Beasts of the Field: The Woods

Episode I

This is Beasts of the Field, a serial paranormal mystery novella featuring Judith Temple, psychic detective.

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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.

Judith Temple opened her car door to towers of firework leaves, incongruous with the frenetic red and blue flashing police cars that lined the steep mountain road. Closing her door and locking it with a pert beep, Judith reached into her bag to reassure herself that her notebook and pen were safely inside, then cast a closer look around the thick trees whose shadows still clung to the morning chill.

Through the thicket, she could just glimpse the ridge and the valley below, a yawning stretch of sun-yellowed grasses that rolled into the riotous trees of the mountain foothills. This was the place, all right. She stepped away from her car, scanning the uniformed officers milling around the vehicles, and searched for Tim Morrissey’s sheriff’s hat.

“Ma’am!”

At the sharp voice behind her, Judith turned to face a stocky officer with McFerrin PD inscribed on his badge.

“Ma’am, police are gettin’ ready to do a search of this area. I need you to get back in your car and head out.”

“Sheriff Morrissey said I could be here.”

“Well, ma’am, Sheriff Morrissey ain’t said nothin’ to me about that. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

“If you’ll go talk to him –”

“Ma’am, I don’t wanna have to ask you a third time.”

Judith craned her neck to look over the officer’s shoulder and caught sight of Tim’s hat in a gaggle of other uniformed men. “He’s right over there.”

“Ma’am.” The coolness in the officer’s voice turned hard. “This area is under police investigation. Please re-enter your vehicle.”

Judith looked again for Tim, but the officer stepped forward, blocking her line of sight. “Now.”

Her lips in a tight, frustrated line, Judith unlocked her car and reached for the handle. The officer, tall and bulky, stood directly behind her.

“Bowen!” came Tim’s voice. “Hey, it’s okay. She’s with me.”

From around Officer Bowen, Judith saw Tim, with his usual long-legged nonchalance, walking toward them across the gravel road. A hint of warmth curled in her stomach, but she quieted it, pushing it down beneath a layer of professionalism.

Bowen crossed his thick arms. “The chief ain’t gonna want people gettin’ in the way.”

“She won’t be in the way, just observing,” Tim said as he reached them, and shot a smile at Judith. “Bowen, this is Judith Temple. She helped us decide where to start looking.”

Bowen fixed Judith with a skeptical frown. “We’da searched here at some point, regardless.”

With a curt nod at Tim, Bowen strode away toward the other McFerrin PD officers.

“He’s a little on the zealous side. Not a bad guy, though,” Tim said in a low voice. “Glad you could make it.”

“I just hope you find her.”

“Yeah.” The word rushed out of Tim in a rough sigh, and the calm of his face gave way to heaviness.

A sudden urge came over Judith to take his hand, to touch his arm – how would that help anything, and there were people watching, and what if he pulled his hand away – but instead she squeezed her hands into fists and tucked them into the pockets of her sweater.

Tim rubbed his hand along his face. “I’ve been hoping it would be a search and rescue, not a search and recovery.”

A voice called from the midst of the police officers. “You ready, sheriff?”

“Yeah,” Tim said. “Let’s head out.”

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Arms crossed, Judith leaned against her car, wishing she’d brought a warmer sweater. The wobbly rays of sunlight that broke through the foliage were fleeting as wisps of smoke, and a stubborn chill lingered in the shade. Judith generally approved of Kentucky in the autumn. She didn’t like the frigid, gray, mostly snowless winters or the scorching heat of summer, but she appreciated the moderate weather of spring and fall, when she could move about outside and wear a light jacket without sweating or freezing. Her review of the available research and her own subjective preferences suggested that 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit was ideal for outdoor activities. This morning was on the cool side, but by midday the weather promised to be precisely in her ideal temperature window.

Officers moved in lines through the uneven woods, some of them pushing down the steep embankment, some of them moving upward toward the few scattered houses that peppered the mountain road, all of them keeping their eyes on the ground. Lean, dark-haired police dogs tugged at the end of leashes, their noses in the undergrowth.

All of them, looking for a body. They hadn’t found it in the field, and now they had turned their search upward, into the winding, tree-shrouded mountains.

As usual, Judith had tried to avoid learning anything about the missing girl before doing her initial reading, to avoid that knowledge seeping in and contaminating her psychic impressions. She’d thought, perhaps, that she would be able to give Tim the news he wanted: search and rescue. Hope. But that vision, when she’d finally been able to tease it out from the noise, had chilled her. She’d had to watch Tim’s face fall and his shoulders slump when she told him what she’d seen.

The hazy gloaming of the woods, the musky lemon flowers that scented the breeze, the steep road with a glimpse of the golden field below, and those staring gray eyes in a cold, still face.

When Tim had pulled out a photo of the missing girl, there they were again, those eyes, gray and striking against a plain face and mousy hair. In the photo Samantha’s eyes were unfocused, not quite looking at the camera. Not looking at it, Tim had explained, because she couldn’t see it.

Judith knew, everyone knew, what had likely happened to a legally blind young woman who disappeared into thin air after her cell phone pinged near an isolated field in the secluded mountain foothills.

A chilly breeze blew through Judith’s sweater, and she pulled it more tightly around herself, even as she pushed away the niggling awareness that her shivering had little to do with the wind.

Judith straightened her shoulders and turned her gaze more intently to the lines of searching officers. It was frustrating when emotions clouded her objectivity. Just because her sister Constance also had striking gray eyes, just because watching the hope drain from Tim’s face made her want to crumple like a crushed soda can, just because it was horrible that someone young and vulnerable could be lying undiscovered and dead in the woods, none of it was a reason to throw away her objectivity.

Judith pulled her notebook from her bag and reread her latest entry.

Woods

Check. Though they hadn’t yet found the body, she’d seen these woods, just as they were now, in her vision.

Floral scent.

Check. The air was fragrant with the last gush of blooms before the first frost.

Gray eyes

Check. Samantha’s photo had corroborated Judith’s reading. So far her vision had yielded 100% accuracy.

Something cold and wet nudged Judith’s hand, and she jumped back with a shriek.

A shaggy gray head loomed near her hip, reaching a black nose toward her hand.

“Go away.” Judith scooted aside, waving her notebook at the dog. “Shoo. Go.”

The dog sat its long, scraggly haunches on the ground and cocked its head.

“Go. Go away. Goodbye. Shoo.”

The animal stared at Judith’s face, panting with an expression that almost looked like a smile. But dogs didn’t smile. Did they? Did dogs experience happiness? She ought to look it up later, when the search was over.

Lying down beside Judith’s feet, the dog rested its chin on its paws. Its gray fur was tangled and matted with dirt, snarled with bits of leaves and twigs.

“I don’t have food for you.”

The dog didn’t move.

“Okay, fine. Stay there, then. Just don’t…lick me or anything. I’d prefer not to have animal saliva on my skin.” Judith turned her attention back to her notebook.

But something prickled at the edge of her awareness, pulling her gaze away from the pages and out to the woods and the quiet gravel road. The strange sensation of eyes on her, of being observed.

The dog raised its head, ears up. Judith turned and looked behind her.

Across the street, a short distance down the gravel road, was a rusted black pickup truck, its dark paint spattered with red-brown mud. Within it loomed the form of a man, big and thick as a bear, whose face Judith couldn’t quite make out.

Judith narrowed her eyes, then closed them. She reached out, listening, watching, waiting.

Whispers of images trickled.

Trees

A truck

A raccoon nibbling at a pile of trash.

A bone-deep heaviness, the world warped and misshapen as though looking out through a snow globe.

Then the images flickered out. Opening her eyes, Judith frowned, drumming her fingers on her arm.

She pulled out her notebook, scribbling a quick note of the impression, along with the date and time.

Strange. Not helpful, but strange.

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The sun dipped toward the trees, its bright light turning golden, when Judith finally caught sight of Tim walking back toward the car. His eyes tracked the ground, his feet plodding through the brush.

Judith’s stomach tightened in a slow, clenching knot. They shouldn’t be coming back emptyhanded again. They couldn’t be. She had seen Samantha, seen her staring gray eyes and her cold, still face.

“Did you look along the ridge?” Judith said as soon as Tim drew near. “In my reading, I saw the woods and the valley.”

“All up and down the ridge and down the embankment and up to the summit,” Tim said. “Nothing. Even the dogs didn’t find anything more than a couple rabbits.”

“I saw her. In these woods.”

“I believe you saw her,” Tim said. His face was weary with a deeper exhaustion than Judith had seen there before. “But she’s just…she’s not here.” Looking down, Tim cocked his head. “You made a friend?”

“He’s not a friend. He wandered over wanting food.”

“Looks pretty content.”

Judith glanced at the shaggy dog stretched in the pockmarked sunlight, then looked back at Tim. Defensiveness tugged at her. She had seen Samantha, right here in these woods, dead on the crinkling leaves. Her visions had an overall accuracy rate of over seventy percent, even accounting for their occasional lack of clarity. They were never flat out wrong. “What are you going to do now?”

Tim sighed. “The community was already organizing a search party in case we didn’t find her, so they’ll be doing that this weekend. Other than that, I’ll be asking a lot of people the same questions over and over again, following up leads people call in, most of which will probably be made up or unhelpful. Don’t have much else to go on right now.”

A sudden, rumbling growl sounded behind Judith, and she spun around.

A sleek police dog strained against its leash, its eyes locked on the shaggy stray.

“Hey! Get outta here!” An officer barked at the mutt. “Scram. Go.” Picking up a small stone, he hurled it at the dog’s backside, and the lanky, dirty creature leapt to its feet with a whimper.

“Is that necessary?” Judith was surprised by the sudden flare in her voice.

“I don’t want strays endangerin’ police dogs, lady.”

“Your dog was the aggressor.”

“Hey,” Tim stepped in, his voice calm, friendly. “She’ll get the dog outta here. It won’t hurt anybody.”

Shaking his head with a grunt, the officer turned, tugging the police dog toward the line of black-and-white cars.

“What do you mean She’ll get it out of here?” Judith said. “I’m not taking it anywhere.”

“McFerrin has an animal shelter.”

“I’m not letting that thing in my car.”

With a smirk, Tim met the dog’s eyes and winked.

“I’m not,” Judith said.

“Poor little guy’s gotta be getting hungry. And it’s supposed to get pretty chilly tonight.”

“He’s not little. Whatever you’re trying to do with these emotional appeals, it’s not going to work on me. I have absolutely no interest in loading a filthy dog into my car. But, on a different, more useful note, I have a question. Who is that?” Judith gestured with her head toward the dark pickup truck where the huge man still sat.

Tim tossed a quick, casual glance over his shoulder, inconspicuous and professional. “Hm.”

“Hm? That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Leon Skaggs.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s his name,” Tim said. “Leon Skaggs.”

“Unfortunate for him.”

“The Skaggs are related to just about everybody in the hollers, one way or another. A long line of cranky hillbillies. Leon seems pretty decent, far as I’ve heard. Keeps to himself. Not the brightest, but a nice enough guy.”

“He’s been sitting by the side of the road for over an hour.”

Tim raised his eyebrows at her. “So have you.”

“I was invited. By you.”

“Yeah.” Tim’s smile faltered, and his face grew serious again as he looked once more out at the tangled trees. “I gotta debrief with the police. A lot of them will probably help with the search party on Saturday, just to feel like they’re doing something. You’re welcome to come up too.”

“Tim,” Judith said around the sudden, constricting tightness in her throat. It was strange. Other people’s opinions of her, as a rule, did not affect her peace of mind or cause her physical distress, and yet the unreadable expression on Tim’s face sent a squeezing, burning sensation all the way from her sternum to the top of her head. “I saw her here. I really did. My readings aren’t always clear, but I’ve never had one be completely wrong.”

A touch of wetness brushed her hand, and Judith jerked back with a gasp, only to find the gray dog’s shaggy head once more beside her hip.

Tim attempted a smile, though it only succeeded in shifting the tired circles under his eyes. He winked again and gestured to the dog. “The shelter’s at the corner of Main Street and Elk Lodge Road.”

“I’m not taking this creature anywhere,” she said. “And it’s definitely not getting in my car.”

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The autumn sunset, creeping earlier and earlier in the day as the season wore on, shone buttery yellow through the rusty leaves as Judith pulled away from the dilapidated McFerrin Animal Shelter.

72 hours. What an absurdly short amount of time.

72 hours for an animal to be reclaimed or adopted – three days. There was no way that lanky, scraggly dog would find a home in only three days.

The acidic scent of stale animal urine and wet dog fur had clung to every surface of the shelter, and the barking, incessant and deafening, had been enough to make Judith’s eyes rattle in her skull. It was an awful place. The woman working the front desk had tilted her head toward the shaggy gray dog with a numb sadness thin as a cheap, shiny plastic mask.

72 hours before the animal would be euthanized.

Saturday was 72 hours away. She’d be back in town for the search party.

No. Judith gripped the steering wheel harder. She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with a dog. She worked too much to care for a dog. She couldn’t even care for a plant, let alone a creature that not only needed to eat and drink but also relieve itself and go outdoors. No, she was not dog owner material.

But Tim was. Maybe she could convince Tim to take the dog. She could research the benefits of dog ownership relative to the cost of food and whatever other equipment dogs needed, and she’d email him a summary of her findings. That’s what she’d do. Surely Tim would love to have a dog.

Thoughts of Saturday, of the search party, elbowed their way into Judith’s mind with a rumble of misgiving.

She had seen Samantha’s corpse in her vision, right there in the woods, in view of the ridgeline. How could they have missed her? She was never completely wrong.

But if she was wrong, this time…

If she was wrong, why was she even doing this, building a side business as a psychic? She never would have started this venture if she’d thought there was a chance she’d make a fool of herself.

And yet here she was. The McFerrin Police Department and the McFerrin County Sheriff's Office had gone out into the woods following her recommendation, and they’d found nothing, neither hide nor hair of the missing girl.

The search party was on Saturday. 72 hours. She’d try again.

The missing girl with the unseeing gray eyes was somewhere, hidden in those hills, along the ridgeline with the golden field below. Judith had seen her; now she just needed to find her.

She would find Samantha Scott.

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Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field!

→ Read Episode II: The Search

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