Chuck ran toward the body. He stumbled over the knuckle of a root protruding from the ground, caught himself, and kept running, dodging trees, his breaths coming in harsh gasps, until he fell to his knees beside Sarah’s still form.
She lay on her back in the shadowed forest, her torso wrapped around the trunk of the tree, her arms and legs askew. Blotches of blood, the color of dark cherry in the shadowed forest, soaked through her jacket. Numerous cuts slashed the jacket’s camo-print exterior, revealing a puffy white layer of insulation, stained with blood in several places. Sarah’s bare head was flung back, her eyes open but unseeing.
Chuck knew in an instant Sarah was dead—her face was ashen, her eyes collapsed into their sockets, her lips drained of color—but he threw himself into action nonetheless, anything, anything to keep from acknowledging the horrible truth before him. He unzipped Sarah’s jacket. A number of knife wounds—more than a dozen at first glance—had gone through her jacket and torso-hugging T-shirt. Some of the wounds slashed diagonally across Sarah’s body, flaying open her ribcage. Others were stab wounds straight into her chest cavity. It was obvious from the severity of the stabs and slashes that Sarah had not suffered long after sustaining her injuries.
Janelle fell to her knees beside Sarah. Chuck cupped the back of Sarah’s neck and lifted, clearing her air passage. Already, however, her neck was stiff with death. A whiff escaped Sarah’s lips, the result of the opening of her throat, but that was all.
Chuck looked across Sarah’s motionless body at Janelle. “She’s gone. There’s nothing we can do for her.”
His stomach lurched. He put the back of his hand to his mouth, fighting the urge to vomit. Little more than an hour ago, Sarah had stood with everyone in camp, listening as Lex spoke in front of the cabin.
The skin at the back of his neck tingled. He spun on his knees, scanning the surrounding forest. Was Sarah’s murderer watching?
He looked up at Keith, who stood at Sarah’s feet, staring. Chance quivered at his side.
“Can Chance follow the trail of whoever did this?” Chuck asked.
Keith lowered his hand to the dog’s head. His face crumpled. “No,” he managed, his voice hoarse. “The blood will have overwhelmed Chance’s olfactory system. Besides, whoever did this is sure to have gone back the way they came.”
“You mean, to camp?”
Keith nodded. “They wouldn’t have gone deeper into the forest.”
“You don’t think an outsider could have done this?” Chuck asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Some crazy person who happened to be waiting in the woods, miles from anywhere, just when Sarah wandered out here with the phone?”
Chuck sank back on his heels and closed his eyes. Tears pressed at his eyelids. “I know. You’re right.” He blinked, freeing the tears, and gazed at Sarah’s pale face.
He forced himself to accept the truth. Someone from camp had killed Sarah, and her killing must have had something to do with the satellite phone.
Janelle’s eyes went to the woods around them. “We should go.”
Chuck worked his arms beneath Sarah and straightened, lifting her to his chest. Crime scene be damned; he wasn’t about to leave her body alone here in the woods. He held her tight and turned a slow circle, taking in the site of Sarah’s murder without any idea what he was looking for. No bloody knife lay on the forest floor. Nothing.
They paused on their way back through the trees long enough for Janelle to pile pieces of the satellite phone into the plastic case and snap it shut. She trudged on through the woods, case in hand. Chuck followed, Sarah’s body heavy in his arms. Keith and Chance brought up the rear.
When they approached the edge of the grove, Janelle turned and headed down the slope past tent row while remaining well back in the trees and out of sight of camp.
“Best not to set off a panic,” she said over her shoulder to Chuck and Keith.
“For as long as we can, anyway,” Chuck agreed.
They left the forest at the bottom of the slope, below the latrines, and made a beeline for the cabin. A misty fog swept low across the valley floor, obscuring their movements from those on the tent platforms above. No one stepped out of the mess tent as they hurried past. Janelle opened the cabin door without knocking and stepped aside, ushering Chuck past her. He edged sideways through the doorway, holding Sarah’s body.
A long, wooden table surrounded by chairs took up the center of the cabin’s single room. Built-in benches topped with foam pads lined the log walls, providing couch-like seating by day and dorm-style sleeping at night. At the sight of Chuck with Sarah in his arms, Lex and Toby shot to their feet from where they were seated at the center table, their ladder-back chairs scraping the scarred, plank floor.
Lex swept notepads, crumb-speckled plates, coffee mugs, Toby’s laptop computer, and a squat LED table lantern to the far end of the table. The light of the lantern and the feeble illumination through the room’s sole window in the cabin’s west wall created a subdued glow. A fire, burned down to coals, cast heat into the room from a stone fireplace set in the back wall. Wooden pegs lined the chinked logs above the benches, serving as hanging storage for an assortment of fleece coats, rain jackets, and daypacks. The combined odor of wet nylon, sweat, and woodsmoke was strong in the confined space.
Chuck laid Sarah’s body on the table as Keith entered the cabin with Chance. Janelle closed the door behind them.
Lex put a hand to his mouth. “Dear God.”
Chuck eased Sarah’s eyes closed with his thumb and forefinger. He straightened her arms at her sides, his movements gentle.
Lex reached to touch Sarah’s hand. “She’s...she’s...?”
“Yes,” Chuck said. The sound of his voice surprised him. “She was in the forest. Chance found her...Keith...the phone...”
Toby clasped his hands together. Tears built in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks into his mustache. “Sarah!” he cried, his voice breaking, his gaze fixed on Sarah’s face.
The tip of her tongue showed between slightly parted lips. Her mohawk fell to one side and her earrings glinted dully in the dim light.
Lex grasped the personal locator beacon hanging from a zipper tab at the back of Chuck’s daypack and pressed and held the button at the beacon’s base.
“Oh,” Chuck said. “Right.” The thought of the beacons hadn’t even occurred to him.
During the seconds required for the light next to the button to activate, Lex gulped repeatedly, battling for each breath. The instant the beacon lit, he spun to the wall of the cabin and pressed and held the buttons, in turn, of the emergency beacons attached to his and Toby’s daypacks, hanging on the wooden pegs above the benches, until their tiny LED lights glowed red, too.
“What?” Lex demanded. “How?”
Chuck explained in fits and starts—their passage through the woods, the discovery of the phone in pieces, Sarah’s body at the base of the tree. He described their return to the cabin under the cover of the mist and gathering darkness.
“Whoever did this had to have seen you. They’d have been watching for you,” Lex said, his voice grim. “Help will be here soon. We’ll evacuate the camp. Everyone will be questioned.”
“I’m not sure how soon help will be able to get here,” Chuck said. He looked out the window at the wind-whipped fog racing across the meadow. “Helicopters won’t be able to fly in this, and the wind and darkness are likely to keep boats off the lake, too, maybe until morning. They’ll come as soon as they can—at daylight, for sure—but they won’t risk the lives of responders in bad weather for what, as far as they know, may be nothing more than a sprained ankle.”
“I activated three beacons. We could activate more.”
“They’ll be freaking out all right. But I still think we have to plan on no one making it here before dawn.”
Lex looked at Sarah’s body. “She was so much like my Lucy, our Lucy.” He shook his head, his cheeks wobbling. “When Joe and Rebecca were killed, it tore Jessie up. She kept seeing Carson and Lucy in those two. She couldn’t get it out of her mind, even when the kids were home for Christmas. Everything should have been fine—we were all healthy, happy—but it wasn’t. It was like there was a shadow over us. And then, a month later, the cancer came.”
He drew a halting breath and pressed a finger to the base of his nose. A single tear dangled at the corner of one eye.
“She said she’d felt it for months, that she should have done something. But the doctors said there was no way she could have known. And of course, at that point, what could they do? Poison her with chemo. Burn her up with radiation. All for just another year. But she took it. She took it all. Those last weeks with Carson and Lucy, she made them count. She never once let them see how much she hurt.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. The tear rolled down his cheek and fell to the floor, making a dark spot on the wood. He opened his eyes, taking in Sarah on the table before him. “This attack may have been personal.” He looked across the room at Janelle. “Your brother, wasn’t he...?”
Janelle’s eyes flashed. “Yes, he was. But he was in camp with Chuck between the time you spoke with everyone and when we found—” She stopped, licked her lips, began again. “Chuck and I left him with the girls when we—” A yelp escaped her. “The girls,” she said, fear rising in her eyes. She whirled for the door.
“Wait,” Lex said. “Please.”
She turned to him, her fingers on the handle. “I’m going to bring them here,” she said, her voice firm. “I want them inside. They will be inside, with me, until help comes.”
“All right,” Lex said. “Understood. But we shouldn’t scare them. I don’t want to scare anyone.” His eyes went back to Sarah. “Most of all, I don’t want to scare whoever did this to her.” He looked around the room. “Everyone got that? We’ll be like Jessie. We’ll be strong. Together.”
Toby clung to the edge of the table, bent over Sarah’s body. Chuck caught Lex’s eye, then directed his gaze at the folding knife belted to the waist of Sarah’s ex.
Toby glanced up, catching Chuck’s look. “I’ve been here, in the cabin, the whole time since the meeting.” He looked at Lex. “Haven’t I?”
Lex nodded.
Chuck stared at Sarah. To his surprise, he found that the killing itself didn’t shock him as much as he’d have expected, coming as it did on the heels of everything else—the appearance at camp of the grizzly and wolf, the arrival of the wolf pack in the valley, the destruction of the satellite phone—almost as if Sarah’s murder was part of a pattern he couldn’t quite recognize.
“We have to play for time,” Lex said. “We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
“We can’t take people’s knives away from them,” Chuck said. “That would set everyone off. But we do need to gather everyone together. Sarah was alone; we don’t want anyone else to end up in the same situation.”
Lex squeezed his hands together, his fingers intertwined. “Sarah,” he murmured.
“We’ll put her in a sleeping bag,” Chuck told him. “We’ll tell the girls she’s asleep, that she’s not feeling well.”
“We’ll have to tell Clarence,” Janelle said. “He’ll ask. He’ll demand to know.”
She waited until Lex met her gaze.
“Okay,” he said, his mouth sagging, his voice weary.
She left the cabin, pulling the door tight behind her.
“Keith,” Chuck said. “I want you at the door. No one else is to come in.”
While Keith manned the doorway, Chuck pulled a sleeping bag from beneath one of the benches and slid it from its stuff sack. Toby, choking back sobs, helped Chuck slip the nylon bag up Sarah’s body.
As Chuck zipped the sleeping bag to Sarah’s chin and lifted her body in his arms, he remembered the story about a member of a friend’s team of rafters, floating the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, who had drowned in notorious Crystal Rapid.
“It was awful,” Chuck’s friend told him. “We were in shock, all of us. We’d just lost one of our best buddies. He’d died right before our eyes. But it was amazing how we kept right on functioning—calling in the rescue helicopter, clearing a landing site, preparing his body for retrieval. The worst thing in the world had just happened, but life kept right on going—we kept right on going—because, really, what other choice was there?”
Chuck held Sarah to him. He bit his lower lip until he tasted blood. The other choice, in this case, was to find out who had murdered Sarah so as to assure her attacker did not kill again, and to assure Sarah the justice she deserved.
He settled Sarah’s body on the padded bench against the shadowed east wall of the room, away from the window. He tucked the hood of the sleeping bag around her head and turned her face to the wall. Blood no longer seeped from her wounds, leaving the outside of the sleeping bag clean and unstained, and leaving Sarah looking for all the world as if she were merely asleep.
Methodically, Chuck took the phone case from where Janelle had left it on the floor of the cabin and opened it on the table. “I don’t think Sarah’s death was the result of a lover’s quarrel.”
Lex peered at the smashed phone.
“I think,” Chuck said, “she stumbled across something she shouldn’t have.”
Lex slid his hand beneath a red bandana lying open on the tabletop amid the items he’d shoved to the table’s end. “I don’t think we were meant to stumble across this, either.”
He held out the bandana, its corners draped over his hand.