The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(17)

I take my day pack out of the back seat and strap it around my waist. I don’t plan on going into the woods. I just want to follow the road a bit.

At least that’s what I think. To be honest, I don’t have much of a plan.



The highway cuts through the forest like a skinny canyon. I stay on the gravel easement in case a distracted driver comes hurtling down the road.

It’s a strange change from the grazing land to the evergreens. In between there are patches of tall wild grass—an ecotone. The trees and the prairie are in a battle for turf. The wild grass straddles the middle, where the rocky flatland gives way to the softer forest ground.

On the edge of the highway, where the asphalt is cracked, daisies and weeds pop through like tiny little islands. Miniature ecotones. If I were looking for a bacterium that could eat oil, I’d be collecting samples of dirt from the middle of busy freeways. I don’t know if I’d find one, but I’m sure I’d discover something interesting.

I lift my gaze from the road to the surrounding forest and try to look for what Juniper was searching for out here.

The smart thing would be to pull up her latest research applications or, at the very least, read her blog. But I am still taken aback by events and can’t bring myself even to spend much time on her Facebook page. Her face keeps appearing, haunting me.

The first mile I walk is a gradual incline as the road begins its wayward journey into the mountains. The second begins to get a little steeper.

I keep my eyes on the trees for any sign of where Juniper was found. Undoubtedly, the sheriff’s department used some kind of marker.

I see a few faded-orange forestry markers but nothing else. To my knowledge, they haven’t released anything other than a general area description to the public.

The connection between this forest and the map I spotted in Glenn’s office isn’t obvious to me—and I spend all day looking at maps of real and artificial landscapes.

A tractor-trailer truck blows past me and heaves a great gust of wind over my body.

I should have asked when Juniper brought her car into the garage. Did she have to do a lot of walking?

I make up my mind to give it another ten minutes and then turn back. I have no idea what I’m looking for, much less what Juniper would have been doing out here, other than walking from her motel to the car shop or back.

The hills on either side of the highway are too steep to form a pond or any body of water bigger than a tree trunk. The only fish would be the ones that fell out of a bird’s mouth.

When I’m contemplating turning back, I spot a blue ribbon tied to a tree. It looks brand-new. A dozen yards into the trees, before it gets too thick to see past, there’s a thicker yellow ribbon—the kind of tape you see at a crime scene in a movie.

This is the spot. Or rather, the spot on the road that takes you to the trail that leads you to where it happened.

I really should go back to the garage now. I have no business out here.

Yet . . . I walk into the forest to find the place where she was killed.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


YELLOW LINE

The ancient Greeks believed that the world began with chaos, a void without form. From this shapeless heap the Titans and the gods emerged, bringing forth man. In his most evolved form—which the philosophers saw as themselves—he tried to put order to this chaos, seeking symmetries and rules to the universe.

It was this rule seeking that created the idea of philosophy and, much later, science.

A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos. Sometimes it simply can’t be done, as science tells us via quantum mechanics and chaos theory. A thing can be one way or the other without any means to predict why it is so.

I’m hiking up the hill because I want to make sense of chaos. We have an event: Juniper’s death. We have a cause: the bear. I don’t have a why, and the police haven’t divulged what led to this encounter.

The first yellow ribbon was just a marker, as I suspected. Ten yards beyond it is another.

I find five yellow ribbons that lead to a small area of level ground.

This is where I see the first red ribbon.

It’s tied around a tree trunk. Below it is a dark blotch on the bark.

Blood.

To be precise, a partial, bloody palm print.

Juniper touched this tree as she was dying.

I spot four more red ribbons in this small clearing and three red flags on the ground.

Some of the ribbons mark where parts of the tree were carefully removed to take back to the medical examiner. Some of the spots on the ground are simply holes where the dirt and blood was shoveled free.

The holes are small. Not quite what you’d expect to find where an adult bled to death.

I kneel down to inspect one of the stains. The ground feels waxy, like clay. Beads of moisture collect on the surface as the minerals behave hydrophobically.

Some dirt repels moisture. Other kinds, like parched desert soil, soak it up greedily.

You’d have to dig down to know how much blood was shed. From an initial examination, it doesn’t look like much. She may have already bled out by the time she came to rest here.

I wipe my hands on my shorts and see the second row of yellow ribbons. They lead higher up the hill.

The pattern is becoming clearer. I’m still surrounded by chaos, but it’s pointing in a direction.

I climb the hill and find my footing a little unsteady as small rocks slide free underneath me. I can only imagine what it was like for Juniper to stumble her way through the brush.