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Nero takes a step in that direction. I do, too, so I can see past a thick tree trunk. When something moves, I stop. It’s a fox, maybe ten feet away, tall and leggy and staring at Storm. Nero makes a noise, and the fox’s attention swings that way. It looks between the two bigger canines. Then it turns and runs.
Storm gives a harrumph of satisfaction. Nero looks from her to the fleeing fox, and she does the same, gaze swinging fromone to the other, as if saying “Aren’t you going to chase that?” When the answer is clearly no on both sides, I swear they nod in satisfaction, as if both recognizing the other as a reasonable and civilized beast, one who will warn a fox away from their people, but does not see the smaller canine as either a threat or a plaything.
“So polite,” Lilith says. “I am terribly fond of Newfoundlands. We had two growing up. You could not ask for a better temperament in a dog. Less slobber, perhaps, but not a better temperament.”
“Less slobberingandless shedding,” I say.
She smiles. “That, too. Now, the spot is just up here. I can see the marker.”
When I peer ahead, I see it—a strip of bright yellow ribbon tied to a tree. She takes us over and bends to point at the undergrowth.
“I found it there,” she says. “I also found signs of passage heading toward the mountain, but Nero isn’t a scent dog, and I lost the trail once it hit open ground.”
I take Penny’s scent marker from its bag and show it to Storm. She barely sniffs it—she recognizes that this is the scent I’m interested in from the glove. But when she snuffles around, she takes longer than I expect. Then she whines and looks at me.
“Could the trail be too old?” Lilith asks.
I’m thinking when Dalton, who has been nearly silent since we left Haven’s Rock, takes the scent bag from me and seals it. He puts it back into my bag while making sure Storm is watching. Then he bends beside the faint trail leading toward the mountain and gives her the command to followanyscent she picks up.
She looks from Lilith to Nero, and Dalton shakes his head. “No, not theirs. Anything else? Scent? Follow?”
She grunts in understanding and a little relief. He’s not asking her to follow the trail of the woman with the glove, which is good because she doesn’t smell it. He’s also not asking her to follow the trail of the wolf and woman standing there, because that would be very odd. Her task is simply to play an old game. Find a human scent trail and follow it.
As we set out, Dalton and Storm take the lead. I fall back with Lilith.
“Your dog is telling us the woman’s scent isn’t on that trail,” she says.
“Correct,” I say.
“Which means someone else had her glove?”
“Possibly, though I think the answer is that Penny didn’t lose it. It fell off.”
“Fell off?”
“While someone was carrying her.” I pause. “Carrying her body.”
Once Storm understands that she is free to follow a trail that does not belong to the missing woman, she has no trouble tracking whoever came this way. She keeps going another couple of hundred feet, up the rock at the mountain base. Then she stops and looks up. Rock juts skyward, a slab too perpendicular for Storm to climb.
“Cave,” Dalton says.
I glance back. He’s retreated fifteen feet and is shielding his eyes as he looks up. I walk beside him and do the same. When I see nothing, he boosts me, over my protest and Lilith’s soft laugh. It works, though, and I see the dark shape of a cave opening.
We ask Storm to stay with Lilith. Then we both scrabble up the rock to the cave opening. It’s just big enough for a person to fit through. Dalton takes out his flashlight and shines it in. The tunnel floor slants downward for about ten feet. Then it drops into darkness.
“I’ll go in,” I say.
He hands me the flashlight. “Stay at the top.”
“I know.”
I leave my pack on the ground. Then I crawl in. It’s big enough for that, though it soon narrows to the point where I need to hunker down into more of a slither. As the tunnel floor tilts more, I lift my hands to brace against the wall so I don’t slide all the way down into the hole up ahead. I touch something tacky and pull my hand back under the light.
I shine the beam on the wall to see a smear of dried blood.
As if someone had been struggling to move a body through the tunnel, pushing or dragging it.
Pushing or dragging Penny. Her corpse.
