looked at the snake twitching on the ground. Coiled like the tree branches wrapped around the child’s skeleton. After a quick just-in-case shot to the body, the sheriff went to close the refrigerator door. That’s when he looked down into the nest and saw baby rattlers wiggling in their eggshells. He closed the door, locking them in, then checked his neck for anything squirming.
He quickly moved away, making a mental note to put in a call to pest control to send their team out. He had no idea why there were baby snakes in November. It was a long time since spring. Nothing was born in winter.
Something was wrong here.
He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it, like his captain’s old dog hearing a whistle. It sounded like the wind. But it wasn’t exactly wind. The sound was more like a snake coiled in the tree branches. Like…like…
Invisible hissing.
The sheriff quickly moved down the hill to the construction site. There were stumps everywhere. Carcasses of trees. Giant roots torn out of the frozen earth. Several bulldozers were parked down the road. Each had a COLLINS CONSTRUCTION COMPANY sign on its door. The bulldozers sat there, lifeless, after the sheriff had shut down the woods for the investigation. Mr. Collins had already gotten his lawyers on the case, and if the sheriff knew anything about power and politics (and he did), construction would resume shortly. Soon enough, Mr. Collins would turn the trees into lumber to build the houses. The sawdust would go to another company to be mixed with flammable glue to make fake fire logs for Christmas. It was as if Mr. Collins were making the Mission Street Woods dig its own grave. As massive as the woods were, they couldn’t exactly fight back.
The sheriff walked past the police tape. Past the field of tree stumps, already cut short by Mr. Collins back in September. They looked like little tombstones that eventually, no one would visit.
Like the girl with the painted nails.
As he drove back to the station, the sheriff looked at the little drops of rain falling from the clouds onto his windshield. He thought about the lovely time he had with Kate Reese just five days ago. God, it felt like a year. He wanted to see her again, but it was Thanksgiving with her kid. And tomorrow would be their Movie Friday together. So, it would have to wait for Saturday when maybe she’d get a babysitter, and she could erase the nightmare of his week with two hours of her company. She looked so nice last Saturday. With that new dress from the Grove City outlets. And her lipstick.
Like the girl with the painted nails.
Daddy.
When the phone rang, the sheriff almost jumped out of his skin.
It was Carl.
“Hey, Carl. You’re a day early. I’m surprised to hear from you on Thanksgiving.”
“You wouldn’t be if you met my mother-in-law,” he said.
The sheriff didn’t laugh. That joke was as old as their friendship.
“What do you got for me?” the sheriff asked.
Carl went on to spew his trademark technical jargon. The sheriff always wondered why geniuses couldn’t talk like normal people. But maybe that’s what made them geniuses. After wading through biological data and DNA and carbon dating factoids for ten minutes, the sheriff was able to put together the facts about the skeleton.
The child was about eight years old.
The child was a boy.
The child had been in the ground for around fifty years.
And most impressively, Carl was able to figure out the cause of death.
The sheriff was stunned when he heard that. Technology had come a long way in the two decades he had been an officer. But still, he had never heard about a cause of death from a fifty-year-old skeleton when there was nothing to test but bones.
But that’s just it. There was.
Carl figured there must have been something in the soil. With enough pressure, coal becomes a diamond. So, maybe it had to do with the coal mine. Or the tree roots. Or some temperature regulation he could not understand yet. A medical mystery that someday would be as routine as fingerprints or DNA. Whatever it was, it kept enough of the brain preserved. The autopsy was conclusive.
The sheriff was ready for anything. A stab wound. A gunshot. He had seen worse. Much worse. But when Carl told him the actual cause of death, the answer was so shocking that the sheriff stopped for a moment. He looked at the phone in his