The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(66)

“I am him.”

“Pardon me?”

“Theo Cray. I’m the one that’s been finding the bodies.”

She takes her time to reply. “You’re the one that found those girls?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what do you think killed them?” she asks.

“A man.”

“A man?”

“Flesh and blood.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You saw something that night.”

“I said it was a hoax.”

“I’m looking at a photo of you taken just a few days later. That girl doesn’t think it was a hoax.”

“That was a long time ago. She didn’t know much.”

“I’d like to talk to you either way.”

“Did I mention my husband is a cop?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right.” She sighs. “You have our address?”





CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE


SHADOWS

Elizabeth and her husband live in a well-kept two-story home on several acres of property. Three slobbering mutts clamber over one another to greet me when I let myself through the gate. After I dutifully scratch each one behind the ear, paying the entry fee, they run off to chase some invisible foe.

Elizabeth is sitting on the porch with a pitcher of iced tea sitting on a table. She’s a bit more robust than the photo taken shortly after high school, but the eyes and hair are the same.

“So you’re the man who keeps digging up bodies?” she asks.

“I guess you could say that.”

She motions for me to sit down. “Thomas says you lost a friend?”

I assume Thomas is her police officer husband. “A former student.”

“I hear they hauled you in as a suspect at first?”

“That was an experience.”

“I bet. I bet. But you’re here to talk about Cougar Creek. Really, you’re wasting your time. Like I said, it was a hoax. That’s all there is to say.”

She delivers this as a prepared speech. I can tell that this has been weighing heavily on her.

“Two people think there is,” I say.

“Pardon?”

“Two people see a possible connection. Me and you. When I called, you said you were expecting someone to reach out to you sooner or later. So far we’re the ones with the most intimate knowledge of this, and we’ve both drawn the same conclusion that they might be related.”

“Maybe it’s time for you to go. I don’t want to have to sic my dogs on you.” She says this only half-heartedly.

“Good luck with that. I met your dogs.”

She shakes her head. “Worthless animals.” She resigns herself to accepting my stubbornness. “Fine. Understand that I didn’t have a clear idea what was happening at the time, and after the fact, my friends exaggerated parts of what happened. And then others just went crazy with it. I once even read an account that said we were up there having some kind of demonic animal ghost orgy. I went up that mountain a virgin and came down a virgin, thank you very much.”

“So what did happen?”

She takes a moment to collect her thoughts. “Well, as you probably know, we weren’t the first ones to encounter the Cougar Creek Monster, or whatever. In fact, it was stories about something lurking up there that made Reese Penny and Alex Danson organize the whole trip. They had some idea it was aliens or Bigfoot. Anyway, it grew into a postgraduation campout. Seventeen of us in all.”

“What had you heard before?”

“Hikers said they saw an animal on two legs watching them. They’d come back from fishing and found their campsite had been wrecked. There was even a photo.”

“A photo?”

“Yeah. I think Alex’s cousin took it a few weeks before. I saw a blurry mimeographed copy of it. It could have been anything.”

“What did it look like?”

“At the time, I think Reese said it looked like the Black Panther, from comics. He actually put a comic book cover next to the image. Maybe. But these new girls, these victims, they were attacked by a bear?”

“There are five claw marks, which would indicate a bear. A cat would have four, normally.”

“Thomas says the folks from Fish and Wildlife think there might be a polydactyl cat running around, and that’s why there’s all this confusion. Both big cats and bears are known to bury their prey.”

“Mrs. Collins, I’ve seen these burials. No animal did that.”

“Elizabeth. But you think the Cougar Man might’ve?”

“You still haven’t told me what you saw.”

“Right. Right. So we hike up the hot spring, and some of the others say they think we’re being watched. Lucy Plavin and a couple other girls and I started straggling, picking wildflowers and talking. Pretty soon we were isolated from the rest, but the trail isn’t too hard to follow. We’re walking along, making lots of noise, giggling, whatever, when Carey Sumter stops and asks, ‘What’s that?’ She points to something on the ridge to the left up in the trees.

“We don’t see anything. She says it was something big, and I tell her if it was anything, it was just a bear. Now she’s bone white. Scared. She saw something, but we talked her out of it. Ten minutes later she’s laughing with us and whatever she saw is out of mind.