Dead Girls

by Russ Trautwig

  He forgot about the coming dark, the new night and the things that crawled on his skin. He opened his eyes watching her again, now her eyes were closed, and her hips were moving rhythmically from side to side, she swayed to a song he couldn’t hear. Her body brushed against his, randomly at first and then with ever-increasing regularity, a dance, a symbiotic gyration.

  Her towel had slid down exposing her breasts in the reflection. He longed to touch them, feel the soft skin, rub her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. The sensation he was feeling, the arousal from direct female stimulation, was almost something he thought he would have to learn again but it was all so natural, he was so alive. He turned and faced her, their bodies touching. His erection, evident through the sweats, brushed her. He reached up and ran his hands over her hair feeling its soft, electric pull. He pressed his hardness into her then backed off a little, unsure.

  * * * * *

  She wanted him, wanted him now. The smell of him was intoxicating. The muscles on his shoulders were tight and hard and his skin was smooth. She was wet with desire. She put her hands on his hips and allowed the towel to fall away. She pulled him in, pressed her pelvis against his growing excitement and her breasts into his chest. It had an attraction she was uncomfortable with but couldn’t suppress, an attraction that was so much more than physical. She was drawn to who he was and not what he was for the first time, in as long as she could remember. She tilted her head up to him, willing his kiss.

  He lowered his face to hers and their lips brushed. Then they lingered against each other, not quite kissing, more of an exploratory sensation. Her lips parted, and he pressed his mouth more firmly on hers, his tongue explored the separation between them and then their tongues danced.

  He pulled away, suddenly creating an immediate separation of every part of them that had been touching. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “So sorry, I don’t know what got into me, please, please, I’m so sorry,” he said and walked quickly towards his bedroom without turning around to look at her.

  “Chris, it’s okay Chris, come back, it wasn’t just you,” she called after him. The door slammed. Well, that’s a first, she thought and debated whether to follow him, naked, into his room. Her cell phone vibrated on the kitchen counter and she walked over to look. It was the EAD and she cursed under her breath. “Hi Jack, impeccable timing as always,” she said as she bent down to pick up her towel from the floor. She looked at her naked reflection in the window. You finally feel more than lust for a guy and this is what you get. After successfully pushing Jack to give her two more days, she went to her room wishing the German Pub had shown more promise. Same old Kimberly, a non-judgmental voice inside her head said.

  Chapter L

  They had spent the morning looking around Rocky Arbor State Park, Chris taxed his memory and believed he had located the exact site where they had camped, ground zero. Kimberly had not expected this to lead to anything but thought it was worth whatever mental refresher it might offer Chris: In case it triggered some long-suppressed detail that would help them out somehow. It didn’t. Just before noon, they drove to the other side of Route 12, crossing the railroad via 60th Street and then heading south on 28th Street. They parked just off the road, across the river from the northwest tip of Blackhawk Island. Neither had mentioned the night before but there was no awkwardness in their partnership, a moment had passed, a lost moment perhaps but perhaps not, there was more to come.

  The forest on this side of the river was dense, lush, and fragrant. As they entered its vibrant womblike environment, it enveloped them, swallowing, and separating them from everything outside. Kimberly led the way, her footsteps slow and deliberate, picking her way through the tangle and brush on pine needles that scented their way. It was like a new world, it smelled so green. A young Coopers Hawk screeched its self-important call and Kim raised her eyes in time to glimpse his raptor silhouette as it drifted in and out of view between the canopy overhead. The sound of the rushing river as it tumbled over protruding sandstone outcroppings on its way around the island was soothing, nearby yet unseen. She was leading the way, working on a path that didn’t exist, walking always towards the sound of the water, since they had pulled off the road a mile or so back. Chris trailed close behind. He had seemed tense from the moment they entered the woods jumping at the sounds of things moving in the brush and flinching at shadows. Kimberly glanced back and the look on his face said he expected things he couldn’t explain to jump from the woods at any moment. His sandaled feet were drenched from the morning dew.

  Suddenly the forest thinned, and Kimberly was the first to see something in a clearing ahead, a stone ruin perched near the ever-closer palisade that she knew would lead down to the river. She paused at the edge of the woods, still in the shadows and looked out into the light. She held one hand up motioning for Chris to stop and he complied. The other hand shielded her eyes from the brightness ahead. The sound of the rushing water was much closer now, right below the bluff, she was sure. It formed the background music to an orchestra of forest sounds: the rapid dry chatter of a troubled Eastern Bluebird punctuated the wail of a Common Loon. Then, the short staccato squawk of a Great Blue Heron joined in. Nearby, two young squirrels chose this moment to chase each other around the base of a tree, only to scamper away when she began to move again.

  Kimberly stepped into the light of the clearing and looked up at the cloudless blue sky. The difference in temperature amazed her. The thick, shaded woods were cool and damp, fall-like. As she exited their protective cover, the sun at first warmed her nicely, but then like a pot of water on the stove, quickly passed warm and went all the way to boiling. The sun was hot and yet a chill gripped her as she walked on.

  She thought she smelled a wood fire nearby and wondered if there were campers close. The State Park was too far away for her to smell anything from there. Approaching the stone and timber cabin, Kim slowed her walk to a cautious gait, her right hand on the Glock 23 pistol that was holstered on her right side. She was wearing black khakis and a black jacket with the letters FBI emblazoned in foot high bright yellow letters on the back. Chris was dressed similarly but with khaki cargo shorts. She had brought him an FBI jacket and Kevlar vest, knowing that if word ever got out, she was done.

  Slung over her left shoulder was a Remington 870 shotgun. Chris was carrying a flashlight that was not turned on. She passed by an ancient rotting wood pile and splitting stump, glancing left and right but mostly maintaining eye contact with the structure up ahead. “Stay here,” she said over her left shoulder to him, as she pushed her way through the rotted door into the stone and log cabin.

  The old floorboards creaked, unaccustomed to the weight of anything heavier than an occasional raccoon, it had been a long time since a person had walked here. Sunlight filtered in through the holes in the decaying, crumbling ceiling and every step forced dust particles up into the light where they danced like they hadn’t in years. The stone walls were moss and ivy-covered and the air felt ancient. The cabin smelled of rot and decay but not in an unpleasant way, in an earthy boreal forest way. The cabin appeared as though it hadn’t been used in a hundred years and the woods had reclaimed the invading structure, taking it back bit by bit. There were no signs of any modern conveniences, no electricity, no running water, no heat. The more she looked around, the longer ago she placed the last inhabitants, maybe two hundred years.

  Just as Chris was coming through the door, she saw the skull, then a second. She waved him over and took out her cell phone. She took a dozen pictures of what appeared to be the skeletons of two people who died in their sleep. The larger skull, a male she assumed, had been smashed: Likewise, the rib cage of the smaller one. There were just a few bones from each skeleton there, along with their skulls. There were no legs or feet, no pelvis, and no arms. Perhaps carted away through the years by animals that stumbled across them while exploring the inside. Her initial gut call was double murder although there was no way to tell if any of the damage
was post-mortem. Something about the deaths made the place suddenly different, crypt-like, a mausoleum. Perhaps that’s what caused her to whisper when she spoke, “Sixty-seven and sixty-eight,” she said. Chris nodded, understanding what she meant.

  After five more minutes of uneventful exploration, the pair left the cabin. Kimberly held both hands across her forehead to shield her eyes against the transition from the dark cabin to the almost painfully bright sunshine. She wished she had sunglasses. Chris just squinted his eyes, and appeared glad to be back in the daylight. “Looks like no one’s been in there since the day they died, huh?” he asked. Kimberly nodded and began taking pictures of the outside of the cabin. Then she checked her GPS and made a note of the coordinates.

  This would all have to go into a formal report. She had been about to tell Jack when he called last night that she had brought, “that Carter guy along,” as Jack called him, but for some reason, maybe sensing where she was going, he had said to her, “If you’re doing anything I don’t wanna know about… I don’t wanna know about it. Just tell me you’re being careful.” She had assured him of the latter and did not mention Chris. He had demanded more frequent updates, “what with this Vale guy murder.” That was Jack, everyone was ‘this or that-insert last name-guy’.

  The cabin was one of the three locations Chris had designated for them to check based on his scrutiny of the satellite imagery of the area. They were headed for the second and the third was tomorrow’s plan. They walked along the edge of the ten-foot cliff, with the water below them and the island always visible. At the widest point, where the Wisconsin River diverted around Blackhawk Island, it was about two hundred feet across and at its narrowest about ten.

  There was a stone pile just across the narrows from the river on its Northeastern side, that was the second area of interest. As they approached, however, it became immediately clear that their plan for the afternoon would not take quite as long as they had thought. It was an illegal dumping site that some local construction company had been using. They had expected to have some excavation to do but it was obvious that there was nothing here but construction debris. It looked as though there was some asbestos as well, and some toxic drums. This would need to be reported also, but it was not part of their case. Kim took several pictures on her phone and noted the coordinates once again.

  That left them with the option of continuing to the third location or stopping for the day, and they both decided to push on. Kimberly had contracted with Captain Ron’s Original Dells Jet Boats the day before, to have them tie up a canoe at the narrows for crossing over to the island. When they reached that location, the Captain had done as promised, and a black polyethylene canoe was floating in the river, tied to a tree on their side. After a few minutes of maneuvering, they were both seated and crossing the river which took all of two minutes.

  Chris paddled both sides while Kimberly waited in the front holding the rope. As soon as they touched the other side, she jumped to the shore, slipped on the wet earth and nearly went down but was able to stabilize her footing before pulling on the rope and settling the craft against the shore. She tied the rope around a young hemlock tree. The air had turned hotter and a warm breeze was blowing across her face from the South. The sky was still clear but just then it darkened, and shadows danced across the trees. She looked up at hundreds, thousands of geese heading South in a V-formation that blocked the sun for five minutes.

  The flora on the island was even denser than the surrounding mainland and passage was slow. Chris assured Kimberly that the mound would be easy to find, knowing how visible it had been on the satellite image, and he told her the woods were going to thin out as they neared it. Sure enough, after a fifteen-minute walk the passage became easier until, appearing like an oasis in a dessert, they were suddenly upon it. Chris was ahead of Kimberly and she saw him slow his pace appreciably and then stop. He turned to her and nodded his head. She knew he had found it.

  It loomed larger than her expectation, taller than Chris by half as he neared it and a good twenty or thirty feet wide. As she grew closer she saw that one side was higher than the other, perhaps twelve feet, while the nearer side was closer to nine. Chris stood in the opening now, with the summer sun burning down on his head. As Kim approached him she expected the sun’s rays to be warming but somehow winter found her, a chill froze her bones and she shivered uncontrollably. When Chris turned to face her, his teeth began to chatter. He was no longer advancing on it, standing back ten or twelve yards, Kim had passed him and was now circling around the mound. She motioned for him to stay where he was. She could see his breath as it escaped his mouth.

  Kimberly was amazed at how accurate Chris’s research had been up till now, but inwardly she was hoping that accuracy ended right here. She was hoping none of the rest of it was true. Still, she found herself thinking, so, this is it, this was where evil lived, the thought almost scoffing. Kim had passed by one small opening and was continuing her circuitous revolution. It was earthen with no vegetation growing on it at all, no stray weeds, not even a blade of prairie grass. In the middle of a thriving forest of life, it was a dead zone. It was not possible for this mound to be barren; not a single seed had found its way into this soil from the seemingly immeasurable species surrounding it. Nope, not possible.

  She stopped and examined a small foot square section, nothing but dirt. Reaching out, she placed her left hand on the square, it was cool to the touch, as though it were shaded by the giant trees that grew all around it, except on this spot there was no shade, it was in full sun. She continued cautiously around, her trained senses all on high alert; her adrenal glands flooded her with hormones that quickened her breathing and heart rate, pumped up her blood pressure. The Remington which had been on her back was now in her hands, crossing in front of her diagonally.

  * * * * *

  Chris was still in the shadows watching from a distance and feeling helpless. This wasn’t good, this wasn’t right. Nothing about this place felt normal. He was wound so tight and drilled into the place he stood. He watched Kimberly pacing back and forth in front of the opening to the mound. An explosion of noise in the brush startled him and he jumped but never took his eyes off the agent. Kimberly pushed the shotgun out in front and aimed it dead ahead, right hand on the trigger and left hand on the pump. Two pheasants which had been in the thicket thunderously took flight to find some less crowded place, narrowly avoiding being blown from the sky.

  He inched forward into the sunlight, looking down and making certain not to step on a twig that might snap, or trip over a root. His eyes kept darting up to Kimberly then back down to the ground, up then down. She had stopped moving, still standing with her shotgun at the ready. He caught her eye, just to make sure she knew he was coming, she nodded.

  A voice in his head said “Christopher, me boy,” in a lilting Irish brogue, “such a lovely lass, I’ll bet she tastes good.”

  Chapter LI

  Kimberly crouched in front of the larger of the two openings in the mound. This one was timber lined on top and both sides. Her shotgun lay on the ground next to her and her Glock was in her left hand pointing into the opening. The summer sun was waning and had all but disappeared behind the trees to the West. Sunset was still a few hours away, but the tall Pines and Oaks were a thick shield once it passed two in the afternoon this close to autumn. Except for a few streaks of bright white breaking through here and there, the whole area around the mound was shaded now, just a short while ago the sun had covered it all. The temperature had dropped more and while the sun passing behind the trees was part of the reason, Chris felt something even colder coming from inside the mound. He peered into the opening from behind Kim, but it was black, not just empty, but somehow void of life and color.

  Kimberly held her hand out for Chris’s flashlight and he passed it down. The opening was about four feet high and two and a half feet wide. She would have to crawl in, stooping would be possible, but it would leave her much more vulnerable, he
thought. She positioned the flashlight in the same hand as the gun and pointed them together toward the opening. There was nothing there. She nodded to the shotgun on the floor and said, “Know how to use that?” Chris looked down. “Pump and fire?” he asked. “Safety off, pump, and fire,” she answered and then added, “aim low and to the left, it’s going to pull up and right.” He bobbed his head up and down. “Okay, stay here, and just make sure it’s not me before you shoot. Here, take my phone, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” he asked, looking at her through narrowed eyes.

  She only shrugged her shoulders then turned away.

  She crawled through the opening slowly on her knees, using her left arm to stabilize. After a moment or two, she was gone from Chris’s sight. He peered into the darkness but saw nothing, not even the glow of the flashlight. It was as if she had crawled into a black hole. Weird. Had the light gone out? He wondered. Wouldn’t she come out if it did? He thought of going in after her but realized his job was protecting the opening from the outside. He stood up and started pacing across the apron of the entrance.