The Chimera Secret

16

Olivia MacCarthy was a bulky, businesslike woman with a florid, round face and brown hair that hung in thick tresses across her shoulders. Her dark eyes squinted at Ethan and Lopez as though they had landed outside her creaking homestead from another planet.

‘Have the both of you lost your minds?’

Lopez took the photograph that Olivia shoved back in her direction.

‘This is where the evidence has led us,’ Ethan said. ‘Crazy as it sounds, we think that Cletus and his brother Jesse were attacked by something in the woods.’

Olivia’s face screwed up on itself.

‘I ain’t heard such rubbish since years gone by. That boy Randy lived in a world all of his own. You look hard enough you could probably find evidence that Cleet and Jesse were abducted by aliens.’

‘That’s probably true, ma’am,’ Ethan replied, ‘but right now your brother-in-law is facing a triple-murder charge on his brothers and a park ranger and we can’t ignore that.’ Olivia’s haughty demeanour faltered slightly and Ethan pressed his advantage. ‘It was Jesse who said they were attacked by something, ma’am. We’re just trying to find out what.’

Olivia relented, and stepped back as she opened the porch door for them to enter.

It appeared that Olivia and Cletus MacCarthy had lived a Spartan lifestyle. The house was more like a cabin, set amid deep forest near the Salmon River. The smell of wood smoke and dried meat tainted the air, but somehow it seemed cleaner than the clinical whiff of air conditioning.

Coals smoldered in a fireplace in the main room, still hot enough to warm the cabin to a comfortable temperature despite the chill air outside. Ethan realized that there was no mains electricity, just a diesel generator he’d glimpsed outside in the yard.

‘You’re off the grid?’ Lopez asked Olivia, noticing the same thing.

‘Don’t got no need for the grid,’ Olivia replied. ‘The land provides most of what we need, if you know where to look.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Cleet taught me that.’

‘How often did Cletus go hunting?’ Lopez asked her.

‘Quicker to ask when he wasn’t hunting,’ Olivia replied. ‘He was either acting as a tour guide in the summer months or hunting for game in the winter. I’d reckon him to be out five or six days a week come rain or shine.’

‘Was Randy ever with him?’ Ethan asked.

Olivia looked at him as though he’d turned blue.

‘That boy didn’t know how to get out of bed, let alone go hikin’ out into the mountains.’

Lopez opened a slim folder she had brought with her, containing a series of photographs taken from Randy’s computer. She showed them to Olivia.

‘These were taken out in the wilderness, but we found them on Randy’s computer. We think that Cletus took them for him and passed them along.’

Olivia looked at the images and Ethan saw her eyes flicker with recognition, as though she had seen the pictures before. She balked and turned away from them.

‘Kids, most likely, playing pranks in the woods.’

‘Did Cletus ever hunt out toward the Pioneer range?’ Ethan asked her.

Olivia nodded.

‘Sure he did, but I never saw him with pictures like that… God knows who Randy might have got talkin’ to on the Internet, swapping fools’ pictures and talking their fantasies out.’

Lopez shook her head.

‘These were downloaded from a digital camera direct to Randy’s computer, Olivia,’ she said gently. ‘Had to have been taken by somebody local. Did Cletus take a camera with him on his hunts and tours?’

Olivia’s lip quivered, and Ethan realized he was witnessing the collapse of a once robust and content woman. Fat tears welled across her eyelids as she turned abruptly to hide her face from them, her hand flying to her mouth. She did not reply, but nodded instead.

‘Can we see it?’ Ethan asked as gently as he could. ‘It might prove that Cletus took the photographs.’

Olivia pointed one heavy arm at a window shelf nearby. Ethan instantly saw a camouflaged camera case lying open there, the silver camera within clearly visible. He walked over and slipped the camera from the case, turned it on and flipped through the menu’s picture history.

Within thirty seconds he found what he was looking for and showed it to Lopez.

‘One of the shots from the computer,’ she said, seeing the image of a gigantic footprint in soft sand.

Ethan shut the camera down as he looked at Olivia MacCarthy. She stood beside the fireplace, one arm outstretched to balance against the wall as she angrily wiped tears from her face.

‘Ma’am, we know that Cletus was working with his brother, searching for what I think is called sasquatch here.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Olivia muttered.

‘Cletus might have been killed by something out in the woods,’ Lopez pressed, ‘and his brother might go to prison for a crime he did not commit if we can’t find evidence to back up his claims. Is that what you want, Olivia? Is that what Cletus would have wanted?’

Olivia stared at her feet for a long moment.

‘We need to find him,’ Ethan said. ‘I think we all need to find Cletus.’

Olivia looked up at him, and for the first time he thought he caught a glimpse of understanding in her eyes. She sniffed mightily, then gestured to the door.

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ she said.

Olivia led them out of the cabin and round the back to the yard. Ethan saw a tidy-looking vegetable garden housed in a chicken-wire mesh wall, a pair of small sheds and two kennels that backed onto the dense forest stretching beyond.

‘It happened two or three years back,’ she said as they walked. ‘Don’t never seen anything like it before or since.’

As they walked, two heads appeared from the kennels. Ethan felt his pace falter as two huge Rottweilers loped from within, drool spilling from between thick white fangs. Olivia waved the two dogs over without apparent concern.

‘Don’t worry, they look like pure evil but they’re totally docile, which is the problem.’

‘Problem?’ Lopez asked as Olivia ruffled the menacing dogs’ heads.

Olivia stood up straight and looked into the forest as she spoke.

‘Two years ago these dogs were only let loose after dark, because if you’d visited here then they’d have eaten you both alive. They were trained to attack intruders because some of the farms about here had been broken into by thieves and vandals, so we trained ’em that way.’

‘What changed?’ Ethan asked.

Olivia was still focusing on the forest ahead as she replied.

‘We used to get all kinds of animals passing through here,’ she said, ‘deer and the like, even elk sometimes. The animal trails ran right through here and up into the hills to th’north. I used to watch them from the kitchen window. Then, couple of years ago, they all vanished just as quick as that.’

She clicked her fingers and the sound seemed to echo away into the forest. Ethan realized belatedly that he could hear little birdsong and see nothing moving in the dense woods. Beneath the low, brooding clouds and with the air cold and still, it felt as lifeless as the surface of the moon.

‘Anyways, I came out here one night at dusk to feed the dogs like I always did. Everything was half-light like it is at that time, and about this time of year too. As I was walking out here, I felt something… strange. It was the weirdest sensation. You ever have a dream where you see a ghost in the dream, or something impossible happens and it raises your heckles like you’ve been tapped on the shoulder by Death himself?’

Ethan nodded but did not elaborate. Olivia went on.

‘The dogs were both out of their kennels and they was growling out at the woods. I couldn’t see much but the dogs started howling like I’ve never heard ’em do before or since. I don’t mind tellin’ you that I panicked and set them loose on whatever was agitatin’ them.’

Lopez, her own eyes cast out into the lonely woods, spoke softly. ‘What happened?’

Olivia gestured to the forest.

‘They ran no more’n twenty paces toward the treeline and then both of ’em came up short like they’d hit a brick wall. They came runnin’ right back past me, into the house and neither of ’em came back out for more than a month.’

Ethan looked at her. ‘You think they saw something?’

Olivia nodded slowly. ‘It wasn’t just that, it was the smell.’

‘The smell?’ Lopez echoed.

‘Like nothing you’ve ever smelled before,’ Olivia said, her nose crinkling up at the memory of it. ‘Imagine fifty people hiking through a rainforest together for six months, not taking a shower or washing their clothes or cleanin’ up after themselves, and then being packed into a small room with you for a week.’ She shook her head. ‘I nearly threw my guts up. We’re standing here a hundred yards from the treeline, and whatever it was that smelled so bad was somewhere beyond that and it still nearly made me hurl, y’know what I’m sayin’?’

Ethan scanned the treeline and reassessed the property. Clapperboard walls, single-glazed windows, no land line. Vulnerable and exposed.

‘Did you see it?’ he asked her finally.

Olivia nodded.

‘Only briefly,’ she replied, her voice now a whisper. ‘I couldn’t move, the smell was so bad and the feeling of being watched just had me rooted to the spot. I must have been here for twenty minutes or more, and then it moved just across there in the trees.’

Olivia pointed to a dense clump of pines jutting out toward the homestead, and an animal trail that ran alongside it and into the forest.

‘What did it look like?’ Lopez asked, unable to contain her curiosity.

Olivia looked like she was going to throw up all over again, her face pale now.

‘Big,’ she uttered. ‘Biggest damned thing I ever saw, and hunched over a bit like a gorilla or something. But it was lookin’ at me. Jesus, makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. It must have been watching me for a long time because the rest of the wildlife had taken off a few days before I saw it.’

‘Is that when Cletus started taking pictures for Randy?’

Olivia recovered herself, and nodded.

‘I told him about it, and he said he’d seen things when he’d been out and about in the woods but never told me on account of me thinking he’d lost his mind. We neither of us spoke of it to anybody else but Randy.’

Ethan took a breath, and took a chance.

‘Did Cletus keep a record of what he and Randy learned about this creature?’

Olivia MacCarthy stared out into the forest for a moment more and then turned to Ethan. She reached up the collar of her shirt and undid two buttons before delving in and retrieving a slim black flash drive that was tied to a thread. She snapped the thread before handing the drive to Ethan.

‘Randy used to say that Cleet should save a copy of everythin’ they found, because someday people might threaten them. I told them both they were fools to think anything they might find out here would make them that important.’

‘And did they?’ Lopez asked. ‘Find anything important?’

Olivia nodded.

‘Whatever’s on that drive is what Randy and Cleet were doing, and whatever they found is there. Cleet kept it buried in a plastic box out in the yard, but since what happened. . I’ve kept it on my person, just in case.’

Ethan looked at the drive in his hand, and glanced at Lopez.

‘Didn’t Sally MacCarthy say that she was sure her house had been searched by someone, after she found Randy’s body?’

Lopez nodded.

‘Maybe this is why. Maybe there really is something on that drive that incriminates somebody enough to lead them to kill, and maybe Randy’s claims of government agents working out here weren’t so wild after all.’

‘Whoever they are,’ Olivia MacCarthy rumbled, ‘find them and make them pay. Don’t let my Cletus have had his life ended for nothing.’