The Girl in the Moss

by Loreth Anne White

  A chipmunk exploded into a machine-gun barrage of chirping as Tuck burst abruptly through the ferns. Fright punched through Budge, followed quickly by a wave of relief. Tuck was panting, his eyes bright, his snout caked with black mud. Budge grabbed Tuck’s collar and ruffled the animal’s coat.

  “Where’s your bear bell gone, eh boy? You snag it loose on a branch or something? And whatcha been ferreting out with that filthy ol’ snout yours, eh, you old goof? You found something good and rotten? Rootin’ out that chipmunk’s stash, were ya?”

  Tuck wiggled and whirled his stumped tail, trying to lick Budge’s cheek.

  “Whoa, back up there, bud. You’re gonna squish my chanterelles.” He slapped Tuck on the rump and allowed his hound to scurry back into the bush to continue digging at whatever had snared his attention. Light was fading fast under the old-growth canopy, and they still had a fair trek back to where he’d parked his truck off an old forestry road. Yesterday Budge had scored only about six pounds of goldens. Today would prove a much better haul if he got cracking before darkness fell.

  Rapidly harvesting the chanterelles, Budge moved deeper and deeper into the woods. Vegetation grew denser around him, mossier, more primal. Sound became hushed. Witch’s hair trailed from massive cedars, and black lichen smothered bark. A chill trickled down his spine suddenly. He stilled. It felt creepy in there, the fog sifting through the trunks like ghosts. Something thwocked onto the bill of his cap. He jumped and fell back on his butt. The object flopped from his cap onto the ground.

  Budge’s heart hammered as he stared at what had hit him. A rotted fish carcass. Adrenaline thumped through his veins. He looked up. Another carcass dangled from the branches above, slimy white and glistening. Eagles, he thought. The bloody scavengers. They flocked north each year when the salmon came up the Nahamish to spawn. When the fish died, the eagles plucked them from the river with their talons and carried them high into the trees, where they fed on the ripe flesh.

  Bears also brought the carcasses up into the woods. Budge had been a logger. He could always tell a good salmon year from the rings in trees—lots of nitrogen in the soil those years. But a rotten carcass smacking him on the head in the goddamn spooky twilight like this? Too much for an old dude’s ticker. He snatched up the knife he’d dropped, swore out loud for good measure, and decided he was done.

  He creaked back up onto his feet.

  “Tuck?” he yelled.

  No response.

  “Tucker! Where in the hell are you, boy? We gotta go!” Budge pushed his way deeper into the brambles and ferns. A rustle and growl sounded along the far edge of the clearing, beneath some wild blueberry and salmonberry scrub. Budge stilled. Unease crawled deeper into him. “Tuck?” He moved closer toward the snuffling, hand fisting around his knife. “What is it, boy?”

  He edged aside fern fronds and then froze. Tuck looked up at him, eyes aglow. He growled again, teeth clamped around a long, dirt-encrusted bone.

  “Jeezus, give me that! We’re leaving.” Budge snatched for the bone. But Tuck backed away, jaw tightening around his prize as he dropped his head, his growl deepening as his hackles rose.

  “Fucksakes, Tuck! You know not to do that. Drop it. Now.”

  The hound lowered his head even farther but acquiesced, reluctantly releasing the bone. Budge leaned in to see what animal the bone might have come from. That’s when he caught sight of the clawed-back carpet of moss behind Tuck. His blood turned to ice.

  Protruding from the moist black earth was part of a large rib cage. Budge swallowed. His gaze tracked up from the ribs. A skull lay sideways in the loam, as if in sleep, the exposed eye cavity caked with dirt. The left side of the skull had been bashed inward.

  Blood began to boom in Budge’s ears. This was no hunter’s kill. This was not a moose or big buck that had perished in the rain forest.

  This skull was human.

  CHAPTER 2

  Angie Pallorino flicked her wrist, trying with sheer force of will to land her fly exactly where she intended. It fell short in a snarl of fishing line. She cursed, pulling her tangled line back into the boat. She and her boyfriend, Detective James Maddocks, were into the last hours of their four-day guided trip down the Nahamish, and today they were fishing in the flats below the Plunge Falls. She’d hoped to have nailed this fly-fishing gig by now, but it eluded her, this apparently esoteric art. Angie didn’t like failing at anything. Irritably, she wound the dry line back onto her fly reel and got set to attempt another cast.

  “Try not to aim directly into the wind—it’s picking up,” their young female guide called from the back of the jet boat, where she sat steering their drift down the river.

  Yeah, yeah, do this, don’t do that, try again. But Claire Tollet was right. The breeze was turning testy, shooting riffles across the smooth surface of this flat section of water. Every now and then a sharper gust brought an icy chill down from the snow-dusted peaks to the north. Angie yanked her woolen hat down lower over her ears and proceeded to cast her line out. She muttered a curse as her fly settled barely a few meters out from the boat. She seated herself in the boat to watch her line.

  “Hey, that one wasn’t so bad,” Maddocks said. Angie still called him Maddocks rather than James. They’d worked together, and not only was it police department custom to use last names, the tag had filtered over into his social life decades ago. No one called him James, let alone himself.

  “You’ll be surprised how much easier it’ll be next time.” He stood above her in the boat, holding his rod as he slowly stripped in his line, making his fly dart atop the water like the real thing.

  “Next time?” she said.

  “Sure, there’ll be a next time.” He grinned. It put light into his dark-blue eyes and creased his face in a way that warmed her heart. In his wading gear and fishing vest, his jet-black hair ruffled by wind, he looked all mountain man—a far cry from the sharp homicide cop in suit and tie she’d fallen so hard and fast for almost a year ago. But the words he’d spoken in the car on their drive up the island to the remote lodge sneaked back into her mind.

  She broke eye contact and returned to watching her fly, a disquiet settling into her chest. Autumn on the Nahamish—it had sounded so romantic when he’d suggested it. And their trip was designed to be just that: a romantic getaway to rekindle their relationship away from cell phones and the stresses of their respective new work commitments.

  But his words—that one question—had somehow sent everything off-kilter before they’d even arrived at the river.

  Have you ever thought about having kids?

  Angie’s line developed slack. She pulled some of it in as she’d been instructed. The water was shallow here. She could see the slime-covered stones along the river bottom. Above the stones a school of salmon carcasses held steady in the soft current. The weight of their skulls pinned the dead fish in place and kept them facing upstream as the current swung their bodies gently to and fro, making it appear as though they were still swimming. Zombie fish, Angie thought, doomed to perpetually fight their ghostly way upriver as shreds of rotting flesh peeled off their bodies. Or until they were plucked from the water by scavenging bald eagles. Or taken by bears, or the wolves that ventured down to the river’s edge at night.

  It was a ritual that played out each year as millions of chum, pinks, chinook, and coho in the Pacific Ocean were triggered by some biological cue to suddenly scent out the fresh water of the one river they were born in and to then swim into that river mouth and fight their way back to their birth home, bashing and beating themselves into shreds upon rocks and in white water. Just to spawn. To fertilize the eggs. And then die. So that the cycle could begin again.

  Angie and Maddocks weren’t angling for the aged salmon, though. They were hunting the muscled and silvery trout that swam among them. But Angie was having trouble moving mentally beyond the bloated carcasses hovering beneath their boat, the stench of dead fish washed up on the shores. This whole birth-death cycle
made her ponder the futility of it all, the merits of bashing one’s way against the currents of life just to propagate and die. It darkly underscored Maddocks’s question at every turn, and she didn’t have an answer.

  Have you ever thought about having kids?

  With quick, jerky movements, Angie started reeling her line back in.

  “You okay?” Maddocks said.

  “Fine,” she said as she came to her feet, wobbling the boat. She cast out her line one more time. “But if there is a next time, it better be someplace warmer.”

  “Come on, you love it. Admit it.”

  “Yeah, right.” She avoided his gaze by turning her attention to the second boat in their drift party. Hugh Carmanagh was the guide at the helm, his clients a long-married couple from Dallas. Seniors with the zest of teenagers. Over the past four days, Angie had witnessed the septuagenarians attacking this trip as though they were trying to bleed every last drop out of the few years they had left on this earth. Again, she wondered about the merits of it all—this gathering into your chest all these life experiences right before you kicked the bucket and went to the grave, where memories meant zip to the dead. She’d seen Maddocks watching the couple, too. She could tell from the look on his face that he was envious of them, that he perhaps wanted himself and Angie to be like that couple one day, aging together. Laughing together. Having sex in tents and fun and adventure to the very end. Making up for lost time—him for a failed first marriage, her for a traumatic past.

  But to Angie those septuagenarians just seemed desperate, like they were panicking now that they’d glimpsed the finish line. She wasn’t 100 percent certain about the future of her relationship with James, either. Right now all she wanted was to get back to the city where she could continue clocking up hours toward her full private investigator’s license. Once she had the legislated hours under her belt, she could think about opening her own agency. She was done working for assholes. She couldn’t wait to call her own shots, pick her own cases. Everything until then felt like a waste of time.

  Light faded and shadows lengthened across the water. It made the dead fish beneath the boat appear more real. Rain started to softly fall. Angie’s thoughts turned to the scalding shower and hot dinner waiting at the lodge. Plus a real bed after three nights in a tent—she couldn’t wait. Tomorrow morning, early, she and Maddocks would start the return drive to Victoria.

  “Time to pack it in,” Claire said, drawing her rain hood over her head. “Start bringing in the lines.” She reached for her radio and keyed it. “Claire for Rex, Claire for Rex.” She released the key.

  The radio crackled. “Rex here. Come in, Claire.”

  “We’re bringing in the boats. What’s your ETA with the trailer at the pullout?”

  “Almost there now.”

  “Good timing,” she said cheerily. “Light’s fading fast. See at you the pullout.”

  “Copy that. Over.”

  Claire waved to the other boat. “Yo, Hugh!” Her voice carried over the water as she made a winding motion with her hand high in the air. “Wrapping it up here. Rig’s almost at the pullout.”

  He gave a thumbs-up. His clients started bringing in their lines.

  Claire fired the motor. It coughed to life with a puff of blue smoke. But as Claire steered the boat around, Angie caught movement on the opposite bank. She squinted toward the thick line of trees, unsure of what she was seeing in the fading light and fog. It looked like a man gesticulating wildly along the bank. He had a dog at his side. Both wore blaze-orange hunting vests.

  “Whoa!” Angie yelled over the engine, shooting her hand up to stop Claire. She pointed. “What’s that over there?”

  Claire killed her motor. Silence descended once more over the river. And they heard him.

  “Help! Over here! Need help! No phone reception!”

  Quickly, Claire keyed her radio. “Hugh, do you copy? Hugh?”

  “Hugh here. Whassup, Claire?”

  “Guy on south shore. He’s calling for help. We’re heading over.”

  “Copy that. I’ll take clients to pullout. Yell if you need me.”

  She fired the engine back to life. “Sit steady!” She gave it full throttle. The boat nose lifted from the water, and they sped for the far shore, a smooth wake surging out behind them.

  As they neared, she slowed their craft. An old man hobbled hurriedly down the pebbly beach toward the water’s edge, his dog in tow. He carried a bag slung across his torso. As Claire nuzzled the prow gently against the gravelly shore, the man waded into the water and grabbed hold of the gunwale. He was breathing hard. Angie judged him to be in his late sixties. He had a big paunch, gray whiskers, and a weather-beaten face that was ruddy with cold—or from years of drinking. Or both.

  “Budge?” Claire said as she raised the back of the engine out of the water so the props wouldn’t catch the shallow bottom. “What’s going on?”

  “I . . . I—” He was seized by a bout of coughing. Releasing the gunwale, he doubled over, hands bracing on his knees as he hacked and wheezed.

  Maddocks hopped out of the boat, boots splashing into water. Angie followed suit, her waders and boots keeping her feet dry as she walked through the shallows and placed her palm on the man’s shoulder.

  “You okay, sir?” she said.

  He raised his hand, indicating he was fine as he coughed out his fit. Coming erect, he thumped his chest with his fist and cleared his throat, eyes watering. “Damn cigarettes. I got no cell reception on this side, but I saw the Predator Lodge logos on the boats, and I know you guys got radios and can relay a message back to the lodge. The folk up there can call the cops down in Port Ferris. I . . . I—” He was racked by more coughs.

  “Take a few breaths, sir. Relax a moment,” Angie said.

  He nodded, wheezing as he drew in a slow, deep breath. He came slowly upright again. “I found a body—a skeleton.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Angie took up the rear as the old-timer who’d identified himself as Jim “Budge” Hargreaves led them single-file into the darkening forest. Each held a flashlight taken from the boat, and their haloed beams bounced off shifting fog, making shadows dart and loom then vanish. Tucker the dog strained against his lead up front. Primeval ferns grew large, and water dripped everywhere as rain fell with a soft patter atop the tree canopy.

  A sound reached them. They all stilled. Even Tucker fell silent.

  It came again—a distant howl, rising in pitch then dying in a series of yips that echoed into the snow-capped hills.

  “Wolves,” Claire whispered. “They’re getting bolder. They come closer and closer to the lodge each fall.”

  Goose bumps shivered over Angie’s skin as a vestigial childhood memory stirred to life. And suddenly she was back in the forested grove where her biological father had held her and her identical twin sister captive as children. Where he’d murdered Angie’s twin and their mother. There’d been wolves on those islands where he’d imprisoned them. Angie had heard them some nights, their howls coming through the bars on their high windows. Fear curled into her; old neural responses reawakened. She fisted her hands at her sides in an effort to marshal control, to remain present. PTSD was the pits. It rose its hooded serpent head and struck when she least expected it.

  The wolves quieted. As if on cue, Tucker resumed panting and yanking on his leash to reach the human remains. Yet as they resumed their trek through the woods, Angie found her mood had shifted. A wet branch snapped back, smacking her in the face. She jumped and froze solid in her tracks.

  Breathe.

  Breathe. It’s fine.

  It’s going to be fine. Just memories. Keep moving.

  “You okay?” Claire said, turning to wait for Angie as the others continued ahead. Claire sounded cool. Composed. On familiar ground. This frustrated Angie. Not because the woman was young and naturally beautiful with thick black hair and moss-green eyes, or because she was skilled in the wilds where Angie was not, but because Angie
hated her own fear. She resented what her buried past could still do to her. She detested that she couldn’t shake this post-traumatic shit that still dogged her and probably always would.

  “How do you know Budge Hargreaves?” she asked Claire, her voice clipped as she resumed walking. The question was in part to deflect the tension she felt. As an ex–sex crimes and then homicide detective with the Metro Victoria Police Department, interrogating people had been Angie’s forte. Even though she was no longer a cop, defaulting to old police procedure at a potential crime scene was an easy coping mechanism, a way of guarding her emotions from others.

  “Everyone around here knows Budge,” Claire said. “He worked as a logger in this region for over two decades before retiring. I feel bad for him. He lost his wife in a tragic accident about twenty-six years ago and went off the rails, started drinking heavily. Sold his place in town and built a homestead in the woods just east of here on land he rents from my family. Pretty much keeps to himself now. When he’s not wandering around in the bush, you’ll find him at the Hook and Gaffe tavern in town.”

  “Your family owns parts of this forest on the south side of the Nahamish? I thought all this area inland from Port Ferris was Crown land.”

  “Big tracts of it are Crown, but we’ve got private pockets from when my great-granddad settled this area and opened a mill.”

  Up ahead Budge and Maddocks came to a stop, Tucker going nuts barking and jerking against his collar. As Angie and Claire joined them, Budge pointed his flashlight into a dim grove. “The skeleton’s in there, behind all that devil’s club growth.”