“I know why I don’t remember that! I was in camp—Magic Camp. Though my mother hadn’t taken me to the Aseer, I was allowed to go to the Natural Elements Summer Camp. It was a lot of hiking and learning to identify plants, and learning how to find water through divination, that sort of thing.”
“Well, if you want to read those files, come down to the station later today. I’ll be free around four o’clock, unless there’s an emergency.” She folded her notebook closed and tucked it into her pocket, then turned off the recorder.
As she prepared to leave, I asked, “Do you know who the skeleton belonged to? You said it’s a male, but do you know who?”
“No, but there was some hair attached to the skull. We might be able to lift DNA from it and run it through the databanks to see if there’s a match. We’ll also have a forensic artist use the skull to approximate the looks of the decedent.” She paused. “I know this is all very troubling, especially since you’re having so many problems given the paranormal side of things, but try to relax. We don’t think you’re involved, so there’s no problem there. But we do need to find out who it was, whether they were murdered, and…who packed them away in the trunk.”
I stared at the table. “Right now, you’re thinking my parents might be guilty, right?”
“Right now, I’m not thinking anything. Your parents had to have known about this—that I’m positive of, but I’m not assuming anything else. This is an old case, even if the skeleton isn’t as old as when your parents reported a prowler. We have a lot more current cases to tackle, so this isn’t exactly top of the list.” She shrugged. “I’ll talk to you soon—if you don’t call me first. I’ll get in touch with your aunt Teran. Maybe she’ll remember who did the contracting work.”
“If she doesn’t, let me know and I’ll go through my parents’ old receipts.”
I walked her to the front door, then came back. “So, that’s where we’re at. A skeleton showed up in my house, and now I’m inundated with a nasty ghost. I’m staying with Killian right now.” I paused, remembering my conversation with Rebecca. “By the way, I talked to the imp out in the Mystic Wood behind my backyard. She said something big and nasty has come into the forest, but she wouldn’t tell me what.”
“Wonderful. Just what we need,” Tad said. “We’ll try to help you out. We can take some equipment over after work, if you’d like, and see what we can pick up.”
Hank nodded. “I’m in. I don’t have any plans for the evening.”
Caitlin was free, too, so we agreed to meet at my place at seven.
“Now, down to the case we called you back for,” Tad said. “Remember the case I told you about where somebody thought they saw a devil-like creature out in the woods?”
“And it turned out to be a wolf shifter caught mid-shift?” I asked. I remembered that case.
“Right. Well, I think we may really have our own version of the Jersey Devil now—” Tad started to say, but Hank cut him off.
“I disagree. I think the woman’s seeing things that aren’t there,” Hank said. “She was a space cadet.”
“She was frightened,” Caitlin said.
“Who are we talking about?” I asked, pulling out my tablet to take notes.
Tad headed over to the coffeepot to pour himself another cup. He dumped enough sugar into it that I grimaced. I liked my coffee drinks sweetened, but that was overkill.
“Monday we had a client call, and she came in that afternoon. Her name is Danielle van Ness. She claims that she’s being followed by a devil-like creature. Danielle first encountered it while out camping on Labor Day weekend, and she swears it followed her home. She took a couple blurry pictures of it, but they really aren’t useful.” Tad brought up the photos—they had been taken via a smartphone—and handed me his tablet.
The pictures were blurry, but there was definitely something there, though it was impossible to tell exactly what it was. If I squinted, I could just maybe think it was a goat standing upright—which might mean a satyr, or it could have been a large shaggy man, or…
“You don’t think this is Bigfoot, do you?” I glanced at Hank. He was obsessed with Bigfoot and still trying to get us all to go out on a sasquatch-hunting trip. Not with guns, but with cameras. But everything I’d heard about sasquatch made me shy away from the idea. Caitlin agreed. Neither she nor I wanted anything to do with tracking down a massive furry creature who was volatile and potentially dangerous.
Hank shook his head. “Not big enough. Even if this was a young sasquatch, the behavior doesn’t track with reported behaviors in the past. Yes, Bigfoot is thought to have followed hikers in the woods, but he doesn’t come down into suburban backyards and peep in through the windows.”
I stared at him. “She thinks Bigfoot is a peeping tom?”
“Apparently so. Now, I do believe that this has a basis in something. She was so convincingly frightened that, if she’s faking it, she should receive an Oscar. She’s terrified to open her curtains, and I verified with Millie that Danielle has called the cops numerous times the past week to complain that someone’s in her yard. The cops get there, find no one. But…and here’s the big ‘but’…they did find oddly shaped footprints in the moist soil beneath her bedroom window. The police can’t identify them as animal or humanoid, and there were scratches on the sill where it looks as though somebody tried to pry open the window.”
I stared at the photos. “So, what have you done so far? Have we ever had a case mentioning a devil-creature?”
Caitlin sent me a link from the database. “Yes, actually. There are reports going back to the days of the miners and prospectors of a creature that lives in the woods around here. They called it the Whatcom Devil—not really original, but hey. They reported it looking like a goatlike bipedal creature that eats flesh and—I’m pretty sure this is based on the puritanical mindset of early settlers—seduces women.”
I grimaced. “Who wants to go to bed with a goat-devil? Unless it’s a satyr. I hear they’re pretty fantastic lovers, though I’ve never met one.”
“Well, here’s the thing. Take some farmer whose wife is having an affair and he might not want to admit his neighbor is packing a bigger sausage than he is, or is capable of wooing women better than he can, and you suddenly have crazy legends springing up. Anything to take the blame off his own inability to keep his woman satisfied.” Caitlin snorted.
Laughing, I brought up the database info. There were reports going back to 1832, and most of them read similarly. Miner or lumberjack was out in the woods, heard a sudden noise, and boom, saw a freakish creature bearing down on him. Some reports, the witness survived. In a number of the reports, the lumberjack went behind a tree to pee, a loud noise ensued including screams, and his buddies found him ripped to shreds with an arm missing or his guts ripped out. Sometimes a large creature was seen loping into the woods.
“So, we have a goat-man who can tear people to shreds? Doesn’t sound like a Casanova to me.” I bit my lip. “So why would it be in town? Why would it suddenly come down into Moonshadow Bay? Surely, it would hit one of the smaller towns before it reached the coastline. There are plenty of them around.”