Malcolm LeFranc saw the smoke rising. Up toward the old man’s place.
“What in hell, Shirley?” he said, looking out through his truck’s windshield as he drove up to the Gore. His mutt, Shirley, squatted on the truck seat beside him, whining.
LeFranc parked up off a logging road and got out as Shirley loped behind him. The old man was probably burning his summer’s and fall’s worth of trash before winter grabbed everyone by the balls.
LeFranc slung his tree-marking sprayer on his back and set off into the woods, picking his way along with familiar ease among the talcum mines and blowdowns.
The snow rose shin deep where it drifted in clear-cuts, yet there was scarcely any at all beneath the biggest beasts of trees. The real lumber. Moneymakers. Two hundred feet tall, two hundred years old. Thousands of board feet per trunk. At each colossal tree, LeFranc was pained to spray an orange X. Trees to be spared. Much as he’d love the money they’d bring, the deal with the feds in order to log the younger trees was to keep these behemoths standing. A trade-off to get at fifteen hundred acres of fifty-year-old trees.
He sprayed an X on a trunk. Kept on.
Up ahead, Shirley barked.
LeFranc smelled the smoke from the old man’s burn pile.
Shirley barked.
The logger moved deeper in the woods, working down toward the beeches to mark the stray spruce.
Shirley barked and whined.
Ahead, ravens called in their garrulous gravel voices, and he heard the whuuuumph whuuuumph of massive beating wings of vultures lifting off the ground. Glimpsed black bodies stark against the white world. They lifted up off into the trees and sat in the top branches of the beeches clumsy-footed off the ground, gawking down on Shirley, who barked and barked.
“Hey, girl,” LeFranc called. “Come on.”
Shirley kept barking.
Barking at something.
No getting her away, except to go yank her and get her on a leash.
“Shhh, girl, shhh,” he said, taking the leash out of his coat pocket.
He stooped over to hook the leash onto her collar.
She growled and bared her teeth.
“Easy, what’s—”
He saw it.
In the snow, next to a pit.
A leg.
A tiny leg.
Half buried under the snow.
Shirley nipped at him.
LeFranc grabbed her by the scruff. “Lie down! Lie down and be quiet.”
Shirley hunkered in the snow.
“Sorry, girl. Just. Be good.”
He looked into the pit.
It was a leg all right.
LeFranc dug around in the snow.
Uncovered a shoulder.
A face.
A girl’s face.
The missing girl.