Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Then I heard a distant sound that was not the trees, or the wind. A low animal snort of exhalation and effort, from somewhere out in front of me. I stopped.

  When the sound didn’t repeat, I took a few quiet steps forward. And a few more. Far out of my sight, in the thick of the woods, something like fabric or wings rustled. I moved off the road and into the trees.

  The ground was twisted by roots and covered with leaves and moss and millions of evergreen needles. On every step I put my foot down softly. When I had gone about a hundred paces, I heard the snorting noise again.

  Definitely an animal. A large animal.

  The noise had come from my two-o’clock, off in the shaded depths of the forest. When I looked hard in that direction I could see a yard or so of angled rooftop, an unnaturally sharp edge among the branches. Kend’s cabin, almost certainly. It was another fifty yards off.

  The trees offered plenty of cover. I moved closer, taking my time. The road to my right turned sharply to lead in front of the cabin. A blue Volvo hatchback was parked off to the side.

  I was looking at the back of the place through the trees. It was maybe fifteen by twenty, more of a tiny house with wood siding than a true cabin. More sounds of movement now, from around the front. I slowly walked a wide circle, keeping my distance.

  There was another snort, and a tearing sound. My circle widened and the area in front of the cabin came into view.

  And I stopped and held very, very still.

  A black bear. It stood on all fours about ten feet in front of the cabin, its head bent low as it worked at something on the ground. It snorted again, and tugged, and moved around to get a better grip.

  And I saw what the bear was dragging.

  The half-eaten carcass of a human.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE SIZE OF it, the body was a man’s. It had hiking shoes and jeans on, and its arms were still mostly covered by blue plaid sleeves. The torso, or what was left of the torso, was red where the bear had been feeding and grayish where it hadn’t. I couldn’t see the man’s face, and considered that fact a small blessing.

  Was he Kendrick Haymes? Where was Elana?

  The bear huffed. It swung its big head around and looked out into the trees. Maybe it had caught my scent. I continued my imitation of a statue.

  I didn’t know a lot about bears. They weren’t high on the list of probable engagements in Army training. I knew they preferred to avoid people, and that they had sharp ears and even better noses, like dogs. And they hibernated. What the hell was this one doing awake in February? Maybe bears didn’t hibernate all the way until spring.

  Or maybe it had smelled something worth waking up for.

  The bear turned back to the body. After another moment, I could hear it chewing.

  The smart thing for me to do would be to turn around, double-time it back to the truck or at least to where my cell phone could get a signal. I wasn’t eager to challenge a three-hundred-pound animal eating what might be its first meal in weeks.

  But I kept thinking of Elana. Was she trapped in the cabin by the bear? Was she hurt? The door was open. No lights on inside, from the narrow sliver I could see. No smoke coming out of the chimney, either.

  The bear tugged at the corpse, tearing off strips of its plaid shirt and what might be a down vest.

  I had to see what was in the cabin. Or who.

  Hikers sometimes carried airhorns to scare off bears, or some kind of supercharged pepper sprays for really desperate situations. I didn’t have either of those things. What I really wanted was a flashbang grenade. Something that would send the bear and every other creature nearby running for the next county.

  I didn’t have that, either, but the notion got me thinking about what was in my ruck.

  Five paces behind me was a huge Douglas fir, with a trunk wide enough to conceal a whole squad. I faded back to it. Slowly, I took off the ruck and opened the pocket with the emergency kit, in a soft waterproof bag. In the kit I found three signal flares, yellow tubes about ten inches long with translucent caps, and a small roll of duct tape.

  I’d also brought a couple of three-gallon trash bags. I wadded up the mouth of one of the bags and blew into it, until it was mostly inflated, like a balloon. When I stopped I was a little dizzy from hyperventilating. A cheap high. It would have been funny, if it weren’t for what was happening at the cabin.

  I pushed a signal flare halfway into the closed mouth of the bag. With the bag inflated, its plastic was held away from the tip of the flare inside. I sealed the bag tightly around the middle of the flare’s tube with duct tape.

  When I finished my invention it looked something like a small sad beach ball. Ludicrous. But it was all I had.

  Edging around the side, I looked for the bear. It was facing away from me, pawing at the thigh of the body. There were twenty yards between us. I’d have to get closer.

  I moved slowly between trees, keeping my eyes on the animal. When I was forty feet away it snorted and lifted its head. I slipped behind the nearest tree, and heard the bear move again. It had heard me, or caught my scent. This was as close as I was going to get.

  Through the plastic of the trash bag I popped the cap off the signal flare. Got the cap turned around, and struck the sandpapery end.

  A flame bloomed instantly inside the bag, and without stopping to check it—the thing would work, or it wouldn’t—I stepped out from behind the tree and threw the flare and the already swelling balloon of the trash bag toward the cabin. The bear saw me and rose up on its hind legs with a heavy grunt.

  Both of us watched the trash bag as it landed and gently bounced. Its plastic stretched and strained rapidly.

  It exploded. A shockingly loud bang that rang my eardrums and shook a torrent of needles off the nearest trees.

  The bear wheeled and ran in the opposite direction, blowing a deep groan of what I guessed was fear. It crashed through the brush. In seconds the sound of its panicked flight faded into the distance.

  I rushed forward, stomping on the flare and crushing the flame into the earth.

  “Elana,” I yelled at the dark cabin door.

  There was nothing I could do for the man. I ran for the silent cabin. If Elana was in there, hiding, she’d be terrified. Maybe in shock.

  But even before I crossed the threshold, I knew I was too late.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SUDDEN REEK OF death at the cabin door made my throat close up in protest. Inside, I could feel the smell seep into my skin and clothes like water from a fog.

  Her body was seated at a small rough pinewood table. She had fallen forward, facedown on the table, long, brown hair draped over the unfinished planks. The back of her head was misshapen and clotted with gore. The body had bloated at some point during the past day or two. Now it was deflated again, and the skin I could see was gray, like the remains of the man outside. Blowflies buzzed into tiny cyclones as I stepped closer.

  On the drywall behind her, two wide splashes of black blood, like spread wings reaching almost to the ceiling.

  I couldn’t see her face under the shroud of hair. From the exit wounds on the back of her head, I knew I didn’t want to. But her body was long and lean. Familiar.

  The cabin was crowded with fake-rustic furniture, a table and chairs, and two double beds and a single dresser. All expensively designed to appear as though some hillbilly had chopped the pieces from raw trees, and joined them together with crude dovetails and dowels instead of hidden screws. Only a potbellied stove and battered pine cabinets looked authentic.

  A woman’s shoulder bag was on top of the dresser. In the bag was a green bandanna. I fished it out and used it to keep from leaving fingerprints as I went through the bag’s contents.

  I found a pocketbook, opened it, and saw Elana’s face, smiling up from a driver’s license photo under a clear plastic window. It wasn’t quite the face of my memory. The girlish softness had been sculpted in the past dozen years into something more defined, mo
re striking. Strong Eastern European cheekbones framing bottle-green eyes. And vibrant. That indefinable something that makes one girl hold your eye among a hundred others just as beautiful.

  Elana Michelle Coll. Twenty-seven years old. Five foot nine inches, 130 pounds, brown over green. And gone.

  God damn it, Elana.

  I edged my way around the table. Her suede blouse was heavy with crusted blood, but intact. There were two crude holes in the painted pink drywall four feet behind her chair. More blood on the chair, and the floor.

  Two shots, straight and close. A high enough caliber to go through her head and take most of it along.

  I suddenly needed to be out of the cabin. Away from the charnel-house smell.

  At the instant my boot was about to cross the threshold, I saw a spattered purple line crossing the grain of the oak floor. I stopped so abruptly to keep from stepping on it that I had to catch my fall on the doorjamb.

  It was just a thin dappling, as if from a flicked paintbrush. Blood, but not Elana’s. She was on the other side of the table. There was another flaking patch of it, just under the base of the open door. And on the floor, pushed almost against the wall by the door, lay a Glock handgun.

  I lay down to put my nose near it. The smell of burned powder in the barrel was strong enough to make out over the fog of decay.

  9mm Parabellum, I was pretty sure. Easily enough punch to be the murder weapon. And from this new sprinkling of blood, I guessed that Elana wasn’t the only victim.

  No sign of the bear outside. I walked over to check the man’s body, what there was of it. The animal had left his chest alone, finding the belly easier picking. There were no gunshot wounds on his front.

  Birds or something else had been at his face and eyes. I knelt to try and get a look at the underside of his head, where his cheek lay against the earth. His right temple was blackened, in sharp contrast with the pallor of his skin. The thick red-brown curls over his ear were fried as black and stubby as candlewicks.

  The shot had been so close, it had lit his hair on fire.

  Was it self-inflicted? I could make that fit what was here. Kend standing at the open door. Elana sitting at the table. He shoots her twice, then puts the gun to his temple. Dead so fast that he barely bleeds at all. Unlike his woman, whose wings would still be spreading on the wall when his body hit the floor.

  He had something in his front pocket. I took it out, very carefully avoiding the flecks of torn flesh. A money clip. Kendrick Haymes’s driver license was at the top of a stack of credit cards, along with maybe three hundred in cash. The photo on his license was handsome in its awkwardness, from the mop of curls to the crooked smile. I put the clip back.

  The wind kicked up a little, and the sudden icy prickle on my face and ears made me realize I was flushed. And sweating.

  Come on, Shaw. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, a lot of them worse looking than these two. I knew what to do. Take my memories of the girl, and put them in a box at the back of my mind. There would be time enough for her later.

  Had they been alone? At least two other people had been at the cabin recently, in the sports car and the dually. Had they all left before the shooting started? Or fled after it happened?

  I wondered how long Kend and Elana had been dead in the cabin, before the bear had picked up their rising scent on the wind. Long enough at least for smaller creatures to brave the interior, to get at their faces and fingers.

  Willard. I’d have to tell him. I went back inside the cabin. Maybe Haymes had kept a satellite phone, for emergencies.

  A backpack lay on the bed against the right wall, a big blue High Sierra with aluminum frame, for camping trips. It was open and half of its contents spread out messily on the bed. Men’s boxers and shirts and thick books on sports history. A yellowed copy of The Boys of Summer, and a collection of essays on boxing from the fifties. Like stuff my grandfather might have read, if he had given a damn for American sports.

  I looked under the bed. No other backpacks. Willard had said Elana only planned to be gone overnight. But there didn’t seem to be so much as a toothbrush here. Maybe Elana’s bag was still out in the Volvo.

  Kend’s cell phone lay on the bed. I picked it up with the bandanna. No signal here, of course. Before I set the phone back, I copied the numbers of the friends Kend called most often into my own phone. Somebody would have to tell them about Kend’s and Elana’s deaths. If Luce knew any of them, maybe the news would be better coming from her.

  I found Elana’s phone in her shoulder bag. Unlike Kend’s, her phone had a security lock. I didn’t want to risk fingerprints or breaking it to mess around with beating the code. Kend’s friends would have to be enough. I put it back.

  Then I looked at the table again. Elana’s head, still at rest.

  But nothing else on the table’s surface. Huh.

  I looked at the squat wood stove again. The powdery ashes fluttered into motion with a wave of my hand, imitating the panic of the blowflies. They were fresh.

  So Kend and Elana were here and alive long enough to build a fire. Kend had unpacked. But Elana hadn’t taken anything out of her shoulder bag. Not her cell phone or a book or even the bottle of water tucked neatly in the side?

  A quick check of all the cabinets and drawers didn’t turn up a satellite phone. I went outside to look at their car, and to think in the clean air.

  The Volvo was unlocked. Its interior had the look of a lot of time spent driving and eating and maybe sleeping inside. Crumpled food wrappers and T-shirts crushed into the crevices. Some back issues of women’s magazines with muddy footprints where they had slipped to the floor. In the glove compartment, under a pile of receipts and maps and paper scraps, I found the registration in Elana’s name.

  Something large had taken up all of the space in the back of the car. The rear seats were folded down, and a brown woolen blanket was shoved to one side of the trunk area, like it had been used to cover whatever had been inside. Large, and heavy, judging by the sharp rectangular dents in the nappy fabric of the trunk’s floor.

  No second backpack, though. They’d driven up here together. Kend had brought enough gear for a long weekend. Elana had only brought her shoulder bag. And left it alone.

  Something didn’t resonate. I couldn’t tell what, or why. But I wasn’t going to get any answers here. It would be dark in another hour. Already the deepening shadows around the glade made me uneasy, thinking about the bear. I had to get down the hill. And give Willard some very bad news.

  Before I retrieved my ruck, I dragged what remained of Kend back inside the cabin. It was the least I could do for the son of a bitch.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I RAN DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. Night had fallen so rapidly that it seemed to have skipped dusk altogether. I had duct-taped my Maglite to my shoulder. The stark white blaze showed me an oval-shaped fraction of the world ten feet in front me. My steps were short and choppy, but in a steady rhythm that let me coast for long sections. When the lower half of my quads started quivering threateningly, I let myself walk for a quarter-mile before starting again.

  I reached the gate at the edge of the Haymes property just before midnight. My truck was where I had left it, on the opposite side. My phone had one signal bar. I wiped trickles of icy sweat from my face while waiting for Willard to pick up.

  “That was fast,” he said. “I’m not even to Portland yet.”

  “Are you driving now?” I didn’t want him rolling his car in shock.

  Willard must have caught something in my voice that was worth an instant of hesitation before he replied. “What is it? You found her?”

  Sugarcoating the news wasn’t going to comfort anybody.

  “I found Elana. She was at the cabin. She and Kend. They’re both dead, Willard.”

  “What?” he said, as if the line had stuttered, and he’d misheard.

  “Elana is dead.”

  I heard him take a breath, almost a hum, low and under the digital static. “Th
at—” he tried. “What. What happened?”

  “I don’t know. She was shot. Willard.” It was my turn to take a breath. “There’s something else. Kend may have killed her.” When he didn’t reply I continued. “I’m about to call the cops.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down the mountain from the cabin.”

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard tires screeching in the background. I could picture Willard pulling a U-turn right over the highway divider.

  “I’ll be there in two hours,” he said. “Find out where they’re taking her. I’ll meet you.”

  He was two hundred miles away. Set on covering the distance with the accelerator stomped to the floor.

  “Willard, there’s no fixing this.”

  He had hung up.

  I DIDN’T SEE WILLARD in two hours. It was close to seven o’clock in the morning when a sheriff’s deputy named Banks and I were waiting at the emergency entrance to the main hospital in Port Angeles. Willard would be coming there to identify Elana’s body as soon as the sheriff was done talking to him.

  I’d been interviewed three times. First by the deputies who’d responded to my 911 call. Then by the sheriff, before he and one of the deputies drove off in their green county SUV, headlights pointed up the mountain toward what awaited at the cabin. Then once again, in a conference room at the National Forest Service station in the nearby town of Quilcene, with a recorder running. They wanted to make very sure they had every detail.

  Every cop I told, I could see the shock underneath their practiced poker faces. One of the deputies spoke to the other before he was completely out of earshot. Maurice Haymes’s kid, for God’s own sake.

  What I told them was 98 percent facts, 2 percent omission. I left out only that Elana hadn’t shown up to work—the cops sure as hell didn’t need to know about Willard’s card game—and I claimed that the idea to go hiking had been mine. When Willard had said his niece was in the area, I’d decided to start my weekend in the woods by dropping by Kend’s cabin to say hello.