The Butterfly Forest

SEVENTY-SEVEN

There were no more roads. No more trails. Billie and I’d come to the last bit of what would have passed as any kind of manmade path or clearing in the forest. We got out of the Jeep, the heat and humidity wrapped around us like a steam bath. I swatted a deerfly the second it landed on the back of my neck. I tucked my Glock under my belt in the small of my back and lifted the .12 gauge shotgun from the backseat. Sweat dripped down my sides, soaking into my shirt at the belt.

Billie carried his backpack, his knife now in a sheath attached to his belt. “You want to carry a gun?” I asked.

“No.”

“I don’t know if we’ll find anything. These guys could be long gone. But if they’re still here, it’s going to be very dangerous.”

Billie said nothing. He inhaled deeply, more like he tasted the air rather than just taking a deep breath. I opened the map. “Even from a satellite, with its high-powered camera, you wouldn’t be able to see anything below this massive canopy of trees. Probably the only way Molly and Mark found this area, if this is where they came, was by getting lost.”

“I love these woods. It’s not so daunting. This is the Florida of my ancestors. Even before the time of the Seminole Wars, hundreds of years before. Many tribes lived off the St. Johns River and the land it touches on its journey to the sea. I’d rather be here than Miami. You can survive in here. This place was home-sweet-home two-hundred years ago.” Billie began walking. I locked the Jeep and followed him.

We were soon immersed in deep woods, sunlight all but impenetrable while we hiked around six-foot high ferns. Air plants and bromeliads clung to tree branches resembling red and yellow decorations strung through the limbs. Dragonflies hovered in mid-flight, waiting for the right moment to savagely attack tiny midges and mosquitoes. Bumblebees darted from white orchids to yellow coneflowers. The air was heavy, filled with smells of decaying leaves, moss and wild azalea. I reached down and knocked a crawling tick off my blue jeans.

We continued walking and entered an area less dense. Old oak trees, many the girth of an elephant at the base, stood resembling quiet sentries. The forest felt immutable, a divine being with lungs, a spirit and life sustained through an eternal umbilical cord from Eden.

Through patches of blue sky, beyond the canopies of oak limbs, I caught a glimpse of carrion birds riding air currents high above the forest, the sun brighter than a welder’s arc in the sky. We walked across shadows cast by trees that seemed older than the nation. Billie said nothing, squatting down to study an indentation in the soil.

“What do you see?”

“Tracks. At least three men.” Billie touched one of his fingers to the soil at the toe of a print. He looked up at me. “Odd shoe patterns. Almost like moccasins. They leave no imprint.”

“You mean pattern, like tread on a tire.”

“Yes. Sean, it’s like they’re all wearing the same shoes. No pattern.”

I looked at the imprints. My thoughts flashing back to the small piece of duct tape I’d spotted on Ed Crews’ boot. “I can just see the tracks. Can you follow them?”

“I can try, but no money-back guarantees.” Billie looked at the leaves, the bent grasses, the crushed acorns, the manmade stamp in patches of earth, then he began walking. He’d stop every twenty feet or so, bend down, eyes honing in on signs of human presence, faint marks almost imperceptible to the untrained eye. “Three men were following someone.”

“How can you tell?”

“I see a fourth set, and it has tread.” He pointed to a print in the soil that had a definite pattern, similar to a hiking boot. A black snake slithered through the leaves and pine needles. There was a lump in its throat, just behind the head, the wriggling tail of a live field mouse sticking from the snake’s mouth.

Dark clouds moved in and blocked the light. Under the umbrella of ancient oaks, an early twilight was settling throughout the woods. An owl flew without a sound from a tree deeper into the hollow. Billie stopped and seemed to consider the flight of the owl for a moment. He said nothing. We walked in the direction the bird of prey had flown.

We hiked another quarter mile into the woods, the light dimming as the storm approached. Lightning cracked, its explosion of light creating a white brightness that cast a shadow of something moving for only a second. But it was long enough to catch our eye. The shadow was not part of the forest. It was an aberration, an out of place silhouette barely swaying across the gnarled and aged face of time stamped into what looked like the oldest tree in the forest.

From a limb, hanging at the end of a rope, the lifeless body of Luke Palmer rocked eerily in the breeze.