AT SIX A.M. THE next morning I joined the line of cars filing onto the early ferry to Bainbridge Island. My truck’s cold engine clattered in protest as I gunned it up the steep ramp and onto the ferry’s upper parking level. By the time the boat began its sluggish pull away from the pier, I’d bought a cup of coffee and was standing out on the deck.
I passed the hot paper cup between hands and looked at the black skyline still waiting for dawn. The city had changed radically in the ten years I had been away. Was still changing. Evolution seemed to be a constant. Even after the economy tanked, construction cranes kept sprouting up like skeletal sunflowers, transforming the old into new and the newer into bigger. Corporations took advantage of the slump to double down on foreclosed real estate.
Luce Boylan was making the same wager, hoping that the Morgen—the downtown bar she owned which had once belonged to my grandfather and Luce’s uncle—would ride the wave of urban renewal and its lease would multiply in value.
Luce had been drifting off to sleep when I’d left. The two of us had tumbled into bed shortly after she’d closed up the bar around three and come upstairs to her small one-bedroom. She’d told me about her night and I’d told her about Willard and his niece. Luce and Elana had run in the same pack as young girls, but they had fallen out of touch when their group split into different high schools.
Somewhere in the middle Luce and I had stopped talking and started undressing each other. A lot of our conversations went that way. I’d only been home a month. The bloom was still on the rose, as Dono would have put it.
We’d been dozing when my phone pinged with a message from Willard, spelling out what little he knew about the location of Kendrick Haymes’s cabin. I tucked Luce in, and made the short drive to Pier 52 and the ferry terminal.
The trip across Elliott Bay wasn’t long. I was still thinking about how Luce’s hair smelled like freshly sanded cherry wood when the big engines downshifted, and a cloud of acrid diesel fumes caught up to the slowing boat.
State highways traced an almost straight line across Bainbridge Island and the first part of the Peninsula, until the blacktop connected with the Hood Canal Bridge. The bridge took me over the canal, to the last piece of continental U.S. before the Pacific Ocean. It was a hell of a piece. More than half a million acres of wilderness, big enough to surround the Olympic Mountain range and the national park named for it.
Willard’s text said Kend’s cabin was on a private road off of Salismount Lane. Google Maps depicted the lane as a very crooked line, deep in the eastern peninsula. The GPS got me most of the way, following roads with names like Penny Creek and Buckhorn. But it still took me half an hour and two passes to find what must be Salismount, a narrow strip of asphalt with no signage.
Once I was off the charted roads, there was nothing but giant trees, any direction I looked. The pavement was shaded and wet, and the truck’s tires slipped an inch or two every time I turned the wheel or tapped the brake.
For the first half mile it was easy going. But the farther I went, the thicker the white layer covering the ferns and mossy soil in the ditches became. The asphalt ended and my tires started crunching an uneven beat over frozen gravel. Another half inch of snow under the treads, and I’d have to stop and put on chains.
As it was, I ran out of road. Tire tracks led off Salismount. Multiple sets of tracks, recent enough to be clearly visible in the dirty snow. The tracks followed a short dirt lane, which curved for another twenty yards before it ran into a closed gate. I got out to take a look.
The gate was made of welded iron pipes and corrugated sheet metal, and chained with a heavy padlock. The padlock had a Day-Glo yellow foam cover to keep it from freezing solid in rain and cold. My breath made dragon plumes in the air.
I could have the padlock open in less than a minute. Dono’s good set of lockpicks was hidden under the wheel well in the truck.
But I wanted to stretch my legs. It was half the reason I’d agreed to Willard’s request. After leaving the big man’s card game the night before, I’d swung by my house and packed a ruck. With my Army gear and what I’d found while sorting through Dono’s stuff during the last few weeks, I had everything I might need for a couple of days in the wild.
Willard’s thousand dollars filled in the other half of my motivation. The sizable nut I’d earned during my last short visit to Seattle had disappeared just as fast, sucked away by legal fees and repaying favors and especially Dono’s astronomical hospital bills. Only the rich could afford to die slowly.
My ruck weighed about forty pounds, counting the two gallons of fresh water in the CamelBak. Less than half of what I was used to humping. It felt odd on my shoulders without the balancing weight of a combat kit and ammunition. Just another little adjustment to being a civilian.
There had been a lot of those discoveries recently. After ten years of taking orders on where to go and what to go, the bigger changes to my life were obvious, and welcome. But small things scratched at me. Choosing the shirt I was wearing had taken half an hour. The streets smelled unfamiliar late at night, after Luce’s bar had closed, all damp and charged with electricity. Even the buildings seemed to lean toward me. I used to be a city kid.
So I’d go for a long walk. Check in on Elana Coll and tell her that she owed her uncle a thousand bucks’ worth of bartending time. Enjoy the scenery. Not a bad deal. And I was curious to lay eyes on Elana again, after more than ten years.
I wasn’t sure how far the Haymes road went. Willard thought there might be a main house that the family used, along with Kend’s cabin, somewhere in all their family acreage.
The road wound slowly upward. After an hour of hiking I guessed my elevation at about 1,500 feet. My breath was steady and my lungs burned just a little from the chill. It was easy hiking. The Olympics were an impressive range of mountains, but gentle. Afghan mountains were like stone knives, slicing up from the earth to shatter anyone foolish enough to underestimate them.
Eventually the road emerged from the trees. It curved along the sunlit edge of the mountain, providing a stretch with no snow on the ground and a view over the forest below. Countless trees blanketed the horizon and crumpled into folds between the nearest peaks. I stopped to open the ruck and eat some jerky and an apple I’d grabbed off Luce’s counter.
Overhead, a hawk was circling. Watching the road in case some small animal dashed across, maybe. I drank water until I’d had enough, and then drank a little more as I hiked on. The road became steeper. Most of the thin layer of snow here had frozen solid, and my progress slowed as I picked my way around the icy patches.
I wasn’t worried about missing the cabin. The multiple sets of tire tracks had been a constant companion since the locked gate. I tried to guess what they belonged to. One was a midsized car with tires that were nearly bald. The second might be a small sports car, front-wheel drive, with newer curving treads that looked like fishhooks. The third was the easiest to spot. A dually, a big truck with four wheels on the rear axle.
Willard had said it might have been a party that had tempted Elana to play hooky from work. There was only one set of tracks for the car with worn tires. The other two vehicles, the sports car and the dually, had gone up the road in my direction and come back down again. I’d have to hope the bald tires belonged to Elana.
Within another four miles the road had narrowed sharply, to where the big dually truck would have had barely a foot of clearance on either side. Low branches hung down over the road, and the shade was thick. All of the tire tracks overlapped now, making two long, straight indistinguishable channels. I hiked along one of them. There was less snow underfoot here, thanks to the canopy of the trees. But the ground was still frozen, and my boot soles made only soft thumps, like walking on concrete. In the quiet, I could hear individual branches moving above me in the mild wind.
Then I heard a distant sound that was not the trees, or the wind. A low animal snort of exhalation and effort, from somewhere out in front of me. I stopped.
When the sound didn’t repeat, I took a few quiet steps forward. And a few more. Far out of my sight, in the thick of the woods, something like fabric or wings rustled. I moved off the road and into the trees.
The ground was twisted by roots and covered with leaves and moss and millions of evergreen needles. On every step I put my foot down softly. When I had gone about a hundred paces, I heard the snorting noise again.
Definitely an animal. A large animal.
The noise had come from my two-o’clock, off in the shaded depths of the forest. When I looked hard in that direction I could see a yard or so of angled rooftop, an unnaturally sharp edge among the branches. Kend’s cabin, almost certainly. It was another fifty yards off.
The trees offered plenty of cover. I moved closer, taking my time. The road to my right turned sharply to lead in front of the cabin. A blue Volvo hatchback was parked off to the side.
I was looking at the back of the place through the trees. It was maybe fifteen by twenty, more of a tiny house with wood siding than a true cabin. More sounds of movement now, from around the front. I slowly walked a wide circle, keeping my distance.
There was another snort, and a tearing sound. My circle widened and the area in front of the cabin came into view.
And I stopped and held very, very still.
A black bear. It stood on all fours about ten feet in front of the cabin, its head bent low as it worked at something on the ground. It snorted again, and tugged, and moved around to get a better grip.
And I saw what the bear was dragging.
The half-eaten carcass of a human.