Relic Page 9

  “Pretty wild, huh?” Denny says.

  “Yeah,” Jack says with a laugh that sounds hollow and empty. His fingers find mine and he laces them together.

  Denny tosses the sheet back over Benjamin Cooper and slides the table roughly back into its cubby. “So now you know.”

  Know what? That spontaneous mummification is possible? That some dude missing for over thirty years didn’t age a day? That Bull Valley Mine is at the center of both? If anything, Cooper’s body triggers more questions than it answers, and there’s only one thing I’m sure of anymore.

  You don’t know anything.

  EIGHTEEN

  I’M UNUSUALLY QUIET ON THE DRIVE HOME. THE IMAGE OF Benjamin Cooper’s leathery, dehydrated corpse is branded into my brain, superimposed on everything I see. I keep trying to recall the face of the man who attacked me on the beach. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not the same person.

  It is.

  But it’s impossible to tell. Any facial features have been obliterated. Am I absolutely sure the fisherman on Slaughterhouse Island is the same person whose shriveled skin and eyeless face we just saw laid out in the ice room at the morgue?

  They wore the same clothes.

  I’m grasping at straws trying to come to terms with what I just saw. I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: the body itself or the idea of how it got that way.

  “Sonya’s here?” Jack says.

  My head snaps up and I find that we’re on my street, Sonya’s mom’s minivan parked in front of my house. That’s right, I forgot to call her back. She must be freaking out.

  “I texted her,” Terrence says as Sonya hops out of the minivan and waits for us on the parched front lawn, “when we left the morgue. Asked her to meet us here.”

  Sonya gave Terrence her cell phone number? Seriously?

  “What did you find?” Sonya says the moment I slide out of the font seat.

  My tongue heavy in my mouth. “We saw him. It’s the same guy who attacked me on the beach.”

  “Oh my God,” she whispers, gripping my arm.

  “With the body in that condition, we can’t be totally sure it’s the same person,” Jack says, slamming the car door.

  Can’t we? “Same clothes,” I say, feeling annoyed that Jack is contradicting me.

  “Same mullet,” Terrence adds.

  “Is the body really mummified?” Sonya asks, turning from me to Terrence. “Not just dehydrated from the hot weather?”

  Terrence pulls his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll show you.”

  “You took pictures?” I gasp. Bribing our way into the morgue was bad enough, but Terrence has upped our criminal activity by taking photos of the corpse. Perfect.

  Terrence doesn’t respond. He wakes up the screen, then pauses, craning his head slowly upward to stare into the empty blue sky. “We should go inside,” he says, pressing his phone to his chest. “Don’t want anyone eavesdropping.”

  Once inside, Terrence quickly sweeps through the rooms. “What are you doing?” I ask, following him down the hall.

  “Recon.” He pokes his head into each of the three bedrooms and the hall bathroom. “I’m in the enemy’s lair. Gotta make sure we’re really alone.”

  I shake my head and walk to the kitchen, grabbing cold sodas from the fridge before I join Jack and Sonya in the living room. My best friend is standing by the fireplace, hands clasped as she rubs her palms together, while Jack sits on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other, with his arm draped across the cushion. They’re yin and yang—one a wound-up ball of anxiety, the other completely relaxed.

  Terrence finishes his search and joins Sonya near the mantel, handing her his phone. “What do you think?”

  Sonya swipes through several photos. I’m surprised Terrence got so many in the thirty seconds or so that Denny had the sheet pulled away from Benjamin Cooper.

  “It definitely looks as if all the moisture has been drained from his body,” Sonya says at last, zooming in on one of pictures. “And the skin is tanned, like the bog mummies found in England.”

  I press the chilled soda can against my eyeballs, which suddenly ache. I can’t believe this is actually happening.

  “Doesn’t mummification take a while?” Jack asks.

  “I thought so too,” Terrence says. “I saw this show on the Discovery Channel where the Egyptians would shove this corkscrew thing up your nose, scramble your brain around, and then yank it all out.”

  Jack shifts his legs. “Thanks for that image, dude.”

  “Those are anthropogenic mummies,” Sonya says. “They’re intentionally created. This looks more like spontaneous mummification.”

  Jack stands up and walks over to Sonya, leaning over her shoulder while she continues to study the images. “Can that happen in thirty-six hours?”

  Sonya shakes her head. “It probably couldn’t happen in thirty-six days. Desiccation of this degree would take months. Even immersing the body in salt to remove the moisture, it took the Egyptians weeks to finish the process.”

  Salt? I place the soda can on the coffee table. “Didn’t Frankie say those pink halite stones inside the mine were made of salt?”

  “Technically,” Sonya says, “they are salt.”

  “Do you think that would be enough to mummify him?”

  Sonya shakes her head. “There’s no way this happened between the time he stumbled on our campsite and this morning.”

  It’s a definitive answer, the kind that ends the discussion. And now I have even more questions than I did before.

  Questions that don’t have rational answers.

  “So what do we do?” Terrence asks. He lingers by Sonya’s side.

  Jack leans against the fireplace. “Nothing.”

  I expect Sonya to disagree with him, but she doesn’t say a word.

  “There’s nothing we can say that will help the investigation,” he continues. “Just get us in more trouble.”

  “If they even believe us,” Terrence adds. “Which they won’t.”

  Jack turns to me. “Are you okay with this?”

  He’s right. If I tell my dad that the mummified corpse he’s investigating was alive and well and trying to strangle me just two days earlier, he’ll either have me committed or ground me for the rest of the summer, neither of which would help them figure out how and why Benjamin Cooper died.

  “Maybe when the autopsy report comes in,” I say, “we’ll have more to go on.” My eyes trail to Sonya, who refuses to look at me, but I know that as soon as there’s a report from the coroner, she’ll be reading about it in the police database.

  “I should go,” she says instead. “My brother needs the car.”

  “Give me a lift?” Terrence asks, following her to the door.

  “Yeah,” she says without looking at him. “Sure.”

  I smile as I watch them go. Certainly not the first boyfriend I would have picked out for my friend, but I’ve never seen her this comfortable with anyone who wasn’t me or a blood relation.

  Jack gathers up the half-empty soda cans and buses them to the kitchen. I trail behind him, eying the well-developed muscles in his upper arms and suddenly, I want to peel off his shirt and run my hands up and down his body.

  “Want to hang out?” I say, slipping my arms around his waist from behind. “My dad probably won’t be back for a few hours.”

  Ew. What is wrong with me? A man is dead under the most bizarre circumstances imaginable and I’m interested in sexy times?

  “Can’t,” he says, without looking at me. “My mom needs me at home.”

  “Really?” His mom works at a law office during the week. Why would she be home on a Tuesday afternoon?

  Jack turns and lays his hands on my shoulders. “She’s home sick,” he says, smiling his lopsided grin. “And I told her I wouldn’t be gone long.”

  “Oh.”

  He kisses me lightly, his tongue flicking across my lips. I shudder, fighting the urge to drag him back to my room whethe
r he likes it or not. “I’ll call you later, okay? Promise.”

  Like he promised not to leave you in the mine?

  I shake off the voice in my head. That was different. “Love you.”

  “I love you too, Annie.”

  I sit on the couch with the curtains drawn. My eyes ache, and I can’t take the glaring afternoon sun streaming through the living room windows. It’s past dinnertime, but still no word from my dad. I’m starving, and I’ve already foraged the kitchen for food, sampling three or four of the leftovers I’ve stashed there in the last week, but everything tastes off. So I just lounge on the sofa, tired and hungry, watching one of my favorite ancient mystery shows on the History Channel, until my eyes close and I start to drift off to sleep.

  A loud ringing scares the crap out of me. It’s a phone, but not my cell. The landline.

  I freeze, remote in hand, listening to the unfamiliar sound. We’ve got to be one of the only households in the state that still has a landline, and ours is a total throwback: gray push buttons and a receiver that’s attached by an actual spiral cord. It was there when my parents moved in before I was born, and my dad keeps the nondigital antiquity mounted on the kitchen wall in case of emergency. Since it doesn’t plug in, if we lose power and cell phones are down, the station can still get ahold of us.

  “Hello?” I answer breathlessly.

  “Is this Annie Kramer?” The voice is male, gruff and somehow familiar, but I know better than to talk to strange men on the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, ready to hang up. “You’ve got the wrong—”

  “This is Deputy Weller.”

  He knows.

  I swallow, my mind racing. I knew it. He kept looking at me that night on the beach. He must have recognized me.

  “Deputy Weller?” I say, trying to pretend like I’ve never heard the name before. “If you’re looking for my dad, you should try the station.”

  “Have you seen the news, Miss Kramer?” he asks, ignoring me.

  “I’m not sure what you’re—”

  “The body that was found this morning near Bull Valley Mine.”

  He knows everything.

  “Oh,” I say, cringing. That. “I think I saw something about it on the news.”

  “Maybe you can shed some light on the situation.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I knew you looked familiar when I saw you on the beach at Slaughterhouse Island,” he says, his voice cold. “You look just like your mother.”

  Dammit. How does he know that?

  “So since you and your friends were in the area, I thought maybe you might have seen something.”

  He knows we were on Slaughterhouse Island, but there’s no way he can link us to Bull Valley Mine. Still, there’s no point in playing dumb anymore. I wonder just how much Deputy Weller knows.

  “If you’re accusing us of mummifying a corpse,” I say, trying to play it cool, “I can honestly say we didn’t do it.”

  “No one’s accusing you of murder,” Deputy Weller says with a dry laugh. “I just want to know if you saw anything . . . suspicious. Or strange. Had any weird experiences around the lake.”

  Don’t tell him.

  Two opposite arguments pull at me. On the sheriff’s-daughter side, I recognize that any piece of information, no matter how small, can help shed some light on what happened to Benjamin Cooper. And his family deserves to know how he died. On the other hand, telling Deputy Weller the fantastical story of Cooper’s apparent thirty-six-hour trip from would-be killer to leathery corpse isn’t one I relish sharing. Will he believe me for even half a second?

  “I want to keep this off the record. You don’t have to come to the station to make an official statement, and I’m not going to tell your father.” Deputy Weller pauses. “Unless I have to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you should come visit me at my house and tell me what you know.”

  Off the record? Go to his house alone? Oh hell no. Does he think I’m an idiot?

  “You can bring your friends if you’d like.”

  “I . . .” The last thing I want to do is tell grim Deputy Weller about our experiences on Slaughterhouse Island and inside Bull Valley Mine, but his veiled threat is pretty clear. I’m not going to tell your father unless I have to. I don’t know why he cares so much about what we may or may not have seen, or why he insists on meeting at his house instead of the station, but as skeevy as the whole thing feels, there’s a part of me that’s curious. Does Deputy Weller know the truth about what’s happening around the lake? Can he explain the craziness of the last two days? Suddenly, I need to know.

  “I don’t have a car,” I blurt out.

  “Can you get someone to drive you?” he presses. “Tomorrow is fine.”

  “Yeah,” I say, pulling my cell phone from my pocket to text Jack. I don’t think we need to involve the others. Not yet. “Tomorrow.”

  “Twenty-four ten Mountain Crest Drive,” Weller says. “I’ll see you then.”

  NINETEEN

  “ARE YOU SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA?” JACK ASKS THE NEXT morning when he picks me up.

  “No,” I say, “but if the alternative is that Weller outs us to my dad, I think this field trip up the mountain is worth it.”

  “Point taken.”

  The drive to Deputy Weller’s house is straight out of a horror movie. He couldn’t live on some nice suburban street, with neighbors a stone’s throw away and a 7-Eleven on the corner. Oh no. He’s on some backwater mountain pass in the middle of nowhere approached by a narrow, winding road. The good news is that I slept like the dead last night, my first decent sleep since graduation, and the slow, heavy feeling that plagued me yesterday has all but disappeared. The bad news is that the serpentine drive is making my stomach want to turn itself inside out.

  “Carsick?” Jack asks when I groan as we exit a banked S curve.

  I nod, not trusting my digestive system enough to open my mouth, and tighten my grip on the oh, shit handle.

  Jack takes the next series of curves as slowly as he can, easing off the accelerator and glancing at me every few seconds. I stare at the key slot on the glove compartment of Jack’s 4Runner, my brain throbbing like someone’s banging on it with a hammer, and try desperately not to launch my breakfast all over the dashboard.

  “Last big one,” Jack says, referring to the hairpin turns we’ve been navigating for twenty minutes, “then we turn off. Shouldn’t be as windy then.”

  Almost there.

  I feel the centrifugal force sinking my stomach to my knees as Jack navigates around one of the tight curves, then the truck bumps, and suddenly we’re off the pavement and onto a rocky semipaved surface. The promise of a near end to the journey perks me up; I peel my eyes away from the glove compartment and gaze out the window at our surroundings.

  Thick fir trees blanket either side of the road, allowing only a smattering of morning sunshine to permeate the gaps in the canopy, illuminating dust clouds kicked up by our tires. It seems utterly remote, in a creepy, serial-killer kind of way, and yet as we bounce down the road, we see a cluster of brightly colored mailboxes labeled with surnames and cutesy decals at the top of a steep driveway that winds down the side of a ravine. Despite its remoteness, there is actually a community up here among the trees.

  Jack slows. “Twenty-four ten,” he reads from the side of a lemon-yellow mailbox. “This is it.” He eases the truck down the hill, then slows to a dead stop. Ahead, I can see the white Lake Patrol pickup truck parked in front of an A-frame cabin tucked snugly into the trees.

  I step out of the cab and stare, dumbstruck, at Deputy Weller’s home. Out here in the boonies, I’m expecting a dilapidated log cabin without electricity or running water, flanked by an outhouse and patched together with duct tape and blue tarps, all surrounded by a variety of rusting, disused appliances and unidentifiable mechanical equipment. Instead, the gleaming redwood timbers of the c
abin look relatively new, and a warm yellow glow of modern light fixtures shines bright and strong through massive floor-to-ceiling windows. The front door is trimmed with green paint, which accentuates the natural redness of the wood and blends seamlessly with the heavy foliage that surrounds the cabin, and a jay flitting around a homemade birdhouse on the porch gives Weller’s homestead a sense of cheerfulness I wasn’t expecting.

  “You look better already,” Jack says, rounding the front of the truck. “Maybe I should let you drive us home?”

  “Maybe.” I take his outstretched hand and together we ring the doorbell.

  A ding-a-ling chime greets us, but instead of Weller’s heavy footfall coming to the door, it’s followed by silence. I wait a few seconds, then press the bell again. As before, there’s no sign of movement inside.

  “Huh,” Jack says. He cups his hands on either side of his eyes and presses his face to the large window next to the door. “Lights are on.”

  “That’s weird.” I glance up at the bright morning sky. Even in this forested ravine, there’s plenty of daylight. Why would Weller have the lights on?

  I join Jack at the window, staring into the cozy living space. On one side, a small kitchen opens to a dining area with a four-seater table and chairs. On the other, a sectional sofa faces a flat-screen TV. Sconces illuminate a variety of framed maps and old-timey photographs—some in black and white, others in sepia tones—and shelves line the far wall, packed to bursting with a haphazard variety of books, almanacs, and overstuffed binders.

  “Maybe he’s out back?” I suggest.

  “You wait here,” Jack says. “I’ll check it out.” And before I can argue, he slips around the side of the cabin.

  I stand on the porch, admiring the beauty of the spot. The blades of light slice through gaps in the towering trees, streaking through the darkened backdrop. It’s utterly still in this ravine, protected from the breeze by mountains on all sides, and the only movement I see is the occasional bug whizzing through my line of sight, and the swirling dirt billowing in the shafts of sun.

  The silence relaxes me. There’s no roar of cars, no planes overhead, no Harley engines revving so loudly they practically burst your eardrums. Just the flutter of wings as the blue-and-white jay frets around his new home.