Cold Wind

by Paige Shelton

  A few moments later, the truck pulled onto something still muddy but much easier to maneuver over. My kidneys might have already been bruised, but the scenery was appealing.

  “You’re not tired of the world yet?” I said, resuming the conversation.

  “No. I was, but it’s better, well, less awful, I guess.” He gestured at the path we were driving on. “This is probably an old logging road. At one time, this whole area was probably cleared out. See how young the trees look?”

  “Mother Nature is bringing it back. Is there another way to get to this location?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe back toward the river and then over it somewhere, but I don’t know. Gril didn’t know of any other way.”

  I looked behind us and then faced front again and swallowed hard. “It feels like a secret hiding place.”

  “I thought so, too. Finding the shelter only reinforced that. You’ll see.”

  “Care to tell me what brought you to Alaska? What made you tired?”

  “Care to tell me what brought you?” he said.

  I looked at him, but he kept his eyes on the road.

  “Not today, but maybe someday,” I said.

  “Same, then.” He paused, but I sensed he wanted to say more. “Actually, my story is pretty simple and not all that interesting. I don’t like sharing the details because I don’t like it when people feel sorry for me.”

  “Okay. I promise not to feel sorry for you.”

  “I lost my family in a plane crash.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Donner.” I broke the promise immediately.

  “No, don’t feel sorry for me.”

  I looked at his profile. I could see his eyes, but from this angle I especially noticed the pinch beside them. His past would hurt forever.

  “Kids?” I said.

  “Wife and one kid, a daughter.”

  “Damn, Donner. Don’t ask me not to feel sorry for you. I am sorry, but I won’t dwell on it. If you ever need to talk, I can be trusted.”

  “Thanks, Beth.” He took in a deep breath and then let it out. “All right, we’re almost there. You know to stay back until you’re invited to come closer to the crime scene, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I knew why Gril thinks it’s okay for you to be a part of this, but he must have his reasons.”

  I hesitated. “You know I used to work for a police chief?”

  “Yes, as a secretary.” His voice was flat.

  I nodded. “It was in a small town in Colorado. The chief was my grandfather. He noticed I was good with numbers, so I became their crime scene measurement expert. When you’re the lawman in a small town, you use any resource you can.” Other than the Colorado part, I’d just spoken the truth.

  “And that’s the only reason I won’t question Gril too much about this.”

  I looked forward again and a bluster of activity came into view. Just off the road was a small structure, worn by weather and time, set at the edge of a clearing and surrounded by a truck and a van, and both vehicles I’d seen parked at the small, local airport before. A few official-looking people were walking around.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  “Yes, we are.” Donner sighed again. “Look, I don’t care what you’ve done and what you’ve seen—this is going to be shocking, Beth. Keep that in mind.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I suspected he’d spoken the truth, too.

  Six

  Before we got out of the truck, Donner pointed out who was there from Juneau.

  Three people had flown over, two crime scene techs and one medical examiner. Donner assured me this wasn’t the same medical examiner who’d been called to Benedict when I’d first arrived, the one who’d overlooked the things I’d discovered at the scene of Linda Rafferty’s death.

  Christine Gardner, the ME, had recently transferred to Juneau from Homer, where she’d been both the local ME and a halibut fishing boat captain. She was in her seventies, and Donner had heard she was tough and thorough. He hadn’t met her yet.

  Donner peered out the truck’s windshield and told me he thought the names of the two techs were Ben and Jimmy. The three visitors as well as Gril all breathed out small clouds. It was going to be cold out there.

  “Just stay back,” Donner said after we got out of the truck. “Do whatever Gril says to do.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I tucked my chin into my coat collar. Gril didn’t behave as if he was cold at all. He stood outside the structure, back from it some, as if he were waiting for something. His jacket was open and he wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves.

  “Donner, Beth, glad you’re here,” he said, walking over to meet us at the edge of the road.

  Christine frowned deeply when she saw Donner and me. She made a beeline in our direction.

  Gril introduced us with only our first names. Donner wore his park ranger gear, and Christine might have heard that he was the one who’d found the body; he looked official. She nodded at him, then looked at me and, without missing a beat, asked, “What do you do with the police, Beth?”

  Her still-present frown was weighed down by a face full of ruddy wrinkles. She wore a gray rain hat, but it wasn’t currently raining. If anyone pointed that out to her, she’d probably just say what everyone else did: “It will.”

  I adjusted my own cap, if only to stall a little.

  “Beth helps by analyzing some of our paperwork. She’s our best proofreader,” Gril said.

  I tried not to look out of place.

  “Yeah?” Christine said. “Never heard of such a thing, but whatever. All right, I gotta get at that body in there, but I want my techs and you all to do your things first. Try not to touch the body. I’ll do that when it’s time. Gather whatever you need to gather, except for the body. I’d bet a dozen doughnuts that I’ll have a good guess at a C.O.D. just by looking at her.”

  “Body’s still there,” Donner said quietly and with relief.

  “Exactly like the picture you took,” Gril said. “I doubt anything was disturbed.”

  “Well, shit on a shingle,” Christine said. “I guess it could have been, though. You didn’t tell me that part. I thought you’d been out here waiting for us, Chief.”

  “No, Christine. There’s no cell phone coverage out here. Donner came out earlier. After I contacted you, I came out in the official truck from the airport in case you needed an extra vehicle or driver.”

  “What the hell were you doing out here?” Christine asked Donner. “Did someone tell you about the body?”

  “No. A local resident”—Donner nodded back in the general direction of Randy’s cabin—“heard a strange noise last night. He called me first thing this morning and I came out to look around. I explored this way because the mudslide made things seem different. Then, when I found the road, I took it. I’d never been out this far.”

  “Did you figure out what made the noise?” Christine asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  No one said a word about the girls. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t going to be the one to bring them up.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that body that made the noise, but I’ll let you know if she might have been alive and screaming or yelling last night.” Christine looked at the two techs, who were standing outside the shelter. “Get in there and do a good job. Hear me?”

  They both nodded, and Christine turned back to Gril. “You all get in there, too. Now’s the time.”

  Gril looked at me. “Wait out here a minute, Beth.”

  I nodded. I was suddenly very bothered by the whole scene. I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing a dead body, but I didn’t want anyone to know that.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  Christine sniffed and rubbed her hand under her nose as she inspected me. “If you’re going to be sick, do it away from the scene, got it?”

  I nodded, but Christine had already turned and followed Gril and Donner to the structure.
She stayed outside, but looked in through the opening where there should have been a door.

  There wasn’t a door. The opening was set at an angle that made it look like the frame had been leaned on by wind and snow. The shelter was a quarter the size of the Petition shed, and it was bent the same way as the empty doorway. Made of old wood planks, it was even less stable than the tin building I worked inside. Spaces between the bent and rotting planks must have allowed the wind to blow freely through.

  A small chimney stood straight up and down on the slanting roof, and I wondered if the chimney was supposed to be the thing slanting but had been moved straight when everything else tilted.

  The surrounding landscape was almost like the rest of the Alaska woods I’d come to know, populated with tall spruce trees—except there were fewer trees in these woods, and a good acre around and back from the structure had been cleared. Tree stumps dotted the lightly snow-covered ground, and I thought I saw a miniature Stonehenge set up in the distance on the perimeter of the cleared area. I wanted to walk over and understand the display, but I stayed put, waiting for someone to give me permission to move.

  “Jesus H.,” Christine said, still at the doorway. “What the hell is that?”

  I heard the rumble of an answer from inside, but could only make out the word “clothes.”

  Christine turned and looked back at me. “You can come up now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Only if you’re not going to be sick.”

  “I’m not.” I hoped I wasn’t.

  I tried to keep my feet inside other footprints as I made my way toward the structure. I thought I heard Christine make a noise as she watched me, but I wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or an irritated snort.

  “She is facedown,” she said. “The place is a mess, so it might take a minute or two for everyone to gather what they need. You seen a dead body before?”

  “I have.”

  I’d observed three autopsies, in fact. Research for my novels. They’d been horrible at first, then sad, then interesting in ways I could never have predicted. Back then, I’d moved closer to the tables and peered inside as organs, muscles, bones were pointed out and described. Ultimately, I’d left the last autopsy in a state of complete fascination, only later thinking maybe I should have been more bothered by it.

  “All right,” Christine said. “Have a look.”

  I stepped next to her.

  At first, and surprisingly, it was difficult to notice the body because of everything else. The four men inside were cramped and had to move carefully around each other. I was surprised that someone didn’t decide that only one could go in at a time. The structure didn’t seem to be or have been a home, but only a storage shed. Boxes, some spilled and some not, took up much of the space around the walls. I saw lanterns and children’s toys, books, magazines, a broken chalkboard still marked with the ghostly outline of a poorly drawn chicken.

  “Are all of those things traps?” I asked, gesturing at several items hanging on the walls and piled in a corner.

  “Yepper depper,” Christine said. “All kinds. Bear and wolf mostly, though.”

  My eyes continued to take in the sight and landed on a short pile of pelts. Bear, I thought.

  But then I steeled myself and focused on the body.

  She was along a wall, stuffed up against it, on her stomach, her limbs bent in unlikely directions. She was naked and her white skin was tinged blue, quite obviously stiff and frozen, or that’s the impression it made. There were no distinguishing marks on this side of her, no bruises or bullet holes, though considering the blue coloration, maybe that was impossible to know.

  “Jesus,” I muttered. It was rare that I wished for something more sophisticated than my burner phones, but now was one of those moments. “You guys taking pictures?”

  “Of course. She was thrown in here,” Christine said. “Probably recently, or it would have thawed much more than it has. I mean, it’s cold, but it hasn’t gotten down to freezing enough yet for this body to be in this state because of it being here.”

  “From here, can you tell how long she’s been frozen?” I asked as I looked at the long, brown hair, matted and tangled like a giant bird’s nest. I tried to memorize the distances between things. It was such a small space full of so much junk that even my ability to see “spatially” probably wouldn’t be in any way relevant.

  “Nope. Not yet.”

  “What’s been found?” I asked everyone.

  Christine answered, “A bunch of junk, but I was particularly bothered by the box of baby clothes that Ben over there found. Where’s the baby that goes with them?”

  “That’s one of the million-dollar questions,” Gril said.

  “A trapper’s shed,” Donner added.

  “The trapper must live around here somewhere,” Gril said. “I know some of those guys, but I’ve never met one who lives out this way. I didn’t think there was anything or anyone out here—but that was shortsighted of me. People are everywhere and nowhere in Alaska.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Christine agreed.

  “We need some fingerprints from the body and some around the shed,” Gril said to Donner and the techs. “There might be a million, there might be none. Just get me something. Christine and I will see what we can do.”

  Gril stepped around everything else and then made his way out of the shed. “I need to look for a house. I don’t see any reason for your expertise here, Beth. Come with me?”

  “Yes,” I said, sending Donner a glance.

  He was crouched down, inspecting the items strewn everywhere. He didn’t look up at me.

  Gril and I marched to his truck and got inside. He started it quickly. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Good. Though I probably shouldn’t have let you come out here, I appreciate you staying out of the way.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t have time to get you back, but I’ve got to see if I can find someone living out here. Do what I tell you to do, got it?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said again as I clicked the seat belt into place.

  Seven

  Gril didn’t seem to want to talk as he drove. He was thinking, working, I understood, but I had questions.

  “Why didn’t you tell Christine about the girls?” I said.

  “Oh. That did seem odd, didn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  “I’ve contacted the proper authorities about the girls, but I’m not sure I want Christine involved with that part. She’s an ME, but I suspect she would feel a need to get social services from Juneau over here right away. That’s probably going to happen at some point, but I want to give the girls’ family a chance to find them first.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “I appreciate you keeping it to yourself, too.”

  “Do you think someone somehow did something to move the earth to hide the body on purpose, and then Mother Nature recently intervened with the mudslide?”

  “I don’t know. Hard to pull something like that off, but not impossible,” he said.

  There was something about the way he suddenly fell silent that got my attention. “What?” I said.

  He shook his head. “A lot happened that summer.”

  “Like?”

  Gril hesitated again but then shook his head. “A lot, but the mudslide was a big deal.”

  “Do people get lost or trapped out here a lot?”

  “Shoot, Beth, more than a couple thousand people a year get lost in Alaska. It’s a big place. Stuff happens. Sometimes bodies are found, sometimes not. We once found a skull and the rest of a skeleton near it. We tested them and found out they weren’t originally attached. The skull belonged to one man who’d come to Alaska to hide, the body to a man who’d come to explore. They’d both been killed by bears and their remaining parts somehow dragged to the same spot. And adding to the strangeness of the whole thing, both of their first names
were Dave.”

  “That is uncanny.”

  “It is.”

  “More than two thousand people a year go missing out here?” I said.

  Gril nodded solemnly and repeated, “It’s a big place.”

  “Wow.”

  We were silent as Gril maneuvered over some craters in the road.

  “Do you think the two girls are somehow involved with the dead woman?” I said as the road leveled again.

  “Not sure. I have no evidence that says that yet, so I need to remain open-minded.” He sent me a quick glace before returning his attention to the road. “I didn’t mention them to Christine, but I will. She’s not a criminal investigator, and I also wanted her and her techs to look at the site with no preconceived notions.”

  He must have felt guilty about not letting her know about them, but I understood his reasons.

  “Do you think the girls were the source of the noise that Randy and I both heard?”

  “Maybe, but, again, no evidence of that yet. I didn’t hear a sound come from either of them. You didn’t either, right? Did the girls do something you forgot to mention, something that might tie them to this?”

  “No,” I said. “But I did hear the noise.”

  “We’ve got two muddy, silent mystery girls and a dead body. It all makes for some real concern.”

  I nodded as Gril frowned and looked around and out the windows. The road wasn’t wide enough to travel down in a truck without moving slowly and carefully, but Gril didn’t hesitate as much as I would have. I thought about how safe I felt with him. I trusted him completely, though I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d stepped out of the boundaries I was supposed to stay inside. My stomach wouldn’t settle, couldn’t fill up a hollow feeling growing inside me.

  I studied Gril, his determined focus. He was a good cop, a good man. Even if we got lost out here—which we wouldn’t—even if we were attacked by a bear—which was always a possibility—Gril would find a way to save the day. The man who had taken me wasn’t out here. I was still in my safe zone.

  I shifted on the seat and cleared my throat. As I looked away from Gril’s profile, something glimmered out in the snowy trees. It was probably just the glass of the snow catching a random ray of sun that had made its way through the clouds.