Julia Spencer-Fleming: To Darkness And To Death

“What time did she leave the house?”

“Around eight.”

“Didn’t take her cell phone?”

“It’s still plugged into the recharger in her room.”

Clare glanced at Huggins. “That’s kind of late to go wandering out into the Adirondack forest, isn’t it?”

Eugene frowned, considering. “Is it? I didn’t think so. Anyway, she had a flashlight. And there are trails all through these woods.”

“Didn’t you worry when she didn’t show up at bedtime?”

“I was readying myself for bed when she decided to take her stroll.” He gestured toward an oak-and-glass gun case mounted on the far wall. “I had planned to hunt this morning.”

You and every other man in Millers Kill, Clare thought. She turned to Huggins again. “Is Millie in good shape? Any physical issues that might slow her down? Is she familiar with being in the woods?”

Eugene van der Hoeven answered. “She’s in excellent health. I’ve known her to readily hike ten miles in a day. As for familiarity, she summered at Haudenosaunee every year from the time she was born until she went to college.”

“We’re guessing she got disoriented in the dark,” Huggins said. “If she was smart, and it sounds like she is, she hunkered down under some brush and is waiting on daylight. We’re working the search with the starting assumption that she walked for up to two hours before she realized she was lost.”

Clare bit off an expletive before it could escape. “That’s a six-mile radius.”

“Maybe more.” Huggins rocked back on his hiking-boot treads. “Hopefully, she figured out she was in trouble after forty-five minutes and she stayed put after that. But I’m not in the hopeful business, so we’ll plan for the worst.”

Russ downshifted and let his truck grind its way farther up the logging road, bouncing from rock to rut. He figured he was a few minutes away from permanent kidney damage when he spotted a gleam through the trees. Around the last bend, where the road petered out into brush and stumps, Ed Castle had parked his Ford Explorer. Russ pulled up behind him and got out. “Did I keep you waiting?” he asked.

“Naw. Perfect timing. Official daylight’s in fifteen minutes. Then we can get started. This gonna be your year, is it?”

“You bet.” Russ hauled his pack with his lunch and Thermos out of the cab and settled it over his shoulders. “Twelve points or bust.”

Ed snorted a laugh. Russ had been hunting with the man for three falls now and had yet to bring down a yearling stag, let alone one with a twelve-point spread of antlers.

He filled one pocket with spare cartridges and then unzipped his new gun case. Ed whistled as Russ withdrew his Weatherby. “Will you look at that,” Ed marveled. Russ held it out for the older man to inspect. Ed rested his own gun against the truck and took the Weatherby reverently. “This is a beaut.”

“Birthday present from my wife.”

“Now that’s a woman. Know what I got for my last birthday from my wife? A dinner out at a restaurant where I had to wear a tie, and a fish on a plaque that sings songs when you walk by it.” He stroked the Weatherby’s stock lovingly. “You treat this woman right.”

“I try.”

Ed handed the rifle back to Russ. “Ready?”

“Lead the way.”

They walked in silence for a while, watching as branches etched themselves in detail and bittersweet berries flushed from gray to orange in the gathering light. Russ loved the woods this time of year, loved the dry, half-musty smell of the fallen leaves rustling underfoot, loved the snap of the cold and the tracery of frost on tree bark and pine cones. Here and there, a lone oak still held its foliage, and he and Ed brushed under tanned leather leaves, acorn hulls crunching beneath their boots.

“So,” Russ said. “Haudenosaunee. I haven’t hunted here since I was a kid. Have you heard it’s a likely spot?”

Ed shook his head. “More of a busman’s holiday for me. I harvest timber from the estate. Or I did. They’re setting to close it to timbering after tonight.” He glanced up at Russ. “You know about the land deal they’ve cooked up for this place?”

“Yeah.” Russ stepped over a mossy rock. “Some big wood products company is buying the whole estate and then turning it over to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. I’m supposed to go to the damn party where they sign the papers tonight.”

Ed’s eyebrows shot up. “How’d you rate that?”

“Linda was invited. Her business is doing all the curtains for the resort.”

“Right, right, that’s right. My oldest girl, Bonnie, she does sewing for your wife, you know. Don’t think she was invited to the party, though.”

“I’d give her my invitation if I could wiggle out of it. Unfortunately, Linda has me in the crosshairs. So I have to show up in a rental tux and make small talk with a bunch of suits.” He took a deep breath of the thin, cold air. “Not my favorite way to spend an evening. But my wife cuts me a lot of slack. I owe her.”

“I hear that.”

They walked on for a while, quiet again, eyes scanning for a telltale flash of white or a trace of spoor. It was true dawn now, rose-gold light shafting high into the treetops from the east, brightness hanging in the air. The deer would be on the move, heading back to their beds, pausing to snatch a mouthful here or there before retiring to sleep away the day.

Over the rise of a slope, the heavy forest opened up to a long glade. Rotting stumps sprouted saplings and mushrooms, and the grass was still shaggy and green under a rime of frost. Spindly young birches and maples shone in the dawn light. The forest was reseeding itself.

“I did this,” Ed said. “Cut it eight years back.” He gestured upward. “It goes way up, between these two hills.”

“How many acres are there?”

“To Haudenosaunee? Two hundred fifty thousand.”

Russ whistled.

“Ayeah. It’s been my primary harvesting area for a good ten years now. Used to cut in forest that was close enough to make it easy to get to, up past Tenant’s Mountain, but Global Wood Products bought it up a decade ago. We’d leased the yearly rights from Haudenosaunee, from way back when it was my daddy and old Mr. van der Hoeven. When I was younger, I didn’t understand why my dad didn’t do more in these woods, since he paid for the license. But as one piece of land and then another shut down to timbering, I was grateful he’d held this place close to his pocket.”

“Isn’t the company that’s buying the land for the conservancy GWP, Inc.? Is that Global Wood Products?”

“It’s their American subsidiary. All these big foreign companies got themselves an American subsidiary these days.”

“So why aren’t they harvesting the timber themselves?”

“Oh, they may some time in the future. Right now, it’s more valuable as a tax write-off to them. It works like this, see. If you’re the owner, you pay six, seven dollars an acre on these woodlands in property tax. That’s sumpin’ like two hundred thousand dollars a year for Haudenosaunee. And the owner pays that whether he’s taking timber from the holding, or building vacation homes, or just sitting on it watchin’ the leaves fall. The Adirondack Conservancy Corporation loves getting their hands on great big tracts of land like this one. But they’re hard-put to buy ’em, unless the owners can afford to give ’em a break on the price. So the ACC teams up with a business like Global Wood Products. The business buys the land and gives the conservancy the development rights to it. GWP takes a big yearly tax writeoff, and the conservancy gets to save the woods from guys like me, as they’d say.”