sixteen

I stay for lunch. That’s expected. Then I help a bit around the house, and when I leave, Granny sends me off with an apple pie. An actual apple pie, which I will appreciate much more than the liquid version, even if it means I need to detour to the shack to drop it off.

I’m about a half mile away when a twig cracks. I spin, like I used to in my early days exploring these woods, and I imagine Edie’s laugh.

You’re like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, Winter, she said.

That doesn’t make any sense, I replied.

She explained the analogy—the cat dashing through the room, just waiting for one of those rockers to crunch down on her tail. That’s how I felt everywhere in Reeve’s End. Tense, waiting for trouble. Forest or town, it was unfamiliar territory, filled with dangerous rocking chairs.

These days, in the woods, I usually process the noises as simple data, potentially a threat but more likely to be dinner. Now I’m jumping.

I catch a flicker of movement in the trees. Dead leaves crackle behind me. I wheel as a rabbit zooms across the path, and I hear Edie’s laugh again.

I take a deep breath and continue on. I’m nearly to the shack when I hear buzzing.

A cell phone?

It’s a testament to my nerves that I even jumped to that conclusion when the answer is one I’m far more familiar with. The buzzing of flies. Lots of flies, from the sound of it. I take another few steps, and there—jutting onto my makeshift path ahead—is something white.

Something white.

I race forward to see—

It’s a rabbit. A dead rabbit with its white rump and tail extending from under a bush. That’s all there is—the rear half. The rest is gone.

I stare at the mutilated rabbit. Its hind leg moves. I jump and hit a tree behind me and something falls, striking my shoulder. When I leap away, I see the other half of the rabbit lying near my feet.

I drop the pie and let out a yelp. I jam my fist in my mouth, but those notes echo through the forest.

I look back at the rabbit’s hindquarters. The leg twitches again. It’s the flies, crawling underneath, making it move. The other half is just the head and part of the upper torso. The middle is gone.

I yank off my jacket and look for blood on it. There’s nothing. I scour the tree branches, but I see no sign that the other half of the rabbit was up there and fell on me.

It looks like an animal kill. A brutal one, but no worse than I’ve seen from those damned dogs, tearing something in two, gulping down the choice middle pieces, and leaving the rest.

It’s a disgusting mess, but nothing unnatural, nothing I haven’t seen before.

I take a deep breath and resume walking. I’ve gone only a few yards when a footstep sounds behind me. That soft thump can be nothing else, but when I spin, I see only trees.

I turn slowly and begin walking, ears pricked for that careless twig-crack or leaf-crumple behind me. I even wheel suddenly, hoping to catch my pursuer off guard.

Nothing.

I take three deep breaths. I’m freaking myself out. I know that. There’s no one else here.

I continue on to the shack. I approach from the rear and climb onto the roof. I left the hatch undone last night, and I crawl to it on my stomach and peek in.

The shack looks empty and untouched. I creep farther to peek over the roofline. No sign of anyone. My gaze swings to where One-Eye…

I don’t see the dog’s corpse.

I jump to the ground and hurry over to the tree.

The dog is gone.

Every sign that the dog’s corpse ever was here is gone. There’s no rope in the tree. No blood on the undergrowth.

I search and find what looks like a few droplets in the dirt, but when I rub one between my fingers, it’s only tree sap.

I climb the tree and crawl onto the limb the dog had hung from, but there are no rope marks on the bark.

One-Eye’s killer returned and took the body and erased the evidence.

Yet it’s more than that. One-Eye had to weigh a hundred pounds. The rope would have left marks. The dog had been split open. There’d be blood or viscera left in the undergrowth.

One-Eye’s killer prepared for this. He cushioned the rope so it wouldn’t cut into the tree bark. He laid something on the ground to catch any falling evidence.

No, that’s crazy—I’ve seen too many of those damn CSI shows. Cadence used to watch them with me, and she’d threaten to gag me when I’d point out that no one can analyze DNA while you wait, like ordering a burger at the drive-through. But it’s that very television show that compels me to look closer here as I search for exactly the sort of evidence I rolled my eyes at on-screen. And I find it. Fibers caught in a knot on the limb, proving he cushioned the rope. More fibers in the dirt, proving he laid a cloth below the dog.

This isn’t a psycho haphazardly cleaning up after himself. He planned this meticulously. String up the dog. Scare us with it. Then clear away the evidence, so if we tried to bring the police back, we’d have nothing to show.

Wait. The arrows.

I turn. My arrows are gone, but he can’t hide the marks in a wooden door. I jog over…and I can’t tell where the arrows went in because he’s added scratches and knife gouges, all rubbed into the wood so they look like old damage.

I carefully open the door…to see my arrows, neatly laid out on the floor.