Chapter Ten
Martin had seen dead bodies in both his military and game warden careers. Difficult. Haunting. But there was something especially disturbing about a corpse that had been in the water for an extended time.
Steeling himself, he secured his grip on the shirt, ankle deep in the water.
His boots sank into the muck, making each step a slog.
Carefully, he eased the body over just to make sure the person wasn’t still alive, even though his gut told him otherwise.
The face came into view, covered in mud and algae.
The gaping wound on the temple left no doubt. The individual was dead.
First order of business? Preserve the crime scene.
Protect evidence as best he could while ensuring the current didn’t reclaim the body.
Or risk the body coming apart if he pulled it to the shore.
Stretching, he grasped a fat stick. He maneuvered it through the neck of the T-shirt and into the mucky water, effectively staking the body in place.
One task at a time, he let training override all else.
His brain felt like a warehouse full of boxes storing memories and emotions, with him choosing which to unseal and when.
Compartmentalizing, some would call it. Not the healthiest of coping strategies, but the best he’d been able to manage to date in spite of all the sessions with a military shrink before he’d opted not to renew his army contract.
He sealed up the horror of securing the bloated body, tucking away the memory to be dealt with another time.
On autopilot, he tugged out his cell phone to call the police department, then his boss, since the job description included assisting law enforcement in a rural setting such as this.
Backup should arrive within a half hour.
Until then, he could only stay with the body.
Which meant he couldn’t drive Bailey Rae home yet.
How had he forgotten her? He glanced over his shoulder to search for her. She sat farther up the embankment, her head between her knees. Her shoulders shook, hard and fast. She must be either crying or hyperventilating. He stalked past the mattress pile, startling a foraging squirrel.
“Bailey Rae?” He knelt in front of her and started to reach for her, then remembered his hands were still covered in filth and death. He clenched his hands into fists to will away the feel of the soggy shirt.
“Is it Winnie?” Her voice trembled, and she didn’t look up. “The body. Is it Winnie?”
Winnie? His gut sank that it had never occurred to him she might think so.
“No. Oh my God, no,” he rushed to assure her. The face had been obscured, battered, but the body was obviously male. He should have guessed her mind would go there. His compartmentalizing had blinded him to her fears. “No. It’s a man. Not Winnie, I promise.”
“Thank God.” She folded into herself, hugging her legs and pressing her face to her knees.
Weeping harder, she rocked back and forth.
He wanted more than anything to haul her against his chest and hold her until she’d cried herself dry, but he couldn’t do a thing until he cleaned his hands and cleared his mind.
Martin climbed the slope past the picnic table to his truck and tugged his rucksack from the toolbox.
He strode back to Bailey Rae and dropped it onto the ground beside her.
He unzipped the canvas bag and gave his hands a once-over with an alcohol wipe even though they’d worn gloves.
Wordlessly, he nudged her arm gently with the pack.
She glanced at him with tearstained eyes and nodded.
Plucking three wipes, she scrubbed her hands and then her face. Mundane tasks could go a long way toward restoring equilibrium. Next, he smeared vapor rub under his nose before passing the small jar to her.
She drew the container to her nose and inhaled deeply before dabbing the menthol just over her top lip. “You must think I’m a wimp. Since Winnie passed without being found, I’ve lived in fear of the day I’d get word that she’s been discovered.”
“You were upset, and understandably so.” Even as a trained professional, he was struggling to keep his mental boxes from overflowing. “I should have realized you would assume it was Winnie. I’m sorry for not speaking up right away.”
“You had your hands full, and I wasn’t any help.” She wadded up the wipes.
“You helped in the most important way. You found him.”
She started to turn to look toward the river.
Dipping his head into her line of sight, Martin drew her attention back to him. “Can you imagine if one of the Boy Scouts had stumbled on him during their Eagle Scout cleanup?”
People drowned annually in this river, some found, others never recovered. A sad reality.
“That would have been so bad,” Bailey Rae whispered.
“Yes, ma’am, it would have.” He stuffed the wipes and menthol back into the backpack, restoring a little order to this place of chaos.
“I’ve called the police, but it may take them a while to get out here.
After they arrive, I’ll still need to stay even after you’ve given a statement.
Is there someone you can ask to pick you up? ”
“I’ll text June.” Nodding, she pulled her phone from her back pocket. Her fingers tapped across the keyboard, an answer swooping in seconds later. “All set. She’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”
That was a long time to sit vigil. “Do you want to wait in the truck?”
“I would rather stay here with you.” Her green eyes held a vulnerability he’d already learned she didn’t show often. “Is that all right?”
“Of course.” He draped an arm around her shoulders and tucked her against his side, a comfortable fit.
“I’m tougher than this. I always have been. Ask anyone who knew me as a kid.” She melted a little closer against him. “But this ... hit me. The violence and imagining what happened to my aunt ...” Her words trailed off, her eyes squeezing shut.
“Death is upsetting, no matter how accustomed a person may be.” Living with PTSD was its own special kind of hell, and he’d had a long time to experience the toll it took. “Doctors. Cops. Firefighters. Military members. We get shaken by the senseless loss of life.”
“But you held it together just now.”
“On the outside. Inside?” He thumped himself on the chest. “My run tonight will be twice as long.”
“Because of what you saw here?” She waved toward the gurgling river.
“Of course,” he said simply.
She angled back to study his face as the wind rustled the branches overhead, releasing a shower of pine needles.
“I’ve mentioned my crummy childhood before.
But one of the positive side effects from that time?
I learned young how to read people. If an adult wasn’t going to protect me, I had to do that for myself.
All of those instincts tell me there’s something more going on in that handsome head of yours. ”
“Handsome, huh,” he said, deflecting.
She tapped a finger along his forehead. “Don’t hold back because I was hyperventilating a few minutes ago. Sometimes the best way to pull yourself back together is to help somebody else.”
He mulled over her words, not sure if she was right or not, but knowing that at the very least she needed a distraction.
If opening up one of his more painful boxes would help her get through the next twenty minutes, then so be it.
“Remember when I told you I served in the army, as a military police officer?”
“The scorpions in the boots,” she said with a snort of disgust. “How could I forget that?”
“Fair point,” he said, appreciating her dark humor.
Although he suspected she used it as a defense mechanism, like with reading the room.
Still, there was no defense against the pain of his most harrowing memory.
“My last year in the military, I was guarding a group of incoming refugees in a hangar. A random shooter opened fire. Seven people died, two of them children.”
Relating the facts in news-headline style didn’t begin to mitigate the horror of what he’d experienced. But it was the only way he knew how to share a scene that would haunt him forever.
“Martin, how horrible.” She rested a comforting palm on his stomach, and he quickly clasped his hand over hers.
“It was. I know that I did everything I could.” The official reports on the incident had said as much.
His superior officer had underscored that fact, as had two other MPs who’d been there with him.
“That doesn’t stop me from hating myself for not being able to do more. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Like how I blame myself for Winnie’s death. Because I fear it wasn’t an accident but that she killed herself over losing Uncle Russell. Every day I wonder what I could have done to stop her.”
He turned to look at her, seeing the loss and guilt in her eyes. Logical or not, that emotional burden was real. “Very much like that.”
A flurry of doves took flight from the trees, drawing her gaze skyward. “It’s just so tough when everywhere I look there are so many memories.”
Silence settled between them, weighted down by grief with nowhere to go.
He’d come to this town to give himself distance from his nightmares, but for her, that meant leaving Bent Oak.
What a time to realize he would miss her, more than he could have imagined when he’d torn off that warning ticket for illegal fishing.
She rubbed her finger just above her lips, where she’d smudged the menthol. “Do you think the body is Gia’s brother-in-law?”
“Yeah,” he said heavily. “I do.”
If so, he needed to know if the damage to his skull had been caused by rocks or by a human.
1978
Attending Russell’s races had taken on a different flavor for me now that I’d ridden in the passenger seat of his Chevelle. As he fishtailed around a curve, I felt the momentum in my stomach. The excitement in my veins.
And an awakened desire that, before meeting Russell, I had thought I’d lost.