But then he rose to inspect the sphere.
Beneath the pallid green tarnish and webworks of crust he thought he noticed outlines of shapes, however faintly. At first he thought the sphere must be a geographic globe depicting the continents, but then he realized that the shapes didn’t correspond at all to anything global.
Fanshawe touched the encrusted orb and found it cold—strangely so, for brass or any similar metal would’ve surely conducted heat from the sun beating down on it all day…
Weird. He stepped back for another more distanced look, tried to figure what purpose lay behind the object, then could only draw blanks. But Abbie had promised to tell him about it, hadn’t she? Tomorrow, he thought with a pleasant twinge, when I take her to dinner. Just then, he allowed himself the luxury of letting Abbie’s image enter his head: her trim shapeliness, the incandescent dove-gray eyes, the exotic alliance of her hair color: auburn with blond. He stood dreamily, musing over the normalness of it all; just a simple dinner date, true, but simplicity and normality were elements that had always eluded him, either that or had been rendered moot by the involutions of his secrets. Just then, the brilliant blue sky seemed to welcome him to a new state of mind…
Then the moment shattered.
Fanshawe twirled in place at an adrenalin dump. It had been the unmistakable sound of a growling dog that had invaded his muse. Not this again! He stood still, eyes darting left and right, poised to flee. It had been much louder this time, as if the animal lurked distressingly close. He’d thought he heard the same sound on this hill already, then he’d even dreamed the sound, hadn’t he? He knew that he could not be mistaken this time.
Careful. Don’t look at its eyes…
His vision pored over the high weeds and tangles of bushes, but in just a few moments, again, he could discern that there was no dog. Next, he walked around the brush for a closer inspection, then found what he’d found previously: nothing. No dog.
What the hell?
Was he hearing things? There had to be some reasonable explanation. Perhaps some other hotel guest was walking their dog, and it happened to snarl along another trail. The idea seemed like an absurd excuse, given the snarl’s tonality but—
All right. Enough. There’s no dog this time, either.
Fanshawe took a final glance at the senseless pedestal and globe, chuckled at this next mishap of hearing a dog that wasn’t there, then turned to continue through the trails, when—
The skin of his face seemed to tighten like shrink wrap, while every tendon and muscle in his body turned taut as stretched wires. This fright doubled that of the imaginary dog-snarl, and he broke into a sprint at this next sound that had caught him so unawares.
There could be no mistake, nor any idle explanation.
What he’d heard was this: a long, high, blood-curdling scream, indisputably that of a woman…
(III)
Fanshawe thought of a plum with its skin chewed off.
A half hour after he’d heard the scream, the manic scene that he’d rushed into became a circumstance that could only be described as funereal. The ambience here seemed to leech power from multiple sets of throbbing red and blue lights. A crowd had formed quickly; the scream had been so shrill it was heard even by those even at the fringe of town. Blanch-faced EMTs were preparing the gurney, while an equally blanched coroner stood aside, signing papers on a clipboard. Several county police officers kept the crowd back; others were cordoning the perimeter, and in the center of all the activity stood a tall, fiftyish county captain who was trying but not quite succeeding in looking stoic. Silence, and a semi-tangible grimness, had settled over everything. Clearly, events such as this never occurred in an area such as Haver-Towne.
Fanshawe’s knees still wobbled from the sight.
“Well, jumpin’ Jesus, I just can’t believe this,” Mr. Baxter muttered next to Fanshawe. “Of all the crazy things to happen.”
“I still can’t quite believe it myself,” Fanshawe said. The aftermath left his throat dry as old leaves. “It seemed more like a dream.”
“So it was you who stumbled onto him?”
Fanshawe shook his head and pointed to the pair of joggers who now looked winded not from exertion but shock. One stood by wide-eyed while the other nervously recited details to a scribbling police officer. “Those two, they were jogging the trails.”
“Aw, yeah. They been here for the convention last couple of years—associate professors I think they are. And what a thing for a couple of gals to run into…”
And run into it they had, literally. Fanshawe had followed the scream to a lower hillock. Evidently the woman in the lead, the bustier of the two, had tripped over some object just protruding from the high grasses that walled the trail. It was her friend who’d seen it and screamed. Fanshawe had arrived just as the first woman’s eyes were rolling back in her head—then she’d fainted.
The obstruction had been a man’s head and shoulders, the rest of the body still concealed in the brush.
Fanshawe had called 911, then helped revive the unconscious jogger. But the image of that victim lying in the brush seemed to sink into his brain like a stone in watery silt, that man…
No details could be made of the man’s face, for he no longer had a face. What sat instead upon those shoulders was little more than a skull stripped raggedly of most of its flesh. The majority of neck muscles were gone as well, as if torn away. Only mere scraps of blood-mucked skin remained. Ears, nose, lips?
Gone.
The eyeballs were intact, but lidless, transforming what had once been the man’s visage into a grinning, staring mask.
Upon seeing this, Fanshawe’s mind swam in a hot panic, fragments of thoughts bursting through. Murder? He doubted it. An animal attack seemed most likely. But if it were the former, couldn’t the perpetrator still be near? The jogger’s ceaseless, whistle-like screams only shattered more of Fanshawe’s concentration. What kind of an accident could account for this? And if the victim had indeed been savaged by a wild animal, why was his coffee-brown suit untorn, and his hands untouched? These and other questions only had time to half-solidify in Fanshawe’s mind. When the second woman had finally stopped screaming, the three of them could only stare open-mouthed at one another. Several police cars and an ambulance showed up sometime later, using the GPS on Fanshawe’s cellphone.
Fanshawe shuffled his feet as he stood with Mr. Baxter. Baxter seemed disconcerted by something more than the presence of the corpse. What’s he got cooking in his head? Fanshawe wondered but didn’t feel he knew the man well enough to ask. Eventually, the police had finished questioning the joggers; they walked shakily back toward town. My turn, Fanshawe realized. The questioning officer approached, his eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses in which Fanshawe saw his own face. The county captain came over, too.
Fanshawe felt interrogated. He explained his presence on the trails along with his chronological observations once he’d heard the scream, and answered rather typical if not irrelevant questions. Then came questions like: “Can you remember seeing anyone here or in town who struck you as suspicious?” and “Do you recall seeing a man dressed similarly to the decedent at any time today?” and “Did you notice any things—articles of clothing, for instance, disturbances in the brush, money, credit cards—while you were out here today?” to which Fanshawe answered in the negative. But then the captain, who seemed self-reflective, interrupted, “Oh, so that’s why your name’s ringing a bell. You’re one of those finance geniuses I’ve seen on TV.”