With the shoes gone, Jack knew he must look at “him.”
With the flashlight on high, he slowly turned to face the back of the ledge. He thought he was prepared, but he wasn’t. A skeleton. A human being who’d been left there to rot. Uncared for. Unmourned.
“Are you okay?” Sara called down to him.
Jack sniffed and swallowed. Cleared his throat. How his father would laugh at him for his sentimentality! “Yeah, fine,” he called up. “I just need to take photos.”
“Of every inch,” Sara reminded him.
“I will. I’ll—” He broke off because he heard the ladder against the wall. “What the hell?” he muttered, then leaned out to look up. Kate was coming down. “You can’t—” he began, but then reached out to get her, and pull her onto the ledge beside him. They were cramped close together. “You shouldn’t be here. You—”
“Neither should you.” She took the flashlight from him and turned toward the length of the skeleton. “He’s—” Her voice broke.
Jack put his arms around her, and she hid her face in his shoulder.
“That poor man,” she said.
“Right,” Jack whispered. He wanted to bawl her out for being there, but it felt so good to hold someone who was alive that he said nothing.
Kate pulled away. “Okay, that’s it. Let’s get to work before someone comes looking for us. Do you actually know how to take pictures with a real camera?”
Her sassiness almost made him smile. “Yeah. I know.”
For the next twenty minutes they were quiet as they both took pictures, Kate with her cell phone and Jack with Sara’s mirrorless camera. Between the two of them, they recorded every inch of the skeleton and the surroundings.
They tried to touch as little of the area as possible as the bones were loose and could be disturbed. All that held them together had rotted away.
“Wonder how Puck knows who it is?” Kate whispered.
Jack, camera to his face, shrugged. “No idea, but I plan to get every detail from her.” He halted. “I mean...” He didn’t need to finish his sentence. If they stayed.
Minutes later, he held Kate about the waist as she leaned out to shoot the interior of the cavernous structure.
“The sun’s coming up,” Sara called down to them. “We should go.”
When Jack lowered the camera, Kate said, “Why is no one mentioning calling the police?”
“Is that what you think we should do?”
With a grimace, Kate said, “I don’t know what to do.” Her eyes were telling him that she didn’t know about staying or leaving, or about a murder.
“Let’s go to Puck’s house and figure it out,” he said.
Kate gave a last look at the place. “Do you think anyone’s been down here lately?”
“No. I’ll look more closely but I think the vines on top were untouched.”
“Except where you nearly fell in.” He steadied her as she leaned out to get on the ladder to climb up.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think that whoever did this is still here?”
“If they aren’t here now, they’ve spent a lot of time in this place. You’d have to be very familiar with this property to know about this old pit. I want to find out who fenced this area off.”
“I have questions too.” Kate started up the ladder, but paused. “How do we begin asking questions? Do we say we accidently found a body?”