Лори Касс: Lending А Paw

I took a look up at the steepness, wished I hadn’t, and started climbing through the drippy rain.

Halfway up, I stopped to rest. While Josh’s weather forecast might have been right about the rain, the temperature part was way off. The cool he’d promised was instead a hot heavy humidity that made it hard to breathe.

On up I climbed. And climbed. Slipping on the wet grass, clutching to it to keep from skidding back downhill, wishing Eddie had suggested I bring cleats instead of a book, climbing, climbing, head down and feet moving, thighs aching, lungs working hard.

At long last, the burning in my legs fell from a hot fire to a slow ache. I looked around and found I’d reached the edge of the hill’s top. Not the tippy-top, but close.

I squinted into the deep, dark forest. The thick cloud cover was making night fall before its time, and up ahead, thick canopies of maple leaves blocked out even that dusky light.

Well.

I looked back and saw the wet trail I’d just laid. Looked ahead to the murky forest. Shivered, then extracted the flashlight from my backpack. My dad had given me this LED light when I’d bought the houseboat, gravely telling me that no homeowner should be without one.

With a push of the thumb it went on, and I flinched as the bright light turned the night practically to day. Since I’d never used the flashlight before, its range amazed me. I danced the beam up the trees, down on the ground, and all around in a giant circle. “Wow,” I murmured, “this thing is awesome. Thanks, Dad.”

I aimed the light forward. Maple tree trunks a foot and a half in diameter. A few scattered bushes. The occasional tuft of grass. A thin carpet of leaves from last autumn. Moss. Not much else. Following a weeks-old quad trail through the woods wasn’t going to be easy. Or . . . was it?

Bouncing the light off the ground, I saw some rips in the pea green moss. Long rips that were in a direct line with the trail behind me. The rips curved, then faded to dents.

Well, there you go. Tracking wasn’t so hard; all you had to do was pay attention.

I took out my cell. Using one hand to shield it from the rain, I clicked off a few pictures, then followed the mossy trail to the very top of the hill. From here, I could see nothing at all except more trees. When the leaves were down, the view must be stupendous, but now there was nothing but green.

The trail wound around the trees, zigging for an occasional monstrous maple, zagging every so often for a large rock, zigging again for a fallen tree, but always trending in the same direction. South, I was pretty sure. Another thing Eddie should have suggested was to bring a compass. Not that I owned one, but I could have downloaded a compass app to my cell.

On through the greenish murk I went. Every so often I lost the trail and had to circle around to find it. Every so often I’d be fooled into following a deer path that would peter out to nothing, and back I’d go until I again found the moss dents.

At one point I stopped to drink some water and glugged down half of it before sense came into my brain. I didn’t know how much farther there was to go; drinking all the water now would be worse than dumb.

I capped the bottle and started walking again. Intent as I was on following the moss trail, I didn’t notice the bush with the very sharp thorns until I was in the middle of it.

“Ow!” The stinging pain flared up hot. Muttering to myself about the stupidity of city folk who like to pretend they know what they’re doing out in the woods, I used the flashlight to push the branch this way and that, trying to loosen its thorny grip. I stepped back, oh so carefully, gritting my teeth at the scratches, then came to a sudden stop.

There, right in front of my eyeballs, was a cluster of long threads. “Huh,” I said. Someone else had been caught by the clutching bush. And there, down at my feet, was another denting impression of quad tires.

A clue!

I wiggled my way out of the bush, then tucked the flashlight into my armpit, unzipped the backpack, and took out my cell phone.

Tempting though it was to pull off the threads and take them with me to dangle in front of the detectives, I didn’t want to mess with the chain-of-evidence thing. So I clicked off a few pictures, the phone’s flash lighting up the trees and sucking up battery power. E-mailing pictures to the detectives wasn’t as good as dangling, but it would have to do.

Pictures taken, I reshouldered the backpack and went back to following the trail.

How far I walked, I wasn’t sure. My normal walking pace (3.4 miles an hour, according to the last treadmill I’d been on, back in graduate school) was worth nothing in this situation. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been walking—the sky gave no hints and my cell was on my back.

Flashlight searching, feet moving, I made my way across the forest floor. The sky was so dark that when I at last emerged into open ground, I almost didn’t notice. What tipped me off was the moss fading away to nothing and the grass coming back.

I looked up, and out. Far, far out and away. Miles of river valley to the left of me, miles to the right, and straight ahead, distant over the wide valley, was another rise of hills.

A USGS quadrangle map was in my back pocket, but I didn’t need to pull it out to know where I was. This was the Mitchell River Valley, hundreds of acres of state land dotted with the occasional private property. There wasn’t a paved road inside the entire valley, just gravel roads and an extensive trail system.

Plus the new little trail I was following, now twin paths of bent grass going down down down the hill.

I stared at it, then hitched up the backpack. Well. This was what I’d come out here for. Not much point in turning back now.

Down I went, following the curving trail around the side of the hill, picking my way across the wet grass, trying not to fall on my behind, trying not to think how I’d get back to my car in the dark.

The farther down the hill I went, the quieter I tried to move. Somewhere up ahead there was a house or a barn or a something that the quad had come from. I was pretty sure that ownership of a quad could be traced. The police would find out if the owner had a connection to Stan. Would find out if the owner had a reason for murder. Then, Stan’s voice would stop whispering in my ear, Holly could get some sleep, and Aunt Frances would stop eating herself up with guilt.

Down and down the hill. My ears strained to hear a car, the voices of strangers, anything, but the only thing I heard was my own footsteps.

Then, finally, around another curve and down a little more, there was a small house tucked into the side of the hill. The slope was so steep that the uphill roof almost touched the ground. A storybook house, if it weren’t for the decaying shingles and peeling paint. If this was Gunnar’s hunting cabin from the days of yore, it had become something else in the interim.

I turned off the flashlight. No lights were on in the house. And no lights on in the large weather-beaten barn standing to the side and slightly behind the house. The tracks led to a door in the side of the barn. I took one step forward. Stopped.

Should I?

Could I?

The needle of my moral compass bounced between GO AHEAD and GO HOME, spent a lot of time on GO HOME, then swung firmly to GO AHEAD.

I edged close to the house and peeked in through a kitchen window. No one was in sight. Excellent. I tiptoed to the barn, one eye on the house, one eye on the steep and rocky driveway. The light breeze I’d felt up on the ridge’s top was nonexistent down here and my forehead beaded with rain and humid summer sweat. I got the sudden urge to use the bathroom.

No noise, no lights, no nothing. I made it to the barn undetected by anyone save a grasshopper or two, grasped the door handle, and pulled.