For Karl, Leila, and Karel with boundless love
Swanton, Vermont
August 1995
The forest circled John R. Raleigh Memorial Field like a scythe, its tree line cutting an arc into the park’s sun-scorched grass. The grass was where I played Little League, back before I decided there were better ways to spend my time in Swanton.
There was no game being played on the day we walked those woods, but there had been. Just two hours earlier, dozens of children and their parents had swarmed the field, mothers chasing toddlers through the silver dust blowing in from the limestone quarry at the end of the road. Nodding absently when their older children, fed up with watching baseball, begged to explore the woods. That’s why what we found there was so alarming. Whoever left it intended for kids to see it. Kids like us.
“Check it out.”
I stopped. He was a few steps ahead of me, and his body blocked my view, but I was conscious of a new sound linking up to the chatter of crickets at our feet and warblers in the leafy, wind-jostled canopy of trees overhead. The flies, mechanical in their buzzing, hovered just beyond where he stood. I closed the distance between us and looked down, first at the toes of my size-three Keds, filthy now—Mom would be pissed—and then at the box. Large. Plastic. Containing something that made my insides squirm.
“Ew,” I said, pressing my chin against his shoulder. He smelled sweaty, which was new; at nine and a half, six months younger than me but tall for his age, he was well on his way to puberty. “What is it?”
“A cat, I think,” he said, still staring.
“Weird.” It was more than that. The animal was wrapped in a makeshift bag, clear plastic bunched at the top and bound with the green paper twist ties I liked to swipe from the grocery store. One furry white leg stuck straight up, and the animal’s pink toe pads were pressed against the inside of the sack. In my mouth, my saliva had turned to glue. “Is it . . .”
“Dead?” I could feel his heart thumping through his back. “There’s blood.”
I swallowed hard and stepped out from behind him for a better look. Through the plastic I could see the white fur around the cat’s left ear was dark and matted with blood.
“If it’s dead,” he said, “that means it got murdered.”
“Fuck.” Using the illicit word gave me a thrill, and tweaked his mouth into a smile. He studied my face.
“I heard a story. This old guy in town, lives over by the river? Crissy told me. He tortures animals and stuff.”
“But Crissy’s a liar.” That was fact: she made shit up all the time, mostly so she could sneak out with her friends.
“She’s not lying about this.”
“My neighbor has a cat,” I said, contemplative. “It digs in our flowers and drops dead mice on the porch. Mom hates it. One time she was so mad she said she could kill it. I bet a lot of cats make people mad like that.” I waved my arm at the box to support my argument. Flies lifted like a cloud of black confetti.
“This isn’t like that.”
“Well, somebody did this. We’ve gotta figure out who.” It was the first thought that came to mind, not We have to tell my parents or Let’s get the cops. I loved a good mystery, even then.
“We’ll look for clues.” There was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. Try as he might to be solemn, I could see he was delighted. “Footprints and stuff. And we can ask around to see if anyone saw him.”
Wanna play? This was our new favorite pastime. The games our fellow fourth-graders liked—four square, cops and robbers—held no joy for us. We yearned for more. Usually we had to concoct mysteries for ourselves, but here was a real one, right at our feet, and we aimed to solve it. We were natural-born detectives, he and I. That’s what I told myself, and I believed it.
“I’ll look here. You take the field.” He flashed me a grin as he crouched on the dirt path and swatted a fly from his shin. He was so tan his legs were three shades darker than the skin visible where his sock, the elastic stretched out from wear, had slipped down.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my head real still. Trying not to let him know I’d spotted the bracelet on his ankle, a neat braid of green paper twist ties lying flat against that band of pale, secret skin.
ONE
Bullshit.”
“Nope.” I turned over the cards on the table between us, and there it was: three aces take the game.
McIntyre groaned. “I hate playing with you. You’re so damn lucky.”
“Me and my charmed life,” I said, deadpan, as I gathered the cards in a stack and tapped their rounded corners into place. Across the table, McIntyre tried and failed to catch my eye. “This has got to stop, Shay.”
She was talking about my mood. It had been black lately; she wasn’t wrong about that. Four months since my rebirth in the Thousand Islands. Three weeks since it all went to hell. Tim once told me things were simple around here, but that was before the murders and the drowning, before the fiancé I kicked to the curb. If that was what passed for simple in Upstate New York, I didn’t want to see things get complicated.
I reached behind me, pulled a blanket from the back of my chair onto my lap, and smoothed the fabric over my knees. There was a quilt for every patron on the covered patio at Nelly’s Bistro, thoughtfully placed for Clayton’s chilly mornings. I was only a little cold, didn’t need the throw any more than I needed a third cup of coffee, but the card game was over and I found I couldn’t quiet my hands. “I know,” I told Mac. “It’s not that easy.”
“Who cares about easy? You’re Shana Merchant, the badass who solved the bloodiest case these parts have seen in years.”
Baptism by fire, as they say—or in my case, water. “Cue the ticker tape parade.”
“Great idea,” she said. “Only instead of ticker tape we’ll shred those damned corruption case files from my desk and blanket Church Street in confetti. Bear claw?”
I looked askance at the pastry in her hand. “Isn’t it taboo to chase breakfast with dessert?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Not yet it’s not.”
Extricating a slice of almond from the frosted dough, she swiped at me, catlike. “Close enough—and when you’re fifty, you get to do whatever you want. I’m thinking about chasing this dessert with that hunky Canadian border guard.”
I laughed, had to, because I knew which guard she was talking about, and he was more scrumptious than any pastry Nelly’s could produce. Where would I be without Maureen McIntyre and her uncompromising humor? It still came as a shock to me that we were friends, especially when I thought of her in the context of her work. If someone manufactured Sheriff McIntyre posters for fangirls, I’d have taped one to my bedroom wall—if I had a wall to call my own, that is. Mac was my professional idol, but she was also the person without whom I’d be homeless. Most of my things were in storage, but thanks to the sheriff of Jefferson County I had a La-Z-Boy couch and the best company a person in my situation could hope for.