The body lay in a gulch, about a hundred yards off the hiking trail.
Is it naked?
No—this isn’t a homicide, so why should it be?
What is it wearing, then?
All those things that say runner/hiker.
Sex?
Female.
No mystery here.
This is no crime scene . . .
The “Orchard,” northwest of Saggerty Falls, runs alongside the abandoned Michigan Air-Line Railway, stretching from Richmond to Dequindre Road, where it connects to the Clinton River Trail. The path the woman traversed was in an area unfrequented by trailbirds, but Lydia Molloy is—was—a solitary hiker by nature. Her last repose is an almost miraculously hidden spot that cannot be seen from the air, should there have been a rescue effort. There will be no cause for that, at least not for some months.
Still, there is no mystery.
We know her name and occupation.
We know how she died, and it wasn’t on duty . . .
She was—is—a Macomb County Sheriff’s deputy, age thirty. If the body had been collected, toxicology would reveal low levels of oxycodone. She injured a rotator cuff while wrestling with a suspect a few years back, and the two pills a day that she took to deal with the pain had become a mostly manageable habit.
She was listening to her Spotify playlist. Inexplicably, she preferred classical music while hike-running but only played “my ladies” when at home—Sia, Gaga, Rihanna.
At the time of death, the particular track she was absorbed in, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, is notable, but for reasons to be later revealed.
How is it, then, that there is no mystery?
What happened?
She saw something off-trail, glinting in the sun—
It was that sort of thing one hears about all one’s life, the bad-luck fall that cracks the neck or bleeds the brain. The friend of a friend falls from their bike and their head hits the curb or trivially stumbles and destiny conspires to end everything—memory, desire, breath, life—in an instant. Usually, it’s bodysurfers into sandbars and divers into shallow pools that one reads about. In the deputy’s case, she tumbled down the maw of the gulch before coming to an abrupt, hidden rest. In the moments that Lydia was falling, what was she thinking? She wouldn’t have had time to voice—or think—more than Shit! though not surviving couldn’t have been in her mind-set, not remotely. A gross and damnable inconvenience, yes, but never the end of all things.
If there was a witness, what would they have seen?
Woman on trail, walking with resolution. Something ten yards ahead gets her attention. Casually curious, she leans to investigate and then trips and tumbles. A nasty fall but the grassy, sloping terrain is such that a sense of fatality isn’t in the air. The spectator draws closer, their drone’s-eye view hovering over where the hiker has come to rest. The witness zooms in on the rock—the rock of destiny, ending memory and desire—and thinks, What terrible luck. The witness stays a few frantic minutes, uncertain if the hiker is dead (we know otherwise), and is about to go for help when something remarkable happens. The lifeless body has a great seizure, a moment of electrified cosmic astonishment to flesh and bones. It stands, haloed in blue. (What is that otherworldly blue?) The hiker’s anguished and astonished face, like that of a child roused from deep sleep, contorts in tears, the mouth letting out a great yawp—more like the scream of a little girl who lost her parents in a department store of the dead. The witness is transfixed, more by the eerie phenomenon of what they see than by the hard fact of the woman’s sudden reanimation.
The face becomes a mask of serenity, regal, timeless. The body remains in place, stock-still. Rigid, though not in the sense of rigor mortis.
A monument now.
A sphinx.
And the gulch—the entire valley—is bathed in the parfum of blue mist, sprayed from a nebulizer of the Unknown.
The body that was Deputy Lydia Molloy and will improbably remain Deputy Lydia Molloy a few months longer begins its slow, labored, somehow elegant ascent from the ravine.
It stops short of the trail and sees something glinting. Not the glint of the original thing that stirred her curiosity—an inexplicably discarded silver belt buckle, of all things—but rather the iPod that flew from Lydia’s grasp at the beginning of the fall. (Though the earbuds remained attached to the body throughout the fall.) The arm of the body reaches out to retrieve it. The hands of the body plug in the earbuds and she resumes listening to the music.
Kindertotenlieder . . .
As Lydia makes her way back to her car, wobbly as a foal yet growing stronger and more resolute with each step, she hews close to the tracks, stepping over a rusted rail, making a game of walking over the buried, blown-out ties just as a child might, arms outstretched as if balancing on a tightrope.
A small smile comes to her lips as she imagines a lumbering, clacking train springing up around her—
At last, she knows she is home again.