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Title: Espial
Warnings: Respect the rating.
Claimer: The characters, settings, and plot are mine. Please do not take, distribute, or archive without my permission.
Have you ever found a dead body? Come close? Ever wish you had found a dead body? We did; wish that we’d found one, that is. Sometimes I think that it would have been better if we’d just found a dead body instead. Certainly then it would have ended.
That day started off fairly normally; well, as normal as things ever got around Isa’s second house. You see, she sort of has two houses- one in the city and one in the middle of nowhere. While the city isn’t really a ‘city’, per se (at least not like cities where I’m from), her cabin really is in the middle of nowhere. Her grandma used to live there up till a year ago, and then her aunt Lynn moved in so they could keep the place maintained without being there all the time. She likes it up there, I think. Given, Lynn’s a little crazy sometimes but I think you have to be to live somewhere without any people around to keep you company. I’d never be able to live out there like that.
Not that she’s alone; she’s got three dogs up there with her all the time and more when other people visit. Of course she brought her own dog, a very pretty mutt named Karly, but then she ended up with two others. When Isa’s grandma died she left behind this adorable little beagle mix named Rosie who has the softest fur- like a bunny’s fur if you want to compare. Then there’s Hunter. He was still a puppy back then, probably five or six months old but he thought he was really much bigger. He was a tri-color Australian Shepard and Lynn’d gotten him because the other two were no good for guarding anything. I don’t know what she thought was going to happen out there that a dog could help with, but if it helped her sleep at night then I wasn’t about to argue.
Anyhow, that’s where we were the spring morning before everything… Sounds pretty normal, doesn’t it? It is, until you start seeing the stranger things like the fox enclosure up against the side of their big red barn, or the bloodstains on the driveway from where they shoot turkey in the summer. It’s normal till you get out there with everyone and there’s nine dogs running around in a pack, excited to be on the hunt with their people. It’s normal till you walk into the back room and notice all the guns.
I’m not saying they’re bad people, they’re just… not people I’m used to, you know? Where I’m from hardly anyone has even one gun, much less a whole room full of them. The people I know who own guns well… they don’t use them for real. They think that ‘real’ is going to a shooting range and popping targets. Isabelle’s family was different; they hunted all the time.
They also owned a ton of land. I guess in the middle of nowhere it’s easier to own 300 acres than it is to do the same in the city. It’s beautiful out there, no doubt. Their land edges up against this really great river and if you climb up from the banks there’s all sorts of habitat from swamps to forests to grassland and anything in between. The best part, though is the wetlands. They’re low set and full of all sorts of things- the dogs love that part best. I don’t know how many times I’d seen them come back after rolling in something dead.
That’s where it all started, you see. Isabelle’s German short-haired pointer, Sera-kai, came running back to the cabin followed by Lynn’s dogs and Isa’s Vizla, Kaden. In her mouth was none other than the leg of some poor, long-dead deer. From the size it couldn’t have been very large; maybe one of the yearling fawns that’d gotten separated from mom.
Of course we couldn’t just let them have it. Sure it made a great play toy but the thing about deer bones is that they splinter really easily and if any of the dogs decided to chomp on it a bit there would be a lot of painful problems. I elected Isa to be the distraction and while the dogs were watching her I snuck in and stole their treasure. It was quite a feat to get away from them after that; if you’ve never had five dogs barking and leaping up to take something from your hand, you’re really missing something.
Now, the dogs find strange things all the time. Dead birds, porcupines, sticks, holes in the ground… But it’s not often that they’ll bring you a whole deer leg. The first thing Isabelle said when I passed over to her so she could have a look was “Let’s go find the rest of it.”
Honestly, who says that?
But you know, I’m just crazy enough to take her up on the offer. We asked her aunt to come with us and after gathering all the dogs we set off down the dirt trails. With 300 acres of land there is a lot of space for dirt trails and even more space for dead things to find a place to die in peace. The chances of us finding the deer were slim to none but all of us knew that even if we didn’t find what we were looking for, we’d find something interesting.
And believe me, we did.
About fifteen minutes into the walk, up atop one of the taller hills on her land, I spied something white in the field grass off the left side of the trail. We’d found a couple small bones earlier, chewed up by the rodents and whatnot that lived in the area. I’d become quite good at spotting unusual things in the years that I’d know Isabelle and so I veered off the trail to investigate.
What I found was none other than a dirty, white latex glove. Interest piqued, I called to Isabelle and Lynn, who had kept going down the path; they were used to me disappearing for a bit before coming back to them. I was almost like the dogs in that respect. They clambered through the tall grass that grew on the edge of the small woods and Lynn took the glove from me to look more closely.
“So who wears surgical gloves on your property, Isa?” I asked, knowing full well that no one did. She knew, too- I could see it in the way her brow furrowed in distrust and she threw a glance around the area.
“There’s markers, too.” She motioned to the two bright orange ribbons tied around the tops of a pair of sapling pine trees.
“Well,” said Aunt Lynn, “Where there’s one glove, there’s two. See if you can find the twin.”
Sure enough there was another glove about five feet away, just as dirty as the first. I held it up and Lynn looked slowly between the glove and me. Isabelle was untying the orange markers but she glanced over long enough to analyze the sight for a brief second. Somehow none of this was impressing her, either; someone had obviously been trespassing.
“Shawn sometimes comes up here and camps just down the road,” she suggested as she tugged free the second marker. “Maybe he left them.”
“Why would Shawn have latex gloves?” I pointed out, poking around in the underbrush with my toe. “If it was someone you knew, don’t you think they’d know better than to litter like that?”
“Well yeah but…” She trailed off as she watched me bend over and pick up a second pair of dirty gloves from a circle of foot-tall baby pine trees.
I held them up for both of them to see and no one said a word. They didn’t have to- we all knew. We were all thinking the same thing. No one any of us knew would have come out here and dropped two pairs of gloves or left markers. Glances were exchanged between the three of us and I saw it in their eyes as well; fear. Uncertainty. What had we stumbled upon here?
When Isabelle raised an arm to motion across the trail, I about jumped out of my skin. She stared at me for a second and then gave me a look like she thought I was being stupid. “There’s more markers over that way and it looks like they’re leading somewhere. I’m going to go check it out while you guys keep looking around here. See if there’s anything else.”
We waited until Isabelle was out of hearing range before I turned to Lynn and gave her a doubtful look. She looked just as uncertain as me. “What if someone was killed?” she asked hesitantly, turning away from me. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“Can we really do that if we haven’t found anything yet?”
“What if we do find something?” I could hear her walking but she’d disappeared into the forest on my right.
Sighing, I headed straight forward, directly left off the beaten path. “Then I guess we’ll have to… to… Lynn?”
“Yeah?”
“Come here.” I could almost feel her pause, hear her debating over whether it was even safe to follow my command.
Apparently it wasn’t a hard debate because a moment later she stepped into the clearing I’d found. Just as I had she stopped and stared, wide eyed and speechless. The tall grass that stood up in the surrounding forest and fields had been pressed flat to the ground. Between and behind us there was a trail of broken branches and flattened grass and places where the dry dirt had been disturbed. There was only so much the winter snow could account for in the way of patterns like that…
But even that wasn’t the most astonishing thing about the clearing.
No, it was the two almost identical, round mounds in the center.
They were about three or four feet in diameter and maybe a foot or two high. There was about five feet distance between them and they were both covered with a thick layer of dried, brown rushes like the normal forest floor. I admit that I didn’t get out into the wilderness very often but even I knew that those mounds were not natural. They couldn’t be. If it was an animal den, surely there would be an entrance somewhere. We were in the middle of a colder climate so I knew there were no crocodiles or alligators or whatever kind of water dwelling reptile builds those big nests…
I glanced to Lynn and she was just staring at them like they were going to leap over and bite her. She jumped when I spoke. “What are they…?”
She shook her head, not taking her eyes off them. “I don’t know…” Her voice was barely a whisper. “They’re human sized, Trish.”
I groaned; she’d practically read my thoughts. That was the last thing I wanted to think about; I was not ready to be finding dead bodies yet. “It could be dogs. Or deer. Maybe… someone could have shot something they didn’t mean to shoot.”
“Like a person.”
I winced. Yeah, like a person.
/End Chapter One, Espial/
