by Mark Dawson
Ellie thought of Orville again and her mood began to curdle. She thought of the four boys that they had been chasing for the last six months. They were young and reckless, but they weren’t stupid. They had been the subject of a full-court press from the bureau after the security guard had been murdered in Marquette, but they had seemingly just melted into thin air. She knew that they had been in Truth, there was too much independent corroboration of that for it not to be true, but she had no idea where they were now. No one did, unless Mallory was right. She looked up, rain smearing into her eyes, and stared out into the gloom between the trunks of the trees. Was she right? Were they in these woods? It was possible, she supposed. Possible enough for her to have agreed to come and tramp out here in this godforsaken weather, anyway.
Ellie thought about Mallory’s story. It was possible, although they had looked into her brother’s history and discovered, with very little effort, that his was not the most reliable testimony they would ever hear. The locals they spoke to about him all said the same thing: sweet boy, simple and trusting, but prone to making things up. He was clearly something of a local institution, and Ellie had detected cruelty in the anecdotes about the things that he had done. Some of the locals had told them jokes, bitter little punch lines that said more about them than they did about him.
Orville had allowed himself to be swayed by the prevailing opinion, that he was not to be trusted, and had effectively drawn a line through the middle of his testimony.
Ellie had not been so hasty.
How had he been able to identify the picture of Tom Chandler if he was unable to read? Orville dismissed that, too, saying that someone must have told him who it was, but as she spoke with Mallory, Ellie couldn’t bring herself to do that. There were a lot of what-ifs that needed to be tested. If the only way to do that was to follow her up to the Lake of the Clouds, then that would be what she would have to do.
THEY TREKKED north through the trees for another two hours. The terrain sloped gently upwards, and Milton explained as they walked that they would need to ascend around a thousand feet to get up to the lake. The trail widened a little as they worked their way along it, thick banks of ferns on either side before the tightly packed trees. Ellie recognised beech, scrub oaks, and maples. They forded narrow streams of crystal clear water, and then they emerged from the bush just a little way downstream of a shallow collection of falls. It consisted of a half dozen chutes arrayed across a rocky ledge that spanned the width of the stream, sending the water crashing over a shallow drop into a wide pool at its foot.
“How much farther until we can stop?” Mallory complained.
“Another mile.”
They climbed the gentle face at the side of the falls and continued ahead, back into the dense foliage. The path drew in tight and then disappeared altogether. Milton retraced his steps, found a suitable alternative route, and followed that instead.
After another thirty minutes they broke through the wet ferns and stepped into a small clearing. The space was littered with discarded machinery and equipment: a coil of heavy cable, chains, pulleys, a large wood stove, assorted cast iron fixtures, and parallel runners for a horse-drawn sled. A huge eastern white pine stood sentry over the junk.
“What’s all this?” Ellie said.
Milton rapped his knuckles against the upturned stove. “My guess is that this is an old logging camp. I doubt any of this has been moved for fifty years.”
“Can we stop here?” Mallory asked. “I’m exhausted.”
Milton paused, took out his compass, and cut an azimuth up to another big tree a mile or two distant. He looked up into the dark sky.
“It’ll do,” Milton said. “We camp here for the night, get up early tomorrow and press on.”
“How have we done?” Mallory’s beanie was sodden with water, and she looked miserable, like a drowned rat.
“Not too bad. We’re about a quarter of the way there.”
Ellie looked around. She had no real experience, but it looked like a good place to bivouac. She removed her pack from her shoulders and stretched.
“How many miles?” Ellie asked Milton.
“About four.”
It felt like more. Ellie was fitter than most of the other agents that she worked with, and she was certainly fitter than Orville, but pounding a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym was one thing and struggling across rough terrain in weather like this was quite another. Moisture had seeped into her expensive boots, she had been bitten by chiggers, her legs were slathered with claggy mud, and she was cold.
Milton took out his tent and moved across to a patch of higher ground, avoiding the dips and depressions that would be more likely to gather water. He stretched out the flysheet and then fed the poles through the appropriate sleeves and bent them into the shape of the tent. He pinned them into place, pegged out the structure with tent pegs, attached the guy lines, working at one end and then moving quickly around to the other. He kept the tension as equal as he could as he battled the wind.
Ellie took out her own tent and got most of it up by the time Milton had finished with his. He came across and helped her to secure the inner skin and the attachable groundsheet, then went around and knocked the pegs more firmly into the wet earth.
It took twenty minutes to erect both tents.
“I’m just going to get some firewood,” he said when he was done.
Mallory frowned dubiously. “How are you going to make a fire when it’s as wet as this?”
“You’ll see.”
There was a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing. Milton took a small bag from his pack and walked across to it.
“Are you all right?” Ellie asked the girl.
“Wet and cold.”
“Me, too.”
Ellie’s tent was larger than Milton’s. “You want to crash with me?” she asked her.
“Sure.”
They hauled their packs inside and sat down, watched the rain as it dripped over the lip of the door and listened to it as it drummed against the outer skin. Milton was crouched next to the fallen tree and, using a utility knife that he had taken from his pocket, he started to scrape the blade up and down on the underside of the trunk.
“You think he knows what he’s doing?” Mallory asked.
“He knows about being outside.”
“What about when we find them?”
“You saw what happened last night. He knows how to handle himself. More than that? I don’t know.”
“What do you think he does?”
“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
They kept watching. Ellie could see that the tree had been infested with termites. Milton used the blade to dig out the sawdust that had been left behind, scooping it into the bag and then adding dry leaves and grass. He went back to the trunk, snapped off a thin branch, and then stripped off the wet bark. He cut thin grooves into the dry wood beneath and then pried them back until the stick was feathered.
The dead tree provided a little shelter from the rain, and Milton started to build the fire there. He created a pile of tinder and used the fire steel that he wore on a chain around his neck to strike sparks onto it. The tinder started to smoke, and then tiny pinpricks of heat could be seen. Milton crouched there in the rain for thirty minutes, nursing the sparks into a small flame until it was established, then carefully added larger pieces of kindling. He added strips of pine wood that were saturated with resin. The flames took hold, devouring the wood hungrily.
When he was done, the fire was crackling with a healthy zeal.
“You’ve done this before,” Ellie said.
He smiled. “A few times.”
When he was finished, he lashed three sticks together to form a tripod, took a small saucepan from his pack, and rested it over the flames. He took a packet of franks, sliced them, and fried them in the pan. He opened two cans of beans and emptied those into the pan, too, stirring until the mixture was hot. The smell was appetising, and Ellie fou
nd her stomach grumbling.
He brought the pan across to the tents. “Here. Sausage and beans.”
“Not over here, English,” Ellie said. “Dogs and beans.”
“You want some or not?”
“Give it here.”
“I don’t think so.” He smiled, took out a folding fork, handed it and the food to Mallory and then sheltered in his tent. The openings faced each other.
“Mmm,” she said after she had taken the first mouthful. “This is good.”
Milton shuffled back until he was sheltered from the rain. “Sausage and beans. I’ve been living off that for the last few weeks.”
“There’s something else in here, too, though.”
“Wild onions. I picked a few on the way. You snap off the stems and cook the bulbs. Wild garlic, too.”
“How do you know all this?” Ellie asked him.
“Just picked it up on the way.”
“Come on…”
He shrugged. “I used to be a soldier. I’ve been trained to live off the land.”
Ellie raised an eyebrow. “What kind of soldier?”
“Just a soldier. Infantry. A bullet catcher.”
Ellie’s curiosity was piqued, and she wondered whether she should press for more information, but he was gazing out at the fire with an abstracted look on his face, and she decided against it.
Ellie took the pan after Mallory and, when she had eaten her fill, she passed it across to Milton to finish off. When they were all done, Mallory opened her pack and took out a bag of marshmallows.
“When did you get those?” Milton asked.
“At the store.”
“I don’t remember buying them.”
“So you don’t want one?”
He smiled widely enough so that his white teeth shone, the first proper smile that Ellie had seen from him. “I didn’t say that.”
She skewered three of the marshmallows on a stick, hurried out into the rain, and held them in the flames.
“This the kind of thing you thought you’d be doing when you joined the bureau?” he asked her.
“It’s what I hoped it might be like.”
“Riding a desk more than you expected?”
“I guess. I was naïve when I signed up. I knew there’d be some, but it’s more than I expected. Sometimes it feels like all I’m doing is pushing paper from one place to another.”
Ellie started to feel comfortable in his presence. There was something about him that said he could be trusted. He was gruff and severe, and there was a restlessness that he did a poor job of hiding, but at the same time he projected a sense of complete proficiency. She would not have described him as reliable, for that was too staid a word, but she believed that if she invested a little faith in him, she would not be disappointed.
She thought back to what he had said earlier. “What kind of soldier were you?”
A moment of unease passed across his face. It would have been easy to miss, but Ellie was good at reading people. “All sorts,” he said.
“Did you fight?”
He smiled thinly. “I did.”
“Where?”
“Can’t really say,” he said, closing the conversation.
Special Forces, she wondered? She had met men from Delta in the bureau, and they had been reticent about what they had done before they joined. But those men wore suits and had jobs. They weren’t trekking across America on their own, spending weeks in their own company, with no obvious plan for the time ahead. Milton was different. There was something else with him.
He gazed over at her, maybe saw the inquisitive glint in her eyes, and changed the subject. “What about you? What’s your background?”
“Bachelor’s in Law and then a master’s in Criminology at Emory in Atlanta.”
“And why the bureau?”
“Why not?”
“You could make more money as a lawyer, right?”
“It’s not all about money.”
“So what is it about?”
“My father was an agent,” she said. “Down in the Tampa office.”
“Following in his footsteps?”
“Something like that.”
“What does he think about it?”
“I couldn’t tell you. He’s dead. He died fifteen years ago. Shot by a suspect as he came out of a bank in Jupiter.”
“Oh,” Milton said.
“I remember the stories he told me. Bank robbers, kidnappings, criminals that made the news before terrorists and cybercrime changed it all into something else. He wouldn’t have recognised it today.”
“If you don’t like it—”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s all right. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, why I did what I did. You’re right. I could’ve earned a hell of a lot more if I’d taken a job as a prosecutor.”
“So?”
“That felt like selling out to me. And my father always said to me that I should do what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do this. I was just a little naïve, is all.”
The rain kept coming down, rattling against the canvas. Mallory came back with the marshmallows.
“What about your partner?” Milton asked her.
It was her turn to feel a little defensive. “What about him?”
“Well, he’s not out here with us, is he? Why? He didn’t think this was a good idea?”
“He wouldn’t even listen to me,” Mallory interjected bitterly.
“He did, Mallory,” Ellie said, immediately annoyed with herself for defending him; why did she still feel the urge to do that?
“He wasn’t interested.”
“He just doesn’t think that the men are in the woods.”
“But you do?” Milton asked her.
“I think it’s worth a look.”
“Yes,” Milton said, smiling with gentle sarcasm. “And you thought it would be fun to see what a lawman’s job used to be like in the old days.”
Ellie raised her middle finger, but she wasn’t offended. He was right. There had been an element of that. Even so, the mention of Orville made her feel uncomfortable. She tried, once again, to forget about him.
Mallory used her fingers to carefully pull the marshmallows off the stick. She handed one to Milton and one to Ellie, and they ate them.
Milton sucked his fingers. “You bring anything else in that bag you didn’t tell me about?”
“No,” she said, grinning. “Just that.”
Milton leaned all the way back, supporting himself on his elbows. He stayed like that for five minutes, just staring out into the rain, and then he sat up and told them to give him their boots. He took off his own, and his socks, collected the two other pairs, and hurried back to the fire. He lashed together a screen of leaves and left them beneath it to dry, not too close to the flames so as not to crack the leather but near enough to warm.
Ellie breathed out contentedly, enjoying the sensation of a full belly and the residual taste of their meal in her mouth.
She found that she was pleased that she was here.
ELLIE ZIPPED her sleeping bag up to her neck and stretched out. The rain had eased off, and Milton had gone outside to build up the fire again. The flames were rising high, crackling as they consumed the wood that he had found. The mouth of her tent was still open and she could see him sitting by the fire on a waterproof sheet, his knees drawn up to his chest, lost in thought as he looked into the orange and red flicker of the flames. He had taken an MP3 player and a pair of headphones from his pack, and he was listening to music now, the faint beat of a drum audible over the snicker of the flames.
She was a good judge of people, but there were layers to John Milton’s personality that she could only hazard a guess at. He was quiet and brooding, and obviously most happy in his own company. Something had happened in his life that had made him that way. She wondered if she would ever find out what that was.
She sighed and arranged herself so that she was more comfortably spread out a
cross her sleeping mat. Mallory was beside her, her eyes closed, maybe asleep already. She looked up at the roof of the tent, the flames casting dancing shadows across it.
She heard the raucous chatter of coyotes and then the sound of cracking twigs and looked outside as Milton got to his feet. She watched him as he laid more firewood across the fire. He took the pack with the food in it, looped a rope through the straps, tossed the rope over a branch, and then hauled the pack up so that it was fifteen feet above the ground. Bears, she thought. He was putting their food out of reach.
He tied off the rope around the trunk of another tree and turned back to camp.
“Milton,” she called out quietly so as not to wake Mallory.
He crouched down at the entrance to her tent. “Yes?”
“You think those boys are out here?”
He looked down at Mallory and mouthed, “Asleep?”
She nodded.
“Probably not,” he said quietly. “But she does, and I don’t mind going out to take a look.”
“Why are you helping her? You never said.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
The fire burned on brightly behind him, casting him in shadow.
“You warm enough?”
She felt a surprising burn of attraction for him. It caught her off guard.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Stay in the tent. I’ve cleaned the camp, but there are bears in the woods. I saw one earlier.”
“Where?”
“Just inside the tree line. Half an hour before we stopped.”
“You didn’t say.”
“Didn’t want to panic you.”
“Who said I’d panic?”
“No, you probably wouldn’t have. But it’s best not to meet one at night.”
“I’m staying right here.”
“That would be best,” he said. “Night.”
“Goodnight, Milton.”
Chapter 14
IT TOOK Ellie a moment to remember where she was when she awoke the next morning. She had expected to have a difficult night’s sleep, but she had been wrong about that. She hadn’t stirred once, and now she felt refreshed and reinvigorated. She opened her eyes and turned her head. Mallory was still asleep beside her, breathing gently through her mouth.
