Amy Cross
THE PURCHASE
Prologue
“Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
Climbing out of the car, wincing a little at the pain in his back, Doctor Jack Levant looked toward the cabin and immediately noticed a few key details. Thirty years in the field had taught him to work fast.
From the cabin’s design and layout, he could immediately identify its construction as early-to-mid nineteenth century, which meant that it was most likely home to one of the prospectors who’d flooded this part of the country. The fact that the cabin was nestled in a valley, so far from the usual trade routes, made it a working station rather than a trading point. The construction looked ramshackle, as if it had been hurriedly put together by, perhaps, a small team. Possibly just one man. And the lack of any other buildings in the area – for miles around, in fact – made him think that this had been home to someone desperate, someone who was willing to go to a place that everybody else had written off.
All of this, he’d worked out in less time for him to straighten his posture and swing the car door shut.
“Doctor Levant,” a breathless female voice said, as footsteps hurried closer. “I’m so grateful to you for coming all this way. I know your time’s very valuable, but I promise I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t have something to show you.”
“It’s not every day that one’s student discovers a perfectly preserved Rattier cabin in Marsh territory,” he said with a faint smile, before turning to Catherine Chandler. “I looked at the photos you sent. Allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations.”
“It was mostly luck, really,” she said, reaching out to shake his hand.
“Of course, but luck can make or break careers.” He shook her hand briefly, before stepping past her and starting to make his way across the muddy open space. “Without luck, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ve got a good two or three years’ worth of work out here. Research papers. Conferences. If you don’t make a PHD out of this place, I’ll be sorely disappointed.”
“It’s amazing that the site has never been touched before,” she said, hurrying alongside him. “One in a million. It’s also amazing that the bodies have barely been disturbed.”
“Bodies?”
“Four of them. We’re still in the early stages of our examinations, but I think it’s three male and one female. And they’re—”
“Prospectors, of course,” he said, interrupting her. He could see Chandler’s fellow students working at various locations around the cabin’s perimeter. “Possibly a family, although that’s rather surprising given how small this place looks. I’d have thought it might have been home to a loner, striking out in the hope of getting some gold. Not that there was ever much gold in this region, so I’m thinking it was a chancer. Or a madman.”
“The bodies are in quite unusual positions,” Chandler continued as they stopped in front of the cabin. Turning, she pointed toward the front of the building. “There’s one male inside, and then a male and a female outside together, and then a third male a little further away.”
She pointed toward the northern side of the site.
Levant looked, but at first he saw nothing of note.
“In the tree, Sir,” Chandler added.
He looked up, and finally he saw a human figure hanging from one of the branches. Some form of noose appeared to be tied around his neck.
“How is he still up there after all this time?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
“A combination of unlikely factors,” she explained. “The rope isn’t actually a rope at all, it’s some kind of chain. Environmental conditions have drastically reduced the damage to the body. And there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of wildlife around here.”
“So you’re telling me that the poor bastard’s been hanging there for a century and a half?”
“It would seem that way.”
For a moment, Levant could only stare at the body. In all his years of field work, he’d never seen anything quite so bizarre. He was almost jealous of Chandler’s luck, and he was starting to think that perhaps this site was too valuable to be entrusted to a mere student. He didn’t want to seem arrogant, of course, but he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that he and he alone would be properly suited to the task. Even if it meant Chandler had to wait a little longer for her PHD.
“Fascinating,” he murmured. “Evidently you’ve stumbled upon quite a tableau. One can’t help but wonder who these four poor wretches were, and how they ended up meeting their end out here in the wilderness.”
“This part of Marsh territory was struck by a particularly cold winter back in the late nineteenth century,” she pointed out. “No-one knows how many prospectors and settlers died, but the estimates range from a few hundred to as many as one and a half thousand. There was a three-month period that’s still referred to by the locals as the Ice Winter. It’s quite possible that these people died during that winter. It’s said that in some areas there was up to five feet of snow. Roads were impassable. Whole towns got cut off for months.”
“Interesting,” he said, before making his way over to the cabin. Reaching the window, he peered inside and saw two students examining a dead body that was sitting upright in a chair.
“Male,” Chandler said, stopping next to him and observing the scene. “Mature. No younger than twenty, I estimate, and probably at least a couple of decades older. There’s a whiskey bottle next to him, and look, part of his skull has been destroyed. There are shards over in the corner. There’s also a knife in the back of the chair.”
“So there is,” Levant replied, looking down and seeing the handle of a knife poking out.
“There’s that broken window pane, too,” Chandler pointed out. “I can’t help wondering when that happened.”
“This man wasn’t a prospector,” Levant said. “You can tell by his clothes. They’re too fine.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So he was just visiting.”
“There’s a cart,” she explained. “It’s right over here.”
For a moment, Levant could only stare at the skull of the body on the chair. A few scraps of skin still clung to the bone, and a surprising amount of hair remained on the scalp. The skull’s remaining jawbone section was hanging low, although Levant knew it was impossible to determine if it had been in that position when the man had died. Perhaps it had slipped due to the processes of decomposition. Overall, around two thirds to three quarters of the skull remained intact.
“You mentioned a cart?” he said finally.
“That’s where the other two bodies were.”
He turned to her.
“This way,” she said, and she led him around to the side of the cabin, where another student was taking samples from the front of a medium-sized wooden cart.
“Well, look at this,” Levant muttered as soon as he spotted the two withered corpses on the back of the cart. “Your mystery site just became a little more mysterious, Ms. Chandler.”
“One male, one female,” she explained as they stopped in front of the cart and looked at the bodies. “They appear to have been… I don’t know, entwined somehow when they died. Embracing, perhaps. There’s no sign of any clothing. I’m leaning toward the idea that they were perhaps placed on the cart after they died.”
“Why would that be?”
“I don’t know at this stage.”
“You need to figure that out.”
“I know. There’s quite a lot of discoloration, especially around the necks. I’m not sure yet whether or not that’s relevant.”
“Star-crossed lovers, perhaps?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow, before turning and looking toward the body that still hung – after so many years – from a distant tree. “This cabin was the scene of a robbery,” he declared suddenly. “It’s obvious.”