I take a deep breath and dive under. As I descend, the water gets dramatically hotter. I feel it on my scalp and the back of my neck. When I shove my arms in front of me, my nerves are burning pinpricks.
I kick my legs, bringing me lower, then hit a wall of even hotter water. My hands begin to burn, so I pull back and head upward.
When I break the surface, the cold air slaps me in the face.
“My god,” says Jillian, now sitting on the log. “Your face is beet red.”
“It’s warm.”
“Satisfied?”
I dog-paddle closer to the bank. “I’m satisfied that no sensible person would go down there.”
“Great. Will you come out now?”
“No. That just confirms my suspicion. Would you hand me my stick?”
“So you can go bobbing for bodies?” She doesn’t move.
“Well, if you don’t hand me the stick, then I’ll have to use my teeth. Your choice.”
“Disgusting.” She tosses it into the water, splashing it next to me.
“Thank you.”
I grab the end, push it in front of me like a spear, and dive back down. I go as far as I went last time and use the branch to poke around the bottom.
The end collides with rocks and what feel like logs. I’m only able to keep probing for a minute before the heat is too much. I swim back to the surface to catch my breath and cool down. Jillian looks none too pleased.
“This is what you signed up for,” I tell her. “I told you that there might be bodies.”
“I wasn’t expecting one of them to be yours. I didn’t come here to watch you boil like a lobster.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You know about the frog and the pot of boiling water?”
“That’s a myth. They hop out. They always hop out.” Unless they’re single-minded professors who don’t know any better.
I dive back down and probe around in another area. This time the stick hits a rock that gives way when I push it, as if it were stacked on top of another rock. I have to go back up before I can investigate further.
“Why do you have to be the one doing this?” Jillian asks as I emerge.
“I couldn’t even get the police to show up three miles away from their station for the first body. What do you think they’d say if I told them that this was tied to the Cougar Creek Monster?”
I dive back into the water and return to probing. My stick stabs into something that feels wooden. When I pull the stick back, I can tell that it’s wedged into something.
I carefully pull it toward me and reach out to touch whatever it is that I speared. My fingers feel a row of something that’s curved and slatlike.
I try not to get ahead of myself. It could be a deer’s rib cage. I slide my fingers over the back and check the vertebrae for prominent dorsal spines, like you’d find on a deer or a bear.
They’re short and blunt. Just like you’d find on a human.
I stick my head out of the water. Jillian’s expression changes the moment she sees me.
“You found something.”
“Yeah . . .”
I swim to the bank, dragging my find behind me.
I move it into the shallow end of the pond where the water is clear.
Jillian kneels down to look at the rib cage. “Human?”
I leave it in the water and slide myself onto the grass. “Adult. Probably female.”
“Is there more?”
“Probably. The water or the bacteria chewed through the connective tissue. We need to leave this one in here until someone can do a proper removal. Once it gets exposed to the air, it will start to decompose.”
I study the surface features of the partial skeleton and notice several prominent claw marks across the ribs.
Jillian notices them, too. “It’s him.”
“Definitely.”
“What’s that?”
I look to where she’s pointing. Something metallic is glittering against the dark bone. I spot a tiny piece of something wedged into the left side of the ribs. Perhaps a little too impulsively, I pry it loose with my fingers.
When I scrape away the grime and algae I realize it’s a sharp metal knifepoint. Maybe even a claw point.
I hold it up for Jillian to see. “This didn’t come from a cat or a bear. They have to believe us now. They have to.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
HAUNTED
We walk the first half mile in total quiet, both of us processing our discovery. After getting several photos, I dragged the rib cage back to the center of the pool to wait for police divers.
When I got back out of the pond, Jillian handed me a bottle of water to bathe with, telling me that she wasn’t going to have someone who smelled like a fart bomb as a traveling companion.
I appreciated her ability to rebound so quickly from what she just saw, then got the drift that she was never all that fazed by it to begin with. I suspect that she’s been around death more than once.
Even so, she’s still alert. As we head down the narrow pass, I catch her looking over her shoulder several times and scanning the ridgeline.
The return trip is more unsettling than the hike up. At first I put it down to the fact that we just came face-to-face with death, but then begin to get paranoid.
“That was somebody’s child,” says Jillian, breaking our silence.
“Yes. Missing for over thirty years, I guess.”
“Do you think there are more down there?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I found this one without much difficulty. He’d put a rock on the chest to weigh the body down. The chances of me happening to pry loose the one set of bones down there are just too remote. I’m sure there are others.”
“Right there, in this pond all this time. All those people swimming and playing—god forbid, drinking the water—with a graveyard right under their toes. It’s wrong.”
“It was risky.”
She looks back over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Those bodies could have swelled from gases and risen to the surface. It’s not a smart way to get rid of them. Better to just bury them out in the woods.”
“Then why do it?” she asks.
“I don’t know. People baffle me.”
“He’s not a person.”
“Yes, he is. He’s just a horrible one. If I were to guess, he liked the idea of having all the bodies in one place. He probably got his rocks off watching people swim in that pool.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“It’s encouraging.”
“What? How?”
“This was his younger phase and he got smarter, but there was and surely still is some thrill in it for him. Enough to drive him to be careless. He’s capable of making mistakes.”
Jillian stops. I watch as she tilts her head to the side for a moment, then starts up again.
“What is it?” I ask.
“What’s what?”
“You stopped.”
“Did I? I guess I heard something.”
This tension between the instinctive animal and the reasoning human who discounts anything that doesn’t fit into narrow sense categories is fascinating to me. I just watched Jillian detect something and then quickly forget about it because she couldn’t classify it.
“Do you feel a tingling on the back of your neck and a tightening in your stomach?” I ask.
“Yes. You?”
“Yep.”
“I think we’re being watched,” she whispers without turning around.
We continue hiking without saying anything. We both make an effort to seem less pronounced in our curiosity about what might be following us, keeping our heads forward but searching the trail with our eyes.
After another half mile, we come to a section where the trees thin out. Jillian whispers, “No place to hide here. But after the next bend it gets thicker. If I were a sniper . . .”
“That’s where you would be.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep walking.”
I let her get farther ahead of me, then quietly begin to climb to the ridge. I wait for her to get around the curve before I go over the top, wanting the focus of any watcher to be her emerging through the ravine.
The forest forms a peninsula as the trail switchbacks in an oxbow.
If whatever or whoever is stalking us is in the cluster of trees ahead of me, there’s only a narrow band of woods for them to go through to leave.
I weigh trying to be stealthy against the direct approach and decide to just run full speed into the trees and pray I’m not about to smack into a mountain lion.