Dinosaur Lake (11 page)

Henry and George exchanged somber looks. Henry had seen poverty before, but there, in the middle of the forest beauty, it was somehow worse than the usual dilapidated town shacks.

“About time someone came out.” The woman was seated at the table. She had long drab hair pulled into a ponytail; wore faded blue jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Possessing plain features and wet eyes full of misery, she cradled a child in her lap whose face was pressed against her chest. Another skinny blond-headed girl, about ten years old or so, in an oversized black sweatshirt, hid behind them. In the darkened tent, the girl’s eyes reminded Henry of a deer’s glimpsed at the forest edge at night from his porch. The boy, Stevie, plunked down in a lawn chair to their right.

“Mrs. Morrison,” Henry spoke, “I’m Chief Park Ranger Henry Shore and these are three of my men, Ranger Redcrow, Ranger Kiley and Ranger Gillian.” Gillian hung back at the entrance, aware how cramped the inside was. “We’re here to see if there’s anything we can do to help find your husband. Do you think there’s something suspicious with his disappearance; maybe a crime’s been committed?”

“Well, could be there’s been a crime committed,” she retorted hotly. “But I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time arresting the perpetrator. My Nikki here,” she patted the girl in her arms on the head, “says it was some king of monster as tall as the trees. Something similar to a…dinosaur. She’s an expert on them, loves them. Used to love them anyway. She says it ate her daddy, my husband, as well as our friend, Gregory.” Her voice was chilling.

As the woman talked, it occurred to Henry she was educated. It was the way she met his eyes and phrased her thoughts. Her looks and circumstances were deceiving. Henry wondered what her story was.

“Can the child speak to us?” Henry stepped forward and bent down on one knee so he was at the same level as the girl.

“You can try. She wouldn’t say much yesterday after it happened. It really scared her, but she’s doing better now. Nikki, sweetie?” The woman hugged the child gently. “Can you speak to the ranger here? He won’t hurt you.” As if other men in uniform in other places might have. Perhaps, they’d been pushed on from one place to another by uniforms. No one wanted homeless people squatting in their manicured towns.

The child mumbled something, but she didn’t come out of hiding.

The woman fought off another coughing fit, then cajoled, “Nikki, please, for Momma. It’s important. What you have to say to this gentleman might help someone else.”

“Okay, Momma,” a tiny voice whispered, and the child turned to look at them. She wasn’t pretty. Her hair wasn’t shiny. Yet there was something so knowing, so resigned, in her melancholy eyes Henry knew she’d left childhood long behind.

He offered a friendly smile, but the child refused to return it. “Your name’s Nikki, right?” He laid a hand on her shoulder in a fatherly gesture. She nodded. “Nikki, I know this is hard for you. For your mom, sister and brother, too. But we need your help. You saw something yesterday evening out in the woods, when you followed after your dad. What was it?”

“I saw a…monster,” the girl stuttered. She bent her head upwards to an impossibly steep angle and pointed straight up. “Bigger than this tent, bigger than a mountain. It made lots of noise in the woods while we were trying to eat supper, growling and stuff. So Daddy and Mr. Black went to see what it was. I wanted to see, too, so I followed ’em. Even though Daddy told me not to. I’m not a ’fraidy cat like my brother thinks,” she huffed proudly before her eyes turned fearful. “But the monster scared me real bad.” Clutching her mother tightly, shaking her head, the words stopped.

“Nikki,” Henry encouraged, “what happened then?”

“The monster came and ate my daddy and Mr. Black. Picked them up like raggedy-dolls. Daddy was screaming…and…and…I ran away fast as I could. I’m so scared, Momma, I’m so scared it’s going to come and get me, too. I want to leave. Leave now. Momma.
Please?
” She was reduced to whimpering, as she retreated into a safer place, her eyes going empty. Reliving her father’s death had been too much for her.

“Nikki?” Henry was anxious to get the answers to a few last questions.

“That’s enough,” her mother interrupted firmly, drawing the child deeper into her arms. “She didn’t see anything else, Ranger. Didn’t see where the monster went, can’t describe it any better than she has. She’s only a child. She raced back here, terrified it was going to come after her next. There, you know everything she does. Now leave her alone. She’s sick with it all and hasn’t slept a wink since.”

Henry straightened up, frowning. His thoughts touched on his granddaughter, Phoebe, and he didn’t have the heart to interrogate the child any more.

In a lower voice he asked, “Mrs. Morrison, does Nikki ever invent stories? I mean, is she an overly imaginative child?”

Anger glittered in the woman’s eyes. “What you mean is, does Nikki lie? Did she make up this
monster?
”

“Sometimes children make up stories. They don’t think of them as lies.” Henry attempted to soften his meaning. It didn’t work.

“No, Nikki doesn’t make up stories and she doesn’t lie.” The woman released a sigh. “She’s an honest child. If she says something happened, it happened. And she’s a smart child. She’s seen pictures of dinosaurs in books and on TV and she knows what they look like. So if she swears some kind of dinosaur-monster ate her daddy, that’s probably pretty close to the truth, no matter how outrageous it sounds.” Leveling eyes at him, she went on, “My husband and Greg aren’t coming back. They’re both dead. There’s a bunch of the men out looking for them now, but they won’t find anything, except maybe left behind pieces. It’s a waste of time. So, Chief Ranger, listen to me. You’d be better off trying to find some way to track and kill that thing, than looking for two dead men.”

She lowered her mouth into her hand and coughed. Stared at the blood with dull eyes and wiped it on her sleeve. The little girl was crying again, muffled sobs of anguish.

Sympathy for the woman’s plight stabbed Henry. He didn’t know what to say in reply to her advice. He saw the pain she and her daughter were in, and that she wasn’t well. Her husband was missing. Conceivably dead. Being homeless was bad enough but being a sick homeless widow with three kids was even worse. He pitied her and her children.

The thing was, Henry believed the child. He’d seen the creature. He would have liked the girl to show them where it had happened, but thought better of it. Obviously, the child wasn’t in any condition to go anywhere, or show anyone anything.

They were on their own.

“That’s all we need from you and the girl, Ma’am, for now. If I think of anything else, I’ll be back and you can tell me then. Thank you for your help. Thank you, too, Nikki.” He reached out and patted the small head.

The woman remained silent in response, rocking her child in her arms protectively, her eyes closed, as the men exited the tent.

On the way out, Henry had caught George slipping a wad of money to the woman. “For you and the young ones. Go see a doctor for that cough, too,” he’d told her, “and have him send me the bill.”

Henry felt bad. He didn’t have any extra money on him to give. He and Ann lived close to the bone these days, but they had a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. With luck Ann’s newspaper story would raise money for the camp people. He’d have to be sure to ask her about its progress when he got home. Later he’d ask George what else he could do to help the camp’s residents. There had to be something.

“Let’s scout behind here in the woods,” Henry ordered, once he and his men were outside. “If something as big as what Nikki says the creature was has rampaged through here, we’re sure to see signs of it easily enough.” He still couldn’t admit out loud to the others that what they were searching for was really a monster. The word itself made him cringe. His men respected him and he didn’t want to risk losing that.

Morrison’s boy trailed them outside. “I can show you the direction my dad and the other man went last night, if you want me to. I saw them go this way.” His finger gestured to their left.

“Lead on, son,” George said. The boy took the Indian ranger’s hand and led the men past the tents towards the woods and Crater Lake.

“That way, through there.” The boy stopped at the fringe of the forest, refusing to go any further. “Walk straight between those two trees and keep going, then all you have to do is follow the path of smashed trees and stuff. Can’t miss it.”

George thanked him and the boy trotted back to camp, baseball clutched in a dirty hand, arm swinging.

“So, what are we waiting for?” Henry stormed into the bush, the others behind him.

The men worked their way through the sparse woods in the direction the boy had indicated. They saw a great swath of damaged, torn aside trees and trampled down foliage before them as if a giant scythe had cut through the woods.

“Good god,” George exclaimed. “Looks like something pretty big crashed through here. Look at this, will you?”

Henry’s expression was glum as they followed the obvious route. George was walking carefully along the path of destruction, examining the ground when he knelt down. “Look at this,” he whispered over his shoulder as the others caught up with him. Twisting his upper body, George held a hand up. It was covered in dark crimson.

Henry’s voice was soft. “Blood.”

“And lots of it.”

“You’re right. Blood’s all over around here.” Ranger Kiley bent down and picked up a piece of a bloodied shirt.

Henry inspected the nearby area, trying not to let his panic show. It was one thing to imagine that thing swimming around in the lake, playing tag with and attacking boats. People could stay off the water and remain safe. But it was another thing altogether to accept it was actually foraging out into the park hunting for human hors d'oeuvres.

Stalking through the bushes, past Redcrow, Kiley and Gillian, Henry prayed he wouldn’t find a dead body; that what he feared the most wouldn’t come to pass.

What he found was just as bad. A large chunk of chewed-up flesh, gnawed by flies, lay on the ground in front of him. He pushed at it with his shoe. The flies scattered in a hundred directions before they re-landed. Henry backed away.

Ranger Gillian hunkered above the grisly find, studying it, hand over his mouth, a sickened expression on his face. He uncovered his mouth long enough to ask, “Animal or human?” He was a bookish man, with a weak stomach. A fairly new recruit, he’d only been a park ranger for two years.

“I’m afraid it’s human.” In his years as a cop Henry had seen plenty of human remains in various stages of decomposition. He’d recognize a human body part anywhere.

George agreed. He was staring at the carcass, too, with thoughtful eyes. As a hunter and ex-marine, dead flesh didn’t bother him. It was what had done this that did. “Whatever tore this guy up had god awful big teeth,” he concluded. “See these grooves in the flesh. We’re talking one heck of a carnivore.”

Kiley had nothing to say. He lifted his hat and wiped off his sweating face with the handkerchief he kept in his pocket. Kiley had been a ranger for longer than Henry had, but he’d never seen anything like what he was seeing now. And Henry could tell it upset him.

“Over there.” Henry pointed a couple of feet beyond their discovery. “There’s another piece of him, or his friend. Appears to be a leg.”

Kiley and Gillain both looked sick.

The rangers didn’t stay much longer, didn’t follow the trail as far as they could have. It wouldn’t have served any purpose. Henry would have bet a month’s pay that it ended somewhere on the edge of the lake, probably in Cleetwood Cove. He didn’t need to check that out, he was sure of it. And so was George.

“Let’s get busy, men,” Henry said. “I’m going to rope off this area as a crime scene. I don’t want anyone else stumbling upon these remains. While I do that, Kiley, go back to the car and radio headquarters to send someone out here to tag and bag these body parts for forensics and the coroner in Medford. Leave a message for the Superintendent of what we’ve found. Tell him I have to talk to him. Real soon.”

Kiley left.

George volunteered to scout a little more around the area for other remains and Henry let him. But he didn’t find anything else. The remainder of the two men had vanished. Not even another shoe was located.

Henry stooped down, and drawing out a hunting knife from his duty-belt, he cut away a section of the cloth covering what was left of the human leg; dropped the scrap and the piece of bloodied shirt in a plastic bag supplied by Gillian.

“Show these to Mrs. Morrison, Gillian, and see if she recognizes either one as something her husband or his friend might have been wearing.” Henry met the other man’s eyes. “Break the news to her gently, would you? Don’t frighten them more than they already are. If these are Morrison or Black’s remains, give her my condolences and tell her I’ll be talking to her soon. Also alert the people in the camp we’re going to move them out to another location. Today. Tell them to start packing it up. I’ll be sending more rangers out with vehicles to help relocate them. I want them out of here by nightfall. Take them to the outskirts of the Last Creek Campground and resettle them there. I don’t care if the other campers bellyache about it. I’ll take the heat. I want the camp residents where I can keep an eye on them, protect them, if need be. Then hustle back to headquarters. I’ll meet you there later to give you further instructions.”