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A moment later, a figure appears on the path we just left. It’s Yolanda, heading back toward town.
Anders gives me a questioning look, but I shake my head. I don’t want to confront her. I want to see where she went.
We wait until she’s far enough past us that she won’t hear any sound of our passage. Then we return to the path and continue along it. We keep going for a least a half mile.
“Is the mining camp this way?” Anders asks.
I point behind us.
He sighs. “My sense of direction has not improved.”
We are indeed heading away from Mark’s camp—and away from Penny’s trail and where we found Denise and where Lilith found Bruno.
Finally, when we’ve gone another quarter mile, Anders slows and inhales. “Is that…?”
I take a deep breath. “Pot smoke?”
“Could be a skunk,” he says. Then he makes a face. “Right. No skunks up here. You’d think I’d remember that after five years.”
I pat his back. “You are brilliant at so many things, but there’s a reason Eric doesn’t like you going into the forest alone.”
“Yeah, yeah. But that is pot smoke, right?”
“Yes, and if this is Yolanda’s big secret, I am going to throttle her.”
“Eric might beat you to it.” Anders pushes aside a branch to let us pass. “We had a talk about that. He knows you’re right not to push, but it’s killing him to just let it drop. This can’t be the answer, though, right? She’s not going to interfere with an investigation to hide the fact that she’s indulging in a legal narcotic.”
“I’d like to say no, but the problem might be that she’s doing it for stress relief, and she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s stressed. She’s a woman in charge of a big job in a typically male environment. She needs to seem invulnerable. No emotions. No stress.”
“I guess so.”
“The more likely explanation, though, is that she’s meeting someone, and they’re the one smoking up.”
“Smoking up?” He snickers. “Does anyone still say that?”
I lift my middle finger. “You know what I mean. The secret is not the smoking. It’s who she’s meeting, and they smell like cannabis smoke. I’ve caught a whiff of it in town. We were allowing it in moderation, like alcohol. Edibles were preferred—to avoid the issue of smoke—but it wasn’t prohibited.”
“Presuming it’s regulated, though, you should be able to find out who’s been requisitioning it, which will…”
Storm has stopped again and is politely suggesting we may want to veer to the left. We follow her and the smell gets stronger.
“Yeah, that’s not lingering on clothing,” Anders says. “Someone was smoking, and not that long ago.”
When Storm stops a few meters in, we find ourselves in a small clearing with a log that seems to serve as a chair, given the boot prints on one side of it. I’m examining those when Anders says, “And what do we have here?”
I turn as he pulls out a backpack that had been hidden in thick undergrowth. I take it and carefully open it. Inside, I can see a shirt and jeans, reeking of pot smoke.
“That is private property,” a voice says behind us.
Yolanda walks into the clearing and puts out her hands.
I lift the backpack but keep my hold on it. “So you are confirming that this is yours?”
Her eyes narrow before she forces the look away and gives a short “Yes.”
“You have been coming into the forest, changing your clothing and smoking cannabis?”
“Yes.”
