“DID YOU FIND ANYTHING?” BRADY ASKED.
Brady and Cole were lagging behind Eva. They’d been on the trail for about twenty minutes, and it seemed as though the tracks went on and on, deeper into Blackwood Forest. Every once in a while, Eva would swivel towards them with her light and she’d shout, “Come on, boys!” and the two of them picked up the pace.
“Where?” Cole asked.
“In the trailer, obviously.”
“Not really, no.”
“Oh, dear Lord above, Cole Harper.” This was trouble, Brady using Cole’s full name like his grandmother would do from time to time. “Eva’s not the only person who can tell when you’re lying.”
“Okay, I found his phone.” Cole didn’t say anything more about it. He kept walking forward, keeping an eye on Eva’s flashlight. He tried to avoid Brady’s stare.
“And?” Brady asked, losing patience.
“And nothing. It had the texts between me and Ashley…”
“Cole, please.”
“Okay, look. You don’t have to feel bad about not going to meet Ashley out in the clearing. I just didn’t want to bring it up because of that. I mean, sometimes things just come up. It wouldn’t have changed anything.” Brady just looked at Cole oddly. Cole felt awkward. “That was it,” he added. “There weren’t really any clues on it.”
Brady stopped. Cole did too. Eva kept going, unaware that the two of them weren’t following her anymore.
“Let me see it,” Brady said.
Cole reached into his pocket. Brady’s face looked even more intense by the way the flashlight was hitting it, like he was about to tell a horror story by a campfire. There was no arguing with him.
“Sure.” Cole handed the phone to Brady. Brady grabbed it from him and went through the texts just as Cole had. He often looked up at Cole as he read through the texts that were presumably between Cole and Ashley, probably understanding why Cole had come. Ashley’s texts read as urgent for Brady as they had for Cole. There was confusion in Brady’s face there. Cole couldn’t blame him. He’d been confused, too. He was still confused. Then Brady got to the texts he, Brady, had supposedly exchanged with Ashley. Cole watched Brady go through these texts, leaned forward and peeked as Brady’s thumb scrolled up and stopped, scrolled up and stopped. Brady read through the texts a few times, then handed the phone back to Cole.
“Cool?” Cole asked.
Brady shook his head. “No, I don’t think it could be more uncool if it was the middle of summer.”
“I can’t even begin to understand how hard it must be for you to read that all over, man. Sorry.”
“That’s not it,” Brady said. “It’s that I didn’t write any of those texts.”
“What are you talking about?” Cole read through the texts between Brady and Ashley and analyzed them. He even checked for matches in Brady’s grammar and syntax.
“I didn’t write one of those texts to Ashley two days ago. Not one. But they’re from my phone.” Brady pulled out his own phone, opened it, and found the messages from Ashley. “Look.” Brady opened the conversation with Ashley. The screen was blank. “There’s no history,” Brady said. “Somebody took my phone, texted Ashley, erased everything they’d written, then returned it without me knowing.”
“Crap.” Cole breathed, and as the clear, indisputable thought began to form in his head about what had actually happened with Brady’s phone—the same thing that happened to Ashley’s—Brady asked, “Who could’ve done that?”
Cole was frighteningly close to answering Brady, just thinking out loud. Of course it had been Choch. He’d taken Ashley’s phone to text Cole, and before that, probably to get Ashley’s phone, he’d taken Brady’s phone to text Ashley. It was a confusing way to go about things, baffling really, but oh what fun he must’ve had doing it (as fun as it is to ride a one-horse open sleigh. Carry on, though. PTI – pardon the interruption). He could’ve just manifested a text from no phone at all, Cole figured. He could’ve made the messages look like they were coming from whomever he wanted. It was infuriating. Cole managed to hold his tongue, to follow the rules. In the process, Brady and Eva stayed alive. “I don’t know.”
“Look at me,” Brady said to Cole. Cole did. “Are you telling me that you don’t know who took my phone?”
Cole didn’t bother lying. It hadn’t worked yet. The only option was to tell the truth. And that was, “I know who took your phone, and I know who took Ashley’s. Same person.”
“And?” Brady prompted.
“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
“Do you realize that my boyfriend got killed last night? You do, right?” It was the first time Brady had ever shouted at Cole, or, Cole thought, at anybody, for all he could remember. It left him a little stunned.
“Of course I realize that, Brady…”
“I’ve been trying to hold it together the whole damn day, and you have stuff you know about his death and you’re not going to tell me?”
“Hey!” Eva shouted from way up ahead. Her flashlight’s glow was dim but loomed large from where she herself had stopped, about a hundred yards away. “What are you guys doing!?”
“I want to tell you, Brady, but I can’t. Something bad will happen.”
“You mean, something bad like somebody getting killed?”
“Worse.” Like all three of us dying.
Brady shook his head in frustration. It looked like he wanted to smash his flashlight against a large rock just off the trail.
“I promise you that what I know, it won’t help us find Ashley’s killer.”
“You mean it won’t help you find his killer. That’s your big stupid top-secret mission, right, Cole?”
“I can’t find the killer without you,” Cole said. “Please.”
“Look at what’s happened since you got here. What if it’s all happening because of that? Because of you?”
“Do you want me to go?” Cole asked. “Because I can’t do that either. I’m not here because I started all this, I’m here to fix it. I have to be.” Cole realized that he was trying to convince himself, as much as he was Brady.
“I don’t know what I want, I—”
“Brady, you know me,” Cole pleaded.
“Boys!” Eva shouted.
“Coming!” Cole shouted back. He said to Brady, “Coming?”
Brady looked all around—at Cole, Eva, back to where they’d come from, like he wanted to go back to a better time. But there was no going back.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming.”
They resumed their painstaking pursuit the way they had started, Eva was in the lead, Brady and Cole behind. The boys stayed closer to her now. She kept looking back at them to ensure they’d not fallen back again. Cole was keeping up okay, but Brady was struggling.
“I’m out in the bush all the time,” Brady said in heavy breaths. “This is baloney.”
“You’re doing fine,” Cole said.
“You’re hardly sweating,” Brady said to Cole, then shouted to Eva, “and you’re a machine, Eva!”
“Dad and I do this every weekend,” she replied. “It’s just that we track animals. Small game, big game. Not a killer. Killer’s are easier to track, though.”
She stopped pushing forward and waited for them to catch up to her.
“You know this isn’t a race, though, right?” Brady asked.
“The slower we are, the longer he’s got to get away, right?” Eva said.
“Assuming he actually stopped at some point,” Cole said.
“Yeah, maybe he just kept going, and that’s that,” Brady said, but he didn’t want it to be this way. Cole could tell by his tone. To reassure Brady that he was all-in on finding Ashley’s killer, he replied, “Well, then we’ll keep going too, okay?”
“That doesn’t make sense anyway,” Eva said. “Why would somebody come all the way to Wounded Sky, kill a kid, and then leave? What’s the reason? There’s always a motive.”
“What motive could there possibly be to kill Ashley?” Brady asked. “Nobody but my parents and a few other idiots cared that we’re gay. A lot of people don’t even know Ashley was.”
“He was a model student, a great hockey player, all around nice guy,” Eva said.
“Maybe somebody was jealous that he was going places for hockey?” Cole asked.
They were in full-on investigative mode now.
“That doesn’t happen here, does it?” Brady asked. “I think people appreciate that we have…that we had…somebody like that living here.”
“Plus Michael’s just as good,” Eva said.
“Michael’s just as good,” Cole mimicked under his breath, like a child. “None of this makes any sense,” he said, this time to everybody. “That’s why we have to find this guy. Maybe he’ll have some answers.”
“And what, now we’re interrogators?” Brady said.
“No, I think that’s when we call Wayne,” Cole said. “Right?”
“That’s when we call my dad,” Eva confirmed.
They continued on together from there, but it wasn’t more than a few minutes that Eva held up. She whispered, “We might need to call him sooner than we thought.”
She crouched beneath the cover of some thicker underbrush, and Brady and Cole did too. She pointed out a small clearing up ahead, and the corner of a tent that was visible through the maze of foliage and trees.
“I actually see what you mean this time,” Cole whispered.
“Kind of more obvious,” Eva whispered back, “but good for you.”
“What do we do?” Brady asked.
“We check it out,” Eva said.
They bear-crawled the rest of the way, kept hidden, tried not to crack a twig and announce their presence. Eva and Brady were predictably great at “stealth mode,” as Brady had called it before they set off. Cole, not so much. By the time they were near the clearing’s perimeter, he’d been shushed multiple times, and for various, clumsy offences. He’d apologized each time, which garnered a follow-up shush.
It went like this:
A twig cracked. In the woods, in the silence, it sounded like thunderclap.
“Shhhh,” from either Eva or Brady. “Sorry!”
“Shhhh,” from the other.
Cole’s ineptitude didn’t cost them anything. At the edge of the clearing it was obvious that nobody was at the camp. They stopped there and huddled around Eva to see how they had got here. She’d been mapping out the route with her phone. The app left a blue trail from here to Ashley’s trailer. Surprisingly, where they were now wasn’t far off from Wounded Sky, albeit on the other side of the community, closer to the quarry. The blue line zigged and zagged through Blackwood Forest, moving left, jerking right, going north a-ways, doubling back. It’s what had taken them so long.
“He was trying to cover his tracks,” Eva said.
“You can’t hide your tracks from a tracker,” Brady rasped, as though he were narrating a movie trailer.
“He’s hidden somewhere, though,” Cole said.
For a camp that had been put up in a forest, where no other camp had been before, it was immaculate and spare: a single person canvas tent and a backpack against a tree. Some smoke was rising from the firepit, meaning the killer hadn’t been gone long.
“I don’t remember camps being this neat,” Cole said as they walked into the clearing.
“They aren’t like KOAs,” Eva said to Cole.
“Can you imagine an arcade just around the corner, swimming pool, convenience store?” Brady asked.
“Roughing it,” Eva said.
“Alright already,” Cole said.
“Cole’s right, though. Hunting camps usually aren’t like this,” Brady said. “There’s just not enough stuff.”
They stopped in the middle of the camp, beside the fire.
“It looks military,” Brady said. “Just precise, tidy, you know?”
“So, wait,” Eva said. “A soldier killed Ashley?”
“Maybe, like, an ex-soldier who’s gone rogue or something,” Cole said.
“Don’t serial killers keep things all neat like this? Like they’re OCD or something?” Brady asked.
“In the movies,” Cole said.
“Look at us,” Eva said. “Tracking the killer, building a psychological profile.”
“Still doesn’t explain what Ashley has to do with anything. It can’t be random like that,” Brady said.
Cole crouched by the fire and touched the ashes with his fingers. It was warm, but he couldn’t have guessed when the killer had been here last. He picked up a stick and poked around at the white and black logs. He found a can of beans hidden in the remnants of the fire. “I’m glad you guys came. Both of you. I would’ve been lost.”
“I just want to find this asshole,” Eva said.
“We can’t do anything right now,” Cole said.
“You’re right. He has a gun, we have our wits,” Eva said. “I don’t like the odds.”
“Do you have reception out here?” Cole said to Brady.
“We can’t get reception some places in the rez, Cole.” To demonstrate, Brady pulled out his phone, turned it on, and showed Cole the screen without looking at it himself. No service. “Let alone in Blackwood Forest. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of cell service.”
“Look,” Eva said, “let’s go back into Wounded Sky and call my dad. It’s time. We can lead him back here.”
“He’s not going to let you come back here, Eve,” Brady said. “He teaches you to do all this stuff, yeah, but at the same time he treats you like—”
“Yeah, well,” Eva said, “he can’t find his way here without me. And neither could you boys.”
“In our defence, I don’t think anybody could find their way here even if they were using your app. It’s like a bunch of blue lightning bolts,” Brady said.
“Shh, shh, shh,” Cole said quickly and sharply. He liked shushing somebody for once.
“What?” Brady asked, instinctively whispering.
“Shh,” Cole repeated.
There was movement, rustling somewhere in the forest, out of range of their flashlights. They stopped everything. They stopped breathing, it seemed.
A twig broke.
Closer now.
“Somebody’s here,” Cole whispered.
Suddenly, the faint rustling and twig-breaking exploded into heavy footsteps over the rough terrain, like drumbeats, rhythmic, foreboding.
“Run!” Brady shouted.
All three of them, jolted by Brady’s desperate command, took off from the camp as fast as they could go, their flashlights trained in front of them to help navigate the obstacles laid out before them at the speed they were going.
They ran faster.
Cole could hear someone running behind him and his friends, but they didn’t gain on them. They bounded through Blackwood Forest, and the footsteps fell behind. Although they were more sure of their safety, they continued to run until they came to the outskirts of Wounded Sky First Nation. Only then did they stop. Brady and Eva bent over in succession, their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath.
“What…the…hell…just…happened?” Eva asked, panting heavily.
“Beats…me…” Brady panted too.
“I think we found who we were looking for.” Cole didn’t have to catch his breath, and he didn’t feel tired from the run—certainly not like the other two. He hadn’t been as tired as Brady during their expedition through Blackwood Forest, either. He wondered if this was included in the abilities that he had been given by Choch, this along with the crushed doorknob. It had to be. He made a quick mental list: endurance, strength.
Should I pretend to be tired? Cole wondered. He didn’t want Eva and Brady to ask too many questions if they saw him standing there perfectly fine while they looked like they’d just been through boot camp. What had Brady said? Eva was a machine. Yet there she was, keeled over and trying to catch her breath. Before Eva and Brady looked up, Cole bent over, hands to knees, trying to look like he was breathing hard. While pretending, a slight bit of anxiety reared its head: weak knees, quick pulse, shakiness. Well, if he did have some kind of superhuman abilities, he supposed he needed a weakness. He’d learned as much from comic books. Instead of panting heavily, then, he did his deep breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It looked the same to the untrained eye.
“Now,” Brady said, “we have to…worry about him…finding us.”
“Check your…phone for reception,” Eva was beginning to even out her breath. “We should call my dad now.”
“Good idea.” Brady reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The light from the screen lit his face. His mouth opened slightly and his eyes opened even more, wide in disbelief.
“What?” Cole asked. “What’s going on?
“B!” Eva said, a little more forceful.
Brady’s hand dropped against his thigh. The phone fell out of his hand and hit the ground.
“Chief Crate is dead.”