The Dead Season (12 page)

I was so tired that I could barely keep my eyes open, but I made myself dig my phone out of my backpack and, pulling the edges of the sleeping bag up around my ears, I scrolled down until I found the e-mailed article Miles had sent. It was from the Bullard
Daily News
, which was in fact a weekly newspaper, and it was brief and to the point:

MISSING CAMPER FOUND DEAD

Oct. 15

The body of 26
-
year
-
old Brian Maddox of Pendleton, Ohio, was found Thursday at the bottom of a ravine in the Attahachee Wilderness Area, the apparent victim of an accidental fall.

Maddox was reported missing last week after he failed to returned from a hiking expedition with the New Day Wilderness
Program
for troubled youth, where he was employed as a counselor.
According to witnesses, Maddox left the expedition shortly after it began without notice after an apparent dispute over wages.
Maddox had been employed with New Day Wilderness
Program
, which is headquartered in Hansonville, North Carolina, for three months.

His body will be returned to Pendleton,
Ohio, for burial.

My brain reacted slowly. I thought,
Why do I know that name?
And then I thought,
Pendleton, Ohio.
I almost missed the photo at the bottom of the article. The pleasant face of the blond haired young man who came into view made me frown because I knew it was familiar. In fact, something about the entire photo, which, with its blurry details and grainy resolution, was clearly a detail enlarged from another picture, was very familiar to me. And as I scrolled down, I knew why.

I had seen it in the New Day year book.

The young man’s hand was resting on the head of a black Lab with a white star on his chest. I might be a little slow with human faces, but I recognized the dog immediately. The dog’s name was Max, and he was right now snoozing away in radiantly-heated comfort at my newly renovated kennel.

CHAPTER
TEN

A
fter that, sleep did not come easily. I lay awake watching the wind fretfully toss the skeletal shadows of tree limbs across the face of my tent and listening to the snap and crackle of the canvas, trying to remember where I had heard the name of Brian Maddox before. By the time I figured it out, it was too late to call Maude and ask her to confirm my speculation by looking up the phone records, so my mind turned to worrying about another question: how had Heather ended up with Max, the dog of the boy who had died on a hike very similar to this one six months ago, and why had she lied about Max’s real identity?

I fell into an exhausted, if uneasy, sleep to the sound of Cisco’s peaceful snoring.

I awoke with a start to the sound of a low and ominous growling. Believe me, this is one thing you do not want to hear in the dark in the middle of the woods with nothing standing between you and your Maker except a few millimeters of canvas and a loyal golden retriever. Instinctively, I put my hand out to rest on Cisco’s shoulder. Usually, my touch will calm him, but I could feel the tension in his muscles and, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see him staring alertly toward the front of the tent. And then I heard another sound. It took me a moment to identify it as the sound of my tent door being unzipped from the outside.

A lot of things happened very quickly after that. Cisco stood up and barked sharply. I said (actually I intended to shout, but it came out as a hoarse croak), “Who’s there?” There was some scrambling outside and Cisco rushed to the tent flap—less than one stride for him—and nosed the opening while I disentangled myself from my sleeping bag and pushed my feet into my boots. And then I heard a scream.

I grabbed my flashlight and switched it on. The minute I unzipped the flap, Cisco burst through. I was half a step behind him.

I stumbled out into a navy blue night with my flashlight beam all but blinding me. I heard voices, one of them crying, “I’m bleeding! I’m hurt!” I caught a glimpse of Cisco’s white furry tail spinning into the night. I plunged forward after him.

I saw Heather coming from the right and Rachel coming from the left. I heard the sound of tents unzipping as I passed and sleepy unhappy voices demanded, “What the…” Cisco bounded straight to the figure on the ground, about fifteen feet from my tent. Tiffanie had a hand pressed to her cheek and I could see the dark smear of blood between her fingertips.

Heather was there before me, kneeling before Tiffanie, speaking softly to her. Cisco was already there, eagerly investigating the scene and, to be frank, mostly getting in the way. I caught his collar.

“What happened?” I demanded. “What were you doing, trying to break into my tent?”

“Somebody pushed me!” Tiffanie was crying now, more scared than hurt, I suspected, as Heather helped her to a sitting position. And then she glared at me. “What are you talking about? I was nowhere near your tent!” She pulled her hand away from her face, saw the blood in the reflection of my flashlight beam and squealed again. “I’m bleeding! Someone pushed me!”

Rachel arrived then and knelt beside Tiffanie, impatiently pushing Heather away. “What happened?”

“I was going… I went to use the latrine and I was coming back someone pushed me and I fell… is it bad? Will there be a scar? I’m bleeding!”

I swept the ground with my flashlight beam for Tiffanie’s flashlight and found it, a half dozen steps away, where it had come to rest against a small rock. I tried the switch and got nothing. It was broken. I brought it back to Tiffanie.

Clearly, she was not the person who had tried to break into my tent. She couldn’t have gotten this far away in the few seconds that had passed, and from the direction in which her flashlight had rolled, I could tell she had been coming toward camp, as she claimed, and not away from it.

Paul had arrived by then and the others were slowly crawling out of their tents. There was a lot of noise. Cisco lunged forward to put his nose in Tiffanie’s face. Tiffanie grabbed hold of his fur for a moment, and then turned toward Rachel’s ministrations.

I said, “Someone tried to unzip my tent a minute ago. That’s what woke Cisco up. Tiffanie, did you see anyone?”

Rachel cast me an incredulous look. Paul’s look was more like that of someone who was at the end of his rope. Tiffanie whined, “I’m hurt. I want to go home.”

“You’re not hurt,” Rachel said calmly, helping her to her feet. “You’re barely scratched. You just tripped. Come back to my tent and we’ll put some ointment on it. You’re fine.”

Paul turned to the others, who had begun to gather like reluctant ravens on a wire in their long-johns and boots, shivering in the cold. “It’s okay, everybody. She’s fine. Reveille at sunrise. Who has kitchen duty?”

The others turned away, grumbling, to go back to their tents, and even I was feeling the bite of the sub-freezing night through the silk long johns and cable-knit sweater I’d worn to bed. Tiffanie was wearing her coat, which made sense, since she had had time to put one on before she left her tent. Oddly enough, so was Rachel.

And, I noticed as she quickly hurried away, so was Heather.

~

There are a lot of things that can impair your judgment, put you in danger, and generally take all the fun out of a winter hiking expedition. The first and most obvious is probably alcohol consumption. Second would have to be dehydration and/or lack of adequate nutrition—which, believe or not, can be a huge problem in the kinds of extreme conditions you’re likely to encounter on a winter hike. Third, and probably the most common, is sleep deprivation.

By the time all the commotion settled, I figure I got probably four hours of sleep that night. And that was
with
a warm blooded, furry companion who heated up the tent and made falling asleep again a lot easier than it would have otherwise been. Nonetheless, I was awake again at the barest hint of dawn. I pulled on jeans, boots, and jacket, and with blurry eyes and cold-numb fingers, made my way to the human latrine, and then to the doggie one, in the green-gray light of a dying night.

When I returned to the campsite, there were a few shadows stirring about, as was the smell of smoky green wood, the clank of collapsible metal cooking pots. The campsite itself was small and precise, with the tents close together and the fire pit in the center; all around we were surrounded by woods and brush. Behind my tent, so that I would only notice it as I approached from the opposite direction, was a stand of scrub pine. And on a low branch of one of those pines was something odd.

Cisco, with his keen twilight vision and natural curiosity, was the first to notice, and he pulled ahead on his leash toward a pile of white fluff at the base of a tree next to the tent. I was more interested in the object that was hanging from the branch and which, as I came closer, looked so much like a dead animal that my throat actually tightened with alarm and my heart skipped a beat. And then I saw it.

Cisco’s stuffed rabbit was hanging crookedly by its neck from a shoelace tied to a pine branch. It had been eviscerated, and the stuffing on the ground was the white fluff that Cisco was so eagerly investigating. Attached to the corpse of the rabbit with a straight pin was a note scrawled on the back of a protein bar wrapper. It read:

And your little dog too

You know that thing I said about dog trainers being able to stay calm in a crisis? It doesn’t apply when my dog is threatened. My first instinct was to grab the effigy and march back to the cooking fire, roaring at everyone in sight and demanding a confession. If I could have found the sick SOB who was responsible, I honestly don’t know what I would have done, but threats and warnings would not have been all that were on the agenda. This was my dog. This was Cisco. This was not acceptable.

I was in such a white rage that I was ready to confront the entire group at the top of my lungs in my next breath, but then I heard Jess’s voice by my shoulder. “Whoa, pooch. Who’d you piss off?”

I whirled on him, but all I saw in his face was a kind of horrified disbelief. Lourdes came up beside him, looked over the situation, and her face slowly darkened with fury. “You think this is funny?” she said lowly.

Jess lifted both hands in self-defense, “Hey, not me.”

She grabbed the stuffed rabbit from the tree and jerked it loose, whirling back toward the sleepy forms that were emerging from the tents. “Which one of you stupid jackasses thinks this is funny?” she yelled. “He’s just a dog! He didn’t do nothing to any of you!”

And even though she was saying exactly what I wanted to say, I reached out quickly to place a calming hand on her arm. “Lourdes, it’s just a joke. I’m sure—”

She jerked her arm away, not even looking at me. “You’re all a bunch of pathetic losers, all of you! He’s just a dog!”

She tossed the toy on the ground and stomped away.

By this time it was light enough for everyone to see what she was talking about, and for me to carefully watch their reactions. As I’ve said, I don’t know much about teenagers, aside from the fact that I was once one. But I do know the one thing they all have in common is an absolute inability to keep a secret, particularly when it comes to a practical joke. But not one of them grinned, or nudged his neighbor, or even shifted his eyes away self-consciously. Their faces, in fact, reflected nothing more than varying degrees of disgust. Pete came over and rubbed Cisco’s shoulder affectionately. Angel helped me gather up the poly-fiber stuffing, and even Tiffanie, with her bruised and scratched face, volunteered uncertainly, “I’ve got a sewing kit. I found it last night when you told us to check our packs.”

Cisco came over and pushed the rabbit once or twice with his nose, trying to bring it back to life, but even he knew it was too late. I managed a smile for Tiffanie. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll check with you tonight when we make camp.”

I would have bet everything I owned at that moment that none of the kids had had anything to do with destroying Cisco’s toy, which left only the so-called counselors as the prime suspects.

And that was scary.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

T
he
door of the interrogation room opened and a man in a sheriff’s department uniform entered. He went straight to Ritchie and bent to whisper something to him. Ritchie listened intently for a moment, and then nodded. I watched anxiously until the uniformed man left.

I said quickly, “Did you find—have they found—?”

“Not yet.” His expression was grim. “We knew the search would be slow in these conditions.”

“What about the murder weapon?”

“It might be spring before we find it, if then.”

I sank back in the chair, trying not to shiver. My coffee was lukewarm, but my throat hurt from talking so long, so I took a sip. It only made me colder.