by Alex Dolan
Some chittery bird outside the window woke me up in the morning. My joints hurt. My thigh was knotty and tender where the needle had stuck me. I shambled downstairs to pee and stumbled into the hallway bathroom. The Moons weren’t up yet, and the toilet rim was smeared with my stomach dross. I polished it clean with one of the towels.
My hair frizzed in the mirror, as much as my capellini locks could. Someone had washed the paint off my face, although blue crusts shadowed under my ears. I was wearing a loose FBI T-shirt and track pants that I had to cinch so they wouldn’t fall. When I stripped down, I found that most of my body was still covered in blue paint. No one had scrubbed my body while I was out. I was happy about that.
The paint came off fairly easily in the shower, but it still took a while before I felt I’d cleaned all the blue off my body. When I was finished, I put on the T-shirt and jeans they had brought from Bernal.
Leland waited in the kitchen for me. He sat on a stool where a counter divided the kitchen and dining room, blowing steam off coffee in faded FBI sweats. I sat on the other side of the counter.
“Made you breakfast.” He slid a bowl full of dry cereal across the counter. My heart forgot to beat. “It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got this morning. Skim milk all right?” Milk in my cereal. I breathed again. I nodded, and he poured from the carton and slid a spoon and napkin in place. “You a coffee person?”
“Today I am.” He poured a cup for me in a Cal mug, and I stirred it with milk and sugar. “How long was I out?”
“Most of a day.”
“So only a day.”
I could have wolfed down the cereal, but restrained myself. I began to recall everything that happened the day before. “We killed a man, didn’t we?”
“It was ruled that Walter Gretsch had a coronary arrest in his cell. The prison officially found him in the morning.”
“Is that the end of it?”
“The death of a sexual predator in prison doesn’t earn much speculation. San Sebastián will cremate him tomorrow. Helena will claim the remains, I’m sure.” While this didn’t completely ease my conscience, it assured me I was safe from criminal investigation.
I ate while Leland talked. “You sad he’s dead?”
I shook my head and wiped milk off my chin. “I’m sad I was the one who did it.”
“It shouldn’t have happened like that,” he said. At first I thought he might have been blaming me for Walter’s death, and then I realized that this was as close to an apology as I’d get from him.
“We frightened that man to death.”
“If he was scared going out, that’s some kind of justice.”
I said, “If his information doesn’t lead to anything, there won’t be another chance.”
“Then we’ve done as much as we can. That’ll have to be good enough. All this has to stop sometime.” This was a new sentiment from Leland. Something felt different in his tone. Walter Gretsch’s death might have been his call-it-quits moment. Even if we didn’t find the rest of the children, maybe the death itself would serve as some sort of closure.
Around when I saw the bottom of the coffee mug, cars cranked their parking brakes outside the house. From the counter we could see across the house and out the living room windows. People piled out of cars, and I recognized their faces from the party.
He said, “You don’t need to be here for this. You can go home if you want, or sleep it off upstairs. But we’re going to find the garden today.”
I wasn’t necessarily feeling up for seeing anyone, but I didn’t feel like sleeping, and it was a bad time for me to bail on those people. Casually, they breezed in through the front door. Some of them even brought their dogs, which sniffed the wood flooring entrance to exit. Roused by the noise, Tesmer shuffled out in sweats. She patted me on the back as she drifted past us to greet them. Emmanuel sprinted to the front door to sniff the dogs.
Within the next quarter hour, the house was filled with thirty people. Excited people. They beamed when they saw me and introduced themselves. I recalled some of their last names from Leland’s files. Then Cindy Coates gaited into the house and threw her arms around me. She said, “You did something we couldn’t.”
Veda emerged, looking exhausted. Cindy waved at him, so he shuffled toward us. The guests gave him booming “Good mornings” as he cut through the crowd, and he rolled his eyes at most of them. I hoped the shower had washed off all of Walter’s smell. I smelled myself, and I smelled strongly of bottled botanicals. When Veda got close, he said without emotion, “So Walter’s dead. Did he go down peaceful like your other patients?”
“The opposite of that.”
This seemed to give him a glimmer of satisfaction, but it didn’t improve his overall sourness. “Bet you think you’re a hero.”
“Anything but,” I said.
“So, you think you’re part of the family now?” he asked.
“Don’t get like this, not today,” Cindy said. She reached for his hand and urged him, “Come with us today.” I didn’t know if it was a good idea for Veda to join the search, nor did I know if I wanted to spend any more time with him.
“To find dead girls? How the hell could I miss it?” Some people scowled when they overheard him. Instead of contrition for his insensitivity, he puffed up like someone starting a bar fight. “What?”
Cindy reached around his back and placed her hand on top of all the four-prong scars. Then she tilted his head and kissed him softly on the lips. I hadn’t realized they were a couple until that moment. Veda didn’t kiss back so much as let himself be kissed. He let her lean on him like a koala wrapped around a eucalyptus. When she held him long enough, her touch had a tranquilizing effect.
• • •
We packed into several cars, and our caravan drove though the Oakland Hills until we reached Redwood Regional Park. I rode with Leland and Tesmer in the lead car. Veda drove with Cindy. It was still early enough that the trails wouldn’t be crammed with hikers and mountain bikes, and we weren’t even headed to the main park entrances. Early in the morning, fog blanketed the Oakland Hills, and where the highway let out, the air was a milky vapor between the spectral silhouettes of trees. Pinehurst Road snaked around the perimeter of the park, and we crawled around the turns until we leveled out at the top of the hills. “There it is,” Leland said. He spotted a small white sign, which marked our distance at 1.37 miles from the start of Pinehurst. The three black letters were stacked vertically, and the decimal point was barely visible. “One thirty-seven.”
We parked at a turnoff just past it. As we piled out, I noticed we were above the fog line. The vast park sprawled down through a steep descent into a gully carpeted by trees. From where we stood, the woodland stretched as far as we could see, with the fog nestled in the ravine. I couldn’t hear other cars, and it was hard for me to fathom that downtown Oakland’s modest bouquet of high-rises stood less than fifteen minutes away.
Despite what the name might indicate, the park wasn’t just a redwood forest. The woods grew wild with a variety of trees and brush. The brambly branches hid the landscape from our gang of thirty, who marched up and down the road along the 1.37 mile marker for some time until a woman in a flannel top shouted, “Found it!”
A screen of leafy brush had hidden the trailhead. The woods grew thick and tangled just a few feet in. Moss and lichens coated the trunks, and ferns and garroting vines filled in the spaces between the trees. A post marking the trail had possibly stood where there was now a hole as wide as my boot sole. Any signposts had been uprooted. We surrounded Leland as he looked over a map of the area. “It’s not even on here,” he said.
We walked single-file behind Leland, all of us lugging stuffed backpacks. I didn’t even know what was in mine. He counted his paces aloud and shortened his strides so they might match Walter’s. None of us spoke, and I listened to birdcalls and twig snaps as I performed the same count in my head.
“Ninety-seven,” Leland announced. “Ninety-seve
n paces in.” The trail had been flat so far, and aside from the two downed trees we needed to throw our legs over, it had been an easy walk. From that point, the path hooked to the right and began a steep climb, so it felt like were at a proper stopping point. Because of Helena’s leg, Walter wouldn’t have taken her up the grade.
Leland walked down the column of people and examined the plants along the edge of the dust and rock path. He struck to the side where the path sharply descended into the gully. This wasn’t a cliff, but the grade didn’t seem walkable either.
“Here,” Leland said. He crouched by a pine trunk, and I was close enough to see what caught his attention. The bark of the trunk had worn away in a ring by the base, leaving a few horizontal abrasions as if sawed and abandoned by the laziest of lumberjacks. “See here? Someone could have tied something around this.” He pantomimed holding a rope that would have knotted around this trunk, and then drew a line in the air across the trail. “It would have run across the path here, and then down the slope…here.” He crouched on the other side of the path and pointed at a few faint tread marks in the earth from where a rope had dug into the soil. “Walter would have tied his sled to this tree, run the rope over here, and lowered a body once it was tied to the sled. Then he would have pulled the sled up and lowered Helena down. Then he could have gone down himself, holding onto the rope to steady himself on the descent. Let’s unpack.”
He walked behind me and unzipped my backpack, pulling out a bundle of rope. Light, red, and banded like a kingsnake. The pack had been heavy, but not heavy enough to contain some sea-soaked coil of wharf hawser. The two men wrapped and knotted the red rope around the same tree Walter Gretsch had chosen and threw the cord over the hillside. Leland descended first. Royce followed, then me, and then Tesmer.
“Take it slow,” Leland cautioned us. “And watch for critters.”
“Critters?”
“Snakes. Bugs.” He meant spiders too, I was sure of it. Strangely enough, the idea of running into a spider didn’t bother me then. As I scaled down the slope, I kept my eyes on my boot tips and anything immediately surrounding it.
The angle wasn’t so steep that I felt like I was repelling off a cliff face, but the rope definitely steadied me. On the way down, I brushed away stray branches, and the vines scratched my arms. I kept a steady pace so Tesmer wouldn’t slide on top of me. Because I was so close to Leland, I could hear him call out observations to Royce and the rest of us. “Look here. Someone dug in with a foot.” When I passed, the indentation was obvious. I put my own toe in it. I wondered how many years it had been since people had made this descent.
Like an ant procession, we clambered down the slope through the trees and brush until the terrain leveled out. The land challenged inexperienced hikers in the group. An older man with wobbly legs stepped sideways, fiddler crab-style, to traverse the brush and still managed to fall on his butt. The dogs scrambled the way they would paw down a flight of stairs. The descent was probably sixty feet, and it took a while for all of us to get down. I marveled at how Cindy made it down with in a sneaker and a prosthetic, something more like a metal tibia and not the running blade. Veda followed her, morose. When Cindy reached for his hand, he wouldn’t hold it.
“There,” said Leland, pointing to an aisle of ground where the weeds flattened out compared to the rest of the brush. Kneeling to examine the brush, he pointed to areas where some of the branches had been snapped. “He cut it back a little so Helena could walk it.”
Forming a line on either side of what might have been an unkempt trail, each of us stood within arm’s reach of the next person, walking through the forest in an approximation of a grid search. Rounding crooked trees and stepping through the growth on the forest floor, we looked for anything that stood out among the leaves and dried needles. Several of us stooped to examine inconsistencies, such as a stick that looked like a bone, but none of us found anything. Eventually, the shrubs stopped, and the ground was matted with crisp orange leaves atop a stratum of decomposed sludge.
I didn’t know what to look for. The last child would have been buried twelve years ago, so we were looking for inconsistencies in the soil after twelve seasons had layered the gorge with moss and pine needles. Leland seemed to doggedly follow the path where feet might have trod. Those with dogs let the canines lead on their leashes, sniffing at everything.
At the back of the line, Veda complained to Cindy, not for our benefit, but loud enough for the rest of us to hear. No one else was talking, and voices carried in the woods. He said, “You think we’re going to find something? You think it’s going to fix anything if we do?” Cindy didn’t reply. She knew people were listening.
I was next to Tesmer, and whispered to her, “Do you think he’s right?”
“I think he’s earned the right to a dissenting opinion,” she said.
I tried to imagine coming across the body of someone I loved. In particular, I imagined what it would have been like to discover my mother in the cinders. The girls we were looking for would have been skeletonized by now. If we found someone, we wouldn’t even know who she was without testing. I wondered whether unidentifiable remains would lessen the shock for the families. I suspected this kind of discovery wasn’t something you could ever prepare for. Speaking as someone who had to cope with a murder in the family, you never get over something like that. You’re just graced with the ability to push it out of your mind from time to time.
Veda said, “Seriously, what do you think this will give them?” A few people looked over their shoulders and gave Veda hateful looks.
Cindy murmured, “Then they’ll know.”
“Knowledge is power,” Veda snarked. His irreverence was getting on my nerves. In a different place I might have slapped the shit out of him. He was the only child who came away from Walter and Helena with his life and his legs.
“Here,” said Royce. He rushed to a tree trunk and pointed out something to Leland. I saw it shortly after. Four small lines had been carved into the tree, as if someone had raked a sharp fork through the bark.
This discovery sent a ripple of emotion through the group. Many let out deep sighs, some out of worry and others out of relief that we were on the right trail. A few of the couples among us held each other, and eyes watered as we realized we were getting closer.
Leland scanned the forest until he found the next one. “There.” An identical carving etched into a trunk twenty feet ahead of us.
Like a slalom course, Walter had carved out markers on the outsides of the path, first to the left, then to the right. Once we knew what we were looking for, we plodded forward more deliberately.
We came to the portion of the forest where the redwoods started. They grew tall and straight, just like at Jeffrey Holt’s cottage. We came to a creek bed that had dried to mud. My boots barely sank into it. “I think we’re headed in the right direction,” Leland shouted at the head of the pack, energized. On the other side, he shouted, “Here’s another one,” pointing to another four scratches carved into one of the thinner redwoods.
Now that we were under the tall trees, the daylight dimmed even more. The forest canopy diffused the sunlight and made noon seem like dusk. It felt cloistered there.
At long last I came across something notable in the path. A small cluster of rocks. One stone the size of a bread loaf rested on top of two others in the world’s chintziest pyramid. I had to remind myself this wasn’t a treasure hunt, and I felt ghoulish for my momentary elation.
With some effort I rolled off the top rock.
Out of the crack sprinted a spider big as a kumquat.
I gulped. It was a nasty one, hairless but red with a lobster-like shell and fangs that might have been its ninth and tenth legs. I stepped back, but my heart didn’t race. I didn’t stomp on it either. After a deep breath, I simply watched it run. It scrambled past me, disoriented from having its roof ripped off, and I let it go. The woman next to me yelped when she saw it.
We kept on. Lel
and, Tesmer, and Royce spotted the next set of carvings, until we reached a huddled grouping of trees surrounded by a field of ferns. They circled like a crown and rose until the white sunlight blotted out their tops. We passed through narrow crawl spaces between the trunks into a clearing maybe fifteen feet across. Those who couldn’t fit into the clearing peered in from between the trees. Dried needles had mounded up over time, and my boots bounced on the soft heap of needles as if it were a mattress.
“There.” Leland pointed to a trunk coated in moss. I didn’t see it at first, but Leland had spotted hard angles—almost a Z—carved into the bark. Tesmer tore down the moss that obscured the rest of the incision, wiping off the sod with her sleeves, and then ferreting her finger into the groove to scoop out the residue. The carving was a house, the height of my forearm. Like Walter’s drawing, it was a crude box at the base, then a simple pitched roof and a chimney the size of a cigar butt. This was home.
One of the dogs barked, and then others barked. Their owners let them off leash, and they sniffed around the grounds, pinning themselves to several spots within this ring of trees. Two of them yelped at a patch of ground close to the house carving. Leland unzipped Tesmer’s bag for more tools. He pulled out a shovelhead, then from Royce’s bag he retrieved several lengths of dowel that he screwed together until the various segments formed a full-size, five-foot shovel. By then his sweat turned the back of his shirt see-through. He started digging while the dogs howled around him, and most of the crowd looked on in horror and fascination, some of them clinging to the trunks around the perimeter. I caught a fleeting glimpse of Veda Moon back there with Cindy. He looked terrified, his chin receding into his neck, possibly on the verge of crying. If I thought I had any chance of comforting him, I would have gone to him. Cindy held him from behind, weeping into the back of his shirt.
Leland and Royce cleared away the top layer with clumped bundles of needles in their arms. I dropped to my knees and helped them push aside the topsoil. Leland snagged his finger on something sharp and nursed it in his mouth, but it didn’t stop him from digging. He dug gloves out of his backpack and gave a pair to each of us. They were nitrile, thicker than latex, thinner than mittens.