Hunting Ground

by Meghan Holloway

  The memory of those words, said countless times with varying degrees of patience, stiffened my spine. “Everything’s fine.”

  He studied me for a moment and then nodded. “Have a good day.”

  Once he drove away, I turned a slow circle on the walk. The inn was at the end of the road, skirted by woods on either side, hemmed by the river at the back. It was a quiet street. Mailboxes at the end of snow-packed lanes marked the lots on the opposite side of the road, but the houses themselves were hidden by trees. This was a lonely stretch of street, even as it was only blocks from the main thoroughfare.

  I rubbed my hands along my arms to ward off a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. My hand slipped into my pocket and clenched around the can of pepper spray as I walked the half mile to the mechanic’s shop. I did not loosen my grip until I reached the auto shop.

  A bell over the door rang when I entered the shop attached to the garage. The inside was spartan but clean, and the chair behind the desk was empty. “Hello?”

  “Be right with you,” a voice called from an open doorway behind the desk, and a moment later, Ed Decker appeared nursing a cup of coffee. “Ev’lyn. What can I do for you this morning?”

  The dropped syllable in my name and his welcoming smile had my shoulders relaxing. “I left a box in my car and was hoping I could grab it before you get to work on her.”

  “Sure, sure. I plan on getting started on her today, but she’s not in the bay yet. I have her parked in the back lot.” He opened a drawer in the desk and fished around for my key. He motioned for me to follow him and led me through a break room to the back door. He dropped the key into my palm. “I have to order some parts from Bozeman. You need any help with your box?”

  “No, I have it. Thank you.” I crossed the back lot to where my car was parked at the end of a row of vehicles.

  The box held the last remnants of my life in Atlanta: a teapot from Japan that my grandmother’s father had brought home after World War II; my grandfather’s grandfather’s pocket watch; my father’s boyhood baseball glove, the leather worn to buttery softness; my mother’s leather-bound collection of Jane Austen novels and an old music box. The music box was shaped like a piano, made of etched crystal so the cogs and wheels were visible when I lifted the lid and a tinkling rendition of Greensleeves began to play. I smiled and let it play for a moment before tucking it inside the baseball mitt. I closed the box and lifted it from the backseat.

  I moved to close the door with my hip but paused. It was the color that caught my eye. Deep purple adorned with pink polka dots. I leaned over and lifted the coat from where it lay in the front passenger’s seat. It was petite in size, designed for a teenager. Familiarity struck me, and unease walked a chilling finger up my spine. One side seemed weighted, and when I searched the pockets, I pulled out a keychain. It was made from a thin crosscut section of tree limb, sanded but roughhewn with the number 7 carved into the wood. A key dangled from the ring attached to one end.

  I locked the door, balanced the box on my hip, and crossed the lot. Ed was at the coffee pot when I entered the break room. I handed him the key to my car and showed him the coat. “Do you know where this came from?”

  He pulled his trapper hat off and scratched his head. “I can’t rightly say.”

  “You didn’t put it in my car?”

  “In your car? No, never seen it before.”

  I made a thoughtful sound and peered out the door at my car. Something gnawed at the edges of my mind, a nudge of memory that slid out of reach as soon as I grasped for it.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No,” I said slowly, draping the coat over my arm. “No, I don’t think so. Thank you again, Ed.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Outside on the sidewalk, I started back toward the inn. I looked both ways at the intersection, but when I glanced to the left to check traffic, I froze. I stared at the bridge. I did not know how the coat had ended up in my car, but I knew why it was familiar to me. The campground. The coat had been in the warming hut yesterday morning.

  I hurried back into the auto shop. Ed was at his desk and glanced up when the bell rang. “Actually, is the offer for a loaner vehicle still on the table?”

  I was used to an old vehicle, but the Chevy predated my Civic by at least thirty years. I had to muscle the door open, and rust fell like flecks of blood onto the snow. The interior was perfectly maintained, though, the leather bench seat as smooth and supple as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.

  The truck may have been ancient, but it rumbled to life at the first turn of the key and shifted smoothly into gear. I left the lot and directed the truck across the bridge. The campground had seen more traffic since yesterday, and the snow was packed down into two ruts I followed along the narrow lane, around the bend, and down the row of cabins.

  The cabin with a 7 above the door was on the riverfront, and it looked as abandoned for the season as the others. I parked in the space allotted for the rental and darted a glance at my cellphone. Most people had the instinct to call the police in situations in which they were uncomfortable. I had been one of those people once. I was not any longer. I pocketed my phone, collected the key and coat, and shoved out of the truck.

  There was no porch. It was on the other side of the cabin looking out over the river. A set of steps led directly up to the front door. Snow covered the first steps and left only one for me to climb to knock on the door. The echo of my knock sounded within. I waited and then knocked again, but there was no movement inside.

  I made a slow circuit of the cabin. The windows were boarded, and when I climbed the steps onto the porch at the back of the cabin, the deck was slick under the layer of snow. I knocked on the back door and received the same greeting.

  Weighing the key in my hand, I glanced around. There were two vehicles parked in the lot by the trailhead. The river tumbled by at my back, and a trio of magpies eyed me from the roof of the adjacent cabin.

  I turned back to the door and fit the key into the lock. It turned easily, but snow and ice had bound the door in place. I had to shove my weight against it to break the frozen seal. The door opened with a groan, and I perched uneasily on the threshold. It was cold and dark within.

  “Hello? Anyone here?” I fished my phone from my pocket, turned on the flashlight application, and cast the beam of light across the interior.

  It was empty, even barren of furniture. The interior reminded me vaguely of the inn on a smaller scale with an open floor plan pivoting around a stone fireplace and the beams of the ceiling exposed. It was sparse and rustic, pared down to the essentials. I imagined it was charming at the height of the season, but in its winter hibernation, it was as welcoming as a treacherous cave.

  A magpie cackled raucously. I jumped, darting one last glance over my shoulder before stepping inside. I left the door open behind me and swept the light through all the corners.

  Two doorways opened off of either side of the den. I approached the one on the left first. It was a bedroom with only the skeletons of two sets of bunk beds against the wall to mark it.

  I crossed to the opposite doorway. When I reached the threshold and heard a scrape of sound behind me, I whirled, panning the light across the great room.

  “Hello? Is someone there?” My voice sounded high and tight in my own ears.

  The cabin was as empty as it had been when I first entered, but a prickling awareness of another presence raised the hair on the back of my neck. I turned back quickly to the second room, expecting to see a hulking shadow in the doorway, but it remained dark and empty. I stepped cautiously across the threshold and panned my light across the room.

  I froze. My phone and the coat fell from my fingers. A scream tried to crawl its way up my throat, but I was too shocked for it to escape, my vocal cords as frozen as my limbs. All that slipped from me was a muffled whimper.

  The paralysis of shock released its hold, and I b
acked away, clamping a hand so tightly across my mouth I tasted blood. I did not stop until my shoulders hit the fireplace with a jarring thump.

  My phone had fallen with the flashlight pointed toward the ceiling, the light illuminating the room in an eerie white glow. The woman’s shadow was elongated on the far wall as her weight spun slowly at the end of the rope stretched from her throat to a beam above.

  Part II

  Remove the Stems that

  Grow Weaker

  Ten

  There are no black roses. Those that appear

  black are actually dark crimson in color.

  HECTOR

  It was all carefully staged. She wore a thin, floral sundress that was too tight in the chest and hips. It looked as if it had been made for someone a decade younger than the early twenties she must have been. Her hair was caught in two braids, and her feet were bare.

  The department’s evidence technician, Ted Peters, put away his kit and his camera. “I’m finished with her.”

  Everyone in the room looked to the detective, Martin Yates. He nodded. “Cut her down.”

  She was stiff, from the cold and from rigor. Ned Ashton, a young officer who had only been on the force for a year, helped me move her to the low gurney. His face was as colorless as the dead woman’s.

  Grover Westland, the county coroner, drew the sheet over her. It slid over her ankle, exposing one bare foot. Her toenails were painted a bright pink that looked shocking and garish on her waxy skin. I tugged the sheet over the small appendage.

  “Do you think Frank can track which direction she might have been brought from?” Yates asked.

  I sighed. As part of the local search and rescue team, Frank and I had found eight people too late to bring them out of the wilderness alive. I tried HRD—human remains detection—training with him, but the poodle had a strong aversion to decomposing tissue. He did not care to be around the dead, and I could not much blame him. “I’ll get him.”

  He was sitting in the driver’s seat of my truck, and he barked when he saw me. “I’ll cook you a steak for dinner tonight,” I promised him as I opened the door.

  I led him inside the cabin. As soon as he smelled her, his head went low, and he hunched closer to the ground.

  “Get to work, Frank.”

  I trailed after him as he darted outside and made a circuit of the cabin, running out wide and then working back in a serpentine path.

  He made it all the way around the cabin, and I was ready to call him back, thinking his search futile, when he found a scent trail. He led me down the lane toward the trailhead and then darted between the last two cabins and into the woods.

  Away from where the foot traffic had heavily trampled the snow, I could see a single set of prints. The prints veered between the boarded-up cabins and trudged into the dense forest. I scanned the ground and the surrounding trees as I followed Frank. Branches were snapped, and I cued up my radio to tell Peters where to find the trail so he could check for snagged fibers or hairs.

  A quarter mile through the woods, Frank and I came upon the old service road. It was the same road he had lost the trail at yesterday, and he did so again today. The same tracks I had seen yesterday marked the deep snow, tracks set like tires with a tread like a snowmobile. The rangers had told me yesterday the service road ended at the river.

  I whistled for Frank and trekked back through the woods along a different route so as not to disturb any evidence that might have been left behind. Back at the station, I left Frank in my office and headed to the equipment room.

  I shrugged into one of the insulated coveralls and grabbed a helmet and my rifle before heading out on one of the snowmobiles kept in the sally port. Once in the campground, I cut through the woods to the service road and followed it into the wilderness of the Yellowstone borderlands.

  The wind was sharp against my face as I rode, and I breathed deeply as the miles raced past. There was a purity to the air here, a clean scent of sky bled into earth that I had never smelled anywhere else. Winter was a hardscrabble, gritty season in this part of the country, but it had always been my favorite. The wildness was whittled to a fine blade in the winter, everything rendered sharper in the cold. This was a land as beautiful as it was dangerous. In other seasons, the beauty could hide the danger. Parred down to bone in the winter, there was no hiding how brutal this land could be. Winter was nature at its most hard and authentic.

  I rounded a curve in the old track, crested the hill, and found the river below. The rangers were correct, the old service road ended here at the summit of the hill, but the tracks I followed cut straight down to the river and then veered off to the right. The tracks headed west, following the Yellowstone River Trail.

  The landscape was jagged and roughhewn. The hills were high and craggy, home to surefooted big horn sheep and stealthy cougars. Across the river, Rattlesnake Butte was blue and white in the late morning light. The way was dangerous through the steeper sections of the canyon, prone to rockslides in the summer and avalanches in the winter. I slowed the snowmobile and kept an eye on the canyon walls as I followed the curve of the river.

  The tracks ran concurrent to the trail until the trail left park land and was nearing Bear Creek. The tracks angled north, all the way back to the state road that ran between Gardiner and Raven’s Gap.

  I killed the throttle and pulled off my helmet. I knew this stretch of road well. Around the next curve, half a mile away, was my own drive leading out to my land.

  This was someone local. Someone who knew the secret passages of this stretch of wilderness. The trail I had just followed had not branched off or backtracked. Whoever had driven it knew the exact route to follow, knew the trail and the old service road.

  And with the deliberate breadcrumbs laid to the scene, the careful staging of the woman in the cabin, and the expertly plotted route, I doubted this was the predator’s first time hunting.

  Eleven

  There is simply the rose; it is perfect

  in every moment of its existence.

  -Ralph Waldo Emerson

  EVELYN

  The shock of recognition still ricocheted through me. I deliberately played it over in my head, refusing to flinch from the memory of her swollen, discolored features. It had been the woman from the warming hut.

  Are you certain? the detective had asked me.

  Those words had brought back other memories. Was I certain I was interpreting his attention correctly? Was I certain I had seen him standing on the sidewalk across the street from my grandparents’ home? Was I certain I had not done anything to encourage him?

  Yes. I was as certain now as I had been then.

  I wandered along the grocery store aisles listlessly. I could not focus on the shelves before me, though, and I made it from one end of the supermarket to the other with an empty basket.

  The grocery store advertised itself as locally and family owned. It was small and neat with a surprisingly decent selection, a deli on one side, a pharmacy on the other. A community bulletin board stretched along the wall between the pharmacy and the restrooms, and I paused to study the flyers.

  There was a plethora of events announced and a menagerie of items for sale. One flyer caught my attention. It was a cartoon of two women in conversation. They were dressed as 1920s flappers and the caption read, I tried to form a gang but it turned into a book club. Amused, I stepped closer to the board and read the information emblazoned at the bottom of the flyer. It directed me to Book Ends for more information.

  I placed my empty basket back in the rack and wandered across town to the bookstore. The place made me catch my breath again as I entered, and I paused in the entryway to study the bulletin board there. Many of the same community events were pinned here as well, but the cartoon ad here was of two men boxing. The caption read, The first rule of Book Club: You do not talk about Book Club.

  The woman I had seen here the other day appeared from the depths of
the shelves with a stack of books in her arms. She let out a breath of relief when she deposited the stack on the desk. She turned, smoothing her blouse, and caught sight of me in the entryway.

  She recognized me immediately, and a warm smile immediately graced her face. “Hello. I didn’t hear the bell.”

  “I only just came in.” I approached the desk. “I’m Evelyn Hutto, by the way. I didn’t introduce myself the other day, but I’m new to town.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. Susan Winslow. Welcome to Raven’s Gap.” She was as polished and put together as she was the last time I had been here. She extended her hand to me with her greeting, and I was surprised to see that her nails were ragged and torn down to the quick. The raw, worried flesh seemed so out of place I caught myself staring.

  I recovered quickly and shook her hand, hoping she had not noticed my stare. “I’m—”

  I felt him behind me even before Susan’s gaze moved to a point behind my left shoulder, before he said my name.

  “Evelyn.” The ardent tone of his voice had my shoulders hitching with tension.

  I turned to face Jeff, and I knew. I knew. I recognized the avid gaze as it searched my face. The too-familiar smile. The stance that edged into my personal space just enough to be uncomfortable but still look completely innocent. I know you stood in the shadows watching me last night. I know you were there.

  Are you certain? Could you be mistaken? He’s really a nice guy. Completely harmless.

  I felt Susan retreat, and I fought the urge to call her back, to beg her not to leave me alone in his vicinity.

  It was the urge to beg that forced steel into my spine and sent a jolt of anger through my veins like an electrical current. I met his stare with my own and hoped my eyes conveyed that I knew. I knew that with men like this, nothing was by accident or chance. I had learned that last time. And this time, I would not be terrorized.