That made no sense. If someone had ripped it away in rage, why carry it through thick brush and set it down unharmed? If an animal dragged it, why were there no tooth marks? No claw gouges? No disturbed soil around it?
Lyle photographed it. Voss swore under his breath.
Absalom walked a slow circle around the gate. He stopped near the fallen cedar.
“There,” he said.
Wendell came to him.
On the underside of the cedar, where rot had hollowed a long cavity, something had been packed into the darkness.
At first Wendell thought it was moss. Then he saw bits of cloth. Strands of hair. Splinters of bone too small to name.
Doctor Pell knelt, then went very still.
“Don’t touch anything,” Voss said.
“No,” Pell murmured. “I do not intend to.”
They cut away part of the rotten cedar with hatchets. The cavity opened like a mouth.
Inside were objects.
A clay pipe cracked at the bowl. Three buttons. A strip of brown wool. A compass needle without its casing. Several teeth. A woman’s hairpin bent nearly straight. A child’s glass marble. A bird skull wrapped in thread. A small square of oilcloth folded around something black and brittle. The items had been arranged, not dumped. Each lay separate from the next, nested in moss and fir needles, protected from weather.
Wendell saw Absalom’s expression and knew the tracker had expected something like this.
“What is it?” Wendell asked quietly.
Absalom shook his head once.
Sheriff Voss stood over the hollow cedar, face pale beneath his beard. “Evidence,” he said, as though the word could make the discovery belong to him. “Bag it.”
Absalom looked at him sharply. “No.”
Voss rounded on him. “This is a criminal investigation.”
“Then investigate from here.”
“These may identify victims.”
“They already identify trouble.”
The sheriff stepped closer. “Mr. Reeve, I have tolerated your cryptic remarks because Deputy Crisp speaks well of your skills. Do not mistake that tolerance for authority.”
Absalom met his eyes. “You take those things down the mountain, something comes with them.”
The men around them shifted. No one laughed.
Voss’s mouth tightened. “Superstition.”
“Call it that if it helps you carry it.”
The sheriff ordered the objects collected.
Wendell helped because refusing would end his career and because obedience is easier when fear has no official category. He wrapped the buttons, the hairpin, the compass needle. When he lifted the strip of brown wool, it was damp, though the cedar hollow was dry. It smelled faintly of rain and smoke.
Doctor Pell examined the teeth and said at least two appeared human.
“Adult,” he said. “One perhaps male. Impossible to be certain here.”
“Could one belong to Orson Thornquist?” Wendell asked.
Pell looked annoyed. “Teeth do not introduce themselves.”
They packed everything into evidence sacks and began down the mountain in late afternoon.
The descent was miserable. Rain started again, light at first, then steady. Mud sucked at boots. Pettit’s camera equipment slowed them. One of Voss’s deputies slipped and cut his palm on a stone. The evidence sacks were divided among the men, and Wendell carried the oilcloth packet because no one else wanted it after a black fluid seeped from one corner.
Halfway to Cornelius’s cabin, Absalom stopped.
“What now?” Voss demanded.
“Listen.”
The rain made a soft, constant hiss. Water dripped from branches. Somewhere down the slope, the creek moved over stones.
Then Wendell heard it.
A knock.
Three short.
One long.
It came from the trees behind them.
Every man turned.
Nothing stood there but fir trunks fading into rain.
The knock came again.
Three short. One long.
Not loud. Not near. Yet unmistakable. Wood struck by knuckles. A familiar rhythm, patient and intimate.
Lyle Pettit began to cry. He did it silently, tears running down his narrow face, camera case clutched to his chest.
Sheriff Voss drew his revolver. “Who’s there?”
Absalom closed his eyes briefly, as though pained.
The knock came a third time.
Three short.
One long.
Then a woman’s voice, thin through rain, called from somewhere upslope.
“Wendell?”
He knew it was not his mother. His mother had been dead eleven years and buried in Albany under a stone his father could barely afford. He knew this with the full force of reason.
Still, his knees weakened.
“Wendell,” the voice called again, sounding puzzled now, tenderly chiding, the way she had when he came in muddy as a boy. “You left the door open.”
His hand moved toward the evidence sack without his permission.
Absalom struck him hard across the face.
The blow snapped Wendell sideways. Pain burst through his jaw. The voice stopped.
“Walk,” Absalom said.
Voss pointed the revolver toward the trees, but his hand shook. “Show yourself!”
From the timber came a sound like someone laughing into water.
Then nothing.
They walked.
No one spoke until they reached Cornelius Holloway’s cabin. The old man stood on his porch with both hounds pressed against his legs. He looked at their faces, at the sacks, at Wendell’s reddened cheek.
“You brought it down,” Cornelius said.
Voss, soaked and humiliated, said, “Go inside.”
Cornelius did not move. “You damn fool.”
The sheriff had him arrested for obstruction the next morning, then released him by noon because no one could decide what he had obstructed.
The evidence reached Salem two days later.
After that, the case changed shape.
