The fourth option, of course, was that Kimi had committed suicide, but every time Tracy considered that possibility, she became less convinced that had been the case. She just couldn’t articulate why. At least now she had Earl Kanasket’s blessing to try to find out.
A sudden glare of high beams caused her to quickly steer her truck to the shoulder. A large flatbed blew by her in the opposite direction, the rush of wind shaking her truck. The encounter had the same effect as if she were a boxer administered smelling salts in between rounds; she sat up, more focused. When she did, she spotted a one-room log building along the side of the road, and it triggered something she’d read in Buzz Almond’s file. She drove to a crude gravel parking area. From the building’s dilapidated condition, Tracy could tell the establishment had long since closed, but she had no doubt that it was the Columbia Diner.
She opened the file and skimmed Almond’s report of his conversation with the waitress, Lorraine. After speaking to the waitress, Almond had made this note: I drove in the direction Kimi Kanasket would have walked home, and came to a turnout 100–150 yards past the café.
Tracy pulled back onto the road and continued at a slow rate of speed, frequently checking her rearview mirror for headlights. After driving a little more than the length of a football field, she spotted a half-moon-shaped escarpment, about the size of a car, carved out of the otherwise encroaching brush.
She parked, reached into her glove box for her Maglite flashlight, and confirmed it worked. Then she grabbed her coat and pushed open the cab door to a rush of cold air. She stepped out, quickly zipped her coat and shut the door, but she did not immediately turn on the flashlight. Without the cab’s dome light or the benefit of any street lamps, and with a low cloud layer preventing any natural light, it was “darker than dark,” as her father liked to say—probably as dark as the night Kimi Kanasket went missing and Buzz Almond described as “dark as ink.”
Tracy flipped on the flashlight and started along the edge of the road, directing the beam over the brush. It was cold enough that she could see the white vapor of her breath in the stream of light, and the chill caused her fingertips and cheeks to tingle. She switched the metal cylinder to the other hand, blowing into her free hand. She’d gone less than ten yards when the beam seemed to pierce through an initial wall of foliage. Stepping closer and using the Maglite to push aside branches, she found an overgrown path that conjured the image of the deer paths her father had taught her to use when hunting in dense brush. If this was the path Buzz Almond had written of in his report, Tracy wasn’t surprised he hadn’t seen it that first dark night. She’d been specifically looking for it and still had almost walked past it.
Common sense told Tracy to go back to her truck and come back in the morning when it was light, but common sense was taking a backseat to curiosity—and her desire to retrace Buzz Almond’s footsteps in the same conditions he’d encountered. Besides, the dark had never bothered her. Maybe because Sarah had been so afraid of the dark, Tracy, as her big sister, never allowed herself to be afraid. Tracy and her friends used to play hide-and-go-seek at night in the woods behind their home, and they’d pitch tents on the back lawn and turn off all the lights and tell ghost stories. Sarah never lasted long before rushing inside, but Tracy enjoyed it. Beyond that, she had the Maglite and her Glock.
Tracy stepped from the road into the brush, kicking at encroaching vines snagging her jeans. A hundred yards down the path, the foliage became less dense and the footpath more defined. Recent rains had made the ground soft but not sloppy. Farther along, the grade steepened, enough that Tracy’s breathing became more pronounced from the exertion. The foliage changed to scrub oak and pine trees, the ground covered with pine needles. Tracy used her jacket sleeve to protect her face from the branches, snapping off the smaller limbs as she went. The grade continued to steepen until she was bent forward, driving with her legs, feeling the cold in her lungs. At least the effort had warmed her and stemmed the chill.
Sensing she was nearing the top of the grade, she bent under a branch, pushed through a final tangle of tree limbs, and came out atop a hill looking down at an open patch of ground—what had to be the clearing Buzz Almond had written of and Earl Kanasket had described. She was surprised to feel a strange sense of accomplishment at having found it. She turned off the Maglite. A break in the cloud layer allowed sporadic moonlight, and the clearing appeared as both men had described it, barren of any tree, sapling, bush, or shrub. It looked like one of those crop circles in the middle of a field that you see featured in tabloid magazines—a compressed area people said had been made by alien spaceships.
As Tracy started down the hill, she quickly realized she’d misjudged the grade. The ground, slick from the rains and the drop in temperature, made keeping her footing like navigating a thin sheet of ice. The soles of her boots slipped and slid, and she feared she’d lose her balance and tweak an ankle, or snap a leg or an arm. She had to angle her body and sidestep to better control her descent. Halfway down, she gave in to gravity and allowed herself to stumble to the bottom.
A noise, what she first thought to be the low, drawn-out hoot of a barn owl, drew her attention to the top of the hill. But it wasn’t an owl. The limbs of the trees, stripped of their fall foliage, began to whip and sway, and she watched the blades of tall grass fold over as a gust of wind shot down the hill. It sounded just as Earl Kanasket had described it, like a man moaning. The wind rushed at her, strong enough to blow the hair back from her face, and felt as though it was passing right through her. She turned and directed the beam of her flashlight to the edge of the clearing, following the wind as it flowed in a clockwise direction, the branches of the pines dancing and swaying. She felt as though she were standing in the eye of a tornado and wondered whether the swirling wind, and not some hanged man’s curse, was the likely reason nothing grew here.
As she followed the wind’s progress, the beam of light fell on something moving at the edge of the clearing. From its brown coloring, Tracy first thought it was an animal—a deer or a bear. But deer and bears didn’t walk upright on two legs.
“Hey,” she yelled, starting across the field. “Hey!”