Beasts of the Field: The Search
Episode II
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← In Episode I: The Woods, Judith directed Sheriff Tim Morrissey and the local police to search the secluded Kentucky mountains in hopes of finding a missing college student.
While Beasts of the Field can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s first adventure, Down in the Holler, in which she investigates a cold case in rural Kentucky. Click here to read Down in the Holler.
“All right, y’all, listen up!” A voice blared through a megaphone, blasting its harsh, stuttering sound down the line of cars that crowded the country road. “Samantha Scott’s phone last pinged right around this field, so y’all stay in your designated section to make sure we don’t miss nothin’. Stick together with your group; be real thorough. If you find somethin’, do not touch it. I repeat: Do not touch it.”
Pulling her baseball cap lower over her forehead, Judith held her hands together and closed her eyes. The small town folk around her probably thought she was praying. Or at least that’s how she hoped it looked.
Ignoring the morning chill, the tall dew-slick grasses beading moisture onto her pants, the assaulting cacophony of the megaphone, Judith focused on the quiet whisper, the frequency only she could hear. Rotating slowly, she faced the field and turned in an arc, waiting.
Nothing, nothing. Then, as she reached the end of her arc, her fingertips dipped of their own accord, as though tugged by a spider’s invisible thread.
Judith opened her eyes. Her clasped hands pointed toward the far end of the field, the disused railroad tracks.
Something was there. An item of clothing, maybe. Or Samantha’s phone. Something. She could feel it.
The piercing drone of the loudspeaker crashed back into Judith’s awareness. “We all got these handy magic communication devices in our pockets, so if y’all see somethin’, call 9-1-1 and let the professionals take care of the evidence. The police and their dogs already searched this field, but they coulda missed somethin’. We’re lookin’ for shoes, socks, a phone, footprints, tire marks – if it looks like it belonged to or was made by a human, you need to stop and call the police. Thank y’all for showin’ up this morning. Now let’s do our level best to find somethin’ that’ll help the police bring Samantha home.”
Judith hurried toward the far left section and fell into step with the group assigned to walk the length of the railroad tracks that cut across one edge of the secluded field.
She’d never been part of a search party before, and it was strange, unsettling. So many people gathered on a beautiful, chilly morning, their cars framing the vast stretch of golden grass.
In any other situation, it would seem festive. But these faces were sober, their footsteps slow.
Judith turned her head, hiding beneath the brim of her baseball cap as she passed a uniformed officer who stood, arms crossed, beside his patrol car. He didn’t seem to notice, let alone recognize her, but Judith was in no mood to deal with the skeptical glares of the officers who’d been so incensed three days before.
Whispered conversations hushed and swayed with the grasses as the group plodded, arms-length apart, toward the railroad tracks. To minimize the risk of bodily harm, Judith slowed her steps before closing her eyes. Pushing through hesitant tendrils of doubt, she reached out again, listening, feeling, waiting.
Samantha, where are you?
Soft, tattered impressions like fading blots of watercolor prodded at her consciousness. Not images, but smells, sensations. An intoxicating, lemony musk. A gentle white crescent of warmth, the first hint of sunrise. Dark shapes, amorphous, pressing, violent.
Then the moment faded, and Judith opened her eyes again to the sunlit field and the grim quiet around her. Pushing her hands into her pockets for warmth, she picked up her pace to catch up with the rest of the group.
Her vision of Samantha’s cold, stiff face – it had felt so immediate, so present. But perhaps that was where she’d gone wrong. Perhaps it hadn’t been a vision of the present, but a premonition, an image of what would happen if Tim and the police couldn’t find Samantha soon enough. She could still be alive, somewhere. There might still be hope. Tim could still have hope, could release some of that weariness that made his face look older.
The last time Judith had come to McFerrin County and its namesake, the town of McFerrin, the ghost of Autumn Hanson had dogged her steps, dirt-streaked, blood-soaked, vengeful. But this time, this case, was different.
Samantha Scott wasn’t seeking Judith. Judith was seeking Samantha and not finding her, barely even sensing her. Bits of memories, impressions left on this isolated field by Samantha or someone else, were all she could glean. She’d made several attempts to reach out to Samantha, alive or dead, wherever she was. But she’d come up blank. Just a misleading image of Samantha’s dead body and a string of vague, unhelpful impressions.
“Just seems like grass, grass, and more grass, don’t it?” A sudden voice broke the rustle of footsteps, and Judith turned with a start.
Beside her walked a young woman, hardly more than a teenager, pale blonde and wispy as the narrow stalks of lilting switchgrass.
“It’s a field,” Judith said.
“Seems a strange place for Samantha to go walkin’ alone,” the girl said. She looked up at Judith with a small, hesitant smile. “My name’s Willow. Don’t think I’ve seen you around here before.”
“I’m not from here. I just came to help look.”
“You know Samantha?” Willow’s voice was quick, breathless, the way Constance’s was when she was nervous. When Judith was nervous, her voice froze up and her brain short-circuited, unable to form words, but when Constance was stressed, her every thought billowed out of her mouth in a rattling, high-pitched jumble.
“No.”
“We were friends as kids,” the girl said. “Haven’t seen her much lately, though, not since she left to go to school. Still see her on holidays, though, and long weekends, even though she don’t have a home to go back to no more.”
Judith focused on swiveling her gaze, observing an arc around her feet.
When Judith did not ask a follow-up question, Willow continued. “You know, on account of her mama dyin’. And her daddy died when she was a kid. Real sad.”
“I assume their deaths were natural?” It was too late now, Judith supposed, to worry overmuch about contaminating the data of her readings with additional knowledge of the missing girl, and it appeared that this Willow had no intention of ceasing her babble. Judith might as well gather a bit of freely-offered information.
“Huh?”
“There was no foul play involved in her mother or father’s deaths?”
“Oh – I think for her dad it was a car crash. Cancer for her mama.”
Judith turned her mind from the heaviness that pressed on her. She would be no help in this search party if she was distracted by misguided sadness.
“A lotta kids at school teased Samantha on account of her needin’ one of those cane things to get around. Ya know, ’cause she didn’t see too good. But me and her always got along –”
“Did Samantha contact you before she went missing?”
“Me? No. I ain’t heard from her much since she left for college.”
“Based on the news reports,” Judith began, careful to purge Tim’s name from her explanation, “my understanding is that she used a rideshare service to drive her from her dorm in Lexington to downtown McFerrin, and then a short time later her phone pinged near this field. Have you heard anything that differs from that?”
Willow cocked her head. “I mean, not really. Don’t think many drivers’d be willin’ to go all the way from Lexington to McFerrin, though. Musta been somebody who really needed the money. That’s over a two hour drive. But I’ve heard lotsa rumors about Samantha comin’ to town to see somebody she met online. Probably some pervert catfishin’ her. That’s what I think happened. Samantha was just the sweetest, but she trusted people too much –”
The sun rose higher in the sky and warmed the field. Judith kept up her slow progress along the railroad tracks with the group, doing her best to focus her attention toward potential clues and tune out Willow’s stream-of-consciousness reflections, which quickly transitioned from heartfelt remembrances of Samantha to a laundry list of complaints about the “white trash friends” her boyfriend brought home.
Judith’s thoughts wandered to the animal shelter, to the shaggy-haired mutt that had no claim on her pity, to the well-researched presentation she’d emailed Tim that outlined the benefits of dog ownership.
He had responded to her lengthy email with one line.
I’m sure you’ll give Rover a very happy home.
Incensed, she had fired back a reply without stopping to wonder if Tim might think it pathetic that she would drop everything to answer his email immediately.
Dear Tim,
This information was intended for you.
Sincerely,
Judith Temple
P.S. His name is not Rover. He appears to be a nameless stray.
Tim had sent back a winking emoji, which, though Judith tended to disapprove of emojis and considered them evidence of technology reducing human communication to its lowest common denominator, at least seemed to imply that his comment had been made in jest.
The shelter had given the dog 72 hours. 72 hours to find a home before the overcrowded, under-funded shelter euthanized him.
The 72 hours ended today.
And, as she had recently learned, Tim’s apartment building did not allow pets.
Her sister Constance already had a dog, not to mention three boys, who were a tornado of chaos on their own. She didn’t have room for another smelly, needy creature in her house.
For once Judith wished her social circle extended beyond Constance and Tim. The small but forceful horde of inescapable familial relations and her network of shallow acquaintances included not a single person she’d be willing to cold call with a pitch for pet adoption.
And she wasn’t quite sure how Tim had wormed his way up from being a shallow acquaintance to being…something like a friend? What a strange concept, that six letters, arranged in that particular order, were supposed to linguistically encapsulate the entirety of her relationship with another person. Friend connoted whispered schoolyard secrets, hushed giggles in side-by-side sleeping bags. Or at least that’s how most people seemed to perceive the word friend. Her own friendships had been more utilitarian in nature, with structured, side-by-side study sessions. What was the root word of friend, what language? Perhaps there was some clearer meaning buried in its history that could clarify the ambiguity of –
A piercing scream rattled Judith’s ears, startling her from her thoughts with a cold shock.
Beside her, Willow stumbled backward, her hands flapping in panicked flutters, her face stretched in a wide-eyed shriek. Members of their group darted toward her, clustering around the wailing, feather-wispy girl as she sank to her knees in the dead, shriveled grass, but Judith ran forward to the gulley where Willow had been standing, a drainage ditch that stretched beside the railroad tracks, flowing in muddy ripples toward the distant creek.
Judith didn’t need her gift to know what was in the ditch.
It was there, immutable, inescapable. Red-tinged and bloated, swathed in the dirt-streaked jeans and t-shirt of a girl who ought to be alive. Mousy hair, stringy and caked with mud. Concave lids where once there had been eyes.
Gray eyes, near-sightless and yet so like Constance’s that even just a glimpse of her photo had made Judith’s lungs ache. She had known, she had known, that there would be no search and rescue, that it was too late, but here in a ditch beside the railroad tracks in an abandoned field was the ragged, putrefied proof.
The corpse of Samantha Scott.
Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field!
→ Keeping reading! Episode III: The Canvas
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Great jolt Bridget, that scream came out of nowhere and I could hear it. Excellent end to the chapter too. - Jim
Oh, man. That was well done, but, oh, man. That's rough.