If the Pioneer Club had really met in this place and really did what they were purported to have done, there might just be evidence of some kind, physical evidence that Ludwig could gather and bring back to campus with him. A discarded bottle. A scrap of clothing. An inscription on a tree or rock. He started walking the perimeter of the clearing, staying on the inside of the circle of rocks, pausing every now and then to examine the ground more closely. It took only a few minutes for him to find a series of shoeprints and scuff marks in the dirt. They were faint, somewhat erased by wind and time, but by his estimation, they had to have been placed there recently. It had been an unusually dry fall so far, with rainfall amounts running several inches below normal, and that fact coupled with the thick canopy of trees overhead might have allowed the prints and marks to remain behind some time after they were created.
But their very presence begged the question: Who had been out there, scuffling in the clearing? The clearing sat too far from the road to chalk it up to the activities of horny teenagers looking for a secluded place to fool around. And the struggle looked somewhat violent. He saw two different shoe prints, one large like a man's and one small like a woman's, and the larger shoes had dug deep troughs in the earth as though it were digging for something or pushing hard against the ground. The shoeprints overlapped a lot, and there was also what appeared to be the outlines of bodies, wide, round spaces in the ground like a human butt had wriggled and squirmed on that space. It did look like someone had been fucking there.
His eyes continued to scan the ground, and he saw another, fainter disturbance. This one looked older and was in an almost perfectly rectangular shape, as though someone had carefully dug a hole and buried something there, something very much like...a human body?
He blinked his eyes a couple of times to be certain he wasn't imaging the shape, wasn't again trying to make the data fit the hypothesis instead of the other way around. He moved closer to the spot, crouching a little and risking his back in order to see better. But he couldn't ignore the shape in the dirt, the neat outline in the ground that looked different from everything else around it.
It was a grave. A recently dug grave.
Ludwig tried to swallow, but it felt as though his mouth had been stuffed with cotton. If he had any doubts before, they were erased. This is where The Pioneer Club had met years ago. And someone was still using it for the same purposes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The girl had eventually calmed down, and they settled into a sort of routine.
Thankfully, Roger thought. He missed the routine he'd had with the last girl, the lazy days of hanging around the house and fetching the groceries so she could cook his meals. The new girl wasn't much of a cook, and half the time, Roger had to tell her what to do, even with something as basic as making spaghetti or tuna salad. But she tried, that was for sure, as long as Roger watched her and made sure there were no sharp knives within her reach. He had locked all of those in the storage shed out back, hoping that one day soon the girl would calm down even more, and he could bring them back so they could live like regular people. Because that's what he wanted them to be. Regular people.
She still hadn't touched the laundry or done any cleaning. Roger asked her almost every day, and when he did the girl looked at him with hate in her eyes. Staring daggers, as his mother used to say.
If looks could kill, you'd be a dead man.
That's the way the girl liked to look at him. The girl made Roger nervous anyway, but when she looked at him like that, he grew really unsettled.
So he kept a close and careful eye on her.
He kept her tied up most of the time. At night, without question. Roger slept deep—like a felled log, his dad told him—so he needed to tie her up then. He used the same rope he had used the day he met her on the road with the story about the dog being hit by the car. At night, he tied her hands and her feet, then looped the extra rope around the metal bed frame and kept the girl right next to him through the night. If she needed to go to the bathroom, she nudged him in the side until he woke up, then he went through the slow process of untying her, while the girl cursed him and told him to hurry up. She called him a "fucking retard" one night when he couldn't get the ropes undone fast enough, and he hit her in the face with the back of his hand. Roger felt bad, but she didn't call him that name any more after that.