't run. She's still breathing. If you run, that changes."