ONE: KATERI
MONDAY, OCTOBER 16
He warned her in the dead of summer, when the heat blew over the trees like a dry lick of fire, that nothing happens here. Until it does.
It’s the same stuff over and over up here, Hurt told her. Drugs. Robbery. Domestic. Child abuse. Animal cruelty.
She’d cut her teeth as a criminal investigator in Syracuse. But after her own run-in with the law, she’d come to Spring Falls as a plea deal.
She hears Hurt call her name before he appears in her doorway. “Fisher,” he says, and then leans in, hair and pants misted from riding his bike in to work. “I need you on suspicious activity.”
“Where are the deputies?” she asks, and pushes her chair back. In truth, she’s happy to have something to check out, a reason to get out of the office, even if it’s just a task.
“Everyone’s out on the Lenox Ave fire,” Hurt says. Six months side by side and he is still awkward around her. He comes no more than a foot into her office and seems to look anywhere but at her. She folds her arms over her chest.
“All the deputies are at a fire,” she repeats, disbelieving.
“It’s a meth fire,” Hurt answers. “Blew up a motel room.”
She nods. She heard the call earlier. Twelve-room motel on Route 8, heading into the mountains. Everything a loss. Kateri stands and attaches her duty belt, and Hurt watches the wall behind her.
“Where?” she asks.
“At the edge of Silver Lake Park.” He hands her a report. The address is only a space—Hidden Drive, Space 17. Hidden Drive, a winding road that leads into acres and acres of forest.
Before Spring Falls, Kateri herself was found on the edge of a park. Covered in blood, throat cut and embedded with glass, unconscious. It was a cop who found her. It was a cop who sent her here. Hamilton County had expected a promotion from within, and instead they were sent an outsider, a woman, from a city. One who’d arrived after a forced leave of absence, and with a mysterious scar.
Kateri looks at the report. “Did they find something?”
Hurt shrugs, then sighs. “People get panicky about a dead smell in the woods,” he says, but adds, “It’s probably nothing. It’s probably a deer.”
* * *
She drives out in her own car, a Subaru she bought when she left for the North Country. Winters were already bad in Syracuse. What awaited Kateri up north seemed like a nightmare of snow and ice, stretching from October to May.
Her other car, a small, smart Jetta, was unsalvageable. She was lucky: no one else had been involved. Just Kateri and a brick wall at the edge of Thornden Park, her Jetta crumpled like a wad of paper. She didn’t remember leaving the bar or getting behind the wheel. The whole night, a blackout. She woke up in the hospital with fifty-two stitches under her chin, a broken wrist, and two cracked ribs. They had her on the addiction rehabilitation floor.
She was given a six-month unpaid leave of absence. After her grandmother died, she sold her childhood home, filed the final divorce papers, and moved to Spring Falls with nothing but a small suitcase. Things were falling away from her. She needed a change. She needed a town where no one knew her.
“How will I know where to look?” she asked Hurt before leaving. He gave her a paper map of Silver Lake Park, dotted hiking trails, camping areas, parking lots. He circled a blank spot in the trees— Space 17.
“There’s one residence,” he said.
“Inside the park?”
“On the edge,” Hurt said. “There’s a house. You’ll see it. The Jenkins own half of it.”
“Half of the house?” Kateri asked.
“Half the land,” Hurt corrected. “The park isn’t as big as it looks. A lot of the land is private, and most of that belongs to the Jenkins.”
She imagined a mansion, dilapidated and old, guarding the entrance of the forest.
“I don’t even know if it’s still occupied,” Hurt said before she left. “They’re dirt fucking poor and crazy,” he added.
She was just beginning to glean the importance of some families in Spring Falls. The Nelsons, who owned the credit union. The Parrys, who were on the school board. The Sullivans, who made up two-thirds of the law firm.
“Who are the Jenkins?” Kateri asked.
Hurt looked at the wall behind her, a habit she disliked. “Almost as bad as the Metzgers,” he said. They’d arrested the senior Metzger last week on weapons charges and child endangerment. He was sitting at county, waiting for arraignment.
* * *
She parks at an entrance called Blue Bell, a field of grass and flowers near a picnic pavilion, a public bathroom, and an opening into the woods marked WHITE TRAIL. She can just make out the house through the trees. It’s gray and low, with a sloping porch. A dense vine grows over the sides and roof, stitching in around the front door, like the woods are trying to take it back.
She would have guessed it was vacant. It doesn’t look livable. But a box fan runs in one window, a small, quiet sign of life.
Her first patrol cases were rural, calls where she went along with a senior partner, checked the welfare of children and animals. She’s seen suicides by hanging and by gunshot and her fair share of DWIs. When she moved to criminal investigation, she worked a rape and murder by the lake, a child rape case, and drugs. Drugs are everywhere.
A jogger enters the trail with a spray of pebbles, his feet hitting the ground with a hollow thud. He startles Kateri, and Kateri surprises him, standing there in her work clothes and belt. She sets her mouth and waves slightly at him while he picks up the pace, his brow furrowed and his cheeks puffed with exertion. He doesn’t stop, and Kateri watches the backs of his calves as he climbs the trail, his ankles paper-thin above his sneakers.
She thinks for a minute about Joel Hurt, the shape of him next to her in the squad car. She knows he runs out here as well, his body lean and working. He’s never completely still. He’s like a compressed spring.
Who didn’t come with her.
She draws her weapon and keeps it low, approaching the house with her head cocked and listening. The woods are loud with birdsong, chattering squirrels, the creak of branches, the crunch of her own feet, the sharp caw of crows.
She can smell it from the porch. The iron tang of blood and a warm, rotten smell underneath it. The house is dark inside, closed up, close, ripe. Slow, fat flies buzz in the windows.
Kateri pulls her sweater up over her nose and takes shoe covers and latex gloves from her pack. The air inside is too thick to breathe.
In the front room of the house, there’s the largest flat-screen TV Kateri has possibly ever seen. It must be six feet wide. The screen, turned on, shows nothing but the quad of security cameras, pointed into the woods, out at the road. One shows the chairs around a fire pit in the yard, another a sliver of light on the trail where Kateri appeared moments ago, the jogger rushing past her.
A large pool of blood collects in the kitchen, the edge smeared from the pull of the body. It drags over the linoleum and onto the wood but disappears. Someone has wiped the path to the doorway. Blood spatters the cupboards, the counter, up onto the ceiling in a particular pattern. Nothing but the floor has been wiped.
On the cluttered counter are bottles of oil, homemade infusions, spices poured into jars and marked with careful handwriting. A row of herbs grow in small pots on the windowsill—basil, mint, oregano. A magnet on the wall holds a collection of old but good-quality knives, a pair of kitchen scissors, a cleaver. The blood is heavy in concentrated areas, caused by blunt force, not a spray from gunshot. From the amount on the walls, she imagines a head wound. From the floor, maybe a stabbing. The cleanup is sloppy and compromised. Whoever was attacked likely fought back.