Daniel moved backward toward the light switch at the end of the hall, careful not to take his eyes from the body, half fearing that the lifeless mass would rise up at any moment and start fighting back.
His fingers fumbled with the switch for what felt like an eternity, and then he had it, and the light was on—the single hanging bulb overhead bathing the hall in a warm, yellow glow.
Daniel blinked once, staring at the blood-matted heap at the other end of the hall, eyes open, jaw cracked and hanging at an angle.
It was not a man or a monster he had beaten to death, but an impossibly large fox.
Chapter 4ANNIE
Annie nudged the Jeep door shut with a boot and hiked her pack up onto her knee, shouldering it as she scanned the vista that dropped away before her.
She was on St. Helens now, about a third of the way up the mountain on the Forest Service road that cut a treacherous gravel path into the steep, piney grade. The road was poorly maintained in some places and downright dangerous in others where the land fell away beside it, but it was obvious why avid hikers risked the drive up.
The view that was spread out before her was breathtaking, with Lake Lumin far below, held like a sapphire in the palm of the foothills, and the town that bore its name beyond it, miniature from this distance and still appearing somehow organic in the forested hummocks that surrounded it.
It had taken four days to get out here—three days longer than she had hoped, due to near-constant rainfall in the latter half of the week. Not that she minded getting wet, but trying to track anything in the rain was foolhardy, unless she had a fresh sign to begin with and was hot on the trail from the start. Today, the ground would still be damp, but prints would hold, and all things considered, it had been nice to spend a few days getting settled in the little room over the garage at Jake’s parents’ place.
Annie consulted the map, then set off down the trail that bisected the road, leaning back to compensate for the abrupt downhill grade.
She had followed Laura’s advice to drive up by way of the service road, not because she was nervous about confronting the hermit in the boathouse, but because she’d spent the entirety of yesterday at the station poring over the maps in Jake’s desk and realized it was her best possible chance of crossing the cougar’s path, if he was indeed migrating due south between the two bodies of water.
Annie raised her knee high to step up onto a boulder and hopped down the other side, where her boots slid out from beneath her and she landed hard on her backside in the mud with a grunt. Moments later, she fell again—the muck making it impossible to gain traction on the precipitous downhill, but this time she rode out the fall, catching at the trunk of a young spruce as she stumbled by and righting herself with a jerk.
She blew out a frustrated breath and kept hiking. It was hard to imagine anyone choosing this trail for a casual jaunt through the woods, but that was good. Preferable. It meant there would be fewer tracks to weed through.
For an hour, Annie stutter-stepped downhill between the trees, following the barely there path over raised roots and uneven boulders, sliding on the rain-slick mud from yesterday’s downpour, until, finally, the terrain leveled out and the narrow trail deposited her onto the wide, even floor of the valley. She swept her sweat-damp hair out of her eyes. Ahead was flat ground—a dark, mossy forest studded with tree trunks and cut through with a pretty woodland path, choked here and there by patches of lacy blue forget-me-nots.
For a split second, Annie almost turned, almost looked over her shoulder to say something, and a stab of loss, sharp as a razor’s edge, tore through her.
This was the moment she would have turned to Brendan, laughing and making light of the grueling trail they had just come down. He would point out the mud splattering her legs up to the seat of her shorts, and she would joke about the sweat soaking his shirt from collarto navel. But Brendan wasn’t here. She was completely alone, and the novelty of it was excruciating.
That was one luxury of a place like Bend. Not a city by any stretch of the imagination, but a fair-size town that was outdoorsy to its core and supported a large group of wildlife officers, three dozen in all, from park rangers to game wardens to wilderness guides. There was no shortage of company, and almost every expedition into the wild was done in pairs. That was how she and Brendan had met, during a search-and-rescue mission late one November that was, in retrospect, the hardest week she’d ever spent on the job.
Brendan was a park ranger, and she had known him as a casual acquaintance, but had never been paired with him on an outing until then. She’d found him to be the perfect partner out in those snowy woods, quiet and steady, keeping her spirits high when their boots soaked through, freezing their toes. He was patient and dependable, everything Annie valued in a work partner and, later, a husband.
Search and rescue was one part of the job that Annie did not relish. It didn’t happen often that game wardens were called in to assist in locating a missing hiker, or a child who had wandered too far from a campground, but once in a blue moon—in particularly bad conditions or when the search range was broad—it did.
On that particular operation, after three days of single-digit temperatures and continual snow at seven thousand feet, with limited daylight hours and gale-force winds to contend with, what had started as a rescue mission quickly became a recovery mission, and despite all odds, despite the hundreds of officers and volunteers combing the mountains, Annie and Brendan had been the team that found the body.
Just before sunset, as they pitched their tents for the night, Annie’s gaze had snagged on a corner of yellow canvas flapping in the wind in a little nook between boulders, and she and Brendan had snowshoed over to find the missing hiker’s tent half buried in the snow. Her hands had never trembled so badly as she fumbled with the zippered door, one thought racing over and over through her mind.
I didn’t sign up for this.
Brendan had noticed her unsteady fingers and insisted that he be the one to open the tent instead. He had—and instantly tried to shield Annie from the gruesome and heartbreaking scene inside, but she had seen it, the dead hiker clothed in only his underwear, the telltale sign of someone who had succumbed to hypothermia. He was face down on top of his sleeping bag with the contents of his pack spread out around him, including a photograph of a smiling young woman with a baby in her arms.
Afterward, Brendan kept her talking and drinking from his thermos of hot coffee, the waves of shock and adrenaline threatening to set her body shaking uncontrollably as they waited for the snowmobiles to come pick them up.
It had bonded them, those bitterly cold days and nights in the wild. Bonded them for better or worse, and while Brendan had bounced back from the experience fairly quickly, Annie had struggled.
The thing that stole sleep from her, the thought she just couldn’t get past, was the hiker’s proximity to the trail. He had been less than a hundred feet away from the path that would have led him in a straightforward kilometer down to the nearest road, but covered as it was in snow, he might as well have been a hundred miles away for all the good it did him. The injustice of it gnawed at her, and she battled crippling insomnia for weeks.
Brendan had stayed up with her during those sleepless nights, coming over when she called him, and putting on pot after pot of tea as they talked it through. Tragedy. Tragedy and trauma, Annie knew, had the potential to be the strongest adhesive in any relationship, if they didn’t splinter it first. Brendan became her best friend, her most trusted ally in the woods, a partner who had her back out there. And when he asked her to marry him a year later, bending his knee during a cliffside hike at the coast, of course she’d said yes. He was perfect for her, on paper at least, and she’d believed with her whole heart that he was the one.
Well, she was paying for it now, the high cost of her blind faith and misplaced trust in the person she’d chosen to be her companion. She paid in moments like these, alone in the woods without him; moments that stung like snake venom.
Annie shrugged out of her pack and sat down on a mossy log. Sliding her right foot out of her boot, she dumped the loose pebbles that had gathered there, then repeated the motion with her left. She lifted a granola bar from the pocket of her pack beneath the tranquilizer gun and tore it open with her teeth, looking around at the pleasant, wooded valley as she ate.
Her gaze skipped from felled log to felled log in the forest, at least a dozen of them here at the bottom of the hill. A landslide must have torn down this ravine at some point in the last century, toppling pines as it went, leaving logs that were now home to countless creatures and species, their very death and decomposition essential to new life. Destruction and rejuvenation walked hand in hand in the woods. The wilderness was like that, as was, Annie suspected, the human heart.
