As she brushed off the dirt, Jake asked, “Are you okay? Did you trip over something?”
“No. My foot sunk into the ground.”
Jake looked down at his feet and noticed that the dirt was almost to his ankles.
Sara stepped onto hard ground and asked, “Why would it be like that?”
“I don’t know. It’s not quicksand.”
Jake scooped up some of the dirt and looked at it briefly before tossing it aside.
“This is really odd,” he said before he turned and looked at the low pile of branches just inches from his right foot.
It only took a few seconds to discover something unusual about the branches, but he continued to just stare at the pile trying to determine the relationship between the two peculiar discoveries.
Sara looked where Jake was staring and immediately noticed what was keeping his focus.
Jake suddenly closed his eyes and quietly said, “Sara, could you please return to the horses?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m right, I don’t want you here. Please go.”
Sara was shaken by the distant tone in Jake’s voice, but decided that this wasn’t the time to be stubborn.
“I’ll wait for you to come back.”
Jake continued to stare at the branches as he replied, “Thank you, Sara.”
Sara took one last look at Jake’s face before turning and retracing their tracks back to the refuge.
After he heard Sara walk away, Jake turned and watched her until she was no longer visible, He then stepped away from the pile of branches and leaned his Winchester against the nearest pine trunk.
He then yanked his gloves from under his belt and quickly pulled them on before he dropped to his knees at the edge of the soft ground. He closed his eyes and hoped he was wrong before he opened them again. He poked the ground and found that there was less than a foot of the soft ground before it was covered by the branches. He pushed the branches back another foot before he began to dig away the soil with his hands.
He continued shoveling away the dirt in large scoops as he dug deeper. He didn’t care if he looked like a dog hunting for a field mouse; he just rammed his fingers into the growing hole and ripped away the dark earth.
His gloves were filthy, and his fingertips were getting numb as the dirt continued to fly out of the hole. He was just about to believe that he’d was wrong when his unfeeling fingers struck something. The hole was almost three feet deep when he leaned forward to see what had stopped him. He hoped it was a tree root, but it hadn’t seemed to be hard enough.
The shadowed forest made it difficult for him to make out what lay at the bottom of the hole, so Jake began to remove more dirt from the walls to expand the hole’s diameter. He spent another ten minutes making it wider before he stopped for a second time.
When he peered into the hole this time, he still couldn’t quite make out was at the bottom, so he began brushing away the dirt. Just fifteen seconds later, he stopped brushing, then quickly turned away and vomited.
He stood, took off his filthy gloves and tossed them aside before he wiped his mouth with his shirt sleeve. Then he began kicking the dirt back into the hole until it was half-filled. He then stared at the ground for two minutes before he picked up his Winchester and began walking away.
Jake wasn’t even sure how long it had been since he had started digging but knew that Sara must be terribly worried by now. As he quickly made his way out of the forest, he knew he’d have to return soon. But as he passed through the trees, his gruesome discovery was already spawning far more questions about what had happened on the second of July and about himself.
_____
Sara had been anxiously waiting with the horses for almost an hour. If it hadn’t been for Jake’s stunned reaction, she might have considered a simpler, less dreadful solution to what he had probably found. But seeing the horror in Jake’s eyes after finding the soft ground where it shouldn’t have been, then seeing the pile of pine branches that had been cut, not broken, led to only one possibility. Jake’s father was buried in the forest. Just as Jake had, Sara hoped that she was wrong. But when Jake hadn’t returned for thirty more minutes, she knew that Jake had probably discovered his father’s body.
While the discovery was a ghastly find in it itself, she knew that it also meant that Dave Forrest had not only murdered Jake’s mother, but had killed his father as well. She couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be for Jake and three times, she had almost reentered the sanctuary to find him. But each time she took that first step, she changed her mind. She would save her compassion until he emerged. Until he did, she just wondered what he would do when he reached the same conclusion. Would he then try to begin another search for his parents’ true killer, or would he let the sheriff and the law handle it? But beyond worrying about what he might do, she prayed that Jake wouldn’t be so devastated by the discovery that he changed into a brooding, angry man.
_____
By the time he walked out of the forest’s shadows, Jake had recovered enough from the shock to be able to focus on what had probably happened and what he needed to do. He was no longer numb from what he’d seen poking out of the ground at the bottom of the hole. Despite the horrific discovery, Jake knew that the last thing he could afford to do
