Wolfwraith (5 page)

Returning to the kitchen, he grabbed a bowl from the drain rack next to the sink and, after looking to make sure it was clean, dumped in a can of Dinty Moore’s beef stew, one of the staples in his larder of easily-cooked food. He popped it into the countertop microwave. When it was done, he washed it down with the rest of the orange juice as he thought of the marks by the pier. Finally, he rinsed the bowl, put it back in the rack, and then walked the hundred yards to Jonesy’s trailer, munching on a candy bar for dessert.

The Taj Mahal, as Jonesy had dubbed it, was an old, small, dingy trailer, once used as a park office. It had only a small kitchen and a bunkroom with a tiny bathroom. Alex allowed Jonesy to stay there, unofficially.

Shadow glanced over at the only two other structures nearby. There were lights on at Jenny Ostrowski’s cottage, a little farther on through the woods. Jenny, the park’s interpretive guide, instructed groups of students and ecological tour parties in the environmental science of the cape. There were no lights showing at the False Cape Environmental Education Center, usually called the E.E.C. This was the only “new” building in the park; everything else had been here since before the government turned False Cape into a park.

Without knocking, he walked in. Jonesy sat at the kitchen table with a beer. Shadow pulled a cold brew from the refrigerator and plopped down in the opposite chair. He opened the can and took a long drink of the cold liquid, allowing himself a sigh at the end.

The two men sat in silence, drinking their brews.

“Long day, huh?” Jonesy eventually said.

“I’ll say.”

“Well, be ready for another one tomorrow.” He took a swig of his beer. Another few seconds passed. “I hear you met everybody’s favorite park commissioner today.”

“Yeah. He chewed me out for saying I thought something killed the girl, with that throat wound and all. He told me not to talk to anyone about it. He’s quite a little Napoleon, isn’t he?”

“You heard what happened with him last year, didn’t you?”

Probably a thousand times, Shadow thought, hiding a smile.

“He was down here, with the governor and a bunch of reporters, the day before the fall hunt. He was standing in the road by the contact station when a boar walks out on the road in plain sight. Without even a ‘by your leave,’ the commissioner draws a forty-four magnum from his holster and pops that ol’ pig. Kills him dead.”

“That right?”

“Yep, and—don’t ya know it—pig season didn’t open ’til the next day. The reporters blasted him all over the state. ‘Top State Official shows disdain for law.’ Probably would have lost his job, ’cept for him bein’ the governor’s friend and all.”

“But it didn’t.”

“No, and I wouldn’t mess with that guy. He’s in really tight with the governor. I mean, if the governor snaps the elastic on his underwear, Barnett says, ‘Ouch’. This guy is a real asshole and you’d best steer clear of him.”

Shadow grinned. “Right.”

“I’m not kidding. All he ever wants to hear from a ranger is ‘Yes, sir’. You get off on the wrong foot with him, you’ll be sorry.”

“I hear you,” Shadow said. “I’ll be a good boy; I promise. I’m beginning to like this place, despite the neighbors.”

“Screw you,” Jonesy said, tossing his empty can toward an overflowing trashcan with a casual, right-handed hook shot. He was way off target. The can clattered on the floor.

Shadow walked over to the desk and picked up a deck of dog-eared cards and a cribbage board. He and Jonesy, and sometimes Alex, often whiled away the evening hours by moving little pegs on a board, often claiming nine holes when they had only scored eight.

He sat down, shuffled clumsily, since card dealing was not one of the things the claw had been able to master, and then slapped the deck on the table. “Cut.”

Jonesy lifted part of the deck, exposing a king. “Shit,” he said.

Shadow grinned, cut a four and shuffled the deck again.

“Alex said you think the girl was murdered,” Jonesy said as Shadow passed out cards.

“Did you see her throat?” Shadow asked.

“No. She was covered up by the time I got there.”

Shadow arranged his cards in the claw. “It looked like something had taken a huge bite out of it.”

“Something? What do you mean something?” Jonesy discarded two cards into the crib.

Shadow also put aside two cards. “Just...well, something. I don’t know how to describe it.” The starter card turned out to be a jack, so Shadow pegged two, and then continued. “I haven’t felt anything like it in years. I told you about how my grandmother used to call on the spirits to help. It felt like that.”

“Twenty,” Jonesy said, playing a queen. “You mean you got bad ju-ju?”

Shadow set down a king. “Thirty. Yeah, when I touched the girl’s body.”

“And you could feel the spirits?” Jonesy played an ace.

“Five.” Shadow started a new count.

“Fifteen.” Jonesy pegged two more points.

Jonesy smiled. “Twenty. You’re puttin’ me on, right?”

Shadow laid down his final card. “No. No bullshit.”

“I thought you didn’t care much about Native American stuff.” Jonesy grinned widely, counting off his cards. “Fifteen to the eighth power, which gives me sixteen.” He moved his peg.

“Well, I don’t. Still it’s hard to ignore something like I felt today.” He tallied up his own score.

“You lucky fucker,” Jonesy said as he watched Shadow move his peg into the lead.

While Jonesy shuffled, Shadow reached for his beer with his left hand, then remembered and used his right. “And there was something else.” He described the marks he’d found by the False Cape dock and what he made of them. “Do you think I ought to mention them to someone?”

“Nah.” Jonesy passed out cards. “Like you said, it was probably where the girls launched their kayaks and it’s too late now anyway, the way it’s raining, any mud will be washed away.”

At eleven, they turned on the old television set; so old Jonesy had to have it updated for digital broadcasting. It relied on a high antenna for reception, since there was no cable service to the park. Reception was unreliable, at best. Tonight, as usual, ghost images mirrored the actions of the blurred figures on the screen.

The news report devoted less than a minute to the False Cape story. The anchor reported the finding of a body and that another girl was still missing. A Live-And-On-The-Scene correspondent in an overcoat stood on the wind-swept Barbour Hill dock, describing the day’s search operation. The picture cut to the weatherman, who answered questions about the chances of the other girl surviving in the cold waters of the bay. The meteorologist explained water temperatures were too low for overnight survival.

Back to the dock, where the On-The-Scene reporter identified the dead girl as Cynthia Reedman, of Virginia Beach, who had apparently drowned. The missing girl was Susan Brandon, of Bedford, Virginia. The news anchor reappeared and finished the story on an upbeat note by saying Back Bay was shallow and a stranded boater might survive, making her way to one of the many small islands.

When the segment ended, Jonesy turned the TV off and Shadow left for his own quarters.

* * * *

A small army of volunteers scoured the bay for three days. The searchers combed woods and reedy marshes of the cape and even the bay islands, without finding any sign of the missing girl. Other rangers, from nearby First Landing State Park, joined the False Cape rangers in their efforts. Local media kept the story alive, even though there was virtually nothing to report. Finally, on Saturday evening, the search was called off.

Shadow asked Alex when the results of the autopsy on the Reedman girl would be available.

“Why?” the chief ranger asked. “The cops will be taking care of this.”

“I’d still like to see what they have to say about the throat wound. Like I said, I have a feeling. I think Barnett is dead wrong to write it off so casually.”

Alex sighed. “Look, try to see it from the commissioner’s point of view. He’s probably only trying to avoid bad press. He had a bad experience a while back, and it won’t do any good to argue. If it was some animal killed her, the police will let us know and we’ll start looking around for the critter.”

“Something did kill that girl—and not an animal. I could feel it when I touched her.”

Alex groaned. “Not more of your Oh-Great-Spirit-of-the-Woods Native-American mystic stuff, I hope. Pretty soon, every time a duck shits, you’ll think it has a spiritual meaning.”

Shadow snorted. “Fuck you, boss. And when a duck flies over and shits, it does have a meaning.”

“What?”

“It means ‘duck.’”

* * * *

Four days later, Alex summoned Shadow to the contact station and took him into the office. “I’ve got the results of the autopsy report.”

“What did they say?”

“Suffocation. Manner undetermined.”

“You’re kidding!” Shadow exclaimed. “That makes no sense at all.”

“I asked the detective who gave me the news a few questions,” Alex told him. “The girl’s lungs were clear, which means she didn’t drown. There was no sign of trauma to the body before death. The wound to her neck happened after she died.”

“So what do they think happened to her neck?”

“It was apparently savaged by some sort of animal—a large dog, maybe.”

“A dog?”

Alex shrugged. “The coroner said it was a large animal, but couldn’t tell what. What else could it be?”

“Uh, a bear?”

“That’s the only other possibility, but we’d know if a bear was around. Unless it recently arrived in the area. A fox is too small, I suppose, and we don’t have coyotes or wolves in these parts. So I’d guess a feral dog.”

“So an animal bit her after she died but she didn’t drown. So why is she dead?”

“She suffocated.”

“Huh? How?”

“They figure she got her head wrapped up in her parka somehow.”

“Bullshit!”

“Damn it, Shadow, calm down. The way I was told, suffocation is easy to spot because it breaks blood vessels in the eyes or something. She had that.”

“Then what happened to the second girl? Why haven’t we found her?” Shadow slapped the desk. “No animal did what I saw! Something else caused that wound.” Something evil, Shadow thought, I can feel it in my bones.

“I don’t know what happened, dammit! Look, we need to take a good look around the park; make sure some feral dog isn’t roaming around.”

“You won’t find one.”

“Shadow, the official report is in, and it’s pretty conclusive. Let’s get back to work, okay?”

“Okay.”

Shadow had mixed feelings as he left Alex’s office. He had been sure the girl had been killed but, according to the experts, he’d been wrong. He wasn’t a detective. Now he could go about his normal routine with a clear conscience, couldn’t he?

* * * *

For the next two weeks, that was exactly what he did. He put in long hours patrolling the beach and the trails, aiding hikers, maintaining his equipment and just plain, old rangering. He watched carefully for any sign of a loose dog, though he didn’t expect to see one. The park allowed dogs in certain areas, but not many visitors brought them in because the refuge to the north was out of bounds to them. The days were uneventful and he tried to ignore the nightmare about the body he experienced every other night or so. Sometimes the corpse was a porpoise with the face of a girl, sometimes it was the human body he’d actually found, but it was always gruesome. In one dream, the dead girl spoke to him and he had awakened in a cold sweat.

When he heard that the body of the other girl, Susan Brandon, was found floating in North Carolina waters off Knotts Island, he tried to ignore it. It had nothing to do with him. There had been a boating accident and he had found the body of one of the victims, sure, but that was the extent of his involvement. He convinced himself, pretty much, until Monday of the following week, when Alex visited him at his residence in the evening.

They went out on the dock by the E.E.C. with a six-pack Alex had brought along. They sat and sipped their beer quietly as a few early frogs hopefully sounded their spring mating cries and darkness grew. A breeze kept the mosquitoes away. Finally, Alex spoke.

“I saw the autopsy report on the other girl this morning.”

“Yes?”

“Her neck was the same.”

Shadow nodded. “I thought so.”

Alex shrugged. “The crabs and such had been at this one, so they can’t be sure it was the exact same thing. She didn’t drown, though; they could tell that.”

“Same as before? Cause unknown?”

“No. They listed the cause of death as exposure.”

“So then...” Shadow took a drink, thinking. “That makes no sense at all. There’s no animal around here that would do anything of the sort. Twice, no less!”

“And the commissioner called me a little while ago,” said Alex. “He wants this cleared up quickly since it’s been reported in the paper.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“They took a closer look at the first girl and said it could have been a large canine that got to her throat. So we look for a large dog, I guess.” He sighed.