Juniper, the more I hear about you, the more interesting you become.
What were you doing out here?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WALKING DISTANCE
Bryson’s Auto Repair sits on a patch of gravel along the highway, seated between long stretches of pasture near where the tall trees of the forest begin. Its presumed namesake, Bryson, in his fifties and wearing grease-stained overalls, looks up at me from under the hood of a Subaru Outback as I pull in.
I spot what must be Juniper’s Jeep sitting in the noon sun on the edge of the lot next to a pickup truck and a Toyota Camry that’s missing a hood and fender.
Bryson walks out to my SUV to greet me. “So you’re the other one?” he says as I climb out.
“The other one?”
“The other fella they took in.”
Ah, I get it. Of course. Glenn had mentioned that they had another potential suspect before they realized a bear killed her.
He’s a few inches shorter than me but has a thick build. I only see one car lift and a small winch. He probably keeps fit lugging heavy parts around all day.
“Yeah,” I say. “Looks like the one they were after walks on four legs.”
“I suppose,” he replies.
I point to Juniper’s car. “Her mother asked that I make arrangements. She lives in North Carolina. Any idea how to get it there?”
“The tow company that brought it only does in-state. But I know a car service that will cost you about eight hundred. If you got a few weeks, you can take out a Craigslist ad and see if anybody working up here for the season wants to drive it back.”
“You think that’ll work?”
Bryson shrugs. “I dunno. But if you got the time.”
“Actually, I have to be back in Austin in about a week. Fall classes are starting. Maybe I’ll try the ad for a few days.”
I’d hate to ask Juniper’s mother to pay for this. Worst-case scenario, I’ll put it on my credit card and figure out later how I’m going to manage the expense.
Bryson looks over my shoulder at my Explorer. “You planning on getting new tires soon?”
I’m about to dismiss him as a huckster when I actually look at the tires and realize I have almost no tread on the front ones.
He’s noticed my hesitation. “I’m not trying to hustle you. I can replace the front ones with a couple of discounts. The rear ones will last you another little bit. It’ll only cost you a hundred and fifty.”
“Each?”
He lets out a small laugh. “Pardner, if I was going to rob you, I’d never let you see me coming. Hundred fifty for the both and I’ll throw in an oil change.”
“That would probably be a good idea.”
“I got a lounge with Wi-Fi if you want to wait. Of course, there’s not much else to do.” He nods to the forest. “Even if they caught the thing, I don’t think I’d go walking around up there.”
“Probably right.”
He points to the field of grass next to the metal building. “It was like a Hollywood movie. They landed the search helicopter right there.”
“Here?” I turn back to the forest. “Wait, is this where Juniper was found?”
“Three miles up the road. Between here and the Mountain Cloud Inn.”
The Mountain Cloud Inn was Juniper’s motel.
I hand Bryson my keys. “I might go for that walk after all.”
I take my day pack out of the back seat and strap it around my waist. I don’t plan on going into the woods. I just want to follow the road a bit.
At least that’s what I think. To be honest, I don’t have much of a plan.
The highway cuts through the forest like a skinny canyon. I stay on the gravel easement in case a distracted driver comes hurtling down the road.
It’s a strange change from the grazing land to the evergreens. In between there are patches of tall wild grass—an ecotone. The trees and the prairie are in a battle for turf. The wild grass straddles the middle, where the rocky flatland gives way to the softer forest ground.
On the edge of the highway, where the asphalt is cracked, daisies and weeds pop through like tiny little islands. Miniature ecotones. If I were looking for a bacterium that could eat oil, I’d be collecting samples of dirt from the middle of busy freeways. I don’t know if I’d find one, but I’m sure I’d discover something interesting.
I lift my gaze from the road to the surrounding forest and try to look for what Juniper was searching for out here.
The smart thing would be to pull up her latest research applications or, at the very least, read her blog. But I am still taken aback by events and can’t bring myself even to spend much time on her Facebook page. Her face keeps appearing, haunting me.
The first mile I walk is a gradual incline as the road begins its wayward journey into the mountains. The second begins to get a little steeper.
I keep my eyes on the trees for any sign of where Juniper was found. Undoubtedly, the sheriff’s department used some kind of marker.
I see a few faded-orange forestry markers but nothing else. To my knowledge, they haven’t released anything other than a general area description to the public.
The connection between this forest and the map I spotted in Glenn’s office isn’t obvious to me—and I spend all day looking at maps of real and artificial landscapes.
A tractor-trailer truck blows past me and heaves a great gust of wind over my body.
I should have asked when Juniper brought her car into the garage. Did she have to do a lot of walking?
I make up my mind to give it another ten minutes and then turn back. I have no idea what I’m looking for, much less what Juniper would have been doing out here, other than walking from her motel to the car shop or back.
The hills on either side of the highway are too steep to form a pond or any body of water bigger than a tree trunk. The only fish would be the ones that fell out of a bird’s mouth.
When I’m contemplating turning back, I spot a blue ribbon tied to a tree. It looks brand-new. A dozen yards into the trees, before it gets too thick to see past, there’s a thicker yellow ribbon—the kind of tape you see at a crime scene in a movie.
This is the spot. Or rather, the spot on the road that takes you to the trail that leads you to where it happened.
I really should go back to the garage now. I have no business out here.
Yet . . . I walk into the forest to find the place where she was killed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
YELLOW LINE
The ancient Greeks believed that the world began with chaos, a void without form. From this shapeless heap the Titans and the gods emerged, bringing forth man. In his most evolved form—which the philosophers saw as themselves—he tried to put order to this chaos, seeking symmetries and rules to the universe.
It was this rule seeking that created the idea of philosophy and, much later, science.
A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos. Sometimes it simply can’t be done, as science tells us via quantum mechanics and chaos theory. A thing can be one way or the other without any means to predict why it is so.
I’m hiking up the hill because I want to make sense of chaos. We have an event: Juniper’s death. We have a cause: the bear. I don’t have a why, and the police haven’t divulged what led to this encounter.
The first yellow ribbon was just a marker, as I suspected. Ten yards beyond it is another.
I find five yellow ribbons that lead to a small area of level ground.
This is where I see the first red ribbon.
It’s tied around a tree trunk. Below it is a dark blotch on the bark.
Blood.
To be precise, a partial, bloody palm print.
Juniper touched this tree as she was dying.
I spot four more red ribbons in this small clearing and three red flags on the ground.
Some of the ribbons mark where parts of the tree were carefully removed to take back to the medical examiner. Some of the spots on the ground are simply holes where the dirt and blood was shoveled free.
The holes are small. Not quite what you’d expect to find where an adult bled to death.