Granny Goes Wild

by Harper Lin

  “What did he say?”

  “Something like, ‘Fine, let’s get it over with. I’ll show you.’ Then he walked out of the camp.”

  “And that’s when you left?” Ms. Chipper asked.

  “No,” Martin said. “We were, like, worried we would bump into him. So we kinda hung out for, I don’t know, another twenty minutes or so, and then we heard him come back. His tent is just across from ours, and we could see his flashlight through the side of our tent. I mean Melanie’s tent. He unzipped his tent, kinda looked around inside for a bit, then turned off the flashlight and zipped up again. That’s how we knew he had come back. We waited a few more minutes for him to go to sleep, and then we snuck out.”

  Poor Martin was too scared and confused to see the obvious: that hadn’t been Thomas coming back, that had been the murderer. He had killed Thomas, dumped him in the mineshaft, and come to check on the tent.

  I decided not to tell my grandson this. The poor child would figure it out soon enough.

  So what had the murderer been looking for?

  I went over to Thomas’s tent. It was a pity that I couldn’t try and track the murderer. Too many people had been stomping around here, and the rain, which was growing in strength, would wash away any tracks by the time it grew light.

  Using a handkerchief, I pulled down the tent’s zipper and shined my flashlight inside.

  The interior was in disarray, as if it had been quickly searched. The sleeping bag had been thrown to one side and a few other items overturned. Thomas’s pack was open, and I immediately saw what was missing—his camera and camera case. He had stored those in the top of his pack, where they would be protected from the elements but also easy to access. The rest of the pack’s contents remained in place.

  The murderer had wanted the camera and, as far as I could see, nothing else.

  I felt a chill run through me. So Thomas really had been taking pictures of someone from that lookout point the day before. And that shape I had decided was a tree trunk had not been a natural feature of the landscape. It had been the killer.

  The killer had been in camo or at least dark, natural colors. He had seen me, my red raincoat marking me out despite my being behind partial cover. He had stood motionless as I stared, waiting for me to think what I had thought—that there was nothing to see.

  Ms. Chipper was peering over my shoulder.

  “Do you see anything missing besides his camera?” I asked.

  “Are you implying that I’ve been in his tent?”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  I shrugged, feeling slightly disappointed that only my grandson was guilty of tent hopping.

  After zipping up the tent, I stood in the rain, apart from the huddled, frightened crowd, and asked the P.E. teacher some questions.

  “Do you know anyone who would wish Thomas Cardiff any harm?”

  She shrugged. “Not that I can think of. Well, he did get divorced last year, but his wife, can’t remember her name, moved to Florida with a surfer dude. Scandalous. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Thomas was very bitter because he still had to pay alimony.”

  “Sounds like she got what she wanted,” I muttered. “No reason for her to come back and kill him that I can see. What was the reason given for the divorce? If she was leaving him for another man and still got alimony, he must have done something bad to get the wrong end of the legal stick.”

  “She caught him going to the B&B.”

  “A bed-and-breakfast?”

  “No, it’s a strip club on the highway. It stands for—”

  “Never mind. So he was going to a strip club, and he was still allowed to teach high school?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “He never did anything inappropriate with the students. We’ve never had any complaints, and after we found out, we watched him like hawks, believe me. He was a sleaze, not a pervert.”

  “Hardly reassuring. I still don’t see why he would be allowed to teach school. Call me old-fashioned, but I think teachers should act as moral role models for their students.”

  Ms. Chipper looked uncomfortable. “It’s not that simple. You see, working at the newspaper, he had access to certain information.”

  “Such as?”

  “Mr. Grundon, the principal of our school, has a bit of a past.”

  “Good Lord. What?”

  Ms. Chipper raised a hand. “Nothing terrible. Just some tax dodging ten years ago.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  Yes, I know sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “He got fined,” Ms. Chipper said. “Quite a big fine. So much of one that he had to sell his business. Mr. Grundon used to own a couple of houses that he rented to students near the university. This was before he was made principal. He then got a job teaching at our high school and worked his way up to being principal. Thomas was working at the newspaper back when Mr. Grundon got hit for tax fraud, and the paper planned to write a big article about it, but Mr. Grundon was friends with the mayor back then, and it all got hushed up.”

  “So how did you learn about it?”

  “After Thomas got caught at the strip club, we had a staff meeting, and the principal threatened to fire him, so Thomas shot back with this information and said that if he got fired, he’d spread Mr. Grundon’s dirty secret all over town.”

  “Charming.”

  Ms. Chipper shrugged. “He kept his job on the promise that he wouldn’t go to any more strip clubs. We watched him carefully, but Thomas was on his best behavior. No trouble with the girls, or the boys for that matter.”

  I looked around, momentarily at a loss. While I had dug up some dirt on the victim, I could not see how this connected with his murder. This state of affairs had been going on for a year. I had also seen Mr. Grundon once when I had come to pick up Martin from school—a roly-poly little fellow who could not have climbed up and down these hills and snuck around our camp.

  No, we were dealing with someone who was far more fit—and far deadlier.

  And I had no idea who that someone was.

  SIX

  The day dawned gray and wet. The rain poured down now, gushing along every fold of the terrain to create countless little streams. The kids packed up their gear as quickly as they could, and the adults served out a cold meal. We weren’t going to waste time cooking, not if there was a chance a murderer was around.

  We hesitated when it came to taking down Thomas’s tent.

  “It’s part of a murder scene,” Quinten said. “We should leave it untouched.”

  “With all this rain, any fingerprints would have washed off,” Ms. Chipper said.

  “Could we just go?” Angie interjected.

  “Quinten is right,” I said. “We should leave it here. Fingerprints might have washed off the outside, but there might still be evidence on the inside.”

  Ms. Chipper turned to the group of students. “Get everything together. We head out in five minutes!”

  She was no longer her chipper self. Now she was serious, all business, and keeping a remarkably level head despite the circumstances. I liked her better this way.

  “You said we were going to take a shortcut out of here,” Quinten said. “How long before we get to civilization?”

  Ms. Chipper pulled out a map of the state park. The trails were clearly marked. “This is the route we took coming in. As you can see, we took a rather circuitous path, stopping to see those mines and go to various vista points here, here, and here. Our return route is more direct, just going straight along here. It’s nine miles, and it’s almost all downhill except for passing over a couple of ridges. We can be out in a few hours. From there, I’ll use the pay phone to call Mr. Bradford.”

  “You don’t have your phone with you?”

  “No, I didn’t bring it so I could be an example to the students. Besides, there’s no signal here anyway.”

  I looked back up the slope, where the entrance to the
mineshaft was barely visible amid the greenery.

  “I want to take another look at the body,” I said.

  “What?” Angie exclaimed. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at it in the dark last night. If we leave it now, there’s a chance the murderer will return and get rid of evidence. We owe it to poor Thomas to recover as many details as we can. I’ll take some photos of the crime scene for the police.”

  Ms. Chipper stared. “With what?”

  “Oh, right. I don’t have my phone either. Strange how we’ve become so reliant on the things.”

  “We need to go,” Angie insisted. Her voice was taking on the knife-edge of panic.

  “You need to go,” I told her. “And so do the kids. All of you, get going. I’ll catch up. The trail is easy enough to follow.”

  Ms. Chipper looked me over. “You’re not going to catch up.”

  I was about to object but then realized she was right. “Then I’ll just have to hike out on my own.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” Quinten said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  I felt flattered by his courtesy, although I didn’t see how he could be much help.

  “I don’t want to go without you, Dad,” Butch whined. Although he was such an oversized young all-star, I suddenly saw vulnerability there.

  “And I don’t want to go without you,” Martin told me.

  “The students have to stay with me,” Ms. Chipper insisted.

  “Martin is my responsibility, and Butch is Quinten’s. You can’t be held accountable. And it’s better if we have a group. The killer won’t want to face us in a group.”

  “Yeah, and he’s probably miles away by now anyway,” Martin said.

  I hoped that was true.

  Ms. Chipper sighed, looked back at the anxious cluster of students, looked at me, and said, “All right. Take Thomas’s map. He put it in the side pocket of his backpack.”

  I checked in his tent. “It’s gone. But this changes nothing. You already pointed out the trail to me, and it’s well marked. We’ll be fine.”

  Ms. Chipper looked as if she would rather jump off a cliff than leave us, but she saw the sense in what I was saying. We couldn’t just leave a murder scene unattended. I’d rather have waited until help arrived, but that might not happen before dark, and I didn’t want to spend another night in the wilderness, not with that killer on the loose.

  Reluctantly, Ms. Chipper gathered up the kids, as well as a frantic Angie, and headed out, but not before Martin and Melanie had a heartfelt farewell. The rest of the kids were too frightened to tease them, and they were too earnest even to notice what their peers did, much less care.

  First, we took a close look in and around the camp but found nothing. While the surrounding brush was trampled in numerous places, most or all of those spots had probably been made by the kids themselves. We found nothing except a couple of candy wrappers, which, to my surprise, Martin picked up and put in his pocket.

  “People should leave nature alone,” he declared.

  We headed up to the mineshaft, looking for clues all the while.

  Once again, we found nothing. It had been raining heavily for hours, and it didn’t look like it was going to let up anytime soon. If the murderer had left any traces, they were long gone now.

  Not so in the mineshaft. It had been left, as far as I could tell, just as it had been the previous night.

  The boards stacked near the entrance remained where we had discovered them. Telling the kids to keep back, because they were far too young to see a dead body, especially that of one of their teachers, Quinten and I went to the entrance.

  The body still lay facedown just inside the entrance. The blood in his hair had dried, and his limbs had stiffened with rigor mortis. The boot prints in the dust had faded a bit, no doubt from the strong breeze that had blown all night, but remained fairly visible.

  “I wish I could measure these prints before they fade away entirely,” I muttered.

  “What prints?” Quinten asked.

  “Clean your glasses.”

  “Do you have a sewing kit?” He asked, pulling out a cloth and wiping his lenses clean. He put them back on, and the fog slowly began to form on them again.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Quinten sneezed. “Measure the boots with thread and cut them to size. Then you can give the thread to the police, and they’ll have the measurements.”

  I gaped at him. “That’s brilliant.”

  Quinten smiled. “Librarians are the unsung geniuses of our civilization.”

  “You’re far too modest,” I said, going to my pack and fetching my sewing kit as well as a ballpoint pen and notepad. The boys stood a little way off, water dripping off the hoods of their raincoats, looking around nervously.

  I measured the boot prints as Quinten had suggested and cut the thread to the proper lengths. I took measurements of the boot length and maximum and minimum width and made a sketch of the pattern of the sole.

  Once I finished, I checked the body again.

  The blow was on the left-hand side of the skull, as if a right-handed man had swung some blunt, heavy object. Studying the wound, I could see he had been hit more than once. I imagined that he had been struck once, had fallen down, and then his attacker had struck him a couple of more times to make sure he was dead.

  What was interesting, though, was that the blow was on the side of the head and slightly toward the front. Thomas had been facing his attacker when he got hit.

  And yet we hadn’t heard him cry out.

  What had Martin and Melanie overheard him say? “Fine, let’s get it over with. I’ll show you.”

  I examined his clothes. His wallet was in his pocket, but it was jammed in at an odd angle, as if the killer had pulled out the wallet and then stuffed it back in haste. Using a handkerchief, I pulled it out and opened it. It was awkward work looking through it while trying not to leave any prints. The money, ID, and credit cards were there. It was a cloth wallet with two small pockets secured with zippers. Both were open and empty.

  After returning the wallet to its place, I shined my light down the mineshaft and saw no evidence that the killer had gone farther than a few feet inside the shaft. He had obviously done away with Thomas at another location, dragged him here, and dumped him.

  Dragged? Perhaps not. Dragging a body would have left a big mark in the forest, one that even a night of rainfall probably wouldn’t erase. Had he carried the body? That would make him a strong man. I estimated Thomas to weigh about 180 pounds. Carrying him up a wet slope in the rain would have taken quite a lot of strength and balance.

  Had there been more than one murderer?

  I came out of the mineshaft to find Martin bending over the boards stacked near the entrance.

  “Martin! I told you not to come close.”

  “Look, Grandma.” He pointed to one of the boards.

  On a hooked nail was a clump of thread, slicked down onto the wood by the rain. I looked closer and saw it was brown wool. Torn from a sweater the killer was wearing? Thomas hadn’t been wearing brown wool.

  “Good job, Martin!”

  “Is that a clue?” He sounded happy to have helped.

  “I do believe it is.”

  The boy grew serious. “That’s from the killer, isn’t it?”

  “Probably.”

  “It was him we heard coming into camp, wasn’t it? For a while, I thought it was Mr. Cardiff coming back. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “It’s all right. I know you were upset.” I tried to give him a hug, and for the first time in a long time, he pulled away.

  “We don’t have time for that.” He had a hard look on his face.

  I blinked. For a moment, he looked like James, my late husband. He had gotten that look any time the mission got tough. The “I’m scared and I’m hurting but I’m going to pull through” look.

  I had never seen that look on my son Frederick. We had shelter
ed him from the hard things of the world, and he had grown up carefree and kind and (I must admit it) a bit soft. Martin had enjoyed that same life.

  Until now.

  It made me wonder how Frederick would have reacted if he had been here.

  “You’re right, Martin. Now that we’ve collected all the clues we can, there’s nothing more we can do to help your teacher. Now we have to hike as fast as we can out of here and report to the police.”

  He nodded, eyes vulnerable, and looked at me for a long moment. I could see he really wanted that hug. And I really wanted to give him that hug.

  But perhaps he didn’t need it. Perhaps, at least for today, he had to be a man and not a boy.

  “You better collect that bit of fluff,” he said. “It might wash away in the rain.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  I collected it, and after searching around the mineshaft and finding nothing, we headed back down to the abandoned campsite and followed the group down the trail.

  We weren’t far behind, only about half an hour, so I hoped that if we pushed hard, we might catch up.

  The trail hugging the side of Coal Valley sloped gently downhill, and we made good time. Not as good as I would have liked, because the rain kept up, and the way at times was slippery, but I felt confident that if we did not catch up to the others, at least we would be out of the park well before nightfall.

  We came to the scenic overlook where Thomas had been spying with his zoom lens. I peered down at the spot he had been focusing on. While it was hard to tell with the rain obscuring everything, I certainly didn’t see any tree trunk where I thought I had seen one before.

  Brown wool. Brown tree trunk. Yes, I had seen him, hadn’t I?

  I suppressed a little shiver.

  “Look,” Butch said, pointing down the valley.

  Far in the distance, I could see the rest of the group on the trail. They were moving fast. Ms. Chipper had kept them going at a good pace. I bet Angie had helped with that too.

  Butch and Martin started jumping up and down, shouting, and waving their arms.