“Thanks, Mary.”
Mary smiled happily at him. “Have a lovely visit!” she said before moving off to help another visitor. That left Cormac and Domingo regarding each other across the laminate counter, between the bins of brochures and park maps.
Native American, isn’t she? Amelia answered. There were several tribes located in this area, weren’t there?
“Hi, can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m Cormac Bennett, we spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”
She blew out what looked for all the world like a relieved breath. “Oh my God, thank you for coming.” She came around the front desk, all business. “We should go somewhere to talk.”
Bemused, he followed her out the building and across the parking lot to some kind of nature trail, marked with gravel and plastic educational signs.
“I just want to get out someplace no one will overhear. I’m already on the outs with a couple of people over this.”
“What, for calling in a supernatural consultant?”
Her answering smirk suggested she had some sense of humor. “The medical examiner is doing another round of blood tests, trying to figure out if Arty ate something poisonous that affected his digestion, so that he either couldn’t eat, or even when he ate he couldn’t absorb nutrients. Like that McCandless kid from Into the Wild? You hear about that?”
Cormac had. A suburban kid abandoned everything and fled to Alaska to live in the wild. Starved to death in a matter of weeks. The initial assumption was he’d been too stupid to hack it. Turned out, he might have eaten seeds containing some kind of toxin.
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“Arty—his name was Art Weber—was a backwoods ranger here for fifteen years. He knew what not to eat. Something else killed him.”
“You sure he didn’t just. . .pass away? He have any emotional issues?”
She gave him another look, her brow furrowed. “Starving yourself to death is a real inefficient way to commit suicide.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully.
They stopped at a rustic, rough-hewn wooden bench along the trail. A nice place to rest, for anyone who needed to rest on a half-mile circular trail. For all that the area around the visitor center and monument was crowded and noisy, they had this trail to themselves. Even noise from the freeway was muffled. The running water of a creek trickled nearby, and the underbrush was thick with birds calling.
Before sitting, Domingo took another look around. “I think something happened to Arty. Something the medical examiner’s never going to find.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know—what do you normally do in a case like this?”
“Not sure there’s ever been a case like this.”
Amelia said, We look for stories, scour the old texts for symptoms, for similarities. We examine the site and look for symbols carved or painted on the walls. We look for bits and pieces of spells that have been used up. We hope for a lead, to make scrying easier. If we don’t find a lead we scry anyway.
Amelia had a spell that woke dead bodies, so she could question them about their final moments. He was pretty sure this Arty had been dead too long to try that. He hoped.
I do have other methods. I think we should see this place, where the man died.
“Can you show me where your friend died? I’ll know more if I can have a look around.”
This must have reassured her—first that he was going to investigate, and second that he might actually be able to learn something. The tension in her shoulder slipped, and she let out another relieved breath, like she hadn’t believed he was serious. “I can take you there right now.”
She drove him in a Forest Service truck, twenty minutes up a couple of increasingly unkempt dirt roads. She had to stop and unlock a steel gate on one of them, and soon the road faded to just a couple of ruts worn into the forest.
A little further on, she finally parked, and up ahead sat the cabin. The thing was small, maybe twenty feet on a side, with a tool shed and narrow porch attached. It looked like it might have been built in the thirties, of simple plank board and a shingled roof. A stone chimney rose on one side. Cormac’s father had worked as a hunting guide and outfitter in the northern Rockies of Colorado. He’d have brought his clients to stay in places a lot like this: functional cabins with few amenities, a woodburning stove but no electricity, no plumbing to speak of. But the walls were solid and the roof stayed dry. A place like this could stay toasty warm all winter. You could live here just fine, assuming the pantry and woodpile were stocked.
Yellow caution tape wound around the outside.
Domingo carefully peeled back a length of tape and invited him onto the porch while she unlocked the front door. When the door opened in, she paused as if steeling herself, and Cormac felt it, that sense that she’d talked about on the phone, a stomach-churning wrongness. He looked around, thinking he’d be able to see something, a shimmering in the air or a shadow covering just this area of forest, the cabin, and a little space around it. But nothing looked out of the ordinary or wrong. It was all in his head, in the shiver traveling down his spine.
“You felt that, yeah?” Domingo asked.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody does. I’ve always had kind of a sixth sense—spend enough time in the woods you get a feel, you know? But I mean everyone—the cops, the coroner, everyone who came in here. They write it off as the power of suggestion. They know what happened here, they just think it’s creepy. Even though they’re all tough, experienced guys who’ve seen a lot worse than this. What is it? What’s making us feel like this?”
Magic, Amelia offered. But it’s. . .off.
Since meeting Amelia he’d encountered a lot of magic. That was where his own sensitivity came from—not any natural ability, but an instinct developed over years, like an allergy that grew worse over time. A demon might crawl out of some rift in reality and exude dread; even a benevolent magician might cast some kind of protection that produced a vague sense of ill feeling in someone who wasn’t welcome. Most of the time, it felt like little more than a tingle on the skin that faded as soon as he was aware of it.
This—the magic had already happened. Any lingering sense of it should be indistinct. A prickling of hairs and nothing more. This—
It’s like some kind of hole in the world.
Domingo seemed hesitant to enter the cabin, so Cormac pushed past her and took a look around.
The place had a sour, musty smell that indicated the man had been dead for a few days before he’d been found. That only contributed to the unconscious creeping fear tugging at his perception. A spot of movement at the edges of his vision. He looked, but nothing living was here. There should be mice in an uninhabited cabin like this. Bugs. Birds. Anything.
As Domingo said, the pantry was stocked. A set of shelves on the back wall was filled with canned food: vegetables, tuna, pasta. A couple of cupboards likely held more. Out of curiosity, Cormac opened a drawer and found a can opener, so that wasn’t the problem. He was willing to bet the propane tank outside was full enough to run the gas stove by the wall. In another corner stood a desk covered with USGS contour maps, pens, pencils, a stack of worn notebooks, binoculars, compass.
“What was he doing here?”
“Arty was a field biologist. He spent a month or so up here every summer doing wildlife surveys, maintaining trails, that sort of thing. He called it his vacation.” Her face was screwed up, her eyes shining, tears ready to fall. She scowled and looked outside. “Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. So why did this happen?”
“Where was the body?” he asked.
“On the bed. Like he just lay down and gave up.”
“He wasn’t on drugs or anything?”
“No! The blood tests came back negative. They’re running a second round of tests for plant toxins. There weren’t any signs of violence or illness.”<
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The bed where he died was a basically a cot, with a thin mattress, made up with white sheets and a government-issue-looking wool blanket, a single pillow. The pillow still held a depression, a crease where a head might have lain. The blanket had been smoothed out.
He knelt, looked under the cot, and found two things: a jackknife, blade open and ready to use, but then dropped, discarded. And a piece of bone, smooth and flattened, probably part of a rib. It was just a couple of inches long, so no telling what it came from.
I’ve no idea what those mean.
Might not have meant anything. Guy dropped his knife. He was a biologist, so the bone might have been a sample he brought in and lost track of. It was smooth, bleached. If it had been magical, part of a spell maybe, it would have had something written or carved into it. He set them on the table, and wondered if the cops had missed the items, or figured they weren’t important.
He held the knife up. “Ms. Domingo, that look like Weber’s knife?”
“Yeah, that’s his.” She stood with her arms tightly crossed, unhappy. “He always had it with him. Where’d you find it?”
“Under the bed.”
Her brow furrowed, maybe thinking what he was: it didn’t make sense, but it also didn’t not make sense. Both the knife and the bone might have just fallen out of his pocket.
Look around, Amelia said. There must be something more here.
He let his vision go soft. He might miss something, so Amelia had to be present, slipping into his eyes, occupying not just his mind, but his body. She had knowledge and skills, but needed physicality to use them. She would see the magic where he might not.
Domingo wouldn’t know the difference. She’d see Cormac standing in the middle of the cabin, turning slowly, studying the walls, the roof beams, the furniture, the floor. She wouldn’t see Amelia looking through his eyes.
Anything? he murmured inwardly.
Let’s try something else.
They’d been doing this long enough that he knew what came next. Before she could instruct him, he drew thread and iron nail from the pocket of his jacket. He unrolled the thread, held the end of it so the nail hung in perfect balance, a compass needle pointing at random. He whispered the words she told him.
Hard to notice at first, if the thing moved or not. The gentle swaying it displayed, shifting left, then right, then back, came from its own natural movements, a draft in the air, or maybe the tiny vibrations of blood pumping through the capillaries of his fingertips. Dowsing alone was inconsistent, unreliable. But then Amelia whispered words that gave the iron purpose. If magic had been cast here, the nail’s point would show the direction it came from.
The thread trembled; Cormac tried to hold his hand especially still, but this was the trouble with physicality: the more you thought about holding still, being quiet, breathing slow, the harder controlling yourself got. Movement amplified.
Vibrations traveled down the thread, shuddered through the nail—which swung to point straight down.
Interesting, Amelia declared. I said it felt like a hole. But this is some kind of vortex. There’s a pull here.
Is there still a danger? he thought to her.
I’m not sure.
He suddenly wanted to get the hell out of here.
What’s next? Cormac prompted.
We need to have a very good look around, said Amelia. Not just here. The whole area. To see if this is happening anywhere else. And to see why anyone would want to target this cabin over anywhere else.
“Could Weber have done it to himself?”
I wouldn’t have thought so—this isn’t the cabin of someone magically inclined. But. . .we can’t discount the possibility.
“You found something?” Domingo sounded hopeful.
Cormac shook his head. “Not sure. Need to look around some more, I think.”
“Will this happen again or is it a one-time thing? How worried do I need to be?”
I don’t know, Amelia admitted.
Maybe this was just about Art Weber. Maybe he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe this was a one-and-done. Cormac’s silence was answer enough—he was worried.
“I’ll call you the minute I have something,” he said.
They stepped back outside, and the sun seemed bright, and the air clean. The death and uncertainty, that creeping primal fear, was closed up in the cabin. Cormac suppressed a shudder.
There isn’t much that frightens you like this, Amelia said.
Frightened might have been a strong word for it. But she was right—he didn’t like it. Usually when he felt something off, he could tell what it was. He could at least make a guess and start hunting. He’d faced down werewolves, vampires, demons, ghosts— This was like water coming through the roof and he couldn’t find the leak.
We’ll find it. Her optimism could be annoying sometimes. She didn’t have physical skin to feel the gooseflesh, or hair on the back of her neck.
As he and Domingo walked back to her truck, another truck pulled in behind them, a basic Chevy pickup ten or so years old. Maybe another Park Service official, Cormac thought, until Domingo groaned with annoyance.
“God, not again,” she muttered.
A man in his forties climbed out of the truck and marched to intercept Domingo, fists clenched and eyes glaring. He was a white guy with thinning hair, wearing a rumpled button-up shirt, khakis, and hiking boots. An outdoors type. He gave Cormac a brief once-over and frowned. All his attention was on Domingo.
“Annie. What’s going on? They tell me the area’s still restricted.”
Domingo reclaimed a professional demeanor, standing tall and relaxed, speaking evenly. “Mr. Peterson, hello. We can’t open that area until we get the okay, and we haven’t gotten it yet.”
“Then it’s true, that you won’t let the police close the investigation?”
“It’s not up to me one way or another.”
“You just don’t want me here anymore. You don’t want me to continue my work, to finish my book—”
Domingo waited with apparent patience, as if she’d heard all this before. Finally, Peterson’s rant landed on Cormac.
He pointed. “—And who is this? I suppose you’re going to tell me he’s part of the investigation? More like some buddy you brought in to gawk—”
The ranger’s job might not allow her to step on this guy, but Cormac didn’t have to take this. He stepped forward, stuck his hand out, and grinned aggressively. “Hey, name’s Cormac, and you are. . .Peterson? Just Peterson?”
The man blinked, nonplussed, and reflexively took Cormac’s hand. His grip was hesitant and he let go quickly.
“Elton. Elton Peterson.”
“Elton, yeah, good meeting you.” Cormac could be as backwoods amiable as Andy Griffith when he needed to be. Best part, it threw people off when they noticed his eyes weren’t smiling. “As a matter of fact, Ms. Domingo here did ask me to come in and help with the investigation. You seem to think you know this area pretty well—you notice anything off around here over the last couple of weeks? Anything suspicious?”
The guy took a minute to stare, probably wondering if Cormac was for real. Cormac just smiled back at him with the patience of a rock.
Peterson shook his head quickly and looked away. Gritting his teeth, like he was trying to keep from shouting. “No, I didn’t notice anything. I thought it was just an accident, the police said it was an accident, and it’s very sad but I need to get back to my research—”
“You said you’re writing a book?” Cormac prodded.
“I’m a historian. I’m writing about the Donner Party.”
“Huh,” Cormac said. “Seems like there can’t be that much more to tell about the Donner Party. Folks have been writing books about it for a hundred and fifty years.”
“Everyone thinks that. There’s always more to say. And I’ve found something. I’m telling you, I know more about what happened than anyone, just wait—” He clamped his mouth
shut, glared. Tried again. “And what exactly is your expertise?”
“Oh, nothing special, I’m just having a general look around.”
Domingo stood back to watch this exchange, considering Cormac with particular interest.
Peterson simmered. “Oh yeah?” the historian shot back. “And what do you think happened here?”
Cormac shrugged offhand. “I’m not at liberty to say until the authorities close the investigation.”
Peterson glared one last, fuming look before storming off. Out of the corner of his eye, Cormac saw Domingo hiding a smile.
“You didn’t close that gate behind us on the way up, did you?” he said, his voice turned flat again.
She sighed. “No, I didn’t. He must have passed by and seen it open. Like a big welcome mat. Arty was able to get him banned from the park entirely for awhile. He was hiking all over the backwoods without a permit, disrupting wildlife surveys. Whew, you should have seen the guy blow his gasket then. But Peterson took it to court, got the ban rescinded, and now here he is.”
“Who all has a key for that gate at the end of the road? Does Peterson?”
“No, but that hasn’t stopped him from parking and hiking up. The sheriff’s office has one, most of the emergency services have a master key, the rangers, the handful of people who own cabins up here.”
“So it’s not hard to get past that gate.”
“No. It’s mostly there to discourage tourists, not to really close off the area.”
Good to know. “What’s Peterson’s real story?”
“Just what he says. He thinks he’s going to tell the real story of the Donner Party, like everyone else.”
“And what’s the real story, that they ate each other or they didn’t?”
“It’s what happens when you put a few dozen people in a pressure cooker. You know something’ll pop, but nobody really agrees on how.”
He looked around at the trees, at the bright blue sky beyond them. Chickadees were calling in the branches. “Yeah, sounds about right,” he said. “And Peterson thinks he has a new ‘how,’ does he?”
“He won’t tell anyone what it is. Doesn’t want anyone stealing his idea.”
Dark Divide: A Cormac and Amelia Story Page 3