Лори Касс - Gone With The Whisker

“Is this like a hangout place? For kids.” She paused. “You know. For . . . stuff some of them like to do?”

I laughed. “Kate, I know what kind of stuff teenagers get up to. I was one once, remember?” Not that I’d been invited to those kinds of parties, but I’d known who went, where they were, and what happened. “And if you’re thinking Courtney and whomever came out here to do whatever, they didn’t need to. Courtney has an apartment of her own.”

Kate managed to shove her hands in her shorts pockets. “There are still good reasons she could be meeting someone out here. The guy could be married and doesn’t want to be seen going into her apartment. Or maybe she’s meeting another woman. Maybe her family will disown her if they find out she’s not straight, and her grandmother is dying and the last thing Courtney wants to do is disappoint her granny, so she’s hiding her true self for now.”

Staring at my niece, I said, “Kate, that’s—”

“Dumb?” she cut in, her chin up. “Stupid? No, wait. Melodramatic?” She drew the word out long.

“What I was going to say is that both of those sound plausible.”

“I figured you’d say that, and . . .” She paused. “Wait, what?”

“Both of those scenarios are reasonable and possible.” Kate continued to look at me blankly, so I went on. “As possibilities, they’re sound. The next step is to find a causal link. Some concrete fact,” I hastened to add, since I’d heard myself lapse into jargon that some might call librarian-y, “that gives credence . . . that makes a good case for one of those theories being true.”

“Or both.” Kate almost grinned. “Don’t you see? Courtney could be hiding her lesbian self from her family, and her lover could be married.”

Another possibility I hadn’t considered. Still, if I’d given a nod to the separate theories, it wasn’t going to go well if I put the brakes on now.

“Lots of could be’s,” I agreed. “But to get the sheriff’s department to take any of this seriously, we have to come up with something more than a theory.” Due to my prior interactions with personnel from said department, this was something I understood at a bone-deep level. “How about . . .” I mentally tacked over to another point of view. “What do you think we should do next?”

“If you seek a pleasant motive, look about you,” Kate said.

Her statement was amazing in two ways; one, that my Florida-bred-and-born niece knew that Michigan had a state motto, and two, that she could misquote it so aptly. I made a mental note to look up Florida’s state motto. “There are lots of trees about us, but not much else.”

“We’re not at the end of the road yet,” Kate said, striding forward. “Courtney and whoever came out here for a reason. All we have to do is find it.”

She made it sound easy. But since I’d been thinking pretty much the same thing when I’d decided to drag her out here, I shouldn’t be harboring so churlish a thought. “Bad aunt,” I muttered, hurrying to catch up with Kate’s longer legs. I was, however, thrilled that Kate was finally enthusiastic about something while in my presence.

“What’s that?” Kate asked. “Do you see something?”

“Nope.” I fast-walked to her side. “Do you?”

“Not yet. But it has to be here.”

She spoke so confidently that I didn’t have the heart to tell her the harsh truth: that it was possible—even likely—that we wouldn’t find a thing other than old tire tracks, which weren’t proof of anything other than an extended stint of parking.

We walked through the dappled sunlight, looking down at the road, looking deep into the forest, even looking overhead. But all we saw were trees, trees, and more trees. All pretty, of course, in their various stages of growth, but none of it could be interpreted as a clue.

Just as my research had indicated, as we walked, the road became two tracks of dirt bisected by a low grassy hump. Though we studied the gravel and dirt, too much time had passed to see anything more than the vague outlines of vehicle traffic, and even those disappeared as the two-track became a narrow meandering trail, then a deer-wide trail, and eventually there was no trail at all.

“Kate,” I called, for she’d taken the lead and was ten yards ahead of me. “Come on back. There’s nothing to find up there.”

“You don’t— slap! —know that. Maybe something’s just ahead. Maybe all we have to do is go a little farther. Wouldn’t it be too stupid to give up just before— slap! —dang these mosquitos!”

“Come on back,” I repeated more firmly, and this time she did so. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m as disappointed as you are that we didn’t find anything. But”—I held up my hand to silence her upcoming protest—“maybe you’re right, and what we want to find is just ahead. However, we need to come prepared. We need mosquito repellant. Plus water, a compass, and a decent pedometer to tell us how far we walked. And we need to tell someone where we’re going.”

She sighed, but it sounded less a teenage sigh of the-world’s-so-unfair and more a sigh of resignation. “Fine,” she said, but the surliness was mostly absent. “That makes sense.”

I let out a small breath. “Now let’s get back before Eddie starts to worry.”

Side by side, we traipsed our route in reverse. “Isn’t it funny,” I said, “how things can look so different depending on the direction you travel?”

Kate glanced around. “Not sure what you mean.”

“Well,” I said, gesturing. “I didn’t notice that tree on the way out. See all the holes? That means it’s old, or diseased, and insects are starting the decay process.”

Her eyes went wide. “ Bugs did that?”

“No, but yes.” I laughed at her expression. “Sorry. But the bugs are in there, eating away at their dinner, and that’s what attracts the pileated woodpeckers. They’re big birds, and—” I stopped.

“And what?” Kate had continued walking, but now saw I’d fallen behind. “What’s the matter?” Then she saw what I’d already spotted, the faintest hint of a trail, which we hadn’t noticed before because of a log blocking the view from that direction.

“Well,” I said. “It seems we’ve found something.”

“Yeah. And look at this.” Kate pointed at the log. “Its bark is different from this tree.” She thumped the woodpecker’s lunch buffet.

“Or,” I said slowly, “any of these other trees.” Not that I was Nature Girl, by any stretch—the pileated woodpecker’s habits was pretty much my full knowledge of woodland creatures—but even I could tell the difference between the bark of deciduous trees and that of conifers. Given that we were surrounded by maples, birches, and beeches, why were we looking at a pine log? “And,” I said, “it’s been cut. You can see the saw marks.”

Kate squatted down to get a closer view. “Okay, I see them now.” She popped upright and looked at me.

I looked back.

The conclusion was obvious. Someone—read Courtney and her cohort—had created this path and hidden its entrance. The big question now was, where did the path lead?

I tucked my curiosity away and put on my Aunt hat. Two people had already been killed and I was not going to put my niece in danger. “We need to leave,” I said. “Now that we have something solid to tell Detective Inwood, he and Ash will follow up on this and—Kate, wait!”

Because she had bolted away from me faster than a runner out of starting blocks. She tore through the trees faster than her aunt could follow, which I was doing, of course, because I wasn’t about to let her go down that trail all alone, but she had youth and—yes, I can admit it—fitness on her side, and her lead on me grew longer and longer.