Season of Death (41 page)

“I’
M NOT GETTING
anything.”

Ray had to laugh at this. Keera had been meditating for almost twenty minutes, alternately humming, rocking on her knees, fondling the Bible as if it were a fetish. “Maybe we should turn around and go back …” He stopped when he saw that her gaze was fixed above and to the right of his head. “What?” he asked, turning. “Wow …”

Cottonlike tufts of clouds dotted the sky, the sinking sun transforming them into a polychrome watercolor that bathed the jagged limestone ridges in pastel shades.

“That’s our sign!” She held the miniature book up to the sky, mumbled something. Then, “Shainin Lake. The Voice will show us where.”

“Okay …” Ray muttered, wondering how a Voice could do anything other than provide audible assistance. “The Spirit Voice?”

Another nod. “If we are quiet, we can hear where to go. Quiet and humble.”

Ray nodded, pretending to understand.

Navigating up the calm channel that bordered the rapids, Ray noted the location of Lewis’s mishap and of his own. His eyes scanned the woods, half-expecting Headcase to leap out, rifle at the hip. They passed the archaeological site five minutes later. Ray considered stopping. The light would fail soon. Better to be at the dig site than up at the lake. And he needed to speak with Janice anyway. But knowing Keera, she would give him no end of grief if he so much as slowed the Zodiac. Against his better judgment, he opened up the throttle, and they bounced their way upriver.

Forty-five minutes later, with the lake in sight, Keera said, “We’re getting close.”

Ray smirked at this. A real psychic insight.

As they plowed through the current and into the more tranquil waters of Shainin Lake, she pointed to the right. “Over there.”

Ray obediently steered for the creek where they had found Fred da Head. He was toying with the idea of telling her about the incident when she announced, “This is where his head was. The rest of him is up there.” An index finger directed Ray’s attention up the hillside, toward a tiny patch of blue ice seated in a bowl of limestone.

“You’ve got to be kidding …” He groaned, already imagining the
fun
they would have tramping most of the way up the mountain en route to the glacier.

“See those trees? He’s right up there.” She said this casually, as if Farrell had set up camp and was hunched over a fire, waiting to be rescued.

Ray beached the raft in almost exactly the same spot where he had landed his kayak a day and a half earlier. Climbing out, he peered up at the mountain and realized that the sun was gone. It had just set and though the glow on the horizon promised another hour of good light: the temperature was already dropping. “Are you positive?”

“No.” Batting her eyelids, she offered him a winning smile. “But I’m pretty sure.”

“Come on then,” he sighed, making no effort to mask his irritation. “I want to make it back to the archaeological site before dark.”

“But what if we find Dr. Farrell?”

“I don’t care if we find Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Who?”

Ray started up the hillside, trudging along the same route Lewis and Billy Bob had followed in their brief search for the rest of Fred da Head. As he did, he wondered what the point was. They hadn’t found anything then. Why would they find anything now?

“You must believe, Lightwalker,” Keera encouraged.

Ray stifled a curse.

A hundred meters up, they topped a rise and were met by a thick, daunting band of alders. Ray’s eyes followed the wall of prickly foliage to the right. It ran horizontally across the mountain, probably all the way to the Kanayut River. To the left, beyond the stream, they formed a similar barrier, this one bending to touch the lake a half mile west.

“Looks like the end of the line,” Ray observed. He wasn’t so much trying to end the trek, as much as he was stating a fact. “Short of wading up the stream, I think we’re out of luck.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Keera assured him. She nodded at a depression in the alders just a few feet from the water. “Thank goodness for moose.”

“Yeah,” Ray sighed, following her into the narrow trail. “Thank goodness.”

The overgrown path of compacted tundra twisted and turned, following the contours of the mountainside and roughly paralleling the stream, before leading them to a slitlike opening in a rocky cliff. Without looking back for permission, Keera began inching her way along a ten-inch-wide ledge, clinging to a carpet of spongy mosses that had attached themselves to the limestone. The water was a dozen feet below them, gurgling hungrily as it gushed through a chute congested with boulders.

Several careful steps later, the ledge opened to a broad sheet of bald granite. The stream was at ground level again, wide, flowing energetically across a field of barely submerged sandbars. The glacier was still a thousand feet above them, a teardrop of blue in a dull gray bowl.

“Well?” Ray asked, his head swinging from side to side. He didn’t see any bodies on display. He checked his watch, calculating the return trip to the raft, the time it would take to float to the dig site. The light was beginning to fail. They would have to hurry.

“Where is he?”

Keera gazed at the glacier wistfully.

“No,” Ray promised. “Not even with ropes and good light … Forget it.”

Keera moved toward the stream. When she reached the water’s edge, she paused, then stepped in like a sleepwalker. She was wet to the knees before Ray caught up to her.

“What are you doing??”

Without answering, she turned and started upstream. Ray braced her, supporting her shoulders, gripping her shirt in case she lost her footing. The current was strong enough to carry away a full-grown man. “Keera? What are you doing?!”

She stopped suddenly. Eyes closed, head bowed, she whispered, “Where?”

Convinced that she was clinically insane, Ray tried to assist her to the bank. “Come on, Keera.” But she was like a rock, her feet firmly planted in the mud.

“I need your Bible again,” she told him.

“Keera …” Ray complained. His legs were numb from the icy water, and what little patience he had begun the scavenger hunt with was now exhausted.

“We’re close. But I need your Bible. Trust me.”

Exasperated, he dug the book out of his parka. She held it in both hands, like a divining rod, aiming it at the water.

“Are you ready to go back to the raft?” Ray asked.

“He’s right here. In this stream.”

Ray gave the water a cursory glance. “I don’t see him.” Shaking his head at the foolishness of it all, he started for shore. “I’m going back.”

“You can’t leave me here,” she pleaded, sounding like a ten-year-old again.

“Watch me.” He had just made it onto the bank when he heard her scream. Turning, he expected to find her being swept downstream. Instead, she was standing on an elevated sandbar, her head bowed awkwardly, her eyes open wide in terror.

“What is it?”

Sobbing, she managed to gasp, “It’s … him …”

FORTY-FOUR

R
AY REACTED BY
high-stepping into the river. “Where?!”

Keera, still petrified, pointed at her feet, as if she had just sighted a spider.

With dusk swiftly approaching, the stream was taking on an opaque quality, reflecting the sky and mountains. It was impossible to see anything below the surface.

“Where?” Ray investigated with his feet, tapping along the sandbar, probing an eddy. His boots found smooth rocks, gravel, a mucky bottom … something hard, long … More rocks? Sticks? He glanced at Keera for confirmation. She nodded once.

He jostled what felt like a tangle of tree limbs. One of the branches poked up from the water. It was attached to a hand.

Ray stumbled backward, swearing. He landed on his seat three yards away. Wet to the armpits, he glared at the place where the appendage had breached the surface.

“It’s … him,” Keera managed in a pitiful whisper.

Returning to the spot where the body had waved up at him, Ray knelt and reached into the water, exploring the bottom: pea grit, polished stones, slime. It took another step forward before he made contact with the sticks. They were bare in sections, spongy in others.
Fabric
hung from them in ragged bands.

After two minutes of blind examination, his fingers fumbled upon the hand. Keera moaned as he lifted it out of the water. Ray fought off the urge to gag.

The hand was recognizable as human only because of the length and number of the digits dangling from the wrist. Part skeleton, part mangled flesh, it looked like something that had functioned as a chew toy for a grizzly before being discarded in the water. The exposed bone was yellow-gray, already covered in a thin layer of silt. The skin that remained was bluish, swollen several times its original thickness.

Ray was about to release his grip when he noticed it: a slender gold band on the third finger. The ring finger. It took him a moment to determine which hand he was in possession of. The left. A wedding band? As he worked it off, sliding shreds of ligament away like muddy residue, he felt like a grave robber. But this was evidence, a means of identifying the body. Dropping the hand, he put the ring into a jacket pocket.

“I told you it was him,” Keera said, the shock of discovery wearing off.

Ray ignored her words. Reaching into the water, he gripped the rib cage and tried to bring up the entire body. It didn’t budge. It was lodged in the sand, as if it had been part of the landscape for years. He traced a leg. The section below the knee was gone. The other was missing from the thigh down. He bent and found the other arm. It was intact, except for stubs where three of the fingers should have been. He returned to the shoulders. They were soft, a combination of wet clothing and muscle. The neck was flimsy and, he realized in horror, reached up into nothingness. The body was headless.

After nearly losing his dinner, he stood and rubbed his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“It … uh … It doesn’t have a … a head,” he stammered.

“I told you it was Dr. Farrell.”

“Just because there’s no head doesn’t mean it’s Dr. Farrell,” Ray pointed out. “Whoever it was, they had a wedding ring on. Other than that …”

“It’s Dr. Farrell. I’m sure of it.”

Ray tried to think the facts through. This was difficult given that his stomach seemed intent upon sending back the chicken stew. Gagging, he decided that Fred da Head had probably belonged to this body. After all, how many disembodied heads and headless bodies were there in the Bush? As to whether or not it was Farrell, Ray knew a simple way to find out: show the ring to Janice.

He was complimenting himself on this idea when he heard something. A snap, followed by a thump. It was barely perceptible above the gurgle of the stream. He swung his head from side to side, eyes darting as he surveyed the shadows in the surrounding brush. Keera had obviously heard it too and was squinting at the nearest rank of willows. They waited, ears straining, minds struggling to classify the sound.

“Wind?” Ray wondered, unconvinced that a breeze could produce a thump.

“Wolves?” Keera thought aloud.

Standing in the stream, they watched for movement. When there wasn’t any, Ray suggested, “Let’s get going.”

“What about Dr. Farrell?” Keera nodded at the water as though the archaeologist had fallen and needed assistance getting to his feet.

“We’ll have someone come back for him. We don’t have the proper equipment. And getting him down would be …” He shook his head at the thought of dragging the headless body down the mountain. “I’ll contact my office and have them call in a forensics team from Fairbanks. They’ll know how to handle it.”

“But …”

“He’ll be fine in the river. The cold water will act as a preservative. It’ll probably help them determine the cause of death.”

“Usually when your head is chopped off, you die,” Keera offered flatly.

“We don’t know if it was chopped off,” Ray argued. “It could have been a bear.”

She shook her head at this, frowning. “Bears don’t do that.”

“You’re an expert on bears?”

“I know my way around the woods. I’ve seen bears attack people. They don’t eat them. They maul them. It’s a territorial thing.”