There was a flurry of movement in front of Lenoir’s face. He leapt back and bumped into Kody, but the burly sergeant held his ground as he fired the crossbow. The spring snapped to and a loud thud sounded against the far wall, and then all was silent. As their eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior, Lenoir spied a small shape pinned against the wall at eye height. A quail twitched in its death throes, its breast blasted through by Kody’s bolt.
“Nice shot,” said Lenoir.
They stepped over the threshold, the shadows of the interior parting to reveal their contents. Dust swarmed angrily in the beam of light streaming through the open doorway. It lit upon a rotting wooden floor and naked walls, and for a moment Lenoir thought the room was empty. Then he saw the boy—gagged and blindfolded, bound to a chair. He knew immediately it was the wrong boy, for his hair was yellow like his mother’s. His head sagged, and for a moment Lenoir feared he was dead. But as Lenoir moved toward him, the boy’s head rose. There was something strange about the way he moved, an eerie calm that drew Lenoir up short.
Kody elbowed past and knelt before the child. He removed the blindfold first. He reached for the boy’s bonds next, then changed his mind and pulled the gag from his mouth. The boy said nothing. He made no move, not even to wet his cracking lips. He simply watched Kody, his face impassive, as though he were not interested in what the sergeant was doing.
Crears was just coming around the front when Lenoir found the bedroom door. It was off to the right, closed. His heart surging with hope, Lenoir burst through.
The room was barren. At least, it appeared to be. “Get out of the doorway, Crears! You’re blocking the light!”
The constable complied, but Lenoir already knew it was useless. Zach was not there. Lenoir got down on his hands and knees, searching for anything that might be a clue. There was a dark stain on the floor next to the door, and Lenoir sniffed at it, fearing the scent of blood. What he smelled was not blood, however, but urine.
“He was here,” Lenoir said as Crears entered the room. “I think he—”
Lenoir was drowned out by a scream. There was a crashing sound from the room next door, and Kody swore loudly. Lenoir and Crears rushed back into the main room to find a bizarre sight: Kody was tussling with the boy, who was shouting and tearing at the sergeant with all his strength.
“What are you doing, Kody?” Crears cried. “You’re hurting him!”
“What do you want me to do, let him claw my eyes out?” Kody was trying to restrain the boy’s wrists. “Calm down! It’s all right, you’re safe now! Stop it!”
Despite his size, he was having trouble keeping the boy in check. The attack was so vicious, so frenzied, that for a brief moment Lenoir even thought the sergeant might be overcome. Then Kody seized the boy by the shoulders and spun him around, clasping him in a bear hug that pinned his arms at his sides. The boy continued to struggle, spitting and shrieking like a fiend, but the sergeant held him fast.
“What’s the matter with him?” Kody growled. He had a gash on his right cheek, shallow but bleeding.
Crears knelt before the boy, just out of range of his flailing legs. “Mika! Mika, it’s me, Constable Crears! You remember me, don’t you?”
But Mika did not seem to remember the constable. His eyes rolled back and he screamed again, as though something before him were too horrible to look at.
“They must have done something to scare the wits out of him,” Crears said.
“I think it is worse than that, Constable,” said Lenoir grimly. “Look at him—the boy is mad.” Mika had begun to tear at the bottom of his shirt, as though he would rip it from his body.
“Take him outside, Sergeant,” Lenoir ordered. “Try to keep him calm until the watchmen arrive. We can’t bring him with us like this.”
Crears looked disturbed as he watched Kody drag the boy out of the farmhouse, and when he spoke again, his voice was distracted. “There’s a path out back. Looks to have been used recently.”
“I saw it.”
“I’ll stay here and help with Mika.” Lenoir started to protest, but changed his mind and merely nodded. As constable of Berryvine, Crears would consider the boy his responsibility. Lenoir did not envy him that, nor did he envy him the task of delivering the news of Mika’s condition to the family.
The path behind the house led between a jumble of rosebushes that might once have been beautiful, but were now little more than a thicket of thorns. They had obviously been pruned at one time, and still retained some hint of their former shapes. The riot of growth that had since burst forth gave them the look of cages that could barely contain the wild creatures within, stray limbs reaching out between bars to claw at Lenoir’s cloak as he passed.
The sound of the river wandered up the path to meet him. He could already smell the clay that lined its banks, and the damp air grew chilly as he made his way toward the water. A tentative chorus of frogs had just begun, only to fall silent as Lenoir drew near. Here the path descended steeply before disappearing behind the trunk of an enormous willow tree. Beyond it, the river was slowly disgorging a ribbon of mist that retained its shape, as though a great snake were sloughing its silvery skin. The opposite bank was all but obscured. Lenoir could sense the trees looming behind the veil, but the only evidence of their presence was the occasional disembodied branch materializing and then dissolving in the roiling fog. Their unseen closeness made him feel as though he were being watched.
At the foot of the path, the tracks Lenoir was following turned over themselves, creating a muddy mess. They drew right up to the river’s edge: dimpled bootheels filled with water pointing in different directions. He had to squat to examine them, for the willow tree at the river’s edge cast a thick cloak of shadow over the ground. Now that he was closer, he saw that the prints had not been made as recently as he thought, for the peaks of the tracks were rounded, not sharp-edged as they would have been if the footprints were fresh. It looked as though someone had come down to the river to draw water, or perhaps to wash something. Lenoir spied a mark that might have been someone setting a jug down in the mud.
Beside him, the willow tree leaned far out over the water, the shaggy tips of its bottommost branches grazing the surface. It looked as though the tree might eventually topple over; so acute was its angle that the roots farthest from the river had begun to tear up through the ground. They were thick, as big around as a man’s thigh, and knotted over one another like a nest of vipers.
That was why it took Lenoir so long to notice the body.
He started back up the path and might have walked right by had he not spied a flash of metal out of the corner of his eye. Peering through the gloom, he saw what had caught his eye: a buckle, attached to a boot. What he had taken for one of the roots was actually a man’s leg, crooked at the knee so that the rest of the body lay concealed behind the mound.
Drawing a flintlock, Lenoir approached cautiously. The leg made no movement, and from the angle of it Lenoir was quite sure that its owner was not merely resting in the lee of the willow tree. His suspicions were confirmed when he walked around the mound of roots and found the wide, vacant eyes of a corpse staring back at him.
The particulars of the scene rushed into his brain, registering themselves one at a time: male; Adal; twenty-five to thirty years old; dead less than twenty-four hours. Lenoir holstered his pistol and approached, cocking his head to reconcile his view with the crumpled form before him. The man was on his back, his body draped across the tangle of roots so that his feet were higher than his head. One leg dangled over the top of the roots—the leg Lenoir had spotted from the path—and the other was splayed at an unnatural angle. The corpse’s head lolled back, openmouthed, hanging over the edge of a root. Neck broken, Lenoir gauged, almost as though the victim had fallen from the tree.