Her eyes widened. “You have tea?”
“ ’Course I have tea. Coffee too. And sugar. Do you think I’m some uncivilized old coot?”
She let herself relax, unaware she’d been holding herself so stiffly, and allowed herself a small smile. She was beginning to like the old hermit.
She’d just had tea with the Psychic Sisters, but how could she refuse another cup from one of Cape Willington’s most reclusive citizens? “I’d love some.”
“Got some biscuits too, if you want them.”
“That would be wonderful. I seem to have missed lunch.”
He nodded, as if he’d expected as much, and used a coarse folded cloth to grasp the kettle’s handle. He poured hot water into the mugs and added two tea bags, which he took from the tinfoil pouch. “I got the biscuits inside. Might even have a little marmalade left, and maybe a few crackers. It’s not fancy, but it’ll fill you up.”
He grunted as he rose, shrugged off the blanket, and ducked into the cleft in the rock without another word.
Alone, Candy surveyed the small, enclosed camp in which she found herself. It was sheltered on the west by the lichen-covered granite wall and on the north by a snowy embankment topped by a thick stand of squat pines. To the southeast, an outgrowth of rocks stood guard, surrounded by dense shrubbery and the encroaching forest.
It was well protected from the weather, and from any prying eyes that might pass by.
The camp itself was sparsely but adequately equipped. She saw a sledge stacked high with firewood parked next to the rock wall, to the left of the cleft. On the other side, Solomon had set up a green-roofed lean-to, backed up against the wall. Underneath it he’d put out a rickety folding table and chair, a small outdoor cookstove, and a lantern, which hung from one of the crossbars on a rusted iron hook.
The only other furniture in the camp was an old wooden three-legged stool by the fire, upon which Solomon had been sitting, and the homemade wood chair opposite it.
Candy crossed to the chair and tested it. It seemed sturdy enough. The blanket looked warm, though she suspected it hadn’t been washed in a while. Nevertheless, she was grateful for a place to sit after her trek through the woods, and settled in, draping the blanket over her legs as she cozied up to the fire.
Solomon was back in a few minutes with a tin of biscuits, a jar of marmalade, and a small silver spoon. “It’s the best I can do,” he told her, setting out his wares. He handed her one of the mugs of tea, still steeping, and pointed to the biscuits. “Help yourself.”
Under any other circumstances she might have refused, since she didn’t know how long the food had been sitting around. But out here in the woods, in the fresh, cold air, after her trek with the moose, she was famished, and grateful for the old hermit’s hospitality. She took a biscuit, which was wonderfully warm, and swathed marmalade on top. It tasted like a feast.
“I just made them a little earlier,” Solomon said with a twinkle in his eye. “Only a half dozen or so. I wasn’t sure what you’d be wanting.”
Candy took another bite of the biscuit, which was flaky and flavorful. And she couldn’t help but let out a laugh. It was all so… unexpected.
“You’re a pretty good cook,” she told him.
He shrugged, but it was clear he was pleased with the compliment. “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. And I been doing a pretty good job of it too, you know.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely out here?”
“Bah!” he told her, emphasizing the word with an exaggerated shake of his head and a crooked wave of his hand, as if brushing away such thoughts.
She got the point and laughed briefly, but quickly became serious again. “How did you know I was coming today?”
He cackled. “That’s just it! I didn’t know for sure. At first I thought you were gonna get here yesterday.”
“Why yesterday?”
“Because of him.” Solomon pointed with his head toward the woods, in the general direction of the moose.
When the old hermit saw Candy’s confused look, he laughed again, which deepened the crow’s feet at the corners of his gray, wizened eyes.
“So the moose is part of all this?” she said by way of clarification as she finished the biscuit in another quick bite.
“Sure is. He’s the reason I’m out here.”
She swallowed and took a sip of her tea as she collected her thoughts. All this time that she’d been worrying about him, he’d been out here in the woods, hiding inside a rock wall, sipping tea and eating homemade biscuits with a moose. It was almost too funny for words.
She looked around the camp again and was amazed that he’d been able to not just survive, but to set up this small bit of civilization deep in the woods. “How long have you been out here?”
He shrugged. “A few days this time.”
“You’ve camped here before?”
“Oh, sure, a bunch of times. It’s nice out here, especially in the summer. Except for the bugs, of course. That’s what makes it especially nice in the winter. It’s peaceful. I fixed it up a little—just in case I needed a place to hide out.”
Something in the way he said it made her shiver involuntarily. In a quieter tone, she asked, “Why do you need to hide out here now?”
He reacted physically to the question, as if it had attacked him, folding in on himself and pulling the blanket tighter around him.
When he spoke, she detected a note of fear in his voice for the first time.
“Because,” he said, eyes shifting back and forth to the woods nearby, “there’s something out there. Something’s after me.”
She felt a chill. “What?”
He grunted and shook his head resignedly. “Damned if I know.”
“Have you seen this thing that’s after you?”
“No, but I heard it.”
“Don’t you have any idea what it is?”
He shook his head.
A touch of desperation crept into Candy’s voice. “Solomon, you must remember something about it. You must have some idea about what’s been going on in these woods.”
“Sure, I have some ideas,” he said, his voice rising defensively. “I got lots of ideas. But none of them makes much sense. I can’t put two and two together. That’s why I was hoping you could help me. Why else do you think I sent for you?”
“Sent for me? But—?” She stopped, suddenly confused. She looked from Solomon to the moose, which still lingered in the woods just beyond the edge of the camp, and back to the old hermit, giving him a stunned look. “Do you mean to tell me that’s why the moose led me here? You sent it to fetch me?”
“Well, what else do you think?” he asked, growing irritated. “It makes perfect sense, don’t it?” He let out a snort and pulled a pipe from a hidden pocket. He clamped it between dark-stained teeth, lit it with a twig from the fire, and blew out a puff of bluish smoke as he pointed with his head toward the great white creature in the woods.
“ ’Course, I don’t think anyone could send him anywhere he didn’t want to go. I just asked him politely to go fetch you and bring you here, and that’s what he did, all right. Don’t ask me how he did it ’cause I don’t know. But you could say I always did have a way with the forest critters, so maybe he just sensed something and went to find you.”
He paused a moment, thinking. “He’s the one who got me into this, you know. But I’m the one who followed him. He didn’t pull me along on a rope. I could have turned back anytime, but I didn’t, and that was my decision, all right. I just sort of walked right into it.” He stopped to take a deep puff on his pipe and looked at her pensively. “He’s the one who found that body in the woods, you know. That moose led me right to it.”
Candy shifted her gaze to the wild moose, foraging farther away from the camp now. It all sounded unbelievable, but somehow, for some reason, she believed him. “No, I didn’t know that,” she said, and found herself leaning forward a little in her chair. “So there really w
as a body in the woods?”
He puffed on his pipe and nodded.
“Do you know who it was?”
Solomon shook his head. “Never saw him before. He was pretty well dressed, though. Expensive clothes and boots. Must have cost him a pretty penny, I can tell you that.”
“Do you know how he died?”
The old hermit nodded sagely. “Oh, sure I do. It was that hatchet in his back that done it.”
Twenty-Six
After that, she got a fairly complete version of the story, though it took a while, since Solomon kept digressing into all sorts of subjects. Even though he lived alone, he was not completely unsociable. Candy suspected he was even enjoying talking to a young, attractive woman who was sitting comfortably in his camp, sipping tea, nibbling on biscuits, and giving him her undivided attention.
It appeared there was still some life left in the old coot.
He’d stumbled across the moose’s tracks two days ago while out collecting firewood, he told her, and that had led him to the moose itself, and the body. That’s when he’d been spooked by something in the woods—possibly another person, he said, or possibly something else. He had started running and thought the thing was chasing him, though he couldn’t be sure.
He sounded confused when he tried to describe this part of the story. “I guess I lost my bearings in the woods and got turned around, which is a rare event for me, I can tell you that. I thought I was headed back to my home camp, but somehow I came out in your field. Could’ve been that bump on the head.”
“How did it happen?” she asked him.
He puffed away thoughtfully before he continued. “Don’t know for sure, but I think I might’ve run into a branch or something. Knocked my hat clean off.”
“Were you attacked?”
“I don’t think so,” he said in a hesitating tone. “There for a while I lost track of things.”
“You scared the heck out of me when you stumbled out on the field behind the house,” she told him. “I was running to get the police, but when I looked around, you were gone. Where did you disappear to?”
“First I went to get my hat,” he said, “and then I went back to the body. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but I had to check. I didn’t want to leave him out there alone in the woods, especially if he needed help.”
“Weren’t you afraid of that thing that was chasing you, whatever it was?”
“Sure I was, but I was careful. I moved slowly and quietly, just in case it came at me again. But it must have moved on. It had been there, though. I could tell.”
“What do you mean?”
Solomon shook his head. “Well, that’s part of what I don’t understand. You see, when I finally made it back to the body, something had changed. I figured out pretty quick what it was.”
“And what was it?”
He squinted his eyes, as if recalling the scene, and shook his head. “The place had been cleaned up. And all the footprints and tracks were gone. Someone had erased them all.”
Her brow furrowed. “How’d they do that?”
He shrugged. “Tree branch with some leaves left on it, or some other type of brush, sweeping it across the ground. You did that when you were a kid, didn’t you? So you could hide somewhere and sneak around on your friends when you were in the woods?”
“I don’t… well, maybe, yes. So all the tracks were gone?”
“That’s right.”
“But you found the body?”
“Oh yeah, I found it.”
“Was he… still alive?”
Solomon pursed his lips and shook his head quickly. “He was dead when I got there. His face was white as the snow, and the body was turning stiff.”
Candy had read about this lately. She knew a body began to stiffen fairly quickly after death, and rigor mortis began in two to four hours. After a few hours, the entire body would feel stiff, though full rigor took between twelve and twenty-four hours, as far as she could recall.
So if the body had been stiff when Solomon had found it, it had been there for a while.
“Is the body still in the woods?” she asked after a few moments.
“No, I moved it.”
This surprised her. “Why did you move it?”
“It was lying in a gully. Snowmelt was starting to cover it up, and more snow was coming soon. It was about to get buried. I had to do something with it.”
Candy remembered. It had snowed later that day, though not too heavily. But it was reasonable for Solomon to think the body might have been quickly covered by snow.
“How did you move it?”
Solomon nodded with his head toward the sledge, parked next to the rock wall. “It took some maneuvering,” he said. Under his breath, he added, “I had to take that hatchet out of his back.”
Candy was afraid he’d say something like that. “Solomon, you disturbed a murder scene.” She didn’t frame it as an accusation, but simply as a statement of fact.
“Yup, I know all about that,” the old hermit said, “but there was no help for it. It was about to get buried, and then it’d be gone ’til spring, so I had to do something.”
She understood his reasoning—he was just trying to help—but she also knew Chief Durr would be livid when he found out.
He’d also be livid when he found out she was involved in the mystery, and had stumbled across Solomon on her own. She wondered vaguely what had become of Officer Jody. Hadn’t he been assigned to her so he’d be here when this sort of thing happened?
She let out a long breath. “Where did you move him to?” she asked the old hermit.
“I brought him here first,” Solomon said, nodding toward the cleft in the rock. “I put him in there for a while, but it just didn’t feel right.”
“You moved him again,” Candy said, finally beginning to understand what had happened.
“There wasn’t anything I could do for him,” Solomon said with a nod. “He couldn’t stay here all winter. It just wasn’t right. Somehow I had to get him back to the people he belonged to.”
“So you put his body on the sledge and took him out to the Loop.”
“It seemed like the best thing to do,” the old hermit said. “I hauled him over there right before dawn this morning. The moose went with me.”
She glanced again at the creature, which was almost invisible in the woods but still hung around, as if eavesdropping on their conversation.
“So it was Victor Templeton all the time then,” Candy said, pondering the ramifications of this latest revelation.
“Who?”
It took Candy a few moments to respond. She was thinking. “The body you found in the woods. His name was Victor Templeton. He was one of the ice sculptors scheduled to give demonstrations in town today. Now we know why he never showed.”
Solomon considered the name for a few moments before shaking his head. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s a tourist,” Candy simplified. “He was supposed to visit Cape Willington this weekend to take part in the Moose Fest. He was married to a woman named Gina.” Candy paused, her mind working. When she’d asked Gina yesterday about her husband, and the fact that he had pulled out of the exhibition, she’d said it was a private matter. And she had seemed distracted and evasive when they talked. Was that because she was worried about him, or had she known more than she let on?
Candy tried to remember what else she’d heard about Victor over the past few days. She’d had so many conversations, and so many people had said so many different things to her. She couldn’t remember who had said what, and when.
But then she recalled that she had all her recent interviews on her digital recorder.
She looked down at her watch. It was nearly two thirty in the afternoon.
How long would it take her to go through all her recordings? And what might she find there?
As her brow furrowed in thought, she looked back at Solomon. “You said you took the hatchet out of his back. What did y
ou do with it?”
The old hermit pointed to a burlap bag resting by the chair under the lean-to. “I got it all right there.”
“All of what?”
“All of everything. All his stuff.”
“His stuff? You mean…?”
Solomon held up a gloved hand and started counting off on his fingertips. “His wallet, money, cards, papers, watch, reading glasses—everything.”
“You stripped the body?” Candy asked, shocked.
Solomon seemed surprised by her reaction. Somewhat defensively, he said, “What else could I do? I knew I was gonna dump it by the side of the road so someone else could find it. What if the person who discovered it was a thief who just took all his stuff? Then no one would know who he was. I couldn’t take that chance.”
“But… what did you plan to do with all of his… stuff?”
“Weeell”—the old hermit gave her a look that told her the answer was obvious—“I was gonna give it all to you, of course.”
“To do what with?”
“Take it to the police so I don’t have to,” he said matter-of-factly.
Candy’s face lightened. “Ahh.” Now it was starting to make sense.
But Solomon must have taken her expression the wrong way and thought she was making a comment on his honesty. “I didn’t steal none of it, really. It’s all there.” And to prove it, he waved to her. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
He set his pipe down, rose again, and walked to the lean-to, beckoning Candy to follow. He took up the bag and set it lightly on the table.
“I handled everything as carefully as I could,” he said as he untied the bag. Slowly he began to remove items from inside it, setting them one by one on the table in front of them.
A black, well-worn leather wallet, bulging with credit cards. A wad of bills in a gold pocket clasp. A variety of coins. A comb. An Omega watch. A cell phone. Car keys. A hotel room key.
And a hatchet.
Twenty-Seven
Candy stared at it, shocked.
The murder weapon.
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