The Hunting Lodge

Chapter One: The Grave by the Road

The backhoe stopped because Curt Danner saw color in the dirt.

He had been widening the shoulder of Shore Access Road since seven that morning, chewing a trench two feet deep along the tree line where the county wanted a new drainage channel. The soil there was sandy, full of pine roots and old beer cans, and Curt had grown used to the way the bucket bit through it with a soft grinding sigh. Then a scrap of cloth came up on the teeth, and it was not the gray-brown of buried trash. It was blue with small yellow flowers on it, faded but recognizable, the way a thing looks when it has been under the ground a long time and the ground has been kind to it.

Curt shut down the machine. In the sudden quiet he could hear the lake through the trees, the small slapping of water against the public dock a hundred yards below.

He climbed down and crouched at the edge of the trench. What he had taken for a root was not a root. It was thin and pale and curved, and at the end of it were the small, distinct bones of a hand.

Curt Danner was fifty-one years old and had never in his life dialed 911. He did it then, standing in the middle of Shore Access Road with his hard hat in his hand, and when the dispatcher asked him what his emergency was he found he had to say it twice before the words came out in order.

There was a girl in the ground by the lake.

---

Claire Milligan got the call at 9:40 the next morning, in a windowless room on the third floor of the state investigative bureau, surrounded by four banker's boxes belonging to a 1998 arson-homicide out of the eastern district.

"Elder Point," Larry Swindell said. He was standing in her doorway with his coat already on, which meant he had somewhere better to be. "Lake Henning. Road crew turned up a set of remains yesterday afternoon. Female, probably. Local PD asked for cold-case support."

"How long in the ground?"

"Long enough that nobody's going to lose sleep over the timeline." He tapped the doorframe twice, a habit he had when he wanted to sound casual. "Two hours north. Nice town. Four thousand people, a lot of lake houses, a lantern festival that gets in the Sunday travel section every year."

Claire capped her pen. "You've never once told me the population of a town before you told me the case."

Swindell smiled without warmth. "Buddy Rankin is the county commissioner up there. He's been good to this office. Budget-wise. And it's an election year."

"So handle it quietly."

"Handle it well," he said. "And fast. Identify the remains, give the family a name, write it up. If there's a homicide, we'll talk. If it's a thirty-year-old drowning that somebody buried out of panic, I don't want it living on the internet for six months."

"And if it's a homicide, Larry?"

"Then it's a homicide." He straightened his collar. "But start by asking whether it is, instead of assuming."

She was on the road by ten fifteen.

The drive north went through farmland, then hills, then hardwood forest turning the deep rust color that brought the leaf-peepers up from the capital every October. Claire drove with the window cracked and the radio off, and somewhere around the ninety-minute mark she picked up her phone and called her daughter, knowing she would get voicemail, because Sophie was in third period and because Sophie had stopped answering on the first ring sometime around the divorce.

"Hey, kid. It's Mom. I'm going to be up north for a couple of days, maybe more. It's a real case, not a paperwork thing." She winced at herself. "That doesn't matter to you. I know. Call me tonight if you feel like it. Love you."

She hung up and drove another twenty minutes before she let herself think about the fact that Saturday was hers and she was not going to be there for it.

---

Elder Point announced itself with a hand-painted sign: WELCOME TO ELDER POINT — HOME OF THE LANTERN FESTIVAL — OCT 11. Under it, a wooden cutout of a paper lantern, weathered to a soft gold.

The town sat on the southern shore of Lake Henning like something arranged for a postcard: a main street of brick storefronts, a white clapboard library, a marina with a hundred masts, and beyond it the water, enormous and steel-blue under a sky that could not decide about rain. Claire followed the shoreline west, past a bait shop and a church, and then the trees closed in and the road narrowed and she saw the flashing lights.

They had strung tape across a fifty-yard stretch of shoulder. Two Elder Point patrol cars, a county van, an unmarked sedan. A knot of five or six locals stood at the far end of the tape with their hands in their pockets, watching the way people watch a house fire.

A man in a canvas jacket came toward her before she had both feet out of the car.

"This is a closed scene."

"Claire Milligan. State bureau, cold case unit." She held up her credentials and let him read them longer than he needed to.

He was about forty, broad through the shoulders, with dark hair going gray at the temples and the kind of face that had been out in weather most of its life. His badge hung from a chain on his neck. "Patrick Osborne. Elder Point detective."

"You're the one who asked for support."

"The chief is the one who asked for support." He said it evenly, without apology. "We've got four sworn officers and a chief who's sixty-three. I asked for a forensic anthropologist. I didn't ask for an investigator."

"You got both," Claire said. "Show me."

Something in her tone must have been acceptable, because he lifted the tape.

The trench ran along the tree line, and they had widened it into a proper excavation, a rectangle eight feet by six, staked and gridded with string. Two technicians in coveralls knelt in it with trowels and brushes. At the bottom, in a shallow depression maybe eighteen inches down, lay the remains.

Claire had seen a great many bones. She still made herself stop at the edge and look properly, because she believed that the first look was owed.

The skeleton lay on its right side, knees slightly drawn up, one arm folded beneath. The skull had turned toward the lake. Around the ribs and pelvis were the shreds of a dress — blue cotton with a yellow floral print, the fabric gone to lace where it had rotted. A thin strap remained across one shoulder blade. There were no shoes.

"Eighteen inches," Claire said. "That's not a grave. That's a hole somebody dug in a hurry, in the dark, with a shovel they had in the truck."

Osborne said nothing.

"How far to the water?"

"Hundred and ten yards down that slope. There's a footpath."

"Public?"

"Everything on this side is public. North shore's mostly private."

A man in his sixties straightened up from the far end of the trench, pulled down his mask, and picked his way over. He had wild white eyebrows and reading glasses pushed up into his hair.

"Dr. James Buckner," he said. "County medical examiner. You're the state."

"Claire Milligan."

"Then you'll want the short version, and you'll get it with the caveat that I'll deny every word of it in three days when the lab talks to me." He crouched, gestured with a gloved hand. "Female. Pelvic morphology is unambiguous. Young — the collarbone hasn't finished fusing and the third molars are just up. I'd say seventeen to twenty-three. Height around five-four."

"Time since death?"

"Fabric's mostly gone, bone's dry and stained, no soft tissue, no odor, root intrusion through the rib cage from that birch there." He nodded at a slim white tree eight feet away. "That birch is maybe eighteen years old. Roots have grown through her. I'd say twelve to twenty years. If you made me bet, fifteen."

Claire looked down at the small skull turned toward the water.

"Fifteen years," she said. "Detective Osborne, how long has the lantern festival been running?"

He hesitated a half-second too long. "Sixty-some years."

"And she's a hundred yards from the shore, in a summer dress, with no shoes on." Claire took out her notebook. "I want dental records requested for every female between fifteen and twenty-five reported missing in this county — and every county touching it — in the last twenty-five years. Today."

"That's a lot of paper for a Wednesday."

"Then it's a good thing you've got four sworn officers and a state investigator," Claire said. "Where do I find your files?"

Osborne looked at her for a long moment. Behind them, down at the tape, someone in the small crowd had begun to cry — a woman's voice, low, the kind of sound a person makes when they already know something.

"Basement of the town hall," he said. "I'll get you a key."