by Laura Bickle
“Thank you very much.”
The doctor patted her on the shoulder ineffectually on the way out. He closed the door, and Petra stared out the window at the empty sidewalk. Soft shock settled over her, like snow, and she recognized it for what it was, this muffled reaction. Stage one of grief.
And it occurred to her that perhaps this was the one process she was finally doing in order.
Petra returned home in late afternoon. The sky spat intermittent snowflakes, and a white sun peered through the blanket of grey clouds overhead. She had no memory of the actual drive to her Airstream trailer at the edge of town, which bothered her. She stopped her 1970s-vintage Ford Bronco before the trailer and shut off the ignition, listening to the engine settle.
She glanced at the referral paperwork and informational brochures she’d been given. In a flash of anger, she stuffed the papers in the glove box and slammed it shut as hard as she could. She stared at the closed glove box. Something about stuffing that diagnosis into a small space and slamming the door on it seemed to take away its power, like it didn’t really exist. She tried not to think about it sitting there in cold darkness, festering with her car insurance paperwork, registration, and bits of used-up pens.
She jumped down from the truck and shut the door quietly. Crossing the snow to the front door of the trailer, she saw her footprints from earlier in the morning, coming back to meet her in a slushy loop.
As she opened the front door to the trailer, an avalanche of grey fur fell over her, licking her face. Petra squirmed through the door and shut it behind her as her coyote companion wriggled with joy at seeing her.
“Hi, Sig. Sweet fellow, you.”
She sank to the linoleum floor, letting the keys fall and wrapping both arms around Sig’s neck. His heart thumped against her cheek, and tears slipped between her cheek and his fur.
Sig whined and leaned close against her.
“Yeah. It didn’t go well. And it may not go well from here on out.” She lifted her hands to the sides of his head. Her nose was drippy and she snuffled ungracefully. “I want you to know that I’ll make sure that you’re taken care of. No matter what, okay?”
Sig pressed his head into her chest. She stroked his soft ears with her fingers, tracing the gold flecks of his coat and the edge of his collar. She would do right by him.
She scrubbed her face with her palm, took a deep breath, and climbed to her feet. The trailer was empty, and she was grateful for the solitude. But a cup of coffee sat on the kitchen table. She placed her hand around the cup. It was lukewarm. She lifted it, drained it, and peered out the window over the sink.
A man stood out in the snowy field, alone, unmoving. She watched him. A trio of ravens walked across the field, muttering to themselves, seeming to ignore him.
After some time, she put the cup in the sink and walked out the door. Sig came with her, tangling around her legs, ears twitching. Her boots crunched down the steps and followed the tracks around the trailer, out to the field.
The ravens spied her immediately and took wing, cawing.
The man in the field watched them go, his amber eyes swallowing up their flight patterns in the grey sky. Petra stepped up beside him, her hands in her pockets.
“Any luck yet?” she asked him.
“No.” Gabriel shook his head. “They won’t speak to me.”
Sig snorted through the ravens’ tracks on the ground. Petra spied bits of things strewn in the snow meant to lure them in: gum wrappers, cat food kibble, and bottle caps. Sig fell upon the bits of kibble in delight, picking through the shiny bits of metal for the treats.
Petra’s mouth flattened. Gabe had been trying to connect with the ravens, spending hours in silence in the field every day until she’d come out to lead him in. He was lost, somewhere on the land, missing the sky. Once upon a time, he’d been one of them.
As a Hanged Man, he’d been nearly invincible and immortal, living in Temperance at the margins of the living world for more than a hundred fifty years. He’d split his time between land and sky, shifting effortlessly from earthbound flesh to weightless feathers. “You miss them,” she blurted, unnecessarily.
“I miss them,” he said.
She reached for his hand. It felt cold and lifeless in hers.
He nodded wordlessly. The Hanged Men had always worked at the nearby Rutherford Ranch, but Sal Rutherford had been the cruelest master his bloodline had ever produced. When the Hanged Men finally rebelled against his domination over magic he didn’t understand, Sal had burned the Alchemical Tree of Life, the Lunaria, in revenge. Sal had gotten what was coming to him, but the damage was done.
“I destroyed all of it.” Gabe was pale.
“You should come in. You’ll get frostbite.” It felt as if she was reminding him that he was human. She didn’t do it to be cruel; she hoped he knew that. With the death of the tree, Gabe had become mortal, powerless, and all the men he’d lived and fought and worked with were now dead. He was the last of them. Petra couldn’t imagine what that felt like. She led him away, through the field and back to the trailer.
His brow wrinkled, as if he just remembered that she’d been gone. “How was . . . your trip?”
She squinted out at the white afternoon sun, trying to break through the clouds. “It was fine. Roads weren’t bad. Got behind a plow, and hung back a half mile.”
“That’s good.” His eyes were still scraping the sky, hunting for ravens.
“Yeah.”
She couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Not yet.
Chapter 2
The Vanishing of Sal Rutherford
A crime had been committed. He could feel it in his bones. He knew that something awful had happened to an equally awful person.
He just couldn’t prove it.
Owen had been poring over Sal Rutherford’s ranch with a fine-tooth comb these last several weeks. Sal, the fat old bastard, had vanished. Normally, the disappearance of a pitch-perfect asshole would not bother Owen in the slightest. Assholes vanished every day, and that was not a bad thing for public order. But Sal was his cousin, and he was supposed to do something about it. As the county sheriff, Owen knew he’d look pretty damn ineffectual if he couldn’t keep track of his own relatives.
Owen jammed his hands into his uniform coat pockets as he gazed over Sal’s snowy field. He still thought of it as Sal’s field. If Sal had met a bad end, then all this land would become his, instead. It was vast—hundreds of acres of cattle, grass, and hills that had been in the family for a hundred fifty years. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Maybe in a larger jurisdiction this would be one of those things that would be considered a conflict of interest, and he’d punt the investigation over to someone from a nearby city or to the state for the sake of appearances. There sure was enough muttering behind his back about Sal’s impressive collection of enemies, but there was no one else to take over in this place where cows outnumbered people.
Owen reached into his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and squinted at the field. Cows milled through the snow, oblivious to Sal’s absence. Sal’s house, too, had been pretty much in order. There’d been no signs of a tussle, and a good dousing of Luminol had shown there were no scrubbed-up puddles of blood hidden under the rugs. Sal’s truck had been parked in the driveway with a full tank of gas and a curious smell of something burnt on the upholstery. Whatever had happened to Sal, it hadn’t been at the house.
And it wasn’t as if Sal had gone on a spontaneous trip. The old bastard wasn’t well. Last time Owen had seen him, liver cancer was eating him alive. He was pretty much confined to a wheelchair, except for a few bouts of drunken lurching around with his cane. Sal’s motorized wheelchair was here, in the house, and the scooter was parked in the garage, fully charged.
Sal’s closets had seemed undisturbed. Dusty suitcases remained in the corners, and his drawers hadn’t been emptied of socks. If he was heading to Florida to relax, he would have at least packed his sunglasses. The only things O
wen couldn’t find were his keys and his wallet.
The one weird thing that Owen had found was a burned tree in the back forty of Sal’s property. It might just be coincidence, but he came back here, again and again, to stare at the blackened timber. The tree had fought through the fire, a new sapling growing from the roots. Owen’s men had found traces of gasoline. Someone had deliberately burned it. Maybe this was something simple, like the old tree had been harboring a nest of yellow jackets. Maybe the ranch hands had waited until it got cold outside and the bees grew sluggish enough to burn it, and the fire got a bit out of control.
But it bothered him.
And the ranch hands bothered him. Sal had more than a dozen men that did his bidding. Creepy guys. Owen and his deputies avoided them as much as possible. They were Sal’s private goon squad, and Owen turned a blind eye to their activities in his official capacity as sheriff.
But that was the weird thing. Sal was gone, and so were all the ranch hands. Nobody had seen them, anywhere. All the vehicles were accounted for on the property. Owen had to scramble to hire some temp workers to make sure the cattle got fed and watered.
So. It wasn’t just one disappearance. This was a mass vanishing. Maybe Sal had taken his men and gone to do some dirty business somewhere and would return, smug and full of himself, tomorrow. Maybe the ranch hands had had enough of Sal, killed him, hid his body, and split. Owen was thinking that was more likely. Sal had never developed any people skills.
“Sheriff, what’s your twenty?” a voice crackled over the radio receiver clipped to his collar.
Owen keyed it. “Rutherford back forty. What’s up?”
“You wanted an APB put out for all the ranch hands and Sal. We got one put out for Sal, but . . . we’re having problems with the rest.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s not a whole lot of information on these guys. We found pictures of a couple of ’em on the surveillance camera at the post office. Got some descriptions from the hardware store owner, and he’s working with a sketch artist.”
“What about names?”
“We searched to see if anyone besides Sal has a valid driver’s license that lists the Rutherford Ranch as a home address. We got a bunch of names that were dead ends, with no corresponding records, but there are photos. One of which looks an awful lot like the surveillance video. We checked the registrations of all the vehicles on the property, and they all go back to Sal.”
“Payroll records?”
“None. No checks cashed through the bank or written by Sal.”
Owen rubbed the dark beard on his chin. “Howsabout you get someone over here to dust for prints in the barn and the house. Run those through CODIS and see if we get any hits. I want to know who these guys are.”
“Roger that, Sheriff.”
Owen clicked off the radio and stared at the tree. He was expecting that at least half of ’em would come back with priors. Most ranch hands drifted around, working for cash under the table, not looking for a helluva lot of scrutiny. But these guys . . . it was like they were ghosts.
He took a drag on his cigarette. He’d figure it out. People just didn’t vanish into thin air, especially in small towns.
“Do you think Sal’s dead?”
Owen looked up. A little girl sat on the lowest burned branch of the tree. She was about nine, her blond hair stringy wet and green with algae. She was dressed in jeans and a pink T-shirt with glitter that had worn off, and a hoodie covered in a cartoon cat print. Only one sneaker dangled from her right foot. She looked him right in the eye as she spoke, the way a good hallucination should.
Owen tossed his cigarette away in the snow. No one was around to hear him. “Probably,” he admitted.
“Why?”
“Sal’s the kind of guy who deserves to get murdered,” he blurted. He regretted it as soon as the words escaped his mouth. But it was true.
The girl lowered her eyes. “Did I?”
“No.” He was able to say that with true conviction.
Not that he knew many details about the girl’s death. On his first day as a sheriff’s deputy, Owen had responded to a call from a hunter who said he’d found what looked like a human head in the bottom of a well. The hunter had hiked three miles to the nearest spot where he could get cell reception, and was waiting by the side of the road for Owen to show up.
Owen had answered the call by himself. That wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. Rookies were supposed to be supervised at all times by a more senior deputy, and Owen sure as hell made sure that policy was followed when he became sheriff. Newbs could get hurt or get somebody else hurt. But on this day, Owen’s dad, the sheriff at the time, had sent him on a run to go pick up coffee filters.
Yeah, coffee filters. Super-duper official business. A harmless enough errand.
Nonetheless, Owen was psyched to go on a run by himself. Even if it was for fucking coffee filters. His uniform was freshly starched. His badge was shiny, and he was full of a sense of his own destiny. And when the local store was out of coffee filters, he went to the feed store to check to see if they had any. They did. He also picked up a pound of the fancy ground stuff to make a good impression on his coworkers, and a root beer for himself. He caught the eye of the checkout girl, tipped his hat and made her blush. She was a cute blond girl with blue eyes and a tattoo of a daisy on her wrist. Sharella. He got her number and whistled to himself when he walked out to the leaf-strewn parking lot.
Everything was right with the world, dammit.
The autumn sky was a cloudless blue, and Indian summer had drenched the land in sunshine. He rolled down the windows on the cruiser, took the chance to gun the engine on a straightaway to feel how fast the car would go. He’d pegged a hundred thirty, felt the wind whipping through the cruiser and getting caught in the cage behind his seat. He let out a whoop of sheer joy and dangled his left hand out of the window to feel the wind rush through his splayed fingers.
He almost missed the radio. Cindy, the dispatcher, was trying to raise some noise.
“. . . Delta Five, what’s your twenty?”
Owen took his foot off the gas, cranked the windows up, cleared his throat, and keyed the dash radio. Dammit. He’d taken too long, and now they were checking up on him. “Base, this is Delta Five. I’m at Harbinger and Route 12.”
“Got a call from a civilian at Stout’s Run. Please check in on him for a 10-17 before you return to base.” The dispatcher made a half-chortle that got cut off by the radio key.
“Roger, that.”
Owen reached in his pocket for his cheat sheet of radio codes. A 10-17 was “meet complainant.” Stout’s Run was way back in the boonies. There was literally no one out there but moose. This was feeling like a prank. He sighed, pretty sure there was no way to avoid being hazed as the new kid on the block, regardless of who his father was. Hell, his dad was probably in on it.
Owen turned down the gravel road at Stout’s Run. The road was bordered by quaking aspen with brilliant yellow leaves. A man in a quilted flannel coat was standing beside the road in a bright orange hunter’s cap. He had a gun slung over his shoulder. Owen recognized him—Larry Marten was a known person to the law. His dad had reeled him in many times for public intoxication and DUIs. Larry had never hurt anybody, not even when he was found asleep behind the wheel of his car in the middle of the highway last June. He’d stopped for a deer, he said, but apparently didn’t bother to start back up again. Larry was famous for telling stories—he’d seen Bigfoot three times and Jesus twice.
“Larry,” Owen said, climbing out of the cruiser. “You need a ride somewhere?”
Larry had his arms crossed over his chest, and the man’s craggy face was pale. “I saw somethin’ back there, somethin’ I need to show you.”
“Okay. Like what? Bigfoot or something?”
Larry shook his head. “Uh-uh. Something bad.”
Owen reached back for his radio and gave his position, all according to the bo
ok. Larry wouldn’t tell him what was up, and Cindy was irritated. Owen decided to just follow the guy, look at the Bigfoot tracks, and then drop Larry back off at his home.
He followed Larry into the forest. The old coot walked noiselessly, but there was an odd silence about the forest. No birds gossiped overhead, and no squirrels bickered in the underbrush.
“So, you gonna tell me what you seen?” Owen asked, wanting to fill the silence.
“I was out here, lookin’ for squirrel,” Larry said. “Fell asleep.”
“You been drinking?”
“Nope.”
“You know you can’t be carrying a firearm under the influence, Larry.” Owen didn’t figure on making Larry his first arrest. That was kind of pathetic, really aiming for the low-hanging fruit.
“I swear I’m sober. Right hand to God.” Larry raised his hand.
Owen did a field sobriety test on him. The man could follow his finger with his eyes, walk a straight line, and recite the alphabet forward and backward.
“So, what did you see?” Owen wanted to know, feeling impatient.
“I woke up after my nap, got thirsty. I went to this well. Over there.” He pointed to a worn circle of stones, partially obscured by a drift of golden leaves. A broken tripod perched above it, from which a piece of nylon rope, bleached white by the weather, dangled.
“Ohhkayy,” Owen said slowly.
“And somethin’ came up in the bucket. It looked like a human head.”
Inwardly, Owen rolled his eyes. He was being pranked, he knew it. “Halloween was two weeks ago, Larry.”
“I ain’t lyin’. Go look.”
Owen circled around the opposite side of the well. He wasn’t taking any chances that Larry might push him in. He reached out for the fuzzy rope and yanked back.
A plastic bucket banged hollowly against the side of the well. The bucket lurched up over the edge and landed on Owen’s shoe, spilling out black muck.
And a skull rolled out into the leaves. It was smallish, about the size of a cantaloupe, with strands of blond hair clinging to a bit of leathery flesh at the brow.
