South Village (Ash McKenna) (17 page)

“Ma, how are things at the house?”

“They’re good. Still getting water in the basement.”

“You call one of dad’s friends?”

“Yeah. Billy Ryan. You remember him? He does foundations.”

“I do, yeah.” Firefighting doesn’t pay well—tragically—so a lot of guys tend to take side-gigs. Especially in construction fields, because it’s good, off-the-books money. I don’t think a single job has ever been done in my parents’ house that wasn’t done by someone on the job.

Thinking about that makes me think about my dad. What he would be doing if he were still alive. He’d still be on the job, I’m sure. For as little as I remember, he didn’t seem to be the retiring type. Maybe he’d do electrical work. I seem to remember he was pretty good at that.

It makes me wish I could remember more about him.

Again, I am happy that my mom can’t see my face.

I check my watch. I’ve got about a half hour left. No time to be wistful. “Ma, listen, I’m sorry but I’m on borrowed time here with the computer and I got a few things to finish. Can I call you soon?”

“Maybe you can try and fix the camera for next time? It’d be nice to see you.”

My hand reaches up toward the lint cloth. Maybe I can tilt the monitor. Maybe if I click off the desk lamp the background will fade out and she’ll only see me. Give her that much.

And then I pull my hand back. Wonder if she’ll see that stereogram image. She’s good like that. The thought of putting that kind of hurt on her isn’t worth it.

“I’ll give it a try next time, Ma,” I tell her. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Okay. Call soon.”

“Got it. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

There’s a look on her face as she signs off, in that frozen moment before the screen disappears, somewhere between sadness and disappointment. I’m not sure where on the scale it lands, and even thinking about it stings, so I click out of my e-mail.

Back to work. I search for the Soldiers of Gaia.

And find nothing.

Well, not nothing. I find a song by a weird electronic rave band called Soldiers of Gaia. I knew it sounded like a band. There’s also a role playing guild for an online war game. But nothing related to eco-terrorism. Nothing that would spur the feds to storm in here and give us the Guantanamo treatment. I’m clicking over to the second page of search results when I hear a rustle outside.

Sunny and Moony maybe? I check my watch. Still got fifteen minutes.

Could be an animal.

Footsteps come up the porch. There’s no mistaking that sound.

What if it’s not Sunny and Moony?

What if it’s someone who saw Sunny and Moony out and about, and figured this place would be empty?

I close out of the browser and cross to the door, my footsteps echoing in the hollow of the raised floor, and realize too late that it must be audible from outside. I get the door open, my eyes stinging from the sudden blast of sunlight, and I see something crash through the woods.

I follow, running hard, trying to keep from tripping over the stray log or elevation in the earth. I can’t even see who or what I’m chasing. I think maybe there’s a flash in front of me, but that could be my eyes playing tricks. Once you’re in the woods the world looks like a painted backdrop.

There’s an open clearing ahead. As I’m about to enter it, passing the trees guarding the perimeter, something hits my face. Heavy, sticky strands wrap around my head, and something hard scratches against my nose.

My insides scream.

There is a spider on my face.

There is a giant monster spider on my fucking
face
.

I fall to the ground and slap at it, trying to get it off me. Spitting, crying in my throat, my mouth clamped shut so hard my teeth ache. The web is keeping it pressed to my face so I pull at it and when I feel like I’ve got a good grip, fling my arm out so hard it hurts my shoulder.

After I’m sure my face is clear—and only then—I open my eyes. Brush away the rest of the web that’s wrapped around my head, shaking, breathing so fast it’s making me dizzy. My heart feels like it’s going to explode in my chest. I press a hand to my sternum, calm myself.

In front of me there’s a loose pile of earth, freshly turned over. I stick my hand in it because of how odd it is. It’s like the kind of earth you would dig up out of a hole. Except there are no holes. This is a completely untouched portion of camp. It looks like a cross between forest and jungle. Probably drops off into swamp in another few hundred feet.

The freshly-uncovered earth makes me think of Portland, and the hole I dug, and I feel the waves lapping at my feet, and it gets even worse when I look up and see Cannabelle’s body, limbs splayed out, staring up, unblinking into the sun.

I’
m still running when I get back to the main part of camp. The clearing between the domes is empty now. Aesop, shirtless in a pair of jeans, is coming out of the kitchen and reads something on my face because he breaks into a run, too.

“Where’s Tibo?” I ask.

He shakes his head. I take off toward the office dome, with Aesop following behind. Tibo is inside the bar area, sitting in a chair in the corner, reading a book. I stop to catch my breath as he sticks a scrap of paper into the book and puts it down besides him.

“What happened?” he asks.

I check around to make sure it’s the three of us. When I’m sure of that I tell him, “Cannabelle.”

“Is she okay?”

“No.”

Tibo gets up, his face twisted in panic. “Let’s go.”

I
lost my bearings, so we have to go to Sunny and Moony’s place to find her again. I follow the path I made through the forest. I’m worried I went the wrong direction but the clearing appears. I was really hoping it was a hallucination. That I was wrong. But no, Cannabelle is still lying there.

Aesop stops and puts his hands on his knees, looks at the ground, breathing long and slow, in through his mouth, out through his nose. He does this a few times and straightens up.

“What happened?” Tibo asks.

“I don’t know. Someone tried to sneak up on Sunny and Moony. I chased them. Found this.”

“Why were you with Sunny and Moony?”

“I was using the computer. They let me. Let’s concentrate on this right now?”

The sun is beating down on Cannabelle so her skin still looks flush, but there’s purple creeping around the lips. Her skin is slack, falling away from her. Dead not like dead in the movies. There are flies buzzing around her, a fat black one perched on her lip.

As Tibo inches forward a twig cracks underfoot and he steps back. He looks up and there’s a long, heavy branch of a tree overhanging her, casting a shadow across her midsection.

“Maybe she fell,” he says.

I squat down. Her neck is broken. It’s tilted at an inhuman angle. Just slightly too far. I’m not an expert but her arms and her legs look intact. The canopy above us is high. Three stories, at least. A fall like that would have to fuck up a body more than this. There’s no blood, even. No fallen branches. Almost like she’s lying down to take a nap.

Her hands are caked in dirt, too, the whites of her fingernails dark from where it’s packed in and caked. She was digging.

“I don’t think she fell,” I tell them. “I don’t think her grow rigs are around here.”

“Okay,” Tibo says. “Okay. Fuck. Whatever happened, I need to call Ford. We have to keep this quiet. I don’t want anyone else knowing right now.”

“Are you sure?” Aesop asks.

“If this is a crime scene, then we don’t want everyone crowding around here. I don’t want another Pete.”

“I’m going to retrace my steps,” I tell him. “See if the person I chased dropped something, or if there’s anything else worth finding.”

“You sure those things are connected?”

“If it’s the same person, they killed her before they came to see Sunny and Moony. Wouldn’t have been enough time to do it while I was chasing them. Worth checking.”

Aesop steps toward me. “I’ll come.”

The way he says it, like a statement, makes me figure I shouldn’t refuse him.

Tibo nods and jogs off, crunching through the brush.

And then it’s me and Aesop. And Cannabelle.

We stand there for a few moments, baking in the heat. We look at each other, both of us searching for something to hold on to. We recognize that in each other and it’s a bit much, so we both look away.

“You want to lead?” he asks.

“Sure.”

We set off through the woods. I feel bad leaving Cannabelle alone, and need to remind myself that she’s dead.

Aesop and I walk in silence, single file, looking around for things we don’t know we’re looking for. When the clearing has disappeared behind us and we’re surrounded by trees and foliage on all sides, I hear Aesop come to a stop behind me.

“Pete wasn’t the first dead body you’ve seen,” he says.

“Can’t be your first,” I tell him.

I say it like a challenge, hoping he takes the hint and doesn’t broach the subject any further. I can feel his eyes on me, like he’s trying to figure me out. I’m not a big fan of that, but there’s not much I can do.

We walk again for a little bit, until the footsteps behind me cease. This time I turn and Aesop has taken a knee, peering off to the side of our path. I come up next to him.

“What is it?” I ask.

Instead of answering he stalks off through the woods, staying low and quiet, like he’s hunting something. I try to see what he’s seeing. There’s a broken branch. I bend over for a closer look and see the outline of what could be a boot print, heading in the direction Aesop is walking. I go after him, keeping an eye out for spiders and other forest monsters.

The terrain gets rougher, more uneven. The branches come out and brush against us, and then they impede us. The odd one looks broken, like maybe it was trampled. I try to differentiate between what’s here and what could have been changed or affected by someone else.

One of the chores here at camp is machete duty. Which is pretty much what it sounds like. You take a machete and crash through the brush, clearing the footpaths. But only in the parts of camp that are commonly tread. This area hasn’t been touched, though we’re sort of close to the back road that runs behind camp.

My foot swings out and hits something metal. I bend down and pick up a shovel. The wooden handle is a little worn and there are dots of rust on the blade, but otherwise it’s in pretty good shape. I hold it out to Aesop and he takes it.

“Did you see all that fresh earth over by Cannabelle?” he asks.

“You think someone was trying to bury her?”

He looks around, thinking about it. Finally says, “There was no hole near her. I don’t know that she’s been dead so long. And she didn’t seem to have been touched.”

“So what do you think?”

“Could be nothing. People are sloppy. I’ve found the odd piece of equipment lying around in the woods. But all that earth… someone was digging something. Let’s use this spot at a starting point. Spread out in a circle, see if we find anything.”

A
half hour goes by and we don’t turn up anything.

Empty forest. A weird looking bug I don’t know the name for that lands on my wrist and bites a little circle into my flesh. Some bones, which I think might be related to the disappearance of Malmon, the chicken who went missing a few weeks back.

I stop when the land drops off into swamp. Nothing that way, I’m sure. The leeches and alligators make sure of that. The alligators never come up out of the water, and the deal seems to be that in return, no one ventures in.

By the time Aesop and I get back to the clearing, Ford and Corey are already there with Tibo, the three of them standing around Cannabelle, looking down at her body.

Ford does not look happy.

He nods toward us. “These boys know what happened?”

“Nothing beyond what I told you,” Tibo says. “Ash found her. He was out for a walk.”

Tibo’s eyes hammer into me on that last bit.

Ford turns toward me. “Well, Ashley, walk me through what you saw.”

“Not much to say,” I tell him. “I was out, found her, went and got Tibo, here we find ourselves.”

He takes his sheriff’s hat off to reveal that his short gray hair is soaked in sweat, like he dunked his head in a sink. He wipes his brow with the back of his sleeve and puts the hat back on. “This was the girl always climbing up in the trees, correct?”

Tibo nods.

“Why did she to do that?”

“People are into a lot of different things,” Tibo says.

Ford takes a knee next to her body, looking back and forth between her and the canopy. “Well, doesn’t look like she fell. I’ve seen people fall from that kind of height. The ground is kind of soft here, but I don’t think that happened.”

So at least my suspicion is confirmed.

Ford straightens up and turns to Tibo. “Now we got a real problem here, son. I got to send out a forensics team, again. They won’t be too happy. Found nothing worth finding around your friend the other day but one of them got bit up by fire ants pretty bad. I need to interview people. Guests and staffers. And you and I need to sit down and go over a few things. So, I hope you’re ready for a long day.”