Natalie gathered up her paperwork while the rest of the guys headed back to their cubicles and Luke remained seated at the conference table. He was on the phone. He prevented her from leaving, motioning for her to sit back down. She figured he wanted to discuss a few more details of the case with her, so she took a seat and waited.
Soon her phone buzzed—it was Brandon. All she could hear was his cotton-mouthed breathing. “Brandon? Is that you?”
He hung up.
Natalie phoned him back, but the call went straight to voice mail. She left a message. “If you want to talk, Brandon, seriously … I’m here for you.” She hung up.
Luke was gesturing for her notebook and pen. She handed them over, and after a few moments of scribbling, he hung up. “That was Benjamin Lowell, one of Riley’s buddies I talked to this morning. Seems Riley was planning to meet up with some friends at the Mummy’s Cabin on Wednesday afternoon. To sell drugs.”
“Great.” Natalie stood up. “Let’s go.”
The Mummy’s Cabin was named after Frederick Moth, a mentally imbalanced drifter, who’d holed up inside the remote cabin in the woods one long-ago winter and killed himself the following spring. It was a gruesome suicide—he’d wrapped his entire head in duct tape, like a mummy, and consequently choked on his own vomit. The police found bottles of Carlo Rossi lying around. The sensationalized newspaper headlines at the time declared, DERELICT MUMMIFIED IN CABIN. The name stuck.
Now Natalie followed Luke’s Ranger northwest of town through a complex topography of cliffs, valleys, ponds, and forest-covered hills. Fifteen minutes later, they parked by the side of a fire road and stepped into the breezy April late-afternoon.
They took a serpentine footpath into the forest, where the trees creaked and rubbed in the wind. White spruce, red pine, bear oak, American beech, and balsam firs all thrived in the conservancy lands and protected woods. The sugar maples grew to seventy feet tall and lived for three hundred years. Burning Lake could feel as quiet and remote as the Canadian outback, with its sun-drenched meadows, panoramic vistas, and miles of hiking trails. In the spring, the forest bloomed with frothy myrtle and patches of sea lavender nestled along the creek beds. By the fall, everything turned as golden and fragrant as honey.
After a strenuous ten-minute hike, they came to a small clearing where a bevy of wild roses and sweetbrier grew. The Mummy’s Cabin was nestled on the edge of the woods, looking blown-out and desolate, overrun with weeds and caught in a net of climbing hydrangea. The windows were broken. The splintery door stood open. Natalie could hear voices coming from inside. Chants. A soft, eerie sound.
She unfastened the safety on her gun—just a precaution. Scattered throughout these hollows were dozens of abandoned cabins where drug deals were known to take place, and violence could erupt at any second. Still, she kept her arms down by her sides and didn’t draw her weapon. Luke kept his weapon holstered but unfastened.
“Police,” the lieutenant called out. “Come out with your hands up.”
The chanting stopped. The voices fell silent.
“Step out of the cabin with your hands over your heads,” Luke demanded, the strain showing in the tendons of his neck.
Shadows stirred inside the cabin. Moments later, six teenagers filed out with their arms in the air—Kermit Hughes, Owen Kottler, India Cochran, Berkley Auberdine, Sadie Myers, and Angela Sandhill. Angela was one of Ellie’s second-tier friends who got invited to all the sleepovers and parties, but who wasn’t part of her inner circle. The six of them were dressed in black, like a flock of ravens.
“Keep your hands out of your pockets where I can see them,” Luke cautioned. “Do you have any drugs in your possession? Any weapons?”
“No,” the raven-haired India responded, speaking for the entire group.
“What are you doing up here?” Luke asked.
“Holding a séance.”
Natalie fastened the safety on her gun and glanced at the open door of the cabin. “Is that all of you?”
“Yes,” India told her stiffly.
She was relieved Ellie wasn’t among them, but couldn’t help wondering where her niece was, since Ellie and India did everything together.
Luke walked over to the cabin door and peeked inside. “You lit candles,” he said. “That’s against park regulations. And I see a couple of liquor bottles in there.”
“Sorry about the candles,” India said. “Those liquor bottles aren’t ours.”
“A lit candle started a forest fire in Elizabeth Falls seven years ago,” Luke reminded them. “Empty your pockets, please.”
“What for?” India asked, blinking innocently.
“Just a precaution,” he said, but when that didn’t seem to convince them, he added, “Drug possession and underage drinking are still illegal, as far as I know.”
“We weren’t drinking or taking drugs, Lieutenant Pittman, I swear. We were holding a séance, that’s all.”
“Empty your pockets, please,” he repeated—leaving little room for argument.
The teenagers emptied their pockets and put everything on the ground. Spare change, smartphones, keys, wallets. Sadie Myers placed two phones on the ground—her iPhone and a Samsung—and Natalie grew immediately suspicious.
“Why do you have two phones, Sadie?” she asked.
“I … um…” Sadie’s eyes welled with tears. Freckled and elfin, she had enough facial piercings to set off a metal detector—earrings, nose rings, a tongue stud that exaggerated her natural lisp. “I don’t know.”
The teenagers grew visibly nervous as Natalie picked up the Samsung. The battery was low. She scrolled through the call logs, then opened up the contact list. She tapped on India’s name and held the phone to her ear.
India jumped when her ringtone burst to life—Selena Gomez’s “Wolves.”
“Who does this phone belong to?” Natalie asked, already knowing the answer.
“It’s Riley’s,” Sadie quickly confessed, blushing crimson.
“Why do you have Riley’s phone, Sadie?” Natalie asked her, hanging up.
“Kermit wanted me to hold it for him. He was afraid he’d get caught with it.”
They all nodded their heads. Kermit shuffled his feet. India averted her eyes.
“How did you get Riley’s phone, Kermit?” Natalie asked him.
“He told me to hold it for him, right after Officer Buckner showed up at Haymarket Field,” the boy explained with a wince. “Am I in trouble?”
“No,” Natalie said. “But I’m going to hang on to this.”
“Can we go now?” India pleaded, a warm breeze raking her long hair in ribbons and waves.
Natalie checked through the most recent calls on Riley’s phone. “According to his call logs, he phoned you five times yesterday, India. And it looks like you called him back twice.”
India grew defiant. “Is this an interrogation? Because we have our rights, you know. You can’t keep asking us questions without our parents’ permission.”
It was true. These children were minors. They weren’t obligated to cooperate with the police, even if they’d witnessed a crime. You could only push things so far, and India’s father was an attorney. Timothy Cochran, Esquire, was known as Burning Lake’s super-lawyer, a diminutive man who planted his intellectual weight into every step.
“We heard Riley came up here to the cabin yesterday,” Natalie said. “Do you know anything about that?”
“No,” India said. “I told you. We haven’t done anything wrong. We aren’t doing drugs. You can’t detain us for holding a séance in the woods. It’s not against the law. And you can’t keep asking us questions without our parents’ permission.”
Luke took this as his cue to intervene. “Step away from the cabin and go stand over there, please.” He pointed at a swath of Douglas firs growing shoulder-to-shoulder on the north side of the cabin. “All of you. Pick up your belongings and go wait in front of those trees. We need to look inside the cabin, and then we may have a few more questions. Okay?”
The six of them grudgingly collected their belongings and went to stand on a bed of needles in front of the fir trees. Natalie activated her flashlight. The interior of the cabin contained a post-apocalyptic feel. There was the dilapidated sofa where Frederick Moth had allegedly taken his own life. The walls were covered with superimposed layers of graffiti. Decades of wind had swirled the trash deep into the crevices.
She aimed her beam at the Ouija board in the middle of the cabin, five lit candles placed around it. The planchette hovered above the word “No.” A foot or two away, on the pine-needled floor, was a rumpled black T-shirt. Natalie squatted down to blow out the candles, while beams of dying sunlight shot through the broken windows. The wooden floor smelled of piss.
“I don’t see any joints or blister packets, do you?” Luke said, kicking an empty cartridge box across the debris-strewn floor.
“Here’s a drug pipe.” She scooped the glass pipe off the floor. “But it looks old. The residue is hardened, and the bowl’s broken.”
Luke nudged an empty liquor bottle with the toe of his shoe. “If Riley was here yesterday, then we’ll need to find out who he met with and for how long.”
India came to the door just then, interrupting them. “My father says we don’t have to talk to you. He told me to leave. He said we haven’t done anything wrong.”
Luke sighed. “All right, you can go.”
“Thanks.” She flashed them both a resentful smile before scurrying away.
Natalie picked up the rumpled black T-shirt from the floor and unfurled it. “Wait, you forgot your—” Out dropped Ellie’s missing scarab-link bracelet.
Little pools of fear flared inside her.
She sat motionless as she cradled the delicate bracelet in her palm. Braided throughout the interlocking scarabs was a piece of knotted red twine.
“Ellie lost this bracelet at school today,” Natalie told him. “And look, this is knot magic. A piece of twine, knotted nine times, binds the spell. Only when the knots are untied will the spell be broken.”
“So who were they casting a spell on? Ellie?”
Fright spread across her scalp. “Let’s go ask them,” she said.
But the kids had scattered. They were gone.