The Girl in the Woods Page 4

  Birdy picked up the remote control. She turned the sound down a little—not off, not on mute.

  “Elan,” she said, “we need to talk.”

  He looked at her and then over at the TV. It was some kind of action flick involving explosions and minimal dialogue. It seemed completely riveting to the teenager.

  “I don’t want to talk now,” he said.

  “Is it that you don’t want to talk now, or talk at all?”

  He shook his head a little. “I don’t know.”

  Birdy sat down. She was soggy, hungry, and she had to get back to work. She didn’t have time to try to draw things out of him. She needed him to focus on what she was saying. She needed to know why he’d shown up like some uninvited pizza delivery boy.

  She clicked the remote control once more. This time she turned off the television.

  Elan stared at the blank screen.

  “Elan,” she said. “Talk.”

  “Aunt Birdy,” he answered, his voice growing soft. “I don’t want to go home. Ever.”

  It was a start. Vague, but a start.

  “All right,” Birdy said. “You don’t want to go home. I understand that, Elan. But what I need to understand is why. Why don’t you want to go back?”

  The teen stayed silent.

  “I need to call your mother,” Birdy said, holding her exasperation to a minimum. She hated the idea of calling Summer. Their last few encounters had been less than cordial. There was always the lingering sting in Summer’s comments that Birdy was selfish and preoccupied with her own life. Her life away from the others. That dead people mattered more to her than her own living family members.

  “You think you’re too good for us, don’t you, sister?” Summer had asked the last time they spoke, a repeat of a conversation they’d had many times before.

  Birdy took a step back. “I never said that.”

  Summer pointed her index finger, one—like all of them—that was coiled with silver rings.

  “You inferred it,” she said.

  Birdy smelled alcohol, but made no mention of it.

  “Implied is the word, Summer. But no, I didn’t.”

  Summer threw her hands in the air. It was a showy move, but within the confines of her living room—where her husband, oldest son, and the family dog watched TV—it didn’t spark the slightest bit of interest.

  “There you go again,” Summer said. “Making me—making all of us—feel like we’re stupid.”

  Birdy had heard that one before. Part of it made her angry. The same song over and over. And yet, the other side of the coin was that Summer didn’t have to end up the way she had. She was intelligent. She was creative. She was all of those things when she was a teenager.

  “You could have gone to college,” Birdy said. “You were the smart one.”

  Summer didn’t say another word. She had been disarmed by the truth and she had nothing to do but accept what her sister had said. Summer had been at the top of the class. She was the sister who taught Birdy the joys of reading, of dreaming of a life beyond the reservation with its endless gossip, heartache, and futility. All of Summer’s dreams evaporated when she dropped out of school, became a mom, got married. Waffled on what she’d do. After that, Summer foundered like a wreck off the edge of Neah Bay. She never got her footing again. She never fulfilled the promise that her intellect had once assured.

  Instead she drank, drifted, and watched from afar as Birdy escaped the reservation and the life there that was never going to be anything but hard.

  “Call her,” Elan said, meeting his aunt’s gaze. “But I’m not going back. If you try to make me, I’ll just run away. I’ll go somewhere far away where no one can find me. And if I do, it will be your fault.”

  Birdy wasn’t sure what she should do. She knew that while she and her sister had their differences they did have a bond, a history that wasn’t always so strained. There were things that kept them wound together like the jute twine they’d used to make bracelets when they were kids.

  “Can’t I stay with you?”

  “You have to be in school, for one thing. For another, I don’t really even know you, Elan. I don’t know how to take care of you.”

  “I’m sixteen. I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

  Birdy didn’t like that response at all. Education was the only way to a better life. She didn’t want Elan to fail. She just couldn’t have that happen. Even though Summer was older, she’d always felt that there was truth to her sister’s insistence that Birdy had abandoned her when she left for the university in Seattle.

  “If you stay here,” she said, “you have to go to school.”

  Elan brightened a little. “You mean you might let me stay?”

  “Are you on drugs?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, his tone a little hurt. “I mean I smoke a little. But not much. Not like the crowd back home.”

  Birdy pressed him. “How much is a little?”

  “Once a week, maybe? I don’t have any with me if that’s what you are worried about.”

  “If you stay, it is only until the end of the school year.”

  Birdy could scarcely believe her own words, but her sister’s complaints resonated. They were unfair, but they still hurt. She had gone away. She had created a new life outside the reservation. Maybe she owed Summer something? Even if Summer was harsh, mean, a bitch, she was her blood.

  So was Elan.

  “If I call her and tell her that it’s all right for you to stay here, would that be okay with you?” she asked.

  Elan looked at Birdy. His eyes were so dark brown they were almost black. They looked wet, pooling with tears.

  “Do you promise I can stay?” He wasn’t going to cry. Elan was toughing it out. It might have been because he was a teenager, and no teenage boy wants to fall to pieces in front of a grown-up. It might also have been that he’d been cried out. Something painful had forced him from his home to hers.

  “Yes,” she said, “on three conditions.”

  The boy looked hopeful. “What?”

  “You’ll have to tell me why you’re here.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “Not now.”

  Birdy landed her hand softly on Elan’s shoulder. She felt a slight tremble, and then he rolled his shoulder to shake her off. “Fine, but later you will, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Birdy got up and went to get her phone from her purse on the console table by the door. Elan’s muddy footprints had dried on the gleaming wooden floor of the old house. Birdy hadn’t wanted to be one of those “take off your shoes” type of people, but she’d spent a lot of money refinishing those floors.

  “What’s the second condition, Aunt Birdy?”

  She turned and faced him with a serious look.

  “You have to get your own robe,” she said, staying deadpan. “You look ridiculous.”

  Elan smiled. It was a disarming smile, one that was at once sad and happy at the same time.

  “I have my stuff in the dryer,” he said, indicating the rumbling machine in the other room.

  “Good. I like that you know how to do your laundry. Might be good having you here for a visit.”

  “I’m good at lots of stuff,” he said. “What’s the last condition?”

  “School, Elan. You miss one day and you’re on a bus back home. Understood?”

  He tugged at the belt of the robe and offered what his aunt considered reluctant agreement.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Understood.”

  Birdy went into the kitchen and left a message on her sister’s cell when Summer didn’t answer.

  “Summer,” she said. “Elan is with me. He’s fine. Don’t know why he’s here. Do you? Call me.”

  Elan appeared in the kitchen doorway, now dressed in his original clothes and radiating the warmth of the dryer.

  “She never answers her phone,” he said.
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  “She will call me the minute she gets the message.”

  “You think so?” he asked.

  “She’s your mother.”

  “You don’t know her, Aunt Birdy.”

  She stared at him for a second, assessing, wondering, processing.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Elan, talk to me.” Her words were direct but tempered with concern.

  Elan crossed his arms. It was a gesture that was right out of a seminar she took on body language, which she thought was a complete waste of time because her patients were all dead and the only language they spoke was silent.

  Elan wasn’t going to talk.

  “Don’t you have a dead body to go look at?” he asked.

  His tone was a little smart-alecky just then, but he was correct.

  Or at least partially.

  It was only a foot.

  That night at dinner in the family’s comfortable log home in South Kitsap, Tracy Montgomery picked at her chicken fingers when she discussed finding the human foot in the woods. Her older sister Monica and her brother Waid were clearly up to their necks with their sister’s need for center stage.

  “You don’t even seem traumatized,” Monica said, texting her friend Carli while the three siblings were eating in front of the TV. “Finding a dead person—or even part of one—would make me hurl.”

  “I did hurl,” Tracy said, dipping her chicken into a pool of catsup. “It was totally gross. But I got to talk to the newspaper and Ms. Hatfield said that I can have a counseling session tomorrow. If I need it.”

  Waid rolled his eyes. “Some people have all the luck. I never get to miss any school. Both of you have crappy teeth,” he said, looking at his sisters. “So you get ortho. You have stupid dance, so you get that time off. Not me. I get nothing. I wish I could have found a dead body.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” Tracy said. “And you’re probably never going to. I’m the lucky one.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Kitsap County coroner’s autopsy suite—Birdy Waterman’s undisputed domain—was in the basement of an old white house on Sydney Avenue adjacent to the courthouse, the sheriff’s office, and the other government buildings that hugged the side of the hill like barnacles. A new building across the inlet on a hill above Bremerton was being built to house the coroner’s offices. All had been designed to be state of the art. That was good. It was not a surprise to any civic-booster that progress had occurred across the water, and not in Port Orchard proper.

  Port Orchard, the Kitsap County seat, was tattered, bruised, and a little rusty around the edges. In truth, the town of about ten thousand had always been a lovely location in search of a better town. It had its bright spots—no one who lived there couldn’t name at least a half dozen places that out-of-towners simply had to visit when they came—especially in the summertime. There were good restaurants and antique shops along the waterfront, and it was in close proximity to Seattle. But what made Port Orchard almost cool was its slightly ratty seaside vibe that was just waiting for hipsters to discover it. It was a town along the shore without a salt water taffy stand or a bevy of shops selling dried starfish, brass portholes, and seafaring bric-a-brac that had more to do with Nantucket than Washington’s inland sea, Puget Sound.

  That was good too.

  Birdy could see all of that when she took the job, her first after medical school. She rented that little house on Beach Drive on a lease option before she fully knew that Port Orchard was destined to be the comeback kid of Kitsap County. It had to be. It was quirky and diverse. Traits Birdy loved. The town had, she liked to tell others, potential. When she told colleagues that she conducted autopsies in the basement of an old house, many were more charmed than horrified. Or at least that’s how they acted.

  After enrolling Elan in South Kitsap High School, driving to the coroner’s office and conferring with the staff upstairs, Birdy went down to the basement and changed into pale green scrubs and gloves. She retrieved the foot from the walk-in refrigerator, a space that was large enough to hold several bodies at a time. That morning, it was empty, except for that sad little maggot-infested foot. Birdy noted that Sarah had taken great care to ensure the evidence was protected during transport in an Igloo brand Styrofoam ice chest purchased from the Walmart on Bethel Avenue. She peered inside a second foam container. It held some soil and the sword fern that had been shading the dismembered foot where it had been discovered in Banner Forest.

  The foot was small and its very size saddened Birdy. She wouldn’t cry about it, but it pained her. She knew that someone was missing someone. There was a dinner table with an empty space. Maybe a classroom with a desk that sat vacant. Someone out there was missing the person who belonged to the foot.

  At the other end of the spectrum, someone out there somewhere had done this to another human being. Why? The why was not Birdy Waterman’s job, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the situation. Why do people do things like this to each other? What drives the depraved? She knew her psychologist friends in Seattle always had a quick answer for that particular query, but Birdy saw evil and destruction as something that was often more random than those who espouse to know the reasons for things insist with their edicts and theories.

  The little foot belonged to someone. It was part of someone. And now it had been removed from a body by someone or something. Someone who might be skilled in dismemberment? A butcher? A surgeon? Or maybe, it was just someone who had a knife and the twisted notion to use it on another.

  There was something strange about the examination of a body part. There was no face for her to talk to, to soothe—even when it was a conversation, or a prayer that she said only in her head. It was part of someone.

  It was also evidence.

  Birdy wheeled the foot to her autopsy table. She made a mental note to plant the fern if it turned up nothing of evidentiary value. The plant didn’t have to die too.

  Chilled by the icy air of the refrigerator, the maggots had ceased their incessant bobble-dance. Once the light over the autopsy table warmed them, Birdy knew they’d wriggle in that way that makes most—but not her—vomit.

  It was just a foot, but it could tell the forensic pathologist a million things about the person to whom it had once been attached. Unless there were indicators of toxins in the tissue, it likely wouldn’t, however, be able to tell the story of how the person had died.

  Or if the person had really died at all.

  Birdy considered the possibility that there was a victim out there who had survived the unimaginable—the severing of a limb while still alive. It had happened before. She remembered a case in California many years ago in which a young woman had been abducted, raped, butchered, and left for dead in a remote area. But the young woman hadn’t died. Despite the fact that the monster that’d held her captive had chopped off her arms, she climbed from a dumping spot on the side of a road and was rescued by a passing motorist from all but certain death.

  Birdy put the foot on a stainless steel tray on the table and swung the beam of a light over it. It sparkled with the glistening bodies of the massing larvae. They beckoned for her to look closer. No problem. Forensic etymology had always been a captivating subject. Birdy had never been the girly-girl who cowered at the sight of a spider or beetle or slug among the deadfall of the forest. She knew the role of bugs—as she called them when she was a kid—was crucial in the way nature worked.

  She slowly passed a magnifier over the foot, confirming what she’d already seen back in the woods.

  Insect larvae, like those of the blowfly, were fierce flesh eaters. They latched onto dead bodies—or body parts—with little hooks that keep them attached like Velcro. Once they start feeding, they secrete enzymes, which further hasten the natural process of decay. They grow, molt, change, and eat more.

  Birdy remembered one textbook fact that never left her:

  Larvae can consume an entire human body i
n a week.

  As she examined the fly larvae, Birdy collected and cataloged specimens for the state crime lab in Olympia. She was fairly certain that a second molting had occurred, which put the foot at about three days of decomp. Of course, that didn’t mean that the victim had been dead three days. If it had been dumped there by a human predator it was possible that it might have been chilled somewhere, the way some serial killers prolonged the enjoyment by keeping body parts as souvenirs.

  And if a cougar or bear had killed the owner of the foot, then presumably the rotting appendage would have been out in the elements also since Monday.

  Birdy scraped off bits of soil for a better look at the wound where the foot had been severed at the ankle. It was hard to determine if the stump had been excised cleanly or if it had been torn away. She threw more light on it and took photos, the flash bouncing off the gray, water-stained ceiling.

  A disgusting story lurked behind that stain. An assistant before Birdy’s time punctured a body cavity during a postmortem with a little too much gusto. The poor guy hit a gassy pocket in the lungs that sent a geyser of putrid fluids into the air and onto the ceiling. The staff cleaned the mess with bleach and elbow grease, of course, but the county refused to paint over the blemish.

  “You’re getting a brand-new facility and we don’t need to spend the money,” one of the county commissioners said.

  That was four years ago.

  Since that time JOE’S SPLAT, as she dubbed it, had been hovering above the table.

  As Birdy continued to examine the evidence, Kendall Stark arrived and stood in the doorway, watching and gathering her nerve to come get a closer, probably disgusting look.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  Birdy pulled the overhead light away from the foot.

  “I’d say a young woman, maybe as young as fourteen or as old as twenty-five.”

  “Not a boy?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy turned her attention back to the foot. “Well these days, anything is possible. But I see traces of bubble gum pink nail polish on two of the toenails.”