Forest Ghost (9 page)

‘Really? Who are they? Or who
were
they, rather?’

‘Researchers, both of them, for Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. Apparently some of the forestry contractors had seen what they thought was cougar scat around that part of the Owasippe Scout Reservation. The two of them were up there to collect samples.’

‘Scat? What’s that?’

‘In wildlife circles, it’s what they call animal feces. It’s shit, Jack. They scoop it up and send it back to be tested for DNA.’

‘Do they know what happened to them yet? Tell me as much as you know.’

‘They’re trying to piece it all together but it isn’t easy. The woman’s name was Sandra Greene, with an “e”. She was twenty-eight years old and specialized in human/cougar interactions, especially in urban areas and subdivisions where human development has begun to encroach on cougar territory. The guy’s name was Weldon Farmer. He was thirty-five years old, married with two kids. He was Sandra Greene’s immediate boss. They were both based at the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy Center in Bath, just outside of Lansing.

‘Undersheriff Porter told me there was no question that Mr Farmer buried Ms Greene up to her thighs and then severed her head. At the time he buried her, that pool wouldn’t have been very much more than a depression in the ground with little or no water in it, because it only filled up after heavy rain. Underneath Mr Farmer’s body they found a machete, which he almost certainly used to decapitate her.

‘He didn’t drown, because there wasn’t enough water in the pool at the time he killed himself. It hadn’t rained until about eighteen hours before you found them. He cut the femoral artery in his groin, probably with the same machete that he had used to kill Ms Greene, and he bled to death.’

Jack said, ‘Was she unconscious when he buried her? I mean, if she hadn’t
wanted
him to bury her in the dirt that deep—’

‘No, you’re right,’ said Sally. ‘The odds are that she was conscious. There was no sign of concussive bruising on her head, and the autopsy hasn’t shown any trace of any kind of knockout drugs in her blood or in her urine – although she must have been there for at least two days before you found her, so any chemicals in her blood would have degenerated long before then. It didn’t help the coroner that she was decapitated, so any drugs like diphenhydramine wouldn’t have had time to penetrate through to her hair, which is where we usually find the most conclusive traces.’

‘So what you’re saying is that this could have been a suicide pact?’

Sally nodded. ‘That’s one of the theories they’re working on, yes. So far, though, the Lansing PD haven’t found any suicide notes at either of their homes or at their place of work, nor any indications that the relationship between Mr Farmer and Ms Greene was anything but purely professional.

‘Undersheriff Porter says he’s very wary of jumping to conclusions. Just because all of those scouts and scout leaders committed suicide so close by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that
this
was suicide, too. Maybe some psychopath forced them to do it.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘I wouldn’t cut a woman’s head off, even if somebody was pointing a gun at me. I’d rather die.’

Sally said, ‘I wouldn’t say no to that soda now. A Diet Coke would be great.’

Jack went to the fridge and took out a cold bottle of Coke. ‘Any more news on the scouts?’ he asked her.

‘That’s the other reason I’m here. Corinne Cusack called me this morning. She received a letter in the mail from Malcolm.’

‘Oh, Jesus. That must have upset her.’

‘Well, it came as quite a shock, I can tell you. I took it straight to forensics but not before I’d taken a picture of it.’ She rummaged in her purse and produced her iPad. She flicked through it and then she passed it over to Jack so that he could read it.

Malcolm had written his letter on lined paper, roughly torn out of a notebook. His handwriting, however, was very small and neat and round, in blue ballpen.

Dear Mom,

We went into the forest today to do tracking. At first it was good but then we got frightend even the leaders were frightend. We didn’t know why but it was the forest. We are supposd to go tomorrow to do wilderness survival but I don’t want to go it is so frightning. But they say we have to go for our merit badge.

Love Malcolm
.

Jack handed Sally’s iPad back. ‘Poor little guy. Do you know if any of the other parents had letters like that?’

‘We’re checking, but so far Malcolm is the only one. The trouble is, he doesn’t say what they’re all so scared of.’

‘Maybe it was the Forest Ghost.’

‘The Forest Ghost? What’s that?’

Jack said, ‘I don’t know … probably this has no connection with those boy scouts at all.’

He told Sally all about his visit to Maria, and what Maria’s great-uncle Andrzej had written in his diary.

‘Sounds similar, doesn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘I mean, I don’t know how it could be, but it does. A white thing, like an animal. Me and Sparky, we saw it for ourselves. And Sparky’s absolutely convinced that there’s a connection.’

Sally grimaced and massaged the back of her neck. ‘This isn’t really something I can tell my captain, Jack. He’ll either laugh in my face or he’ll send me off for psych evaluation. Besides, this isn’t really my case. I’m just giving the Muskegon Sheriff’s Department some friendly back-up.’

‘I don’t know what more we can do,’ said Jack. ‘There’s something scary in the forest at Owasippe, just like there was something scary in the Kampinos Forest in Poland, but whether it’s the same kind of scary something, I don’t see how we can ever find out. Not unless the sheriff’s deputies in Muskegon actually
catch
it.’

Sally finished her bottle of Diet Coke and stood up. ‘How is young Sparky?’ she asked.

‘Not too bad, considering. But you know what he’s like. I always feel he’s got something on his mind that he’s not telling me.’

‘How about you? How are you feeling?’

‘Fine. The restaurant’s doing fantastic. I hardly have a moment to myself.’

Sally laid a hand on his arm. ‘What I meant was, how are you feeling about Aggie? It’s two years ago next week, isn’t it?’

Jack suddenly found that it was difficult to speak. ‘There’s nothing I
can
do, is there? My brain still won’t accept that I’m never going to see her again.’

Sally kissed his cheek. ‘Just remember, you’ll always have a friend in me. Any time you feel low, you just call me.’

Jack nodded. ‘OK, Sal. You’re an angel.’

T
hat Saturday, Jack took Sparky up to see his mother in Highland Park, thirty minutes due north of Edgewater. She lived in a secluded loop, in a detached stone-fronted house with a view through the trees of Lake Michigan. It was gusty that morning, and the clouds were tumbling helter-skelter over the lake as if they were being chased by something that was threatening to tear them apart.

Nina Wallace was waiting for them in the porch when they came up the front steps. She was short, plump and round-faced, with ruddy cheeks and a curly perm which was suspiciously dark brown for a woman of sixty-one. She was wearing a bright summer dress with red-and-yellow flowers on it, and red Minnie Mouse shoes. Jack always thought that you can take the woman out of the Ukraine, where Nina’s family had originally come from, but you can never take the Ukraine out of the woman. Her parents had brought her up speaking Ukrainian, and with Jack’s father she had always spoken Polish, so even though she had been born and been brought up in Chicago, she spoke English like an immigrant. She was always coming out with sayings like, ‘A woman is not harmonica, for a man to toss aside when he finish play!’

‘Jack! Alexis!’ she called out, lifting up both of her arms. She never called her grandson ‘Sparky’. He had been christened Alexis after her father, whose somber mustachioed photograph hung in her hallway, and she never allowed him to forget it.

‘Hallo,
mamo
,’ said Jack. ‘How have you been?’

‘Oh … no so bad. Nobody come to see me. But no so bad.’

‘I came to see you only a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Your sister no come.’

‘Anya lives in California now,
mamo
. Apart from that she’s very busy.’

‘All the same she could call. What is wrong her finger, can’t call?’

They went inside, to the open-plan living room. Considering how traditional her dress was, his mother’s house was furnished in a very sparse, modern style, with plain white walls and white carpets and glass and chrome furniture. The only concession to tradition was an icon of Our Lady hanging by the fireplace. Jack walked through to the dining area, and looked out at the garden. He could see the lake glittering behind the trees, in the same way that the white thing had flickered behind the trees at Owasippe.

‘So, how you?’ his mother asked him.

‘I’m OK,’ he told her. ‘On Thursday I met this really interesting Polish lady. Maria Wiktoria Koczerska, that was her name. I thought about phoning you and telling you about her, but then I thought, no, it would be better if I told you in person.’

Sparky had already sat down on his grandmother’s large white leather couch, and had opened up his iPad. He had told Jack that he was drawing up a new star chart for him.

‘You want beer? How about you, Alex? Dr Pepper? I fetch cake.’

‘It’s okay,
mamo
, we had breakfast only a half-hour ago. Let me tell you about this Maria Koczerska.’

‘You’re sure you don’t want beer? Let me fetch cake anyhow.’

‘
Mamo
, she found out what happened to great-grandfather Grzegorz, during the war. She found out how he died.’

Nina Wallace promptly pulled out one of the chrome and white-leather dining chairs, and sat down. ‘How she know that? Agnieszka’s family never knew. Her mother always say to me, my grandfather Grzegorz was very famous musician, but he stay in Poland when the Germans come, and disappear. Nobody
ever
know what happened to him. So how this Koczerska woman know? I don’t believe her!’

‘
Mamo
, why are you always so suspicious? I haven’t even told you what she said yet.’

‘Because you good-looking, widower, got plenty of money, run restaurant. She get her hooks into you with some bull-cock story!’

‘She’s older than you are,
mamo
, by a mile!’

‘So? Old women like money, too, and men! That Mrs Lucas, across the street, she is seventy-five! But every week the fellow who mow her grass, he goes inside for extra payment!’

‘Come on, you don’t know that. He probably goes inside just to wash up.’

‘Huh! He always come out with such big smile.’

Jack said, ‘Maria Koczerska was sent a diary that used to belong to her great-uncle during the war. Her great-uncle was good friends with Grzegorz Walach. It turns out that they were hiding in the Kampinos Forest, north-west of Warsaw. In November of 1940, they committed suicide.’

Jack’s mother stared at him in disbelief. ‘
Fwofff!
’ she said, flapping her hand. ‘This woman is telling you bull-cock story!’

‘I’ve seen the diary for myself. She isn’t making it up.’

‘They kill themself? Why?’

‘There was something in the forest that frightened them. Not the Germans. Something else. They heard the Germans call it
Der Waldgeist
.’

Sparky looked up from his iPad for a moment, and stared at him, but then he went back to his star chart.

Jack’s mother, however, was frowning, her thick dark eyebrows drawn together. ‘
Waldgeist
? Wood Ghost? Maybe they mean
nish-gite
?’

‘I don’t know. She said it was German for “Forest Ghost”. What’s a
nish-gite
when it’s at home?’

‘Same I suppose. When my family live on West Walton Street, when I am maybe six or seven, there is Polish-Jewish woman live next door. Mrs Rosen. She is always telling me stories about ghosts in the forests when she was little. Wherever there is trees that they can hide in, she says, you have
nish-gite
. Even when I am older, sixteen maybe, and I have to walk home through Humboldt Park in the evening after my work at Greenberg’s Store, I always run quick because I remember what Mrs Rosen tells me about
nish-gite
in trees.’

She paused, her eyes darting from side to side as she remembered what her neighbor had told her all those years ago, and thought of herself hurrying home across Humboldt Park. But then she flapped her hand again and said, ‘
Fwoff!
It is only a story! Mrs Rosen trying to frighten me, silly woman! You not think your great-grandfather kill himself because he is scared of
ghost
?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘It doesn’t seem too likely, does it? But who knows what it was like when they were hiding in that forest? They could have been discovered by the Germans and shot at any moment. Maybe the stress made them all go bananas, and they started imagining stuff.’

‘But we didn’t imagine what
we
saw, did we, Dad?’ said Sparky, without looking up from his iPad.

‘
You
saw something?’ asked Jack’s mother. ‘Where you saw something? What do you mean, Alexis? Like
nish-gite
?’

Sparky shrugged. ‘We don’t know what it was, Grandma, not for sure. But it scared us, didn’t it, Dad?’

‘It was in Michigan,
mamo
, in a scout camp,’ said Jack. ‘It could have been a cougar. In fact, it probably
was
a cougar, so it was just as well that we got the heck out of there.’

Sparky didn’t comment on that, but after a pause he said, flatly, ‘Your stars for next week are so-o-o strange.’

‘What –
my
stars?’ Jack asked him.

‘Yes … somebody’s going to give you a message.’

‘A message? Who is? What’s it about?’

‘A woman. You haven’t met her yet. You won’t believe the message when you get it, but then somebody else far away will tell you that it’s true.’

Jack didn’t know what to say to that. Just as he didn’t believe that our destiny is predetermined by the planets, he had never believed that it was possible to tell what was going to happen in the future, by any means – stars or crystal balls or tea leaves or Tarot cards. But Sparky’s forecasts often turned out to be startlingly accurate – even if some of them had been as non-specific as this one. To be fair, any woman could give him a message about anything. It might be Sally giving him some more news about the suicides at Owasippe; or it might turn out to be Mrs Debska from Polish Meat Supplies telling him that she had just had a new shipment of
swojska
sausage.