Cut and Died

by Jeff Shelby

  “This guy is insane,” Mack said from inside the camper.

  I had all sorts of visions of what he might be seeing that would constitute insane. Had he found more dead bodies? Torture items? Had he been right to suspect that Tim had something to do with the Miranda’s disappearance and death?

  The curiosity was killing me. I’d peek inside, quickly, but not go in. My eyes couldn’t trespass, could they?

  I climbed to the top step and poked my head inside the open camper.

  And gasped.

  There were no body parts and no torture devices, thank goodness.

  But the camper was filled to the brim with every possible thing someone might need in a time of disaster.

  Boxes of freeze-dried meals—some that were MREs straight from the Army—were stacked everywhere, solar-powered flashlights sitting on top of them. Jugs of water lined an entire shelving unit along one side of the room, and another unit held guns and ammunition, bows and arrows, and hunting knives. There was a solar-powered generator in the middle of the camper, half put together, a hand-crank transistor radio next to it. Pots and pans were stacked in an open cupboard, right next to another cupboard filled exclusively with canned goods. A handheld, slight rusty can opener was mounted to the door.

  “What is all this stuff?” Mack asked incredulously.

  “He’s a doomsday prepper,” I said.

  Mack gave me a look. “What? How on earth do you know that?”

  “Mikey knows him,” I said. “The cook at the Wicked Wich,” I added, when Mack’s face screwed up with confusion even more.

  His expression cleared a little. “A doomsday prepper, huh?” He was walking around the camper, picking things up, inspecting everything.

  “Don’t touch anything,” I said.

  “How else am I going to find clues?”

  I knew he didn’t care that he was breaking the law just by being inside of Tim’s camper, so I tried a different approach. “You’ll leave fingerprints.”

  He shrugged. “No one’s gonna know I’ve been in here so why would they dust for prints?”

  He seemed remarkably unconcerned with the idea of being caught in someone else’s home uninvited.

  He was standing in front of a makeshift desk area riffling through a stack of catalogs and papers: receipts and invoices, from the looks of it.

  “Mack.” My uneasiness grew the longer he stayed inside the camper. “You should get out of there.”

  It was a warning said too late. Because as soon as the words were out of my mouth, a lone figure walked out of the woods.

  A man wearing a hooded jacket, his head angled down, his hands shoved in his pockets.

  My heart skipped a beat and I jumped off the steps as though they were molten lava.

  The man glanced up, startled by the noise of my boots crunching the snow below.

  Tim, the doomsday prepper and owner of the camper, wasn’t staring back at me.

  But his brother James was.

  TWENTY SIX

  “What are you doing here?”

  The first thing I noticed was the tone of his voice. He didn’t sound angry or suspicious, just curious.

  I took that as a good sign.

  But I didn’t have a good answer for him, something that wouldn’t make him suspicious.

  “Oh, well, I...” I stammered, trying to come up with a plausible reason as to why I was standing outside of his brother’s camper and why my friend was actually inside.

  Mack appeared in the doorway wearing a smile and a friendly expression. “Was hoping to find my charger,” he said smoothly as he stepped out of the camper.

  “Your what?” James asked.

  “My phone charger,” Mack explained. “I know your brother said he’d picked the car up for parts and I thought maybe he’d grabbed the charger from the front seat.”

  James’s cheeks colored. “Yeah, I’m sorry about the...misunderstanding.”

  Mack gave a curt nod.

  “Is he inside?” James asked hopefully. “In the camper?”

  Mack shook his head. “The door was unlocked. I knocked a few times and when he didn’t answer, I figured I’d peek inside to make sure everything was okay. Didn’t you say something about there not being any heat in there?”

  James’s eyes darted to the ground. “Oh, sure. Did you find anything?”

  “Nope. Guess it’s still in the car,” Mack said with a sigh. “My phone is almost dead and I was hoping to not have to shell out twenty bucks for a new charger.”

  “Maybe you can convince the sheriff to give it to you?” James suggested.

  Mack nodded. “Good idea. Think I’ll go pay him a visit.” He looked in my direction. “You ready, Rainy?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, relieved that James was apparently satisfied with Mack’s explanation as to why he’d been inside his brother’s camper.

  But there was something about James’s response that niggled at me.

  Mack was already walking back toward my car with rapid speed.

  I glanced at James. “Are you looking for your brother?”

  James hesitated, then nodded.

  My pulse quickened. “Is he missing?”

  “Not missing,” James said quickly. “I just...can’t find him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His arms straightened, almost as if he were stretching his hands in his pockets. “He took off last night,” he said. “With my truck.”

  This was news to me. “The pickup truck belongs to you?”

  James nodded.

  “Any idea where he was going?” I asked. “Did he tell you anything?”

  “He didn’t say a word,” James said.

  Mack had noticed I wasn’t following, nor was I unlocking the car. With a frown, he ambled back over to us.

  “And are you...” I searched for a different word, something that sounded a little less judgmental than doomsday prepper. “...a survivalist, too?”

  James gave me a horrified look. “Oh, gosh, no. No.”

  He was emphatic, which took me by surprise.

  “No?” I repeated, hoping he’d expound on it.

  He didn’t disappoint. “I don’t live here,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “I live in Charlottesville, have a good job with Siemen’s.”

  “So you’re just visiting?”

  He nodded. “I come down once a month or so, try to talk to some sense into him. He’s been screwing around with this stuff for a couple of years now. Told him to come to town with me, I can hook him up with a good job. He’s not interested.”

  Mack was listening now. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He hesitated. “Yesterday. Late afternoon, I think. He went out foraging or hunting—I guess both—and I went with him.” He bit his lip. “I got a little cold and decided to head back. Came into the camper to take a nap and when I woke up, he wasn’t here. And my truck was gone.”

  “Where do you think he would go?” I asked.

  James shrugged. “No idea. Maybe to pick up supplies? To access a different hunting site? I have no idea.” His shoulders sagged. “All I know is I have to get back to Charlottesville and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that without my car.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Mack muttered.

  “So are you just going to hang out here, then?” I asked. I felt a little twinge of sympathy for him. He was stranded, just like Mack, but it also seemed like his brother might have a serious problem. I mean, if Tim would steal his own brother’s truck, what kind of a person was he?

  “I don’t know,” James admitted. “I can call a few of my friends, see if someone is willing to come get me.” He looked around the clearing, squinting into the sun. “And maybe he’ll show back up.”

  Mack fished his wallet out of the ill-fitted jeans and produced a business card. “Do me a favor,” he said as he handed the card to James. “Give me a call if he comes back. I have a few questions for him.”

  James nodded and
pocketed the card.

  I was pretty sure James had some questions for his brother, too.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  “I thought your phone was dead,” I said as we got back into the car. I was thinking about the business card Mack had just handed over.

  Mack stared at me. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you told James you were looking for your charger,” I reminded him. The engine was on and thankfully hadn’t cooled off too much during our time on Tim’s property. Heat was already pumping through the vents.

  Mack gave me an odd look. “Would you rather I tell him I was looking for clues that might implicate his brother in Miranda’s murder?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Oh,” I said at last. “So you mean you didn’t leave your charger in the car?”

  “Of course not,” he scoffed. “Who would do that?”

  Me, I thought. I would have panicked as soon as the car skidded into the ditch and probably would have left everything, coat and purse included, as I raced around looking for help.

  “So, I guess that was a bust,” I said. I had turned the car around and we were headed down the gravel road and back toward the county road that would take us back to Latney.

  “No, actually, it wasn’t.”

  I looked at Mack. “It wasn’t?”

  He shook his head.

  I frowned. “All I saw were things for the end of times,” I told him. “The food, the solar stuff.”

  “You didn’t look close enough,” Mack said smugly, but there was an edge to his voice, something that raised the hackles on my neck.

  “What did you find?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Mack Mercy,” I said in my best no-nonsense voice. “Tell me what you found or I’m not driving this car a foot further.”

  He made a face but eventually shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a square scrap of paper.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Something that exonerates me,” he announced.

  “Exonerates you?” I repeated. I had no idea how a single piece of paper could prove that Mack had nothing to do with Miranda’s death.

  He nodded but made no move to show me what it said.

  We were sitting there at the T and I shifted the car into park and took my foot off the brake.

  “What are you doing?” Mack asked. “We need to get this to that sheriff of yours. Immediately.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you show me what that is,” I told him, pointing at the paper in his hand.

  A thin smile crept across his face. Slowly, he turned the piece of paper over and dropped it in my lap.

  It wasn’t paper at all.

  It was a photograph.

  A photograph of a woman, smiling directly at the camera.

  “Who is that?” I asked. “And how does that prove your innocence?”

  “This, Rainy,” Mack said, “is a picture of Miranda.”

  TWENTY EIGHT

  I swallowed. “Miranda?”

  Mack nodded.

  I held the photo with trembling fingers. “Miranda? “ I said again. “The woman who was murdered?”

  Another nod.

  I stared at the woman in the photo. She was probably Laura’s age, or at least close to it, with long blonde hair and green eyes. Freckles dusted her cheeks, and a small diamond stud pierced her nose. There was a small scar above her right eyebrow, only a quarter of an inch long but the redness of it stood out against her fair complexion.

  “Where did you find that?” I asked.

  “It was in the camper,” he said as he snatched it from my grasp. “Stuck between all those papers and catalogs on the desk.”

  I leaned back against my seat. “Why would Tim have a picture of Miranda?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked, sounding as though he thought it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  I waited.

  “Tim and Miranda were involved,” he declared. “Lovers. Something went wrong—some kind of lover’s quarrel—and he killed her. A crime of passion.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You got all that from a picture?”

  “Of course.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’m good.”

  “I think that’s all a bit of a reach,” I said. “You found a picture in his camper, hidden in a stack of papers, and you’re convinced he killed her?”

  “Why else would he have her picture?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Because they were friends, maybe? Because he found it during one of his scavenging expeditions and decided to keep it? Who knows?”

  “You’re right,” Mack agreed. “Who knows? Which means that I could be right.”

  “It also means you could be wrong.” I pointed out.

  He scowled.

  “Besides,” I said, “that doesn’t explain how Tim ended up with your car. You’re telling me he just happened to take the car of the man his girlfriend had slept with the night before?”

  “Maybe he did it on purpose,” Mack said. “Maybe he did it to frame me.”

  “But how? Why?” I asked. “That seems like an awfully big stretch, don’t you think? You came through this way by accident, because the freeway was closed. Your car veered off the road and into the ditch. None of those things were predetermined.”

  Mack was quiet for a few seconds. “Stranger things have happened,” he remarked.

  I couldn’t argue with that, especially not after the things I’d experienced during my time living in Latney.

  I shivered.

  Mack noticed. “You cold?” he asked, reaching out to adjust the heat.

  I shook my head.

  “So,” Mack said, settling back into his seat, “are you going to drive me to the sheriff’s office or am I gonna have to walk there?”

  It was an absurd question. Of course I was going to drive him. Not just because the air was cold enough to make my nose sting or because Winslow was still another four miles down the road.

  It was because, as farfetched as Mack’s theory was, it was better than letting the sheriff assume the worst of him, that he was somehow responsible for Miranda’s disappearance and death.

  The fact that I was also under suspicion, and that this piece of evidence might exonerate me, also was front and center in my mind.

  I released the parking brake.

  “Let’s go.”

  TWENTY NINE

  Cindy was behind the receptionist desk, this time without a baby reaching for her short brown curls.

  She looked up in surprise when Mack and I walked through the front door.

  “Oh,” she said, patting her curls and straightening herself in her chair. Her eyes raked over Mack. “Can I help you?”

  I rolled my eyes. Mack was easily ten years her junior, maybe more.

  “We’re here to see Sheriff Lewis,” I said.

  Her eyes flickered to me before returning to the man standing next to me. “Oh...he’s in a...meeting.”

  “A meeting?” I said. I glanced behind me, looking at the empty parking lot. Besides my car and the blue sedan that I knew belonged to Cindy, the lot was empty.

  “Well, it’s an appointment,” she amended, her cheeks reddening a little. “He asked not to be disturbed.”

  Mack spoke up. “Can you tell him we might have some information for a case he’s working on?” he asked with his most winning smile. “Won’t take but a moment or two. I think he’d be very interested in hearing what we have to say.”

  A slight frown marred Cindy’s features. “I’ve heard that before,” she murmured, her eyes on me.

  I looked down at the gray, industrial-grade carpet that was turning almost black as the melted snow on the bottom of my boots puddled beneath them. I had told her once before that I’d had information about a case...and the sheriff had not been happy that she’d waved me through to see him.

  “Please,” Mack coaxed. He was practically batting his eyes
at her. “Five minutes is all we need.”

  She looked down the hallway toward the sheriff’s office and then back at us. “Five minutes?” she repeated.

  Mack nodded. “Scout’s honor.”

  “I suppose it couldn’t hurt,” she said.

  I didn’t wait for her to change her mind. I grabbed Mack’s hand and practically pulled him past her desk and down the hallway to Sheriff Lewis’s office. The door was slightly ajar and I could hear a man speaking in hushed tones.

  I paused, listening.

  The man stopped talking, then started again, his voice soft but much too loud to be a whisper.

  “He really needs to be careful with this,” the man was saying.

  I frowned.

  The voice did not belong to someone sitting in the sheriff’s office. If I wasn’t mistaken, the voice was coming from a radio.

  A very loud radio.

  I popped my head into his office.

  Sheriff Lewis was at his desk, his feet propped up on his desk blotter and his hands threaded behind his head. He looked like he might be napping but his eyes were open and he was staring at a radio sitting on a low bookshelf.

  I cleared my throat and he jumped. He shifted so that his feet were back on the floor and fixed us with a scowl.

  “What are you doing here?” he groused.

  It seemed like an odd question, especially considering he’d come by my house just a couple of hours earlier, demanding to talk to Mack and ask him questions.

  But I didn’t have time to point this out because Mack stepped forward, the photograph of Miranda in his hand. “I have something to show you,” Mack said.

  Sheriff Lewis arched a bushy eyebrow. “Another dead body?”

  Mack ignored the jibe and held out the picture.

  The sheriff leaned in, squinting at the image. “What is that?”

  “It’s a picture,” Mack told him. “Of Miranda.”

  “Miranda Fielding?” His mouth twisted, and the moustache above his lip moved like a wooly caterpillar. “So you have a picture of her now, do you?”

  “I found a picture,” Mack corrected.

  The sheriff cocked his head, clearly confused. Then his expression cleared. “Let me guess.” He jabbed a finger at me. “You found it in her house.”