Such a broad offer, Amelia murmured. So many questions. . . .
“Is Annie Domingo here?” Cormac said.
The volunteer opened her mouth to tell him when a door behind the desk opened, and a woman in her thirties in a Forest Service uniform emerged, as if she’d heard her name spoken. She was average height, with an athletic build and skin like weathered sandstone. Her thick black hair was braided down her back. Her dark eyes were piercing.
“Oh, here she is! Annie, someone’s here to see you.”
“Thanks, Mary.”
Mary smiled happily at him. “Have a lovely visit!” she said before moving off to help another visitor. That left Cormac and Domingo regarding each other across the laminate counter, between the bins of brochures and park maps.
Native American, isn’t she? Amelia answered. There were several tribes located in this area, weren’t there?
“Hi, can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m Cormac Bennett, we spoke on the phone a couple of days ago.”
She blew out what looked for all the world like a relieved breath. “Oh my God, thank you for coming.” She came around the front desk, all business. “We should go somewhere to talk.”
Bemused, he followed her out the building and across the parking lot to some kind of nature trail, marked with gravel and plastic educational signs.
“I just want to get out someplace no one will overhear. I’m already on the outs with a couple of people over this.”
“What, for calling in a supernatural consultant?”
Her answering smirk suggested she had some sense of humor. “The medical examiner is doing another round of blood tests, trying to figure out if Arty ate something poisonous that affected his digestion, so that he either couldn’t eat, or even when he ate he couldn’t absorb nutrients. Like that McCandless kid from Into the Wild? You hear about that?”
Cormac had. A suburban kid abandoned everything and fled to Alaska to live in the wild. Starved to death in a matter of weeks. The initial assumption was he’d been too stupid to hack it. Turned out, he might have eaten seeds containing some kind of toxin.
“I suppose that makes sense.”
“Arty—his name was Art Weber—was a backwoods ranger here for fifteen years. He knew what not to eat. Something else killed him.”
“You sure he didn’t just. . .pass away? He have any emotional issues?”
She gave him another look, her brow furrowed. “Starving yourself to death is a real inefficient way to commit suicide.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully.
They stopped at a rustic, rough-hewn wooden bench along the trail. A nice place to rest, for anyone who needed to rest on a half-mile circular trail. For all that the area around the visitor center and monument was crowded and noisy, they had this trail to themselves. Even noise from the freeway was muffled. The running water of a creek trickled nearby, and the underbrush was thick with birds calling.
Before sitting, Domingo took another look around. “I think something happened to Arty. Something the medical examiner’s never going to find.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know—what do you normally do in a case like this?”
“Not sure there’s ever been a case like this.”
Amelia said, We look for stories, scour the old texts for symptoms, for similarities. We examine the site and look for symbols carved or painted on the walls. We look for bits and pieces of spells that have been used up. We hope for a lead, to make scrying easier. If we don’t find a lead we scry anyway.
Amelia had a spell that woke dead bodies, so she could question them about their final moments. He was pretty sure this Arty had been dead too long to try that. He hoped.
I do have other methods. I think we should see this place, where the man died.
“Can you show me where your friend died? I’ll know more if I can have a look around.”