The Fall of Never(53)

Five minutes later, Graham Rand was seated in the passenger seat of Raintree’s sedan as the detective maneuvered the vehicle through the darkened, wooded back roads of Spires. The moon was full in the sky, passing behind the occasional coal-colored cloud.

“The spot ain’t far from my home,” Rand said. He was sitting on the edge of the passenger seat, straining the seat belt. His fingers, thick and fumbling, wrestled with each other. “I’ll point out where I saw him, but I ain’t going back into those woods. You can take me directly home, thank you.”

Graham Rand lived in a clapboard ranch just off North Town Road. The tiny house was obscured on three of its four sides by the massive expanse of woodland that stretched all the way beyond the Adirondack Mountains and as far north as Canada. From Rand’s house, over and above the forestry, it was easy to make out the brooding profile of the Kellow Compound nestled on its hill on the other side of the valley. Deep Valley, as it was called by some of the locals, separated the Kellow place from Graham Rand’s home—and the rest of Spires, for that matter. A network of vein-like brooks and streams wove throughout the canyon in every imaginable direction in Deep Valley and, in some places, the forestry was so impenetrable, even the most experienced hunter knew to steer clear of the area.

North Town Road turned to dirt and gravel, now covered in a film of frost, and Raintree slowed the sedan down to a manageable speed. The car slowly drifted by Graham Rand’s little house.

“Just a little further up,” the old man said to Raintree. He was pointing at the windshield. “Just a little. On your left now…here…up here…”

“Here?”

“Stop.”

Raintree stopped the car, clicked it into PARK, left the engine running. “You want to show me exactly?”

“Ain’t moving,” Rand said, shaking his head. “It’s just there. You’ll see my traps. I dropped them and didn’t pick them up. Go on, you’ll see them. That’s where I was standing.” He shifted his index finger and pointed due north. “And that direction—that’s where I saw the fellow. He moved deeper into the woods that way.”

Now, peering through the windshield, Raintree could see the silhouette of the Kellow Compound on the hill in the distance.

“All right,” Raintree said, grabbing his flashlight from the back seat. “I’ll just be a minute, I’m going to have a look around. You wait here, then I’ll take you home.”

“Be careful, Detective.”

It was freezing outside the car. Raintree shuddered against the heavy wind, pulled his coat close to his body, and stepped across the dirt road. His shoes crunched on the frozen earth. He clicked on the flashlight and worked it around the perimeter of the woods. The old man’s story was certainly peculiar, but not uncharacteristically peculiar; old Graham Rand had told some whoppers in his time, and naked albinos weren’t the craziest. However, he didn’t believe the old man was lying this time. Maybe a bit confused with what he saw, but not lying.

Is it possible that the old man actually saw one of those missing hunters, that maybe he saw Justin McCullum himself? he wondered. That hat he found—that could certainly belong to McCullum, those could certainly be his initials…but running around naked in the woods? No, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Raintree jumped, nearly dropping his flashlight, the second the sound of the car horn pierced the night. Shaken, he spun around to see Rand poking his pigeon-faced head out the window at him.

“Graham!”

“Would you mind gathering up the traps for me, Detective?”

“Be quiet!”

Regaining his composure, Raintree turned and stepped into the forest.

A little jumpy, are we? a small voice said from the back of his head. Maybe just a little bit frightened?

No—he wasn’t frightened. There was nothing to be afraid of. Just a few missing hunters and an injured young girl.

He walked through the woods, side-stepping the interlocking arms of impassable vegetation, his booted feet crunching on the frozen dead leaves. The flashlight’s beam only played a small distance ahead of him. The woods beyond the beam was dark, like a black curtain drawn across that part of the world. Again, he thought of the hunters. They’d gotten a call about them just over a month ago, from one of the wives of the three men: they’d gone hunting for the afternoon, and had not returned the following day. Alan Bannercon had taken the call and had calmed the woman, but did not bother to put anyone on the case (hadn’t even referred to it as a “case” until a good two days later when commotion befell the station in a hailstorm of frantic wives and sobbing, grub-faced children), having prematurely written the situation off as an instance of Three Men and Some Booze and Guns Out on a Friday Night. But Bannercon had been wrong—those hunters had not just been out having a good time. They’d disappeared. And soon, Bannercon had the entire Caliban County Police Department searching the immense timberland for any trace of the three hunters. Helicopter sweeps, scent-trailing canines—only to turn up not even a single clue as to the hunters’ disappearance. And now old Graham Rand finds a hunting cap? A hunting cap with the initials J.M. printed in marker on the tag? Maybe it was some kind of joke after all…

Raintree’s foot slammed into something solid and he muttered under his breath. He focused the flashlight beam on the object and saw that it was one of Graham Rand’s squirrel traps. It was on its side, its wire-mesh hinged doors flung open.