Hanging Falls

by Margaret Mizushima

  Glenna pulled, and the body went with the pole. Mattie focused entirely on the process, but she looked up when something crashed at the base of the falls. A huge log the size of half a tree bobbed up from the churning water and, like a missile, headed her way.

  “Pull!” Mattie shouted to Glenna, her first thought being to get that body out of harm’s way. Mattie tried to raise her legs out of the water so she could scramble back down the tree trunk to land, but it was as if they’d turned to lead.

  Another glance told her the log would strike the pine trunk about five feet from her position. She didn’t have time to reach shore. Grabbing on to any branches she could reach, she drew a deep breath and hunkered down on the trunk as it swayed in the current.

  Boom! The log rammed the pine, making it buck and then dip below the water. Mattie tumbled into the lake, its icy flow reaching for her, breaking her clumsy grasp on the pine’s boughs. The crashing water bombarded her ears. A glacial fist closed around her chest, forcing her to release her breath. She fought the reflex to gasp for air.

  She flailed and kicked as the rapid flow sucked her beneath the pine. Unable to think, she rolled into the tree. Broken branches jabbed her face. Boughs entangled her arms.

  Disoriented, she lashed out against the current, not knowing which direction would take her to the surface. She thought her lungs would burst.

  She sensed a splash beside her, and a surge of displaced water rocked her into the trunk of the pine, banging her head. Sparks flared at the backs of her eyes, which she dared not open. Pine needles pricked her face.

  She felt the furious churning of water beside her … the bump of a warm sensation against her arm. She reached out blindly, clutching with stiff fingers. Her dull sense of touch told her she’d grabbed a handful of fur. Robo? She willed her uncoordinated fingers to hold on and started kicking her feet with all her might.

  At the moment when she couldn’t resist gasping for air any longer, her head breached the water’s surface. She sputtered and coughed, still holding on to Robo while he paddled furiously to stay above the water. Her weight pushed him below the surface. She panicked but immediately regained the presence of mind to release him. He rose up beside her, his head bobbing on the surface.

  She tuned in to Glenna screaming behind her and realized she was in the space between the felled tree and the corpse, which remained lashed to the pole. She grabbed the end of the pole and kicked hard as Glenna started reeling it in to shore. Robo swam alongside, making her giddy when she knew he could make it on his own.

  Mattie clung to the pole while Glenna hauled it to land. Still gasping air in great, lifesaving gulps, Mattie cleared her vision. Soon she could sense the shallow water a few feet from the lake’s edge. She touched down a split second before Robo, and she hugged him with one arm as she dragged herself out of the water.

  Robo gave a mighty shake, scattering droplets of the frigid water, while Mattie crawled a few feet up onto the rocky shore before she collapsed. Robo was on her in a second, licking her frozen face with his soft warm tongue and wagging his furry body as he nuzzled her arms and hands.

  Her energy and strength had been drained, but she gathered him into a hug. Her teeth chattered and her body shivered hard against him. Even though his fur was soaked, he felt warm beneath the wetness. Convinced he’d saved her life, she kissed his muzzle while he licked her cheek.

  Still clutching the pole and struggling to pull the heavy corpse from the lake, Glenna was shouting at her. “Mattie! Are you okay? Talk to me.”

  Mattie drew a shuddering breath and tried to speak through her chattering teeth. “I’m okay. Just a second.”

  She leaned against Robo and used him to push herself up to stand. She stumbled toward Glenna as she briskly rubbed her forearms. Though not up to par, she lent enough strength to help tug the corpse to land. Denim pants dragged from where they were caught on heavy work boots. Otherwise the corpse had been stripped bare.

  “Thank God you made it out of there,” Glenna murmured, as she dropped the pole and helped Mattie scoot the body, facedown, away from the water. “I’ll make a fire here in a minute.”

  Though they were surrounded by wood, the forest was damp and soggy, so Mattie didn’t hold much hope for a blazing fire. As she shivered, she studied the back of the corpse, noting that the pink marks on its back appeared to be welts and slashes. Whip marks?

  “Let’s turn him,” Mattie muttered, clenching her quivering jaw.

  When they rolled the bloated corpse, she confirmed that it was indeed male. Slash marks crisscrossed the dead man’s chest.

  She forced herself to examine his face. She couldn’t tell how old he was, but he had a close-cropped dark beard along his jawline and dark hair. He stared at the sky with round opaque eyeballs, the lids nibbled away by water life. His nostrils had suffered the same fate, revealing the creamy gleam of cartilage beneath what was left of his nose.

  “I think he’s been dead a while, but I can’t tell,” she said, talking to herself as much as to Glenna.

  “Good grief, Mattie. Look at the marks on his chest.”

  Her vision still blurred, Mattie swiped moisture from her eyelids to focus. Pink cuts stood out against his white, bloated flesh. Any residual blood had been washed away, but the letters looked as if they’d been carved with a knife: PAY.

  “What do you think it means?” Glenna asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  FOUR

  Mattie huddled by the fire that Glenna had started by using a ferrocerium rod tool to throw a shower of hefty sparks onto a packet of compressed, dried tumbleweed, which she’d brought with her in her backpack. Mattie had to hand it to her—the game warden was better prepared for a backcountry emergency than she. Glenna had used plenty of pinesap-soaked bark and twigs from a pile of deadfall to feed the fire until it was large enough to add branches and logs.

  After making sure the fire was banked and that Mattie was warming beside it, Glenna had left to go downhill to radio for help. She’d been gone an hour. Though the heavy clouds looked low enough to touch, they’d still shed no rain. Mattie leaned in close to the fire, toasting her clothing front and back, making it steam as it dried.

  She removed her sister’s soggy note from her pocket. The paper appeared too fragile to open, so she tucked it inside a small zippered pocket on the outside of her backpack. No matter. She could print another copy when she got back to the office.

  Her teeth had stopped chattering, and she decided to walk down to the water and further examine the corpse.

  With Robo staying close by her side, she dug out some latex gloves from the bottom of her backpack, slipping her hands into them as she walked toward the body. She wanted a closer look at the pants gathered at the man’s feet. Maybe there would be a wallet or some source of identification in one of the pockets.

  She stared at the word PAY on his chest, wondering what it meant. She thought of the obvious: the man could have been tortured and then killed in order to pay for some transgression—or some perceived transgression. With murder involved, you couldn’t make assumptions about the victim’s guilt.

  She knelt at his feet and started sorting out the pants, which were turned inside out and gathered at his ankles above heavy leather boots. As she worked the denim pants up on the swollen legs, she was able to reveal the waistband and placket. This is odd. No zipper. The placket was still closed, held together with five medium-sized navy-blue buttons.

  She slipped her hand inside one pocket and then the other, finding nothing, but she noticed that the pants seemed to be hand sewn. They had the wide seams that reminded her of the clothing her foster mother used to make. She checked down by the boots and confirmed that the hems of the pants had been hand stitched.

  His boots looked store-bought. They were made with plain leather and had no fancy tooling. Smooth, rounded toes. The boots had been saturated while in the water, and there was no way to tell how old they were. Perhaps when they
were removed, there would be a brand name or something useful to try to follow up on.

  A crash at the waterfall signaled another huge log coming. Mattie rocked back on her heels to watch it circle and roll at the base of the falls until it righted itself and blasted into the current headed toward the pine. It smashed into the trunk where Mattie had removed the body, moving the tree sideways and ripping up the rest of its root system. The felled pine teetered, tearing away from the edge of the lake foot by foot until at last the forceful current snatched it and pushed it toward the stream.

  Thank goodness we moved the corpse out before that happened. Mattie walked back to the fire, picked up her rain poncho, and carried it back to the dead man. She couldn’t stand letting him lie there exposed any longer. As she spread the poncho over his torso, she squatted near his shoulders to arrange it over his face and noticed a purple birthmark on his neck. It covered the left side, roughly the shape of a kidney. Should help identify him, she thought as she tucked the waterproof fabric under his sides to anchor it.

  She went back to the fire, stripped off her clammy gloves, and placed them in a waxy evidence bag that she removed from her backpack. Robo had stayed with her, going back and forth but keeping his distance from the dead man. Now she patted her leg and squatted, folding the dog into her arms and hugging him against her chest. She buried her face in the fur at his neck, dry now but smelling funky with a mixture of lake water and smoke.

  “You’re the best, you know that,” she murmured, kissing him on the silky fur between his ears. His was the bravest soul, and she counted herself among the most fortunate of law enforcement officers to have him as a partner. He’d saved her life more than once.

  After finding a treat for him, she spent some time throwing his tennis ball—his favorite reward—even though carrying out this ritual felt bizarre in the presence of a corpse. Afterward, they sat side by side in front of the fire, Mattie feeding it with sodden sticks that sizzled and popped as they dried in the flames. Every few minutes, another log or clump of deadfall came down the falls, and she wondered what the terrain was like up above. Obviously flooded and letting go of dead stuff—nature’s way of cleaning house.

  She glanced at the corpse. Had this poor man been carried down through the falls before lodging in the pine tree? Had someone buried him up above, thinking he would never be found, only to have Mother Nature intervene?

  Mattie scanned the ledge at the top of Hanging Falls, and a flash of movement caught her eye. What was that? She searched the ledge but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. A single pine jutted out of a rock formation, pointing upward at a wheeling hawk. A mountain jay flickered from one of the pine’s limbs and left the bough waving.

  Maybe that’s all she’d seen—just the normal motion of the forest. She continued to pet Robo as an eerie sensation stole over her. Standing guard over a dead body was unnerving, but surely she wouldn’t let her imagination get the best of her. Still, she felt like she was being watched. And if that was the case, she and Robo would be clear targets sitting here in the open by the fire.

  After picking up her backpack, she rose to her feet and strode off toward the trees. “Robo, come.”

  Once they were within the shelter of the trees, Mattie drew a steadying breath and scanned her surroundings. On the other side of the lake, sheer granite walls rose above a boulder field that would challenge even the most skilled rock climber. No place to hide there.

  Her eyes were drawn again to the terrain near the falls. She’d climbed to the top of that ledge before, and she knew the path to be steep and rocky. There was a faint trail made by people who had blazed their way up, but not one that the Forest Service maintained.

  She itched to take Robo up to explore. If someone was watching, it would be from the ledge. That, coupled with the movement she’d sensed earlier, led her to believe that her suspicion might be right.

  Is this man’s killer still in the forest?

  If she could leave the body and explore the ledge, she was certain Robo would pick up a scent trail and track the observer. But she couldn’t leave the body, especially not on a hunch.

  She brushed her fingers along the handle of her Glock and hunkered down beside Robo. Her dog didn’t seem to be alarmed—no raised hackles, no alerting to the forest. She sighed as she settled in beside him. Maybe this hinky feeling was all in her head. For now, there was nothing she could do except watch and wait.

  * * *

  An hour later, she felt relieved to see Glenna and Moose crest the top of the rise and jog down the trail that led to the lake. While Mattie waited, she had built a fire pit and lined its perimeter with a circle of stones before laying some twigs and kindling inside. She’d placed a log halfway into the fire down below until it dried and its end blazed; then she’d carried it like a torch up to her new fire pit beneath the shelter of the trees. She made certain her fire blazed cheerfully before letting the one down below go out.

  Her clothing had dried for the most part, so she’d donned a light jacket retrieved from her pack. Off and on, a smattering of raindrops had fallen, keeping the forest wet enough to make tending the fire a challenge.

  She’d lost the eerie feeling of being watched, making her wonder if that’s all it had been—a feeling. She walked down to meet Glenna, raising a hand in greeting as she approached.

  Glenna gave her a once-over with a concerned gaze. “The fire’s out. You all right?”

  “Sure. I moved it up into the shelter of the trees. I felt exposed down here.”

  Moose and Robo greeted each other with sniffs and a tussle while Glenna told Mattie the plan. “Sheriff McCoy will organize a posse to bring Detective LoSasso up. They should arrive within a couple hours. I see you covered the body.”

  “Yeah.” Mattie led the way up into the trees toward her fire. “I don’t know if it was real or imagined, but I had a feeling I was being watched. So I moved up here.”

  Glenna frowned as she held her hands out above the flames. “Did you see anything?”

  “Maybe some movement. I’d like to climb up there and check it out.”

  “When the others get here?”

  Mattie didn’t know when they would arrive. “I’d like to go now. This damp forest is ripe for holding scent. If anyone’s up there, Robo will find the track. Would you guard the remains?”

  “All right. If you think you should go.”

  She needed to be on the move again; she’d had enough waiting. “It shouldn’t take long.”

  She slipped on her backpack and headed for the falls. Robo gamboled alongside, eager to run, while Glenna called Moose to stay with her. Mattie had already mapped her course. She found the sloping channel she’d planned to use and started to climb. Robo swept around her to lead the way, and she followed, using boulders, tufts of grass, and bushes as handholds.

  When the terrain evened out on top, she could look down on the lake and easily spot the body covered with her yellow rain poncho, but Glenna and Moose remained hidden in the trees. Robo was sniffing everything, burying his nose in rocky cracks and plants. He lifted his head to sneeze but shook it off and went back to the business he was born to do.

  “What do you smell, Robo? Can you find a bad guy? Let’s go find a bad guy!” Mattie continued the chatter that raised Robo’s prey drive. If there had been a human up here, it wouldn’t take him long to pick up a scent and then follow it.

  Robo moved his head side to side as he quartered the area, moving around the tree that had caught Mattie’s eye earlier. He sniffed his way closer to the falls. Tons of water rushed over the edge, and the sound of it crashing down to the rocks below filled her ears. A wave of dizziness struck her as she watched the water pour over the cliff.

  She tore her eyes away from it to study Robo. His movements short and choppy, he sniffed, his head wagging back and forth as he homed in on a scent. His excitement transferred to her when she realized he’d found the track of a human. She’d been right. Someone had been
in this area and had probably watched her from behind that very tree on the ledge.

  Robo struck off from the ledge into the terrain beyond. Summer rainfall had turned this area into an alpine swamp. Trees had tumbled, their tangled roots snaking out in all directions. A temporary lake filled this basin, created from snowmelt and rainfall that had drained down the granite peaks from above. Water rushed through the swampland to the lake, and a torrent flowed from there to spill off the cliff, clearing out some of the deadfall as it went.

  Mattie hurried to follow her dog, stepping on tussocks of green grass to avoid falling into the muddy glop. Robo quickly led her onto higher and rockier terrain. Nose to the ground, he zeroed in on the track with no hesitation. She struggled to keep up, not wanting him to get too far from her protection.

  Without a leash, she jogged behind Robo, staying as close as possible, her eyes flicking between her dog—so that she could monitor his body language—and the treacherous ground beneath her feet. As far as she knew, there was no way out of this basin except the way she’d come, and there appeared to be few places to hide up here except among the sparse trees.

  Hackles rose on Robo’s back, making the hair prickle at the nape of her neck. This was her dog’s signal that he’d closed in on his prey. She hated to interrupt his search, but she couldn’t let him rush into an ambush. “Robo, wait,” she said softly.

  When he paused, she caught up and took hold of his collar. In a near whisper, she encouraged him to move forward. “Okay, find the bad guy.”

  They’d done this before, this teamwork between handler and dog, edging through the forest, facing danger together. Time stood still as once again Mattie touched her service weapon. The trees grew thin here against the side of the basin, and she felt exposed.

  “Hey!” The male voice came from up ahead. Near. “Hey! Call off the dog. I surrender.” His words were drawn with a southern accent, making his I sound like ah.