When the plane turned back east, I headed for the woods, bogged down with my duffle, my travel bag, and the new backpack. Hiking was going to be a pain in the ass with all that luggage, but I had nowhere to leave it. Too bad there wasn’t a certain hellhound around to help me haul supplies…
Resigned to my burdens, I set off across an overgrown field toward the woods. Fallen leaves and blades of grass crunched beneath my feet, but not because they were frozen. They were just dead. It was damn cold in Maine, but not quite cold enough for snow—at least not yet—which was a step up from Nova Scotia.
On the other side of the field, a thick line of trees marked the edge of the forest, less than a hundred feet from the lake. The woods beyond were thick, dark, and fragrant with the scents of pine and cedar. They were a shade-lover’s dream, a never-ending woodland playground where fading daylight mingled with the encroaching darkness and somehow found compromise in endlessly swaying shadows.
The forest was beautiful, a woodland home furnished with fallen logs and small streams, carpeted in moss and dead leaves, and decorated with curtains of fern, draping vines, and dangling limbs. And from the looks of the thick brush and interwoven branches, no one had set foot in this particular section of Maine’s wilderness in years. Until now.
I hiked my bags higher onto my shoulder and stepped into the forest, willing myself to enjoy the beauty and exercise, rather than dreading the lack of civilization and technology. But the forest must have sensed my true feelings, because she tried every trick up her sleeve to impede my progress.
Grumbling beneath my breath, I stomped on a thorny vine and shoved aside a long, bare branch. For the next ten minutes, I mentally cursed the state of Maine in general, and the trees in particular, frustrated and irritated by my own inability to see each successive obstacle until it slapped me in the face. Literally.
Maybe it was encroaching exhaustion. Maybe it was nearly being killed the previous two days in a row. Or maybe it was the fact that I had no idea how far I was from the nearest town—a small community called Dayton—or how long I’d have to walk to get there once I’d finished at the crash site.
Regardless, I managed to catch part of myself, my clothing, or my equipment on every single thorn and branch I passed. Twigs lodged between my skin and the amputated handcuffs, where they peeked from beneath the sleeves of my coat. Leaves blew from the trees directly into my hair. Acorns fell from above to bounce off my nose no fewer than three times. Somehow, I even got one particularly bothersome branch stuck through the buttonhole on the right lapel of my coat.
Finally, around what was surely the mid-point of my hike, I settled into a steady rhythm: Three or four good-sized steps, pause to dislodge a twig from my hair, step high to avoid a root arcing from the dirt, duck beneath a low-hanging branch, stumble and catch myself against a tree trunk…then repeat the entire process. It was a graceless ballet. A dance of torment. And the only up-side was that no one was around to witness my uncoordinated spectacle.
Another half-hour later, I tripped over a half-buried root, scraping my palm raw on the rough bark of the oak I grabbed to regain my balance. “Son of a bitch!” I hissed, blowing on my bloodied hand, as if that would help. More than ready for a break, I shrugged out from under my bags and dug in my backpack for a bottle of water. Even with the temperature hovering below forty degrees, I’d worked up a sweat, as well as a bit of an appetite.
As I unscrewed the lid on my water, smearing blood across one side of the clear plastic bottle, I glanced around in what little daylight remained and realized that soon I’d be hiking alone in the dark, toward a plane that crashed under suspicious circumstances while carrying a “bad” feeling stone sarcophagus, with who-knows-what inside. Overall, not one of my better days.
As I shoved the empty water bottle back into my bag, I stared up into the limbs overhead, amazed by the array of vibrant deciduous leaves backlit by the last weak rays of sunlight. Maples and oaks sprinkled throughout a sea of towering evergreens. The range of colors was breathtaking. The view was almost enough to make me forget that my feet were wet and sore despite my comfortable work boots, and that my face was a collection of scratches from the branches I hadn’t managed to miss.
According to my brand-new compass, I was headed in the right direction, and by my best guess, I was less than a mile from the crash site. There should be some sign of it soon, but at the moment, I saw nothing but trees. In fact, one red maple in particular had caught my eye, but I couldn’t quite figure out why…
The tree was beautiful, its limbs afire with an intense blend of deep orange and yellow leaves, practically blazing in the red-tinged light of the setting sun. Squinting, I scanned the branches, blowing in the frigid wind like flames in the breeze. It was spectacular. But it was just a tree. Why the hell had that one tree captured my attention?
Then I saw it. Dangling amid the mass of vibrant leaves was one that didn’t match. It was black. And large. And oddly textured.
It wasn’t a leaf at all. It was a shoe. Specifically, a boot.
Intrigued, I looked closer and realized the boot was attached to a leg, clothed in baggy black cloth. A black flight suit.
Pulse racing, I leapt to my feet. “The missing co-pilot.”
No wonder they hadn’t found him. Devich had come in by helicopter, so he would never have seen a body caught so low in the branches, unless it was actuallyatthe crash site. Which it was not.
The poor dead co-pilot was barely balanced in the tree, only one thick branch away from tumbling to the ground. His head hung at an odd angle from the rest of his body, and above him stretched a series of broken tree limbs, some completely severed, others dangling by strips of bark.
Several questions came to mind immediately, the first of which was how to get the body out of the tree, and who would be responsible for that particular chore. I hadnotsigned on for corpse retrieval.
But the second question was much more relevant to the case at hand. “How the hell did he get out of the plane?” I asked the woods in general as I dug through my backpack for a Twinkie. I focused better with a full stomach. Or at least a full mouth.
Ripping the cellophane open, I pulled out the first cream-filled cake while I considered the corpse in the tree. There were only three ways I could think of for a man to leave a plane in mid-flight. The copilot either jumped, fell, or was pushed. Yet none of those possibilities answered the big question:Whyhad the copilot jumped—or been thrown—from the plane? Or if he’d fallen, why was the ramp lowered, or the door opened? Or whatever.
Devich believed his missing copilot took the box because both he and it had disappeared at the same time. Only that no longer appeared to be the case.
Could the sarcophagus also be lodged in a nearby tree?
No. No fucking way. A stone sarcophagus had to weigh a minimum of a couple of thousand pounds. Even if it had fallen from the plane—or been pushed out—the box would have smashed right through any tree in its path. It would have slammed into the soil hard enough to half-bury itself in the ground.
If the co-pilothadbeen trying to steal the box, it would’ve made much more sense for him to kill the pilot and take the plane wherever he wanted. So why hadn’t he?
Because most humans are reluctant to kill their fellow man?
Or maybe murder and plane theftwashis plan, but something went wrong, leading to his own fatal plummet as well as the plane’s.
Ormaybe the co-pilot didn’t kill the pilot and take the plane because he wasn’t trying to steal the box at all. Maybe he was trying toprotectit. Or to keep the plane in the air. That made much more sense than trying to steal a priceless artifact from one of the most powerful men on the planet, who just happened to be his boss.
