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Nick was debating how much he wanted to share about his lack of family when he spotted something off the trail that made him pause. Martin, not realizing Nick had stopped, kept on walking.
A tree had fallen about sixty feet off the side of the trail. Recently too. It looked like a hemlock to Nick, but he’d have to get closer before he knew for sure. The now exposed dirt-encased root ball was easily taller than Nick or Martin. The tree had been an old one. The last big storm must have been too much for it. There was justsomethingabout the roots that seemed weird to his eye. Something that didn’t make sense.
With the voices of both Critter and Mags bitching in his head about hikers who went “stomping” off trails and inadvertently crushed rare native plants like trillium and the stream orchid, Nick gingerly moved toward the tree, watching every step.
“Nick,” Martin called out, finally realizing he wasn’t behind him any longer. “What are you doing?” He jogged back toward the spot where Nick had left the path.
“Just a sec, I need to check something.”
Carefully watching his every step, Nick approached the fallen tree. He felt a bit silly—the tree, after all, wasn’t going to attack him.Trees That Attack, he snickered. That would be a great title for a horror novel.
The closer he got, the more certain he became that he had actually seen something. Something very wrong.
“Fuck,” he muttered, staring up at the massive root ball full of rocks, chucks of earth and—“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“What is—shit, is that a skull?”
Martin had followed him, standing close enough now that their shoulders touched.
“I’m no forensic scientist, although I have watched a lot ofNCIS, but I have the feeling that is, indeed, a human skull.”
As much as it pained Nick to agree with Martin—that one of them should remain behindjust in case,the other returning to town to alert the authorities—Nick stayed back at the site while Martin headed back. His thigh ached, although he didn’t admit that to Martin. Nick watched him jog down the hill, and when he disappeared around a far bend in the path, Nick picked his way back to the tree.
“How long have you been here?” Nick asked the skull.
There was no answer, of course.
The skull appeared to be embedded on the outermost edge of the root ball—that was what had caught Nick’s attention, the wrongness of it. Peering closer, he tried to see if there were more parts, more bones. He didn’t see anything obvious, but they could have been carried off by scavengers or buried more deeply, where they were difficult to find.
As he’d told Martin, he wasn’t an expert. But Nick had seen his fair share of calcified human remains. Early in his career, he’d been hired by a group of forensic anthropologists to photograph their findings and help them identify victims buried in mass graves in southern Mexico. So he had, in fact, seen many human remains.
Regardless of what he’d said to Martin, Nick knew the skull had once belonged to a human.
“Who are you?” he wondered out loud.
A raven, maybe even the same one he and Martin had seen earlier, fluttered down from above and landed on top of the exposed roots.
“Do you know, raven?”
The bird cocked its head as if it was trying to think of an answer.
Nick suspected the remains had been there for some time. A year, possibly many years. As far as he knew, there were no unaccounted-for hikers, not in the last decade or so. There was the girl who disappeared last summer, and Blair Cruz, but this skull couldn’t be either of theirs. He didn’t think so anyway. The cops hadn’t yet identified the bones found last month and those had been further up anyway, closer to the lakes. Nick doubted they were related.
“Who thefuckis responsible for this?”
The raven cawed, the sound eerily loud and jarring. Then, apparently deciding Nick was boring, the ebony-black bird flew off again and disappeared into the forest.
MARTIN
Fact:Rivers within the Olympics mountain range form a radial drainage pattern, meaning they flow away from the center of the ancient volcanic uplift.These rivers carry colossal amounts of water from the top of the Olympic Mountains, where it rains an average of 140 to 200 inches a year (more than any other place in the continental United States), down to the Pacific Ocean.
Martin sighed, thankful to finally be left on his own. Conversation flowed around him, and for the time being, at any rate, he was not the center of attention. Nick, he noticed, had disappeared. Or, more likely, the residents of Cooper Springs knew better than to trap Nick Waugh and pummel him with questions.
Finding human remains was not what Martin had envisioned for the first day of the new year.
It had taken him less than an hour to jog back down the trail. Thirty minutes to rally the troops. And another hour to lead them back up to Nick. He supposed it hadn’t actually been him doing the rallying, but it seemed like it had taken forever for the police to get their act together.
Yes, it was only a skull,as far as they knew. The person whose skull it had been was long gone. But Martin didn’t like the idea of Nick being up there all alone.
