Page 34 of Dark Roads
Staying within the trees, I moved closer until I could see the full side of the car—carefully placing my feet in between fallen branches and twigs, avoiding anything that would snap. Wolf followed close with his breath hot on my legs.
The back tire was flat, a spare lying on the ground beside it, and the trunk was gapped slightly. A tire iron lay in the dirt. It was like she had just up and walked away. I crouched low, wondering if I should take a closer look inside the car—she could have passed out—but all the windows were up, and it wasunlikely anyone could sleep in that heat. If I stepped out from the woods, my boots would make tracks on the dusty logging road. I gnawed on a fingernail.
A guttural birdcall, loud and familiar, ripped through the air. Ravens—fighting over something. I wheeled around, trying to gauge where the sound was coming from, but it was distorted and echoing. I found an old fir tree nearby, shimmied up the trunk, swung myself onto the first branch, and climbed until I could see over the canopy of trees.
Three ravens spiraled in large circles near the highway to the north, past the campground and on the other side of the road. They had company. Vultures. A deer carcass, maybe. I swallowed hard, clinging to the branch, bark biting into my fingers. I began climbing down.
Wolf met me at the bottom, circling around my legs and pacing, a low whine coming from his throat. I headed toward the birds, but he stayed back. His ears were down, his tail tucked between his legs. As I got farther away, he barked at me, then trotted to catch up. He followed behind my knees, brushing my skin with his nose. He was panting hard.
I had to cross the highway again and travel through the woods until I passed the campground. Within minutes, I smelled it. It hit me hard, came in on a breeze, and I bent over, clutching my stomach. Wolf whined louder, long, plaintive moans. I ignored him, pushed through the branches. They slapped at me, tore my arms, caught in my hair. My eyes watered. I breathed heavily through my mouth, tugged the bandanna from around my forehead and knotted it tight around my nose and mouth. It still wasn’t enough. Tears ran down my cheeks.
Sunlight knifed through the gap between two tall fir trees, revealing an open area ahead. The ditch alongside the highway, a low bank rising on the other side. I froze. I wanted torun back into the forest, pretend I had never spotted the car. The birds screeched back and forth, driving me forward.
I stepped into the long grass. Two more halting steps, and I looked down into the space between a cluster of shrubs, to the bottom of the ditch. Cherry-red glistening strands of hair fanned across the dirt. A white hand stretched out, frozen into a claw, a raw mark around a bruised wrist, where there used to be a bracelet.
CHAPTER 12
The ravens perched on a branch above me, the vultures in another tree. Quiet and watchful. Wolf barked. The ravens screamed and rose into the air. The vultures stayed.
I looked at Amber, my hand over my mouth. Broken fingernails. Dark red streaks down her arm. Flies filled the air with an incessant buzz. My face stung with tears and I was making a strange garbled sound. Wolf took a few cautious steps toward her, sniffing the air.
“No.” I held his bandanna. “Stay.”
He dropped to the ground beside me, his low whine blending with the hum of flies.
Birds had been pecking at her face. She didn’t look real. Like a mannequin in a horror movie, a prop in someone else’s nightmare. Her skin was too white, the puncture holes and claw marks too gruesome. Her mouth was stretched in a wide grimace. She was wearing a lacy white bra, blood turning the edges brown, and her black tank top was tied around her throat. Her beaded necklaces were wound in the fabric. One hung between her breasts.
She’d been wearing jeans shorts. They were nearby, lying in a small patch of dirt as though they’d been set out that way. The top button was ripped off. I didn’t want to see everything, didn’t want to know the agony that she’d endured, but my eyes couldn’t stop taking it in. The way her legs were spread wide, bruises on her hips. Bite marks down her side and across her chest—the slope of her breasts. One sandaldangled from her foot. The other was buried partway in the dirt. She’d dug her heels into the ground, fighting for her life, trying to push him off her dying body.
The heat and the smell were too much, my sight gone hazy and gray at the corners. I’d never felt so much evil in one place. It paralyzed me. My head and eyes pulsed from it. My blood hammered through my heart and veins all at once, a panicked stampede. Her pain and fear were imprinted in the molecules of the air. Her screams lingered.
A fly walked across her hip bone, the discolored skin. Her flat stomach was bloating with gas from her decomposing body. I wanted to brush the fly off, but I couldn’t get closer to her. There would be hair fibers, boot tracks. She had to have been out here for a couple of days for the smell to be so strong. Maybe Friday night. I bit the fleshy part of my palm to hold in my cries, the hiccupping sobs. The fly settled above her groin, on what looked like a tattoo.
A small running unicorn, mane and tail blowing in some imagined wind. I’d never seen it before. But it would have been hidden by her bikini. I thought about the unicorn dangling from Amber’s rearview mirror. Then I remembered the photos on Vaughn’s computer. The edge of a tattoo showing on a woman’s stomach. The bright colors. It had beenAmber’sstomach.
My heart was beating too fast, stabbing pains across my chest. Spasms. I sucked at the air, but nothing came into my lungs. I pressed my palm to my chest, hit my ribs. Black dots danced in front of my eyes. I sank to my knees, head bowed.Don’t pass out. Don’t pass out.
Wolf jammed his wet snout into my neck, dropped onto his stomach, and tried to squirm under my arms, licking my face. I took small breaths. I had to get it together. I had to think.
People were probably looking for her. She had a landlord, a job, friends. Her family. I didn’t want search and rescue goingthrough the woods or flying over with helicopters. And I didn’t want her lying out here alone until someone found her. With the heat and the animals.
Wolf and I hiked back up the ridge. The sun beat on my shoulders, the rocks hot to the touch. I guzzled my water, poured some for Wolf. I moved to the right side of the cliff so I could see past the lake easier, checked the spot with my binoculars. The highway was quiet. The vultures and ravens had swooped back down but I couldn’t shoot them from the ridge.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
I put my hand over the speaker to muffle my voice. “I was driving on the highway and I noticed vultures circling a ditch. It smells really bad. I think it’s something big.”
“Would you be able to describe the location?”
“Just after the campground, heading away from town.”
“And your name?”
I ended the call. Wolf and I waited at the top of the ridge—he under a tree nearby, me sprawled across the hot rock. With my binoculars I watched each truck and car that came past.
Wolf was getting impatient, whining and huffing. I tossed him part of a protein bar. He snatched it out of the air, then his body stiffened, his head cocking toward the south.
I aimed the binoculars at the bend of the road. Chevy Tahoe. White. Lights on top. The truck slowed as it drove past the campsite, then pulled onto the side. He was near Amber. Either the driver had seen the birds—or it was Vaughn, and he knew exactly where to stop.
