Sticks and Stones

by Michael Hiebert

  Boughs of sumac on either side of her reached up and across, intertwining above her in a knotted canopy of branches and leaves. What little sunlight they allowed fell dustily through the open spaces, bright pockets of green in a shadowy darkness.

  A thorny thicket of mayhew grabbed at the side of her pants, pulling her back until she freed herself, pricking her finger in the process. “Damn!” she whispered. Putting her finger into her mouth, she sucked it until the bleeding stopped.

  In places, the trail closed in on itself, overgrown elm and underbrush squeezing into the path, leaving Leah little choice but to blindly push her way through all the limbs and leaves until, eventually, the trail opened up again. And always, the smell of wet woodlands, everything still damp from all the rain.

  She came to an old rotted log lying in her way. Carefully, she stepped on top of it, breaking the soft wood against the sole of her boot. Her leg fell inside the log. It came down heavy and it was painful. She kicked her other foot forward so it landed behind the log and she managed to clamber over it without stumbling.

  But her shin hurt like a son of a bitch.

  The trail wasn’t straight. At times, it veered to the left, and other times it curved hard to the right. Leah wished she could see the sun so she’d have some idea which direction she was headed. She wanted to know she was still on course for the Anikawa River.

  She took another five steps and then, from somewhere off to her left, a twig snapped.

  She froze, her hand reaching down and unclipping her gun from its holster. She pulled the weapon and held it away from her body with both hands. Squinting, she tried to peer through the foliage, but the tangle of branches and leaves and chaparral blocked anything from sight.

  Something had made that noise.

  She went a little farther, her few steps silenced by the velvety leaves scattered on the brown soil, and found a place where the wood thinned and the path widened.

  Her fingers tightly gripped the gun’s handle, and she had the barrel pointed at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground.

  She still couldn’t see what had made the noise. It was probably a goddamn squirrel, she thought and took another step. That was when she heard it again. Another snap. This one closer.

  She tensed. A rivulet of sweat ran from her hair down her face. Her heart pounded in her head as she adjusted her stance to get a better view of the direction she thought the sound had come from.

  Then, somewhere behind the tangle of branches and leaves beside her, something moved. She saw it in the corner of her eye. A branch shook, or something. She wasn’t exactly sure what she had seen, but whatever it was, it was big. A lot bigger than some GD squirrel.

  Her heart pounded behind her eyes. Her adrenaline kicked into high gear. Dropping into a crouch, she waited, staring at the tapestry of forest, listening for more sound. A ways off, the Anikawa babbled and burbled. Mixed with that, the ubiquitous song of the cicadas rode gently on the light wind.

  Leah’s eyes searched the scrub of woods where she’d seen movement, but saw nothing. “What the hell was it?” she whispered to herself.

  Inside her chest, her heart continued thumping faster and harder than usual. She let go of her gun’s grip with her left hand and pulled up the front of her shirt, using it to wipe sweat from her eyes. Then her hand went back to join the other as she readjusted her grip on her revolver.

  She counted down from sixty, and still nothing had moved again.

  “You’re going crazy,” she whispered.

  She stood up and started to take another step when it happened. From right beside her, a doe burst from the mess of brambles and trees, bending boughs and snapping branches. Leaves fell in the deer’s wake, coming down on the trail’s floor.

  Her heart in her throat, Leah swung her gun around and sighted the deer on reflex. Her trigger finger tightened, and she nearly peeled off a round before realizing what she had in her aim. The deer landed almost directly in front of her and, after regarding her for a half second, fled down the path the same direction she was headed in a flurry of mulch and hooves.

  After a few deep breaths, Leah’s panic subsided and her pulse went back to normal. She clipped her gun back into its holster and again used her shirt to wipe sweat from her face and neck.

  She continued following the trail, seeing the fresh hoofprints embedded into the loamy ground where the doe had dug deeply into the soil. Those tracks went on a good hundred yards before bounding off the edge of the path back into the dense forest.

  The trail continued to swerve left and right as Leah walked, but the turbulent water of the Anikawa kept growing louder. She was headed generally in the right direction.

  When the forest finally broke, she found herself on hard clay that ran along each side of the ravine cut by the Anikawa. The ravine was deep, probably thirty feet if you counted the depth of the river, and it spanned maybe thirty feet from bank to bank. The river was high and fast, as Leah had expected. The waves cresting in the current couldn’t have been more than ten, maybe fifteen feet down, filling up at least half the gorge.

  Sunlight glimmered and winked in the cascading water, nearly blinding Leah, whose eyes had become accustomed to the dimly lit forest. Shading her face with the cup of her hand, she tried to get her bearings. She had expected to come out across from Painted Lake, an open body of water surrounded by a rocky black and gray beach, but all she saw now across the flume was more woods, only these looked even more dense than the ones she’d just come through.

  A worried sigh escaped her lips. Her watch read 9:05. Only three hours left until her opportunity to catch the killer came to a close. She didn’t have time to be lost.

  She thought about the layout of the eastern edge of the Anikawa, which was the area she’d picked to search. She reckoned she must have come out of the forest farther east than she expected, since the remainder of the land wasn’t nearly as wooded. Her eyes followed the gurgling and grappling course of the river as it rushed around boulders and splashed against rocks, sometimes pouring in little falls over slate edges, sometimes pooling into little eddies, but all the while racing toward the Mississippi, taking anything in its current not rooted down with it.

  “If he threw you in here,” Leah whispered, “I ain’t never gonna find you. You might not even be in Alvin anymore.”

  She could only see maybe another three hundred yards before the river took a soft left. That was where she expected the tree line to open up to the beach wrapping Painted Lake.

  She began walking the edge of the river, following it west to where it bent. Here the water was even louder as it roiled around the bend, tossing water up against the ravine’s smooth, curved edge that splashed back down on huge rocks. She followed the edge, twisting through a large S shape before continuing on eastward. With each step she made, the sun seemed to grow hotter.

  Again, she wiped away sweat that had dripped into her eyes.

  Keeping an even pace, she went as fast as she could without missing something. Always, she looked and listened for the slightest hint of something awry. She didn’t know what she expected to hear, especially with the clamorous sounds of the river.

  She turned out to be right, and shortly after walking through the bend, the forest on the other bank thinned and finally came to an end on the rocky beach of Painted Lake. The still water reflected the morning sun like a mirror, its light broken into tiny ripples along the penumbra.

  A wooden footbridge constructed from rope and planks ran from one end to the other, sagging in a parabolic shape. It was old and, in places, looked rotted. Leah looked ahead where the river continued as far as she could see without any other means of crossing. The forest she just came out of ran right along with it.

  She saw no point in searching the woods. In three hours, she couldn’t possibly go through even 5 percent of it. If the killer had left her in there, there wasn’t much she could do. So she had to assume that wasn’t where the body would be left. Besides, the only vehic
le access to the Anikawa was Garner Road, a narrow artery of gravel and dirt that came down from Tucker Mountain and led not only to Bob Garner’s ranch, but also the other side of the Anikawa and to Painted Lake.

  Odds were, if the killer wanted to dump the body as quickly as possible, it would be somewhere on the other side of the river. Along with the river and the lake, there was also Skeeter Swamp, a consideration that cast a black and bitter shadow over Leah’s heart.

  The thought of the swamp immediately switched pictures in her mind. Suddenly, she was back in time two years ago when the Cornstalk Killer was nabbing fourteen-year-old girls out of the town. Then her mind went even further back to the first incident of the Cornstalk Killer a dozen years earlier. Ruby Mae Vickers. Leah had promised her ma that she’d find her girl and bring her back safe and sound. But she hadn’t. Instead, she found her body by Skeeter Swamp beneath the boughs of the willow tree growing between the swamp and Garner’s Ranch. Leah hadn’t kept her promise, and the Vickers family got back a daughter who was irreparably broken.

  Leah never got over that case. That swamp and that willow still gave her nightmares. Especially the willow.

  She didn’t relish the thought of having to search either of them, yet she had picked this area on her own volition. Had she subconsciously set things up so they forced her to face her fears? She didn’t know.

  At any rate, time was running out, and she was stalling because her next task was to cross this wooden bridge where, fifteen feet below, the river smashed and licked huge jagged boulders thrusting up from the running water like giant teeth waiting to be fed.

  She put one careful foot on the bridge. It immediately began to sway. Closing her eyes, Leah took a deep breath and took another step, trying to keep from trembling because trembling only made the bridge pitch even more. She couldn’t help it, though. Her legs quivered involuntarily, nearly buckling her at the knees, and she continued taking little step after little step.

  When Leah made it to the middle of the bridge, its lowest point, the river spat and spewed up at her, nearly reaching the planks of wood she stood on. The thunderous roar of the breakers hitting the rocks in a gush of whitecaps nearly deafened her. Her legs stopped convulsing and fell numb. Fear fell over her. She was too scared to move.

  She shifted her stance slightly and a rotten piece of plank broke off beneath her boot, leaving a gap big enough for her to watch its complete fall until the Anikawa swallowed it from sight.

  “Okay,” she said. “Come on. Pull yourself together. You have to get through this.”

  After a few deep breaths, she managed another step. Then another.

  She was halfway up the other side of the bridge when another rotted piece dislodged from a plank beneath her boots, sending it tumbling into the river’s watery depths. This time, she stumbled and, for a moment, thought she would fall. In that instant, the sounds of the river raging beneath her went away, along with everything else. For that moment, everything stopped and became silent as she dropped into a squat and put her hands out, one in front of her, one behind her, and steadied herself on the wooden planks.

  Fear and adrenaline tingled as they coursed through her. The sound of the Anikawa came back, more fierce than ever. “Okay,” she whispered, “that was close.”

  Slowly and cautiously, she rose back onto her feet and managed to make her way up the rest of the bridge.

  Her legs felt like chewing gum when she finally stepped onto the shore of Painted Lake. Somewhere out on the water, she heard a fish jump, flipping back in with a splash. Searching the lake would have to wait, though. She wanted to walk the full length of her area down the edge of the river. After that, she would search deeper.

  From this side, oddly, the river wasn’t as loud and it mixed with the cicadas chirping from wherever they were hidden. She walked the river to the end of Painted Lake and still had found nothing. A copse of elm, oak, maple, and pine blocked all but the edge of Skeeter Swamp, and she was happy for it. The small wooded area was a tangle of trees, strangler fig, and thorny vines. She tried to give it a quick search but couldn’t find a path. Without one, it was nearly impenetrable.

  She followed the river farther, the copse of trees continuing along her left side until it ended at the shallows of Bullfrog Creek, a small tributary that formed a little kidney-shaped pond out behind the marshland and moor of Skeeter Swamp.

  She walked down the creek a ways, trying to find an easy way over. This time there was no footbridge. There were, however, big, smooth stones rising from the shallow creek’s surface. She found a place where they more or less formed a walkable path from one side of the creek to the other. As carefully as she could, Leah hopped from one stone to the next, slipping only once, but managing to get nothing but her boot wet. After braving the footbridge across the Anikawa, this was a no-brainer.

  At just after ten, she decided she’d spent enough time scouring the edges of the river. With two hours left, she needed to widen her investigation. Skeeter Swamp and that willow loomed close. She could almost hear the slip of a dark voice calling out to her, asking her to come and return to this place where all her bad dreams came from.

  She forced the voices to quiet as she walked around the chaparral and through the glade that opened onto the moor around the swamp. A blue and red dragonfly nearly flew right into Leah’s face and she had to bat it away.

  Between the huge cypresses lining its edge, Skeeter Swamp appeared deceptively passive. Deceptive because she knew damn well that beneath the green, murky water lurked dozens of gators. She’d had to wade into this swamp once in her life, and that was once way too much. She had no plans on searching that brackish fen today.

  She approached the edge of the swamp, walking across the wet marshland, ever wary for gators. Her gun on her hip was holstered but not clipped. If she needed it, she could have it in a jiffy. As she got close to the swamp’s edge and saw the willow tree on the small hill across from it, a strange combination of emotions swept through her. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Fear? Not quite. Regret? Closer. Guilt? Yes. But, likely, all three.

  She searched around the cypress that towered from their fluted trunks, their boughs like the gnarled fingers of some giant hand all draped with Spanish moss. She looked into the nooks that formed between them where their roots split and intermingled, and also around the shallows of the swamp where the trees dug into the water’s edge, clamping themselves in place.

  She found nothing.

  With a heavy heart, she moved on to the willow, the base of its trunk coming into view as she ascended the gentle rise. She had half-expected to find another dead girl propped up beneath it, her vacant eyes pleading to Leah, asking why she wasn’t saved.

  This was the nightmare she lived through continually. It haunted her at least once a week.

  Instead of a dead girl, she found only fresh flowers scattered around the willow’s base. Pansies. Pink and blue.

  She knew where the flowers came from. And that thought just brought more guilt and shame along with it.

  The Cornstalk Killer case had been a bad one. Bad enough that she almost hung up her badge for good. She still remembered the writing on the tombstone: DREAM WITH LITTLE ANGELS.

  She headed across the glade, back toward Painted Lake, her eyes probing the area for any sign of a body as she went. The dirt here was hard and grassy with the odd thicket of shrubs. Another copse of trees, this one much smaller than the other and mostly consisting of maples, stood between her and the river. Leah checked them out, but found nothing.

  The smooth stones covering the beach of Painted Lake crunched beneath her boots as she started searching around the water. She hadn’t gone even twenty yards when she thought she heard something over the chorale of cicadas and the far-away swooshing sounds of the Anikawa.

  She stopped walking and listened more closely, but whatever it was she’d heard was gone. Cupping her ear with her hand, she strained to pick out even the quietest of sounds from all
the background noise.

  Then she heard it again. The same sound. Only, this time, there was no question what it was she heard.

  Again, her adrenaline and her heart kicked into high gear. From somewhere down the river from where she now stood, she’d heard the distinctive click of a car door being closed. There were only three places a car could be, and she could see two of them, those being the front of the Garners’ house and the hard-packed area just behind her that butted up against the shores of Painted Lake.

  The third was hidden from view behind the large copse of trees that was so dense and convoluted she was unable to search it. She knew what it looked like, though. A small dirt road split off from Garner Road before it led to where Bob Garner’s farmhouse nestled among a bed of smooth stones on one side and a gentle slope of land on the other. That small road continued toward the edge of the Anikawa, fanning out into a dusty steppe ornamented by the occasional clutch of witchgrass and other weeds. This plain rolled out a fairly large area and snuggled right up against the river’s southern bank.

  What she just heard could only mean one thing. Someone had pulled right up to the river and opened and closed a vehicle door at least twice, which probably meant two different doors. Or perhaps the second one was a trunk, or a tailgate.

  It didn’t matter. It all meant the same thing.

  As fast as her feet would take her, Leah ran back across the glade the way she had come, pounding the ground with her boots. She didn’t even think of the evils of Skeeter Swamp as she hit the edge of the marshland, her feet digging into the moist, soft ground even as her boots sank into it. The morass slowed her, so she pushed harder, coming out of the swamp area just this side of the small wooded area that ran between her and the dusty plain, where she now heard a vehicle engine idling.