Wolfwraith (6 page)

Shadow thought for a moment. “Hmm...Did they check to see if either of the girls was sexually assaulted?”

“Yes, they checked everything. The first girl hadn’t been touched; the second body had been in the water too long. What makes you think of that?”

“Something killed them. Why not a man? And maybe there was some other cause of death, but it’s being hushed up.”

“You’re going in circles. First, you went on and on about evil spirits when the first girl died, then you ask if they were raped. Now it’s a man instead of a spirit and you’re suggesting a cover up.”

“But...” Shadow began.

“No buts,” Alex said. “You never found a body before and it got you upset, that’s all. Barnett says get out there and look for a dog.”

Shadow wanted to say Barnett was a jerk, but kept his mouth shut. Alex finished his beer and left before Shadow could bring up what he’d begun to say. “Don’t predators kill by cutting off the air from going through their prey’s windpipe?”

* * * *

For the next several days they searched the park thoroughly, but found not even a paw print, other than fox sign. Three weeks later, the day after Memorial Day, another girl came up missing.

Chapter Four

Have you seen those titties bounce?

The missing girl—a young woman, really, but Shadow thought of early twenties as a girl—was identified as Amanda Gordon.

Alex gave the details to all of the rangers and Jonesy at a meeting in the contact station. A marathon runner, she had supposedly left her home in Sandbridge, a beach residence community north of the wildlife refuge, two mornings ago, to run on the firm sand near the surf’s edge. No one had actually seen her leave, however. She worked as a waitress in one of the many taverns on the resort strip and Monday night had been her regular night off. Her live-together boyfriend said he’d thought she had probably gone to visit friends, but he became uneasy after two days and called to report her missing. The police had notified False Cape Park and the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge and requested an unofficial search of the area.

“Could she have come this far south?” Shadow asked.

“The boyfriend said she routinely runs down into Carolina,” Alex answered.

“I think I’ve seen her,” Mark Wilson said, a gray-bearded older man who, like Alex, was due to retire soon. He had served with Alex for many years and now lived with his wife near the Barbour Hill dock only a hundred feet from Alex’s mobile home. “Blonde girl, short hair, wears a blue baseball cap and earphones?”

“That fits the description,” Alex agreed.

“Yeah,” Shadow said. “Good looking girl. Usually has two water bottles belted to her hips and wears runner’s shorts and a sports top in good weather, sweats in cold or rain.”

“Well, since you all seem familiar with this girl, where do you suggest we start looking?” Alex asked.

“Got to be in the dunes or in the ocean, I would imagine,” Mark suggested. “We’d have seen her by now if she’d collapsed on the beach because of heat stroke, or something like that.”

“Maybe she went into the surf to cool off and an undertow carried her out?” Shadow added.

“I doubt it,” Alex said. “The water is like ice.”

“’Course, she could be shacked up somewhere else...maybe in Sandbridge,” Steve Slocum drawled. “Maybe she got tired of her boyfriend...met some young stud on the beach.”

Steve, a tall, thin blonde man in his late twenties, was the only ranger who lived outside the park. He and his pretty wife rented a modest home in Sandbridge, where they could put their two young children on a bus for school.

Shadow didn’t much care for Slocum, who seldom smiled, except for leering when he told dirty jokes, which happened often. He usually messed the punch line up, though, with his slow, halting speech. Shadow had also noticed that Slocum was adept at being elsewhere in the park when there was physical work to be done.

“It’s possible, of course,” Alex admitted, “but the police have asked us to look for her and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. They’re using a ‘copter to search from the air, and they want us to check on the ground. It’s not certain she even ran that day, though, so we’re not going to make a big deal of it. Check the beach; watch for anything in the surf, drive around and eyeball the dunes. I’d tell you to look for footprints, but the squall yesterday would have washed any away.”

Alex assigned each man a specific area to search, then dismissed the meeting.

Shadow walked with the other rangers and Jonesy to their vehicles, slightly confused as to how to conduct such a search. One man, driving down the beach, would be able to see anything out of the ordinary along the unbroken expanse of sand, but it would take several days to search the dune area.

“Hell, this is a waste of time,” Slocum said. “I’ve seen that girl.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “She is one hot piece; I give her that...” He sucked a tooth, distorting his lip below the nose. “Have you seen those titties bounce? She’s found herself a new boyfriend...” He made an obscene gesture with his fingers. “Prob’ly busy screwin’ him silly. I’ll bet she hopped into some guy’s Mercedes—livin’ the high life up on the resort strip.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say about a girl you don’t even know,” Jonesy said. “What makes you think such a thing?”

“Hell, you’ve seen her,” Slocum drawled. She wears those shorts...whooee...don’t hardly cover her butt cheeks and a little top showing off those fine titties of hers. I don’t know which is best—the way her ass rolls or how her tits jiggle.” He cupped his hands in front of his chest and bounced them up and down. “She’s lookin’ for it—you can bet on it.”

“What do you mean, looking for it?” Shadow asked. “She’s no different than any other girl on the beach. That’s what they all wear.”

“Are you kidding?” The other man leered. “They’re all lookin’ for it.”

“And your mind is always in the gutter,” Mark replied.

Slocum grinned maliciously. “Not that you’ll ever get the chance, old man, but are you saying you wouldn’t take a little young stuff?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Slocum.” Mark scowled. “You’re married yourself and you shouldn’t even consider fooling around.” He turned and stalked away to his truck.

The other men got into their vehicles and drove away, as well. Shadow had been assigned the southern section of the beach, from Wash Woods south to the North Carolina line, the least visited area of the park.

When he reached Wash Woods, he turned off and followed an old abandoned road—now covered with drifts of loose sand—that ran between the dunes and the woods. The rangers had kept it mostly clear over the years for their own use. He put the truck in four-wheel drive and slowly drove to the state line, watching both sides for anything unusual. When the track ended, he crossed over to the beach and returned north along the coast. The beach and the adjoining dunes were deserted. He might have believed he was in an earlier century if it were not for the police helicopter passing overhead a couple of times.

Every once in a while, he left the truck and climbed a dune to look inland. There had once been a small settlement here, more of a collection of hardscrabble farms than a real town. It was called Wash Woods since the ocean often sloshed over into the bay in severe storms. The only employment in the area had been at the coastal life-saving stations up and down the coast, but the stations closed in the mid 1900’s and people began to leave the area. Wash Woods was mostly abandoned by the time the park had been established and the state had bought out any remaining inhabitants. All of the wooden buildings had collapsed over the years and been covered by the shifting sands. The movement of the sand was whimsical, though, and it wasn’t unusual to find abandoned cars, brick foundations, tin-roof sections, toilets or other signs of past human habitation protruding from the dunes.

There was no sign of the girl, so Shadow decided to look in the dunes. He couldn’t search them all, but there was a nearby trail leading to an area he hadn’t searched, the Wash Woods cemetery.

Shadow left the truck and climbed the side of the dune by a trail marker. Atop the second row of sand hills, he went up the steps of an observation tower, built as some boy scout’s Eagle Project. He scanned the area, but saw nothing out of the ordinary and was about to go back down when he caught a glimpse of something red moving through the trees to the west. He watched for another minute. When it didn’t show again, he left the tower and resumed his walk to the cemetery, a site he had visited only once before with Jenny Ostrowski. Every so often, reaching into a bag in his shirt pocket, he’d pop a jellybean into his mouth.

Soon he crossed over the old road he had driven on earlier. Moist, dead leaves muffled his footsteps as he walked out of the sunlight and under a canopy of twisted, gnarly live oaks. Here in the shadows, silvery-white lichens tinged the bark of the trees. Gray Spanish moss hung thickly, like funeral draperies. The wind off the sea didn’t reach to this side of the dunes, creating a solemn hush.

The weathered steeple of the former Wash Woods Methodist Church stood like a lonely sentinel over the abandoned graveyard. Jenny said the church was built from cypress lumber salvaged from a shipwrecked schooner in the nineteenth century. The building itself had collapsed several years ago. Most of the debris had been hauled away, but the peak of the steeple, shaped like a tee-pee of the western-plains Indians, had been left behind. It stood intact except for a recent, make-shift cross, cobbled together and nailed atop it to replace the missing original icon, perhaps by someone who couldn’t bear to see a Christian church without its defining symbol of crucifixion. Twice the height of a man, the steeple roof had been set to stand upright within the confines of the low, brick foundation of the former church. Covered with narrow, mossy wooden shingles, the conical structure looked as though it could be the home of forest gnomes, surrounded by a foot-high brick wall.

As he approached the structure, Shadow was perplexed by small, white, irregular objects resting atop the bricks of the foundation. They had not been here the last time he visited the cemetery. When he got near, he saw they were obviously skulls of small animals, but it puzzled him as to why they were placed around the shrine-like steeple roof. He recognized the head-bones of raccoons, foxes and squirrels, among others. There was also the skull of a large bird, probably an osprey. Had they had been placed there to guard something within, their sightless eye-sockets and bare, pointed teeth or beaks pointing outward?

Shadow stepped over the low wall of bricks into a space that had once been the interior of the church. A thick, invisible miasma of energy enveloped him. It became hard to breathe. His movements became slow and drawn out. His skin tingled. It was different from the sensation he had felt pulling the girl’s body from the bay. This was like drowning in a slow moving river, unable to tell where the water was coming from, but knowing it was wet. He wondered if this force was something left by whoever or whatever had placed the macabre ornaments on the bricks. He swallowed the jellybean he’d been sucking. It went down like lump of coal.

It was the same sort of energy he’d felt as a child, when his grandmother Min had occasionally called for assistance from one or another of the primeval forces her people had always known. Almost all the spirits his eccentric grandmother had summoned had been benign, but when she was angry, a heartfelt curse could evoke more than a hint of more malevolent essences.

Young Shadow had been scared. His grandmother, apparently surprised he felt the forces so strongly, had reassured him. She told him he shouldn’t fear the hostile entities she sometimes skirted with; he possessed a power of his own to protect him.

“But Grandmother Min, I’m a Christian. Like Grandfather,” Shadow protested. The old man was devout in the Baptist faith and had instilled many of the Christian Bible’s values in his grandson.

“I go to church. Am I not a Christian, too?” Grandmother asked. “Nevertheless, the old ways are in our blood. Be strong in each belief and both of them will someday serve you well.”

Shadow had always known everything had a spirit if you only looked at it in the right way—like the wood, which told him how he should sculpt it with his knife. As a child, he had found many an old arrowhead in the woods. Some spirit in him shared the memory of the long-gone toolmakers, who had chipped away at the edges of a piece of stone, knowing exactly how to work each unique piece of raw rock. If carved true to the stone’s inner soul, its energy would guide it to skewer a fat goose or a deer. Young Shadow had somehow known, when setting a rabbit snare, which trees would cooperate when bent over to provide the spring for the trap.

It had been the same when he was inside the Baptist Church, though. Viewing the statues he encountered there, he glimpsed another world beyond the plaster and stone, sensing the power of the icons. He became aware of the embodiment of the worship flowing through the building, especially during services. Shadow no longer went to church, but the church was still within him.

What he felt now, in this grove where the old Methodist church had stood, was also a manifestation of the true nature of some life force, living or dead—but it wasn’t Christian.

He turned to the remains of the church graveyard nearby, looking for a clue as to what haunted this place. He noted nearly a dozen grave markers, set haphazardly. None of the tombstones stood straight after all these years, yet there were signs of recent care. A white picket fence, which appeared to be fairly new, surrounded one grouping of graves, perhaps a family plot that was still occasionally tended. Other markers lay hidden by underbrush, deeper in the woods. Shadow wondered if some of the graves had been dug for victims of the many shipwrecks along the cape. There was a story about an entire shipload of children who had once drowned here, their cries still keening on the night winds.