This must have reassured her—first that he was going to investigate, and second that he might actually be able to learn something. The tension in her shoulder slipped, and she let out another relieved breath, like she hadn’t believed he was serious. “I can take you there right now.”
She drove him in a Forest Service truck, twenty minutes up a couple of increasingly unkempt dirt roads. She had to stop and unlock a steel gate on one of them, and soon the road faded to just a couple of ruts worn into the forest.
A little further on, she finally parked, and up ahead sat the cabin. The thing was small, maybe twenty feet on a side, with a tool shed and narrow porch attached. It looked like it might have been built in the thirties, of simple plank board and a shingled roof. A stone chimney rose on one side. Cormac’s father had worked as a hunting guide and outfitter in the northern Rockies of Colorado. He’d have brought his clients to stay in places a lot like this: functional cabins with few amenities, a woodburning stove but no electricity, no plumbing to speak of. But the walls were solid and the roof stayed dry. A place like this could stay toasty warm all winter. You could live here just fine, assuming the pantry and woodpile were stocked.
Yellow caution tape wound around the outside.
Domingo carefully peeled back a length of tape and invited him onto the porch while she unlocked the front door. When the door opened in, she paused as if steeling herself, and Cormac felt it, that sense that she’d talked about on the phone, a stomach-churning wrongness. He looked around, thinking he’d be able to see something, a shimmering in the air or a shadow covering just this area of forest, the cabin, and a little space around it. But nothing looked out of the ordinary or wrong. It was all in his head, in the shiver traveling down his spine.
“You felt that, yeah?” Domingo asked.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody does. I’ve always had kind of a sixth sense—spend enough time in the woods you get a feel, you know? But I mean everyone—the cops, the coroner, everyone who came in here. They write it off as the power of suggestion. They know what happened here, they just think it’s creepy. Even though they’re all tough, experienced guys who’ve seen a lot worse than this. What is it? What’s making us feel like this?”
Magic, Amelia offered. But it’s. . .off.
Since meeting Amelia he’d encountered a lot of magic. That was where his own sensitivity came from—not any natural ability, but an instinct developed over years, like an allergy that grew worse over time. A demon might crawl out of some rift in reality and exude dread; even a benevolent magician might cast some kind of protection that produced a vague sense of ill feeling in someone who wasn’t welcome. Most of the time, it felt like little more than a tingle on the skin that faded as soon as he was aware of it.
This—the magic had already happened. Any lingering sense of it should be indistinct. A prickling of hairs and nothing more. This—
It’s like some kind of hole in the world.
Domingo seemed hesitant to enter the cabin, so Cormac pushed past her and took a look around.
The place had a sour, musty smell that indicated the man had been dead for a few days before he’d been found. That only contributed to the unconscious creeping fear tugging at his perception. A spot of movement at the edges of his vision. He looked, but nothing living was here. There should be mice in an uninhabited cabin like this. Bugs. Birds. Anything.
As Domingo said, the pantry was stocked. A set of shelves on the back wall was filled with canned food: vegetables, tuna, pasta. A couple of cupboards likely held more. Out of curiosity, Cormac opened a drawer and found a can opener, so that wasn’t the problem. He was willing to bet the propane tank outside was full enough to run the gas stove by the wall. In another corner stood a desk covered with USGS contour maps, pens, pencils, a stack of worn notebooks, binoculars, compass.
“What was he doing here?”
“Arty was a field biologist. He spent a month or so up here every summer doing wildlife surveys, maintaining trails, that sort of thing. He called it his vacation.” Her face was screwed up, her eyes shining, tears ready to fall. She scowled and looked outside. “Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. So why did this happen?”
“Where was the body?” he asked.
“On the bed. Like he just lay down and gave up.”
“He wasn’t on drugs or anything?”
“No! The blood tests came back negative. They’re running a second round of tests for plant toxins. There weren’t any signs of violence or illness.”
The bed where he died was a basically a cot, with a thin mattress, made up with white sheets and a government-issue-looking wool blanket, a single pillow. The pillow still held a depression, a crease where a head might have lain. The blanket had been smoothed out.
He knelt, looked under the cot, and found two things: a jackknife, blade open and ready to use, but then dropped, discarded. And a piece of bone, smooth and flattened, probably part of a rib. It was just a couple of inches long, so no telling what it came from.
I’ve no idea what those mean.
Might not have meant anything. Guy dropped his knife. He was a biologist, so the bone might have been a sample he brought in and lost track of. It was smooth, bleached. If it had been magical, part of a spell maybe, it would have had something written or carved into it. He set them on the table, and wondered if the cops had missed the items, or figured they weren’t important.
He held the knife up. “Ms. Domingo, that look like Weber’s knife?”
“Yeah, that’s his.” She stood with her arms tightly crossed, unhappy. “He always had it with him. Where’d you find it?”
“Under the bed.”
Her brow furrowed, maybe thinking what he was: it didn’t make sense, but it also didn’t not make sense. Both the knife and the bone might have just fallen out of his pocket.