Jenner stood in the mud, peering into the hammock as he tried not to slip back down into the sedge. Tangled undergrowth pressed all the way to the banks, the entire island packed tight as a bird’s nest. In an hour or so, the dawn light would help, but he couldn’t keep his footing on the bank until then.
From the water behind him, he heard soft splashing, and in the gloom, he imagined a huge water moccasin writhing through the saw grass, coming at him like a heat-seeking missile.
Time to go in.
There was a tentative spatter of rain, then a thick mist of tiny droplets ticked at the leaves and branches near him. The sound swelled quickly to a rattling roar, the drops striking him hard, flowing down his face, washing the mud from his skin. He held his face up, then his hands, the raindrops pressing into his palms like cold, tiny fingers.
Off to the east, lightning flared the sky purple, each flash illuminating the endless expanse of marsh, the grass garish green-yellow, the naked trunks bleached white, the slate-gray water shirred silver by the driving rain.
Jenner leaned over to get the bicycle light, then thought better of it; fingerprints. He turned slightly, stretched his right leg out into the undergrowth, then wedged himself into the thicket, pushing between two slender trees, the branches poking and scraping as he eased forward, crushing the plants at his feet.
Within a couple of yards, the vegetation thinned, and he moved more easily. A little farther and he entered more open space. He wrestled his scene bag through the gap behind him, then shone his flashlight.
The narrow beam fell off sharply in the gloom, but Jenner found himself surrounded by old-growth mahogany and gumbo-limbo, the trees almost completely hidden by the writhing, choking strangler figs coiling around them, their wet trunks black and glistening in his light. The ground was damp, slippery with moss, but firm. High overhead, the canopy hid the sky but let the rain pass.
He lifted his small MagLite, the thin beam feeble in the black. The pinpoint of white hovered and bounced across trunks and saplings as he moved forward into the grove, scanning the mud and the moss, searching for the curve of a head, the sharp angle of a bent arm, the contour of a shod foot. Inside the hammock, the smell of wet, dark earth competed with the odor of putrefaction.
Jenner reached the center of the hammock; he’d found nothing. Perhaps he should be looking for the turned-earth hillock of a fresh grave, a low mound of dirt covering something rotten. Half-covering, more like—the reek of decay was too strong for a completely buried body. Maybe something had dug up the corpse.
Not too long and it would be light. How much light would break through the branches and leaves to reach the hammock floor? It was cooler inside the hammock, almost cold.
A rusty metal chair.
He moved the light. Two rust-pocked metal chairs, folded, leaning against the foot of a big mahogany.
He stepped toward the tree, and his light leaped up, jumping over four dangling legs, hanging in the dark. He stepped back quickly in surprise.
The bodies are on fire.
They swam before Jenner’s eyes, brilliant orange and smoke-black in the flashlight glare. But there was no flame, no smoke, no smell of burning: as he drew close, Jenner saw the bodies were covered by thousands of small, tiger-striped snails, thousands of glistening orange-and-black shells swarming over the torsos, coating the heads and arms, dripping in clumped orange gouts to the moss beneath. A million eyes staring back at him; a low breeze shifted the body and the slight sway refracted the flashlight’s beam, turning each cadaver into a twisting column of fire.
The bodies hung back to back, so close that they seemed to form a four-legged creature. Jenner let the beam play over the first body, then up the snail-encrusted rope. He followed its loop around the branch, and back down to the second body, where it disappeared under the grotesquely tilted neck.
The two men had been hanged together, the weight of each body used to strangle the other across the fulcrum of the branch.
And they had to have been killed—this wasn’t suicide. He’d seen a dual-suicide hanging before, a pact where twin brothers had hanged themselves neck-to-neck over a door. But it was vanishingly rare, and if they had killed themselves, who’d folded the chairs and stacked them against the tree afterward?
From their size, build, and clothing, both victims were men. Between the snails and the putrefaction, Jenner couldn’t form an impression of age or race; they looked neither particularly old nor particularly young. The wrists were not tied—how had the killers immobilized the men to string them up? It would have taken more than one attacker, probably several, to do it—to corral the two victims, lead them to the site, wrestle them down, tie the rope, loop it around the branch, get the men onto the chairs, then push them off. Even at gunpoint, the killers’ intentions would’ve been quickly obvious, and the victims would’ve fought back.
The two folding chairs were generic; they could have come from any church basement or school auditorium. They were rusty—how long had they been out here?
Jenner looked back at the bodies. The rain had picked up again, spitting through the canopy and down into the dark emerald moss.
Both men were pretty putrefied; it had been hot in Douglas County, so they would have rotted quickly. Then again, they had hung in the shade cast by the woven branches of a hundred trees; even at night, it was cooler in the heart of the hammock than out on the sedge.
Jenner would have a clearer idea when he saw the bodies up close, in good light, but he figured they’d been there a good week or two.
So why were the chairs rusty? Even with the rain and humidity, two weeks wasn’t very long.
He walked toward the other end of the hammock, looking for the point where the men had come ashore—there had to be some kind of entrance, some place to land a boat where a group of men wouldn’t have had to fight through the undergrowth.
The clearing narrowed, and the trees and undergrowth pressed in again, but Jenner could still make out a muddy path leading through the dense bushes at the edge. He kept going, keeping off the path in case there were salvageable footprints.
He stopped, unsure why. He hadn’t seen a motion, or a flash of color, hadn’t heard a noise, at least not consciously, but something had made him stop.
He turned slowly back to the clearing and shone his flashlight once more over the bushes and trees.
As Jenner swung the beam up, his flashlight lit up two more hanging bodies; these had been suspended much higher off the ground, the feet drooping down to the level of his head. This pair had been reduced almost to skeletons, the floating shapes slathered with snails, a coating of bright orange and black that clung like candle wax drippings to the clothes sagging from the emerging bones.
There was a low drumming sound above him, and then again the roar of rain, and the leaves bowed and spread, and the water spattered down and flowed through the canopy to collect into slender waterfalls, which poured down into the clearing, glittering like silver ropes in his flashlight.
Jenner shone the beam up, then back at the other two victims. He walked the length of the hammock carefully, methodically scanning the branches for other bodies hanging in the orchard of death.
He found no more. He walked back to the center of the clearing and stood still, looking back and forth between the two pairs of murdered men. Standing alone there in the silence, in the stillness and the cool, the smell of dark earth and crushed plants and decaying bodies pressing against his skin, Jenner felt as if Death had sidled up beside him to whisper in his ear.
He laughed out loud at himself, the sound of his voice feeble and hollow under the spattering rain. But even though the first light of day would soon be edging onto the island, Jenner suddenly realized he was afraid to turn off his flashlight.