THIRTY-ONE

He leapt down the boulders, his feet barely touching one rock before they thrust him onto the next, his gun banging against his shoulder blades. Should’ve come down here loaded, he thought as he slid and nearly fell on loose gravel. But there was no time now to shove any buckshot into his gun. He jumped over the last rocks and threw off his pack. The air from Atagahi rose warm and moist against his face; faraway he heard the warning caaaawww of a crow.

The body floated facedown in the green water. Hair clung like dark tar to the skull, the hands bobbed outstretched, as if beseeching someone beneath the water.

“No,” Jonathan said under his breath.

He shrugged off his gun and knelt by the spring. Leaning out over the water, he could just touch the right ankle with his outstretched fingers. He grabbed the leg, then an arm, then he hoisted the body out of the spring. Maybe he wasn’t too late . . .

Billy had not yet bloated or stiffened, but his skin looked like unmelted paraffin and felt like a well-chilled steak. Blood and water oozed from the dime-sized hole in the middle of his stomach.

Jonathan’s brain went numb. All he could do was cradle Billy’s head in his lap and stare into his face. Billy’s mouth seemed to gape open more in surprise than terror, an expression Jonathan had seen often on his friend in high school, after they’d been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom.

Billy’s hands bore no signs of struggle. The knuckles were unsplit and the fingers hung limp, frail as the bleached bones of a dead bird. They would coax no more music from horsehair and gut.

“Oh, Billy,” Jonathan said thickly. There was a hard angular lump in the pocket of Billy’s sweatshirt. Jonathan reached in and pulled out a small harmonica. It was waterlogged, but untouched by any bullet. Jonathan lifted it to his lips. He blew a cluster of sad, tinny notes into the air, then he buttoned the harmonica in his own breast pocket. He would give it to little Michael. The boy was too young to understand now, but someday they would sit on the porch at Little Jump Off and Jonathan would tell him about his father—that he had been a good man and a fiddler like no other.

“I’m so sorry,” Jonathan moaned, wishing he could speak the words in Cherokee. He pressed his forehead against Billy’s. He held him for a moment, then he examined the bullet hole more closely. The orange fabric of Billy’s sweatshirt was charred around the edges, and a thin smear of blood trailed along the rocks for almost twenty feet. Whitman, the stranger who’d lured him up here with the promise of a thousand dollars, had shot him in the gut from point-blank range. Ever the Cherokee, Billy had spent his last moments trying to crawl to the healing waters of Atagahi.

The sharp taste of anger rose in Jonathan’s throat. If Whitman had already killed Billy, then he might well have murdered Mary, too, and now be on his way back to civilization. But Jonathan had passed no one on the trail; he hadn’t seen the slightest trace of anyone heading east. Could Whitman still be here, in the forest, waiting?

Quickly, he laid Billy on the ground and picked up his shotgun.

He loaded two shells and circled the pool, trying to stay inside the deep purple shadows cast by the rising sun. He peered into the small crevices between the boulders, his ears keen for the scratch of a pebble or the cock of a gun’s hammer. When he found nothing but the same blank boulders that had stood there for the past ten thousand years, he climbed up into the bigger surrounding rocks, steeling himself to find more bodies, but hoping to find anything that might give him some kind of clue. Again, the rocks revealed nothing. He crouched beside a boulder. Could Mary and her friends have gotten lost in the Ghosts? Did the three women even make it this far? If that was the case, why did Whitman kill Billy here?

He turned that over in his mind as he searched the rest of the rocks. He’d just crept past one huge boulder that protruded upward from the others when he heard a whimper.

“Mary?” he called out, his voice lifting with hope.

He heard another, sharper cry. Under a small outcropping of sandstone, a familiar face peered up at him. Dark brown eyes, floppy ears alert for danger.

“Homer!”

The dog whimpered as he leapt into Jonathan’s arms. Wagging his tail like a buggy whip, he plastered Jonathan’s face with sloppy, ardent kisses. The weight of sixty twisting pounds of joyous hound pushed them both backwards into the dirt.

“Homer, what happened?” Though Homer wiggled with delight, Jonathan could feel his rangy muscles shivering. Whatever had transpired before Billy’s death was still terrifying his dog.

A bloody gash creased the top of the animal’s head, the result, Jonathan surmised, of a poorly aimed bullet. Other than that, Homer was okay, though there was an edginess about him that Jonathan had never seen before. He scratched Homer underneath his chin, then got to his feet and shouldered his gun.

“Come on, old boy. You can help me out here.”

He searched the remainder of the clearing, Homer at his heels. No one else, dead or alive, was hiding anywhere at Atagahi that morning. More puzzled than ever, Jonathan climbed back down and sat beside Billy. Homer nudged Billy’s hand once with his nose, then nestled close beside Jonathan and again started to shiver.

Jonathan stared at the hole in Billy’s gut as he considered different scenarios. Had Whitman killed Billy, then killed the three women and left them somewhere else? Had he buried them? Why bury three victims and leave the last floating? And why not kill Homer, too? Surely a man who would gut-shoot another man would have no qualms about dispatching a dog. If—he had just begun to postulate a third possibility when he noticed two dark splotches on a boulder beyond the spot where Billy’s bloody trail began. He jumped to his feet and ran to get a closer look.

Two chalk markings decorated the sandstone. The lines and loops looked like they could have once formed words, and it seemed to him a single line was scribbled at the bottom of each block. Just like two separate letters with two signatures. He traced the edges of them, as if that might tell him what happened here, then he touched one block itself. It was dry. He leaned over and licked it. The bitter taste of burned wood stung his tongue.

He frowned. There must be something else here, something he’d missed. He surveyed the spring again, this time softening his focus, allowing his gaze to absorb everything.

Halfway through a slow scan of the area, he saw it. A narrow, trampled trail through the grass that led past the willow and up into the mountains, weeds bent along both sides, wide enough for one person to walk. A dot of color caught his eye. A yellow fleck dotted the old willow.

He hurried over to the willow and touched the lemon-colored spot. It felt sticky; a bit of yellow came off on his finger. He sniffed it. Oil paint. Mary. She had come up here to paint, and she’d left this dot of yellow pigment five feet up the tree. Why? Because she had to go into woods she didn’t know, and she was marking a trail to lead her back here.

“Okay, Homer,” he murmured as he scanned the trees up the mountainside, searching for more dots of yellow paint. He saw none, but surely there must be more. Mary wouldn’t have marked one tree and then quit. “We might have the start of a trail here. Now we’ve just got to find the rest of it.”

He began to move quickly. Homer followed at his heels as he pulled a tarp from his pack and spread it beneath the willow. Then he walked back to the spring and gathered Billy in his arms. His body felt lighter than he’d expected. Jonathan carried him to the tree, remembering all the sweet summer evenings Billy’s fiddle had sung at weddings and wakes and barn dances, for free, just because he loved to see hard-knuckled farmers and their taciturn wives jumping like crickets to his music. As he thought of that, Billy’s body grew leaden in his arms, and he felt as if he were carrying some dead part of himself as well.

Homer watched, ears pricked, as Jonathan laid the corpse squarely in the middle of the tarp, then turned it so Billy’s head pointed west. He knelt there, trying to call up some Cherokee prayer that would send Billy off, but he couldn’t remember any Cherokee words. Suddenly a dark, hot rage shot through him. Some rich white fucker in a rented Ford had killed his oldest friend, and he hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.

He stuck two fingers of his right hand into the wound in Billy’s stomach. He pulled them out, dark with clotted blood, then closed his eyes and smeared the blood across his cheeks and nose. A single stroke, left to right, as he once read the great Tsali had done; then he looked up at the sky. Though he knew it was crazy, at that moment he felt just like one of the old warriors—hot and strong and utterly without limits.

“I don’t know if the old ones did it like this, Billy, but I swear to you that you shall have the heart of the one who killed you.”