by Hannah Reed
I’d seen Ben in action when he responded to Hunter’s attack commands, several times while they practiced together and once in real-live action. Not only was Ben an amazing animal, Hunter was really good at teaching police dogs to do their stuff, one of the main reasons he’d been put in charge of the K-9 unit. He loved those animals.
When we joined the anxious group, Rita stepped forward and handed Hunter a plastic bag.
“You didn’t touch them?” he asked her.
“No. I did it just like you told me. With gloves.”
Hunter opened the bag, exposing a pair of pink pajama bottoms. He offered Ben the opportunity to explore the contents, adding a one-word command, “Smell.”
I wanted to ask a bunch of questions, but Hunter was in serious work mode and I was just along for the ride, watching the action from the sidelines. Until now I had had no idea Ben could actually track a missing person so I had a bunch of unspoken questions. This was going to be an interesting adventure.
Ben did some sniff-sniffs with the pjs while Hunter outlined his plan to the Kerrigans. “I want all of you to stay right where you are. Story is coming with me. If we find Lauren or any evidence that she passed this way and my cell doesn’t pick up a signal, Story will come out and inform you.”
“I’m going, too,” Gus said, a firm set to his jaw. “Lauren is part of our family.”
Hunter shook his head, just as firmly. “You might confuse Ben.” He went on to tell all of us a few facts about tracking dogs:
• Ben’s opportunity to follow a trail was reduced to hours, unlike a bloodhound that can still trail a scent weeks later.
• Tracking dogs trail after the odor of skin cells that flake off a body. (Which, ew, I didn’t even know that. My body flakes skin all the time?)
• Ben should have Lauren’s unique scent from the pair of pajama bottoms she had worn the night before.
• But other family members might have a similar smell, which could throw Ben off. He needed to fully concentrate on trying to follow Lauren’s scent. The more similar scents nearby, the harder Ben had to work at his task, and the higher his risk of failure became.
• Therefore, the Kerrigans had to stay behind.
Gus held out a walkie-talkie, resigning himself to a more passive role. “Story, you don’t have to go along,” he said to me. “Hunter can take this walkie-talkie with him and use it if he needs to.”
I grabbed the mobile radio. “I’m going. My scent won’t confuse Ben, and I know my way through this area better than most of you.” Which was true. I hiked these woods often. But always in the light of day.
Hunter released Ben from his leash and we headed into the darkness of The Lost Mile, surrounded by a cloak of blackness, dependent on the small halos of light from the flashlights. We moved fast and wordlessly. Ben seemed to know exactly how far ahead of us he should stay, operating just beyond our beams. At times his head was down, nose to the ground, at other times he paused to sniff the air.
But we always kept moving forward, so it seemed Ben knew what he was doing.
I thought about the last time Hunter and I had been together in this spot, sixteen years ago, and about how that one night seemed to be defining the present. And about how I’d left Hunter behind at the end of my senior year when I moved to Milwaukee. Not that our relationship had been in the best shape when I left. We’d both been young and immature and had said and done things we shouldn’t have.
Ten minutes later, fog began to swirl around us.
“Can we talk?” I asked at one point. “Or will that interfere with Ben’s tracking work?”
“He’s been trained to ignore distractions. We can talk all we want.”
“Do we want?”
“Not yet. I’m listening.”
“For what?” But Hunter didn’t answer.
Several times after that, I lost sight of Ben, but every time, just when I was sure we’d lost him for good, he would reappear out of the fog like an apparition.
Speaking of apparitions.
“Any recent Lantern Man sightings?” I asked Hunter in a low voice.
“Nothing new,” Hunter said keeping his voice low, too. There was something about the dark woods and fingers of fog that brought out our caution reflexes.
“But you checked for reports before you came tonight?” I asked him.
“You bet.”
“Not that there would be anything to report, since he managed to scare everybody away a long time ago. Nobody comes in here after dark anymore.”
“We’re here. Shhh.” He paused and I could tell he was listening for something.
“What?” I whispered. “What?
“Nothing.”
“You’re creeping me out.”
“Sorry.”
This time when we started moving again, I stayed closer to Hunter. He was as alert for trouble as Ben was. I should have felt very safe with those two. I was working hard to achieve that warm, fuzzy feeling, but it was hard to do in this cold, damp place.
The walkie-talkie clutched in my hand crackled, startling me. I almost dropped it. Robert Kerrigan’s voice came through loud and clear. If wild things roamed in this part of the woods, they had our exact location by now. “Find anything yet?” Robert’s voice boomed.
I fiddled with the controls and answered him, “Nothing.” I looked around as I walked, trying to get my bearings in such low visibility. “I think we’re about halfway through.” Ben came into our circle of light, still working the ground.
“There are more of us gathering here at the road,” Robert said. “Lauren wasn’t anywhere in town and nobody we talked with fired those shots you heard. You and Hunter are our last hope.”
Wonderful! That’s what I always wanted to be, someone’s last hope.
“Any possibility she just drove off?” I said into the radio.
“She didn’t have a car. And none of ours are missing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Roger. Over and out.”
Hunter chuckled quietly beside me. “Very professional,” he said with a teasing tone. “So who’s Roger? Does that mean I have more competition? I thought I drove them all away for good.”
“I’m a hot babe,” I reminded him in case he hadn’t noticed. Keeping a man on his toes was a full-time job for a woman. I glanced around. “Where’s Ben?”
“Around here somewhere.”
I glanced around again, thinking Ben had been gone longer than usual. Then I heard him bark. Hunter tensed beside me.
When Ben barked again, Hunter moved off the old logging road. I followed, recognizing the decaying white birch with the woodpecker holes. My bee tree! Hunter headed for it, then past it. I could see the dark outline of my bees even in the fog, although it seemed thinner here. The black blob of bees stood out against the cloud cover.
When I drew my eyes back to earth, Hunter was squatting next to a large heap on the ground. Ben was quietly standing guard.
“Stay back,” Hunter called to me, rising and swinging his light away, sweeping the beam high over a clump of trees, so I couldn’t get a good look at what was on the ground. “Don’t use the radio,” he said. “This place will be mobbed with people if you do.” He came over to me. “Here. Hold both flashlights and keep at least one focused on me.”
He studied my bee tree.
“My swarm,” I offered, noting that all the activity on the ground hadn’t fazed the bees at all. The chill and darkness had them tucked in close to each other, virtually immobile.
Hunter moved on to another tree, a maple with lower branches.
I avoided looking at where Ben stood, and instead my eyes and the light beams followed Hunter as he began to climb the maple. He swung effortlessly up from branch to branch. What on earth was he doing? Then I realized he was climbing up the tree to find a cell signal. He needed to make a phone call. Yet Hunter had told me not to notify the search party. Why not?
I found my voice.
“Is that Lauren?” I asked, continuing to shin
e the light on him as he’d asked me to do. “Is she dead?” If it was Lauren, I figured she must be dead, since Hunter hadn’t bothered to attempt CPR.
But Hunter was intent on other things and he didn’t seem to hear me ask if the body belonged to our high school classmate.
A moment later, one more branch up, he found what he needed. Cell coverage.
“Chief Jay,” he said with more professional courtesy than Johnny Jay had heard all night, or deserved. I groaned inwardly at the thought of having to answer questions from our police chief.
I tried to listen to the one-sided conversation, but my head was spinning. I had started out with Hunter on a lark, never expecting to actually find Lauren, and all I could think of was how sad this all was that she had finally been freed from prison, only to end her life with a bullet.
How lonely and distraught she must have been to take such drastic measures. What should have been a new beginning, a new start, was a final tortured farewell, especially for the family left behind. Briefly, I felt bitter toward her for the pain she continued to inflict on Rita and the rest of the Kerrigans. T. J. was so right. She’d been nothing but trouble.
Hunter gave Johnny our location and warned him about the search party congregating out on the road north of The Lost Mile. He recommended plenty of backup.
Then he started down, jumping to the ground from the lowest branch of the tree.
That’s when I first discovered the dead body we found wasn’t Lauren Kerrigan.
It was Hetty Cross, the Witch.
Nine
Hetty Cross had been one of my neighbors, loosely speaking. When I lived in Milwaukee, my neighbors lived right next to me, so close I could look through their windows and tell what they were watching on TV. We didn’t even have to know each other’s names—and most of the time we didn’t—to be considered neighbors.
P. P. Patti and I were obviously neighbors since she lived right next to me. She could pry into my private life, probably knowing exactly what I did inside my home thanks to her telescopic lenses. Even in the city, Patti would be considered abnormal.
Here in Moraine, neighbors weren’t defined by meters, feet, or yards. Hetty Cross and her husband Norm lived at least half a mile away from me. But because of the river, lost land, fields, and government-owned trails standing between us, no other houses or residents existed there.
So in the scheme of things, we were neighbors.
Not that Hetty had a single neighborly bone in her body. She wasn’t known for her friendliness, which was her prerogative. No one held it against her. That was the beauty of a place like this. If you wanted solitude, you could have as much as you could stand.
Apparently, Hetty had ended up with a lot more desolate alone time than she’d bargained for. The Witch was dead. The same one who had yanked me across her property line by my ear when I was a kid.
Good thing I had a strong stomach, because even with that going for me, my insides were doing flip-flops for a variety of reasons. One, I wasn’t particularly used to death (other than honeybees, because they had short lives and so many predators). Two, I knew this dead person personally. Three, she was lying right there almost in front of me and as hard as I tried not to look, my eyes had a mind of their own and took in every bit of the scene.
And then there was number four, which had been confirmed a little later when the powers-that-be (aka Johnny Jay and Hunter) requested the presence of Gus and Terry Kerrigan. A certain weapon was lying on the ground on the other side of Hetty’s lifeless body and needed to be identified. Gus and Terry reluctantly did so.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Johnny Jay asked them.
“It’s a short-barreled Sig Sauer,” Gus said. “And it looks just like the one Rita owns.”
“That’s all we can tell you,” Terry said, letting the chip on his shoulder show in every single move he made.
“That’ll do it,” Johnny Jay said, pleased with how the case seemed to be progressing along.
So unless things changed later, it appeared that Hetty had been shot and killed with the handgun from Rita Kerrigan’s nightstand drawer.
Letting my vivid imagination run rampant, that meant Holly, Patty, and I could have been in this exact spot earlier in the evening right with the killer. He—or she, as the case might be—could have been hiding behind a tree watching and waiting for us to move away. And Hetty could have been lying right next to me while I sat on the ground leaning against the trunk where my bees landed for the night.
I felt chills. Hunter noticed, removed his black leather jacket, and wrapped it around my shoulders. “Not that kind of cold,” I muttered.
“I know, but it’s the best I can do.”
Lauren Kerrigan was still missing just like before, but suddenly her rating on the importance scale rose dramatically, earning her the full attention of a much wider group of concerned individuals.
Suddenly, Johnny Jay really, really cared about where she was. It didn’t take him long to put out an all-points bulletin. After that he skirted the tree with my bees, giving it a wide berth like everyone else was doing, and turned his full attention my way.
“Missy Fischer,” Johnny Jay said, still calling me by my schoolgirl name, knowing it bugged me. “You’re telling me that you and your sister just happened to be in this exact location mere hours before you just happened to find this body.”
I stared at the emergency crew, at the stretcher, at the body bag on it, wishing I hadn’t had to divulge that particular bit of information. But a team was dusting for fingerprints. What if they pulled my fingerprints from the tree, if that was even possible? My fingerprints and my sister’s had to be all over the place.
Better to get the truth out in the open right from the start rather than give Johnny Jay more ammunition later on. In spite of Mom’s gloomy assessments, I really was learning from past mistakes.
“Ask my sister or Patti Dwyre, Johnny Jay,” I said, realizing way too late that my prints weren’t on file and I might have possibly slipped under his radar. “They will confirm what I told you.”
“Of course, they will,” Johnny sneered. “And I’m Police Chief Jay to you. Don’t call me Johnny again.”
Okay, I thought, mentally coming up with some choice new names that suited him better.
Hunter stood off to the side, talking to a group of county deputies, leaving me alone in the clutches of the police chief. The town residents were divided as to why Johnny hated me so much. One side believed it was because I had turned him down years ago when he had asked me to prom, when I chose to go with Hunter instead. Jeez. Wouldn’t anybody? I thought that explanation was lame, because who held a grudge like that over years and years?
The other side of the fence insisted it was because of the time Johnny was tormenting a younger kid and I’d hauled off and decked the bully with my backpack, which happened to be loaded down with heavy books. Johnny went face first in the snow right in front of everybody. He lost some fearful respect that day and spent a long time earning it back.
Whatever the reason, the negative feelings he had for me were mutual. I didn’t hesitate to reciprocate, although I often wished the man hadn’t grown up to be in a position of authority over me.
I was in his sights, that was for sure. “And you’re telling me you didn’t see Lauren Kerrigan shoot and kill Hetty Cross in cold blood?” he said for what seemed like the hundredth time. But this time Terry Kerrigan and some of the others were in earshot. Terry didn’t look happy. Neither did Robert. They scowled at the police chief.
Johnny went on, still badgering me. “You say you heard shots. You were right here where it happened. You saw something or you did something, or you know something, and I’ll take you in and throw you in a cell if you don’t start talking. Now!”
“What’s going on?” Hunter said, finally strolling over, but still taking his sweet time.
“This is nothing to you, Wallace,” Johnny said to him.
“Afraid it is. This is c
ounty land,” Hunter replied, while I admired his coolness under pressure. The man was easy, relaxed, and confident. “Gives me jurisdiction.”
“Like hell it does,” Johnny shot back. “This is town land.”
The two testosterone heavies were probably as confused as everybody else over The Lost Mile’s jurisdiction and who owned which parts of it. Did the town own this stretch? Or the county? Or one of the landowners? Before the mess would be officially sorted out, if it ever could, these two were in what was referred to as a particular type of manly contest to see whose stream was longer.
At least Johnny Jay’s attention wasn’t focused on me anymore.
I considered slinking away.
Ben stood off to the side, leashed to a tree. I walked over and kneeled down beside him. Petting his sleek coat earned me a gentle kiss. “We should get away,” I said to him. “While the getting’s good.”
A skirmish broke out. At first I thought Johnny Jay and Hunter were duking it out over territory, but it turned out Terry Kerrigan was making another attempt to get at our police chief. “You dumb-ass pig,” he said, directing the slur at Johnny while others struggled to hold him back. Terry was always good at giving lots of advance notice when his hackles were up. I suspected he was more noise than anything else. Someday the others weren’t going to jump in to stop him and we’d all get to see how tough he really was.
“You bumbling idiot!” he shouted again. “You better stop accusing Lauren until you know the facts. This is slander.” Terry spit on the ground. “You have no business bad-mouthing her.”
“Get him out of here,” Johnny Jay said to the other Kerrigans, “or I’ll take him in.” A group of relatives hauled Terry off. “And take her with you, too,” Johnny said, pointing at me. “She’s just in the way.”
Finally! I’d been released from the scene, although Johnny’s poor attitude made me consider staying just to see how much more I could annoy him.
“I’ll call you later,” Hunter said, following me a short distance so we could have some privacy. “Lauren has been here, no question about that. Ben had her scent earlier. We’re going to keep following her trail.”