The Body Finder

by Kimberly Derting

  “I’ll get dressed and go over there,” Violet decided.

  Her mom looked up, as if surprised by the declaration. “No, Vi. I think you should stay here today….” She didn’t finish her thought, but Violet could hear the unspoken words that hung in the air…where it’s safe.

  She thought about holing up in the house again, watching the clock and waiting, not doing anything productive, and she just couldn’t take it. And then she wondered if she would sense anything when she got there…a new echo maybe. She pushed away the troubling thought.

  “No, Mom. I’m gonna go talk to Uncle Stephen. Maybe something I saw, anything, can help them find her.” She was surprised by her own conviction, but she knew she hadn’t yet convinced her mother, who was still wrestling with her own silent fears. “Don’t worry, Dad’s there. I won’t do anything without his permission.”

  Violet waited for her mom to say something, holding her breath and willing her mother to agree to let her go.

  When she did finally speak, her words were unsteady and filled with defeated fatigue. “I’d feel better if Jay was going with you,” she said.

  Me too, Violet thought without giving her words voice. Me too.

  Violet wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find when she turned down the road toward the house where she and her friends had partied just the night before. She had assumed there would be small groups moving around the area, calling out to the lost girl in hopes of finding her, misplaced among the thick stands of tall trees that practically overcrowded and dwarfed the few homes in the area.

  But it wasn’t just a few Good Samaritans helping a missing neighbor. This was a full-on search-and-rescue operation. It had the feel of organized chaos, with emphasis on the organized part.

  Violet had to park her car much farther away than anyone had the night before, when they were just a bunch of teenagers converging on the semi-isolated house. And people were still arriving behind her. While ahead of her, emergency vehicles, both police and fire, hovered around the entrance to the forests that lay beyond.

  Men and women, young and old, volunteers and professionals, all dressed in brightly colored vests, many of them carrying walkie-talkies, moved in smaller groups in all directions, efficiently combing the endless landscape with deliberate order. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. They were like a swarming sea of fluorescent vests, bobbing and shifting in steady progression.

  Violet made a quick scan of the area as she walked toward the mass of people, to see if she could spot her father or her uncle in the throng of rescue workers. But if they were there, they were lost among the crowd.

  She approached what seemed to be the central hub of activity. Groups grew larger as more people arrived, waiting to be told what they could do to help. She recognized some of the people among them, parents of her friends, neighbors, people who worked at stores in the area, and even one of the teachers from her school.

  A woman was passing out the neon-colored vests, while another was taking down the names of the volunteers and organizing them into search teams, each with a leader who was assigned a walkie-talkie. A man with a bullhorn was shouting out orders about where to check in and instructions on how to proceed once they got started. Everyone was handed a black-and-white flyer with a picture of the missing girl, and Violet was glad to replace the mental image she had of the stumbling, incoherent girl from the night before with this smiling photo.

  She waited with a crowd of people who were hanging around one of the many uniformed police officers; she was hoping he might be able to tell her where she could find her uncle. Other people shouted out questions all around her.

  How long has she been missing?

  Was this where she was last seen?

  Do they think the killer might have taken her?

  Do they expect to find her alive?

  Violet tried to push her way to the front of the gathering, to get the officer’s attention, but it was like swimming upstream, and she found herself making backward progress instead as she was squeezed toward the rear of the group. She didn’t want to yell out and draw attention to herself, so eventually she just pried herself free from those looking for answers.

  She wondered if coming here had been a mistake. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so adamant about trying to help. But she felt guilty, riddled with a sense of at least some degree of responsibility for being among those who had last seen the girl…and one who hadn’t bothered helping her when she’d so obviously been in need.

  She drifted around, feeling a little like a wayward snowflake caught in a breeze, finally landing near the cluster of volunteers who were busy checking in.

  “Are you already assigned to a team?”

  Violet looked up, caught off guard by the woman passing out vests. “No,” she answered, thinking to tell the woman that she wasn’t planning to join the search but never quite finding the words.

  The woman handed Violet a vest and another woman assigned her to a team. She was introduced, only briefly, to her team leader, a man who was probably in his late fifties or early sixties. His gray hair was cut high and tight, army style, and he looked like he’d done a tour or two in some branch of the military. He handled his walkie-talkie like a seasoned veteran.

  Surprisingly to Violet, however, especially since he gave the air of a man who had seen some action in his day, she sensed nothing at all from the über-militant team leader. John Richter carried none of the imprints of death she would have expected.

  Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all. Or maybe he’d just been lucky.

  The no-nonsense team captain took the lead, reading the coordinates on the map he held and piloting them to the area they’d been assigned to search, which was circled in red Sharpie. There were five other members of her team, two women and three men. Violet didn’t know anyone in her grouping, and she didn’t really care. That way she didn’t feel the need to make polite chitchat.

  The farther they walked, passing other teams as they scoured the area, and moving deeper and deeper into the damp, darkening woods, the more ominous it all began to feel. Violet wasn’t afraid, but she was definitely troubled by what they were doing out here. She had the foreboding sense that this was an effort in futility, that they were out here simply to rule out the possibility that Mackenzie had wandered away from the party and had gotten turned around among the trees…when it seemed so obvious to Violet, and probably to almost everyone around her too, what had really happened to her schoolmate.

  He had gotten her.

  Violet could hear the others, in all directions, calling out Mackenzie’s name. They passed a few men who were carrying long wooden poles that looked like unpainted broom handles, and she could only imagine what they were meant to prod or uncover.

  She followed her group until they reached their designated coordinates, and they were ordered by John Richter to fan out, keeping one another in their sights but spreading wide enough apart to cover as much ground as possible.

  Violet moved with careful steps, losing herself in the process of the search. The familiar, reassuring smells of the woodlands drifted around her. The Christmassy smell of the fir trees surrounded her, along with the dank, earthy scent of fallen autumn leaves left to decompose. The air was moist and thick with the kind of misty precipitation that was common this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. It seeped through Violet’s clothing and her shoes, until it was pressing itself damply against her skin and chilling her all the way to the bone.

  While she explored she was aware of several weak echoes around her, which she generally assumed were long-dead animals buried in the underbrush of the thickly overgrown forest floor. They were easy enough to ignore under the circumstances.

  Other teams moved past and around them, moving in larger circles, widening the search and covering more and more area. The sheer number of people involved in looking for Mackenzie Sherwin seemed endless, and Violet took some amount of comfort in the fact that so many people were trying…that so
many people cared.

  She hoped beyond hope that their efforts would be rewarded.

  But she wasn’t holding her breath.

  She heard the musical ringtone of a cell phone, and even though the sound was far away, she instinctively patted her pocket to feel for hers and realized that she’d left it back in her car. Her mom would be pissed. It probably didn’t matter, though, since she doubted she would have gotten reception out here anyway.

  She climbed up, and over, a rotting log that was lying in her way. Her hand touched the slippery film on top of it as she maneuvered it, and when she was on the other side she wiped her hand against her jeans to rub away the slick sensation. She thought of Grady, trying to cram his greasy tongue down her throat last night, and she nearly gagged.

  It was the first time she’d thought about what had happened to her, so close to this very spot, since she’d left her house that morning. It had been a nice reprieve, not to be consumed by the instant replays that had run over and over in her head, keeping her awake all night long.

  But she let herself think of Jay. And of the kiss. And suddenly the damp chill that had been clinging to her evaporated in a wave of heat that started in her belly and spread like an uncontained blaze, flushing her from cheek to toe.

  She realized that she was smiling now, and she had to force it away, not wanting anyone to see her as she searched in vain for the missing girl, grinning like the village idiot.

  The cell phone was still ringing in the distance.

  Violet looked around, trying to figure out which direction it was coming from, and realized just how easy it would be to get lost out here. All alone, in the dead of night.

  Violet couldn’t help but hope that was what had really happened. And that today, with the light on their side, they would find Mackenzie Sherwin, cold and hungover, confused and grateful to be rescued.

  She heard another voice calling out for Mackenzie, and she looked around her.

  She could no longer see the woman with the too-red hair, the team member that she’d been assigned to keep within visual range. She’d lost track of herself, and of where she was supposed to be searching, and she realized that she’d been moving without thinking, like a sleepwalker.

  The sound of the phone grew slightly stronger, and she realized that she’d been following it. Searching for the source. Drawn to it…against her own will.

  She could see another team’s members, not too far away, and realized that even though she was breaking the rules by wandering off on her own, she still wasn’t lost. It wasn’t like she was out here on her own. This morning, the forest was swarming with dozens, maybe hundreds, of people. She wasn’t alone.

  She heard it again, only slightly louder, and she wondered why it was still ringing.

  An ear-piercing bellow broke through her concentrated silence, and Violet jumped. She felt foolish when she realized that it was just another searcher, moving between the trees to the right of her, calling out the missing girl’s name. She silently chided herself for being so skittish.

  That was when she realized why she was so skittish…so jumpy.

  It was the cell phone.

  But it wasn’t really a cell phone at all.

  The sound that she’d been following, the sound she’d been drawn to, the very one that had pulled her away from her own search team as she wandered closer and closer to it…it was never a cell phone.

  It was the sound of bells.

  The spectral sound of Brooke’s bells.

  Far away, muffled, obscured over the distance…but growing clearer…stronger.

  Her heart pounded violently, and her feet suddenly felt like they were mired in quicksand that was slowly sucking and pulling her down. She was afraid to struggle, afraid to move or even breathe, for fear of being dragged beneath the surface forever.

  A thought flashed through her head that maybe she had never been moving closer to the sound at all, but rather he was out here and moving closer to her. She wasn’t sure whether that was good news or bad. This was a man she’d been hunting. A man she’d been determined to find. A killer who needed to be stopped.

  But why would he be out here? Now, of all times? Was he part of an assigned rescue team, searching through the forest and pretending not to know the fate of this poor girl? Or of all the others before her?

  And, now, he was out here with her?

  She suddenly felt trapped, and she wished that her father were here. Or her uncle Stephen. Or Jay.

  And then the sound grew fainter, and Violet knew that could only mean that he was moving away from her. An unexpected panic settled over her as she realized that she could lose him. He could still get away from her, and they would be no closer to ending his reign of terror than they had been yesterday or the day before that. And no closer at all to finding Mackenzie Sherwin or Hailey McDonald, both of whom were still unaccounted for.

  Violet moved then, stumbling in an effort to keep up with the sound of the bells…not wanting to lose his trail. She caught herself before she actually fell and was practically running before she’d fully recovered. She passed through areas being searched by other teams and felt a little like she was trespassing on their assigned coordinates, but that didn’t slow her down. Thankfully no one seemed to notice her as she rushed past them.

  She barely watched where she was going, concentrating only on following the sound of bells that was resonating, louder and louder, as she drew closer to the man carrying it. She didn’t bother planning what she would do when she found him, when she could see into his face and feel the imprints he wore like a tainted uniform woven from his monstrous deeds.

  She was more afraid of not finding him. Terrified that she would lose him inside the vast, crowded, overgrown woodlands.

  She didn’t even see the man in front of her until she had run smack-dab into him. The impact knocked the wind out of her in a breath-stealing whoosh as she collided against his rock-solid chest. He caught her with one strong arm before she could fall backward from the force of the collision.

  She was too stunned to be immediately embarrassed.

  “Whoa! Are you okay?” he asked, not releasing his grip right away, probably afraid she was too klutzy to stand on her own two feet. He looked down at her with genuine concern. “Do you need some help?”

  Violet didn’t recover quickly, and she looked up at him in confusion, still processing what had just happened. “I…uh, I…I guess I’m okay,” she stuttered, wondering at the buzzing sensation in her head. Had she actually hurt herself when she’d so gracelessly run into this man?

  He let go of her cautiously, watching her for any sign that she might not be ready to stand on her own.

  “Er, thanks.” She started to feel the lagging humiliation wash over her.

  She took an unsteady step back and saw that, beneath his orange vest, he was wearing the standard-issue uniform of the Buckley Police Department. He was one of her uncle Stephen’s officers.

  She didn’t recognize his face, and she silently hoped that he didn’t recognize her, especially since she’d practically run him over.

  “Sorry about that,” she offered lamely.

  “Don’t worry about it. Did you need something?” he asked her. He raised one eyebrow, studying her. “Did you find something?”

  Violet had the sudden, inexplicable feeling that she shouldn’t tell this man anything, and she wondered a little at why she would feel that way. “No,” she stammered, uncomfortable about lying to a cop. “No, nothing like that. I was just…leaving.”

  He looked down at her, and she wondered if he believed her. She wasn’t even sure that she’d been moving in the right direction if she had actually been leaving.

  She met his gaze, smoothing her face into what she hoped looked like a convincing smile. “Thanks, by the way,” she said, trying to laugh at her own clumsiness. “You know, for catching me.”

  He smiled back and reached out to pat her on the shoulder. She felt the vague buzzing again, and
she realized that it was coming off him. An imprint, probably…not all that unusual for someone who carried a gun for a living.

  “Anytime,” he responded. “Just take it easy. Oh, and keep an eye on where you’re going—it can be dangerous out here.”

  His warning hadn’t really been necessary. Everyone who was out here this morning knew just how dangerous it could be.

  But Violet knew, better than anyone else, what the real danger in the woods was today.

  She thanked him again and moved away as casually as she could, trying to maintain the appearance that she was calmer than she felt, all the while focusing to stay tuned in to the sound of the haunting bells that were still too far away from her. Once she was sure she was out of the officer’s sight, she sped up again, paying little notice to where she was stepping.

  The sweetly melodic sounds drew her closer…seeming to pull at her from the inside out.

  She came upon it quickly, much more quickly than she’d expected, thinking that it was farther away…so distant. But now she was sure he was nearby.

  She slowed down, only now noticing that her shoes were muddy and the lower half of her jeans were soaking wet and filthy. She wasn’t cold, she wasn’t even afraid, but she was shivering, and her teeth were nearly chattering as she shuddered all over. She thought that it must be the anticipation, the adrenaline coursing through her as she approached a killer, still not knowing what she would do when she saw him.

  She looked around. The bells were nearly deafening here, louder even than they’d been at Brooke’s grave site. A volunteer moved past her, but she knew when she looked at him that he wasn’t the source of the echoes.

  Violet was sure, beyond any doubt, that she would recognize the killer immediately when she saw him.

  She slowly scrutinized the area now, searching for something that no one else knew how to find. She moved in and out of stands of evergreens and stepped around the giant ferns that sprang up from the damp, shadowed forest floor.