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“Can you describe the woman?” I ask.
“It was dark, and she was wearing a hood trimmed with fur. I couldn’t see her face. I just thought it was a woman. Maybe it wasn’t?” He chuckles, the movement making him wince. “I could describe the wolf better.”
“Did the woman speak? Maybe the voice is what suggested she was female?”
He shakes his head. “I remember trying to talk to her, but she ignored me. Or I think she did. I kept losing consciousness. Next thing I knew, I woke up here.”
“Let’s go backward. Can you tell me why you were out there?”
He looks sheepish. “We’re not supposed to leave the town, but… I needed to clear my head. I was upset over the schedule. We get a bonus if we finish on time, but between Yolanda and Pe—”
When he stops himself, I say, “Penny.”
“Look, I respect Penny. She’s a pro, and she’s freaking brilliant. So is Yolanda, and sometimes, that’s a problem. They’re idea people. They live in their heads, and I’m the one that needs to take that and make it real, and sometimes I can’t. We’re on schedule to get that bonus, if we make a few changes. The people who’re building this town, they have all these big dreams, and that’s great, but I don’t really see the point. I’m an engineer. I’ve worked on northern projects. The clients don’t expect all these fancy extras. They’re just here to make a few bucks and get home.”
“So you wanted to simplify things to get the bonus.”
“Sure. Tell the clients to scale back their expectations, give them something decent, and get out of here. I have a wife waiting for me. I just want to get home, and if I can get a bonus for being done on time, that’s gravy.”
“Yolanda and Penny were digging in their heels, wanting it done according to plan.”
“Yeah, which I get, like I said. That night, I’d just had enough, so I went into the forest to cool off.”
“Which you’d never done before?”
He lets out a long, slow breath. “No, I’ve done it before. Like I said, I’ve worked in the north. I’m not like most of these guys, who really shouldn’t be in the forest. I mean, other than Kendra,noneof them should, and maybe I shouldn’t be either, but I felt confident enough to go in. I had a pocketknife and a flashlight, and I always followed the same route. Or I usually did. The other night, though, I needed more, so I went off-path, and that’s where I got myself into trouble. I turned around to go back and started passing landmarks I didn’t recognize and then realized the mountains had moved.” A wry smile. “Which meant I was heading in the wrong direction. I panicked a bit, and that’s how I stumbled off a cliff.”
“Did you see or hear anyone else out there?”
He pauses. There’s a flicker on his face, as if he’s just remembered something. Then he struggles to douse it and mumbles, “No, nothing.”
“You’re sure of that?”
He curses under his breath in Spanish. “Fine, I saw Yolanda. That’s actually how I got off track, now that I remember it. I always go into the forest on my own trail, but I join up with the main one. That night, I was on the main one when I spotted her, and I stepped off the trail before she saw me. I still needed time alone, so I went my own way.”
“And that’s when you got lost.”
“Yeah.”
“Yolanda was heading out?”
He nods. “In a hurry. Seems I wasn’t the only one in a temper after our meeting. She was a woman on a mission. I decided to stay the hell out of her way.”
It’s night. Dalton convinced me to eat dinner, and then we spent another two hours looking for Penny.
I don’t know how much longer we can keep up the search. I hate feeling as if I’m ignoring the fact that we still have a crew member in the forest, but we’ve exhausted every lead. Her trail is cold. We can only keep heading out in that general direction in hopes of finding her. We’ve mapped out the area in a grid, and we’ll search new sections when we’re able.
It’s dark now, and we’re in the town hall. Anders settled in upstairs and then came back down to join us for a fire. Whilenormally that’d be a bonfire outside, we can’t discuss this within anyone’s hearing, so we’re sitting around the town hall fireplace, drinking beer and bringing Anders up to speed on the investigation.
“So Bruno is an accident,” Anders says. “He wandered and fell. No one pushed him off that cliff. The mystery then is who found him and used him to deliver the ‘Go Away’ message.”
“Unless the person who delivered him also pushed him andthat’sthe real message.”
“Go away or else.”
“We also have an unidentified murder victim, with no way of identifying her, let alone figuring out who killed her, which is really not our jurisdiction anyway, except it is, because we accidentally took possession of the body, thinking she was ours.”
“Yep.”
