Page 58 of Deadly Attraction
Mitch fell into step beside her. “Dogs are intuitive. Maybe he knew the mom was dead, so he brought you the babies.”
“Huh,” Emma said. “Maybe you’re right.”
They came upon the dogs and Mitch grabbed Emma’s arm to stop her. “That’s no bunny hole.”
Salt and Pepper had partially unearthed a fire pit, Pepper’s nose now stuck in a red and black plastic bag labeled as beef jerky.
Emma looked around. “Someone camped here.”
Mitch made out some tread marks near the pit, faint, but there. Probably from some type of hiking boot. “Yeah, and recently.”
“How do you know?”
He motioned behind them. “Look at how close this is to the stream bed. If someone had camped here a few months ago, they’d have been in the water. And this jerky bag.” He pulled the plastic bag off Pepper’s nose and examined the date stamped on the edge. “It’s not sun bleached and the expiration date is next year.”
“Beef jerky expires?”
He’d eaten his fair share of it while in the field. That and MREs—meals-ready-to-eat—were two things he never wanted to see or taste again. “Store bought beefy jerky can last two years under normal conditions, but, yes, it will eventually go bad.”
“Two years? Eww. That’s gross.”
Mitch moved the dogs back so he could inspect the rest of the tiny camp without them destroying any other evidence.
“So you think this might be your arsonist?” Emma asked. “Because why would anyone camp here and not inside the park, unless it was in the last few days while a fire raged in there, correct?”
Mitch looked at the dusty ground, noting where the sparse, dry grass had been folded down. “Someone sat here,” he pointed to the spot, then cast his eyes around the fire pit area. “And someone slept over there. See the imprint in that yellowed grass?”
Emma followed the line of his finger and nodded. She pointed to the east. “There’s another large imprint there.”
They walked over to that one, both staring down at it.
“Two people or one who slept in two different places?” she asked.
Good question. It was hard to tell exact body size by the matted down grass. “The imprints are too similar to tell.”
“Mitch?”
She’d done a one-eighty, now focused on a ring of river rock that someone had laid out in a three-by-three foot circular diameter at the base of a scraggly pine.
The hair on the back of his neck lifted as he took a step closer to her. “What is it?”
“An altar,” she whispered.
Yep, the hair on his arms joined the hair standing at attention on his neck. “An altar?”
As Emma moved forward to take a closer look, Mitch stayed by her side. What he saw inside the ring of rocks made him want to grab her and put her back on her horse.
A half-burnt candle, a feather, some tiny, white bones. A pocket watch.
In the dirt, someone had drawn four symbols. In the center of the symbols stood a green Tom Monahan statue that matched the one Emma had found in her nightstand.
“Goddammit,” Mitch swore under his breath. “The guy who broke into your house. This is where he camped, either before or after the break-in.”
“Season Two, Episode Four,” Emma said, her eyes glued to the collection of stuff. She pointed at the feather. “The Hawk Sees. Tom is visited by a hawk and has a vision of the cyborgs kidnapping his mother. He carries one of the hawk’s feathers with him for the rest of the season, but it’s stolen and burned by Calypso, one of the other kids in the original group, in an act of bullying. In a later season, when they’re both grown, he kills Calypso when he discovers Calypso has been working with a cyborg to destroy their camp.”
Her finger moved to the bones. “Season Five, Episode One. On Tom’s fifteenth birthday, his group is starving. He goes into the woods and kills a squirrel. It’s the first time he’s had to kill anything. He wrestles with his conscience, but realizes in order to survive, he’ll have to do a lot more killing.
“The pocket watch.” Again her finger shifted. “That came late, Season Ten, I think. One of the few men who’d been with Tom and Mary through everything always carried a pocket watch and became Tom’s surrogate father. In his last episode, he’s mortally wounded by a cyborg and gives Tom his watch right before he dies.”
