Day 12

It was early morning on the first Saturday of October, and Danny Vandervere was out for his usual run in the woods; he was floating along a broad, gently hilly trail that meandered in scenic curves through the dense trees, humming along to the vintage disco pouring into his ears from a tiny mp3-player strapped to his upper arm, wearing nothing else but very short royal blue running shorts and high-tech running-shoes.

He loved the feeling of near-nakedness, the chilly morning air bracing on his bare skin; soon he would have to start wearing more when he ran, the mornings were becoming increasingly frigid as autumn progressed, but for now he could run naked if he wanted. He had once tried running completely naked, but the pine needles and pebbles hurt his feet and his heavy genitals slapping against his thighs were much too uncomfortable.

Danny was an incredibly graceful runner, his torso erect, his arms tucked loosely against his sides, his long legs stretching out far in front to meet the ground, kicking back with the grace of a leaping gazelle, presenting a picture of effortless flight suitable for immortalization on a Greek vase. His hair floated around his head, his white skin glowed rosy with exertion and shimmered with perspiration, and the even sound of his deep breathing came in perfect unison with the crunch of his feet in the gravel and needles on the path.

The trail Danny used was one of three that connected the "wild" rose-garden at the edge of his family's property (climbing roses and reverted hybrids tangled around a rustic gazebo in a circular clearing studded with concrete nymphs and bronze sundials, designed and planted by Danny's great-grandfather, who had built the Lake House in 1905) to the Lake Augusta Hotel and Resort, two miles away as the crow flies; the first trail was a completely level bridle path that ran alongside the lake-shore below, by which Danny intended to return home, and the third was a narrow hiking trail that climbed up and down along a steep hillside above. There were more trails above that one, snaking through the hilly forests of the Trenion County Wilderness Area, a popular camping and picnicking site north of Lake Augusta, on the opposite side from the town.

This late in the season, Danny expected to have the trails to himself; the few people who did come out usually preferred to come after noon when the sun had warmed the forest. And so there was nothing to interrupt his thoughts, or rather the meditative lack of thoughts that his morning run usually produced. Danny always welcomed an opportunity to not think, sometimes worried that his head would burst from the number and variety of thoughts that often spun through it at high speed.

Coming around one of the more acute curves, a little more than halfway along the three-mile trail, something odd on the ground caught Danny's eye. It was just beyond the curve, a strange pale pinkish-grayish-white object that had an indefinable air of not belonging to the landscape. Danny hadn't intended to veer toward it, but his curiosity led his feet without his conscious mind taking note; as he got closer to it, the odder it looked, almost like a human hand, palm up with its fingers curled.

When Danny got close enough to see that it was in fact a human hand, he was still running at full speed; he tried to stop, some atavistic impulse telling him that a human hand was something that one should avoid rather than run toward, and his foot caught on a stray root that he ordinarily would have seen and evaded if his attention hadn't been diverted.

With a painful wrench to his ankle, Danny flew several feet through the air before crashing into the ground, skinning his right shoulder and cutting his side on the gravel, his hands instinctively covering his head and receiving the full benefit of the pine-needles, pine-cones, and small rocks that would have made a mess of his beautiful face.

When the dust settled, Danny hesitantly opened his eyes, and shut them again quickly when he saw two eyes staring back at him. Swallowing a spasm of revulsion and fear, he opened his eyes again and looked at the thing in front of him: a human face, swollen and greenish-bluish-gray, its light brown eyes bulging and riddled with purple veins, a blackened swollen tongue sticking out of its gaping mouth, its thin light brown hair full of leaves and pine-needles. There were scout ants and a couple of millipedes crawling on the face, right across the bulging eyes and tongue, and Danny let out a scream of terror as he scuttled backward away from the thing, fetching up with his back against a tree four or five feet away, his feet still pushing at the ground as if trying to get even further from the corpse.

Danny continued screaming for quite some time, until his throat hurt and a rational voice in the back of his mind asked him what purpose was being served by screaming. The scream broke apart into chest-wracking sobs, the animal horror of a dead body destroying what little emotional reserve he'd ever had. But as he sobbed, his rational mind was taking in and cataloging the details.

He noticed that the body was male, around medium height, with a heavy build, front-side down on the ground; that the belt pulled tight around its neck was familiar, brown leather with Western-style tooling but a standard brass buckle; the dress shirt was also vaguely familiar, with tiny brown diamonds arranged in stripes on an off-white background; the wispy brown-gray hair was familiar, too, but not familiar enough to spark recognition; the hand that he'd seen on the path was the left hand, which bore a silver or white-gold wedding ring and a Timex digital watch on a steel link band; the arm was stretched out full-length, and must have been dislocated from its socket to lay at that angle; the right hand was clearly broken at the wrist and tucked under the body's chest.

The corpse wore jeans that had worked down past its hips, the belt gone from the loops, with cheap white briefs showing above the waist, and clunky brown suede walking shoes; its skin was lacerated in many places, as if it had slid and tumbled down the hill for quite a distance before falling alongside the trail, the blood on the wounds was dark and still, indicating that it had been dead before it fell.

But as Danny stared, sobbing with his fist wedged into his mouth, recognition dawned: it wasn't an it, it was a he -- it was Mr. Janacek! Grief joined with horror and he started crying even louder, howling rather than screaming.

Danny crossed his arms over his knees and lay his head on them, letting the grief run through his body, making all the noise he could on the assumption that nobody would hear him; he was over a mile and a half from home and from the hotel, it was not quite seven a.m. on a Saturday morning, and nothing stirred but deer, rabbits, and birds -- all of which had gone quite silent when Danny screamed.

Therefore Danny was startled into a thrill of fear when he heard footsteps coming toward him; looking up from his folded arms, he saw a smallish teenage boy with a thick fall of inky black hair covering most of his face, dressed in shapeless black and dark blue clothes, an olive-drab canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder and an expensive camera held out defensively in front of him.

"Are you OK?" the boy asked, one startling black-rimmed blue eye staring at Danny.

"No," Danny wailed, "He's dead!"

"Who is? Oh..." the boy had apparently not seen the corpse, his eyes only on Danny as he came around the bend with his camera; but he didn't seem as disturbed by it as Danny had been: instead of screaming or trying to get away from it, he approached the body and looked in its face, still holding his camera in front of him like a shield, "What happened to him?"

"I don't know," Danny sobbed, "I think he was strangled. Uphill somewhere."

"You're bleeding," the boy abandoned the corpse and came to kneel in front of Danny, finally stowing the camera away in the messenger-bag and reaching out to touch Danny's side, where a thin trickle of blood made a path from just below the lateral muscle down into the waistband of his shorts. The boy didn't actually touch him, though, seeming to think better of it before he made contact.

"Can you get help?" Danny asked, his sobbing subsiding somewhat, his attention leaving the corpse and finally starting to notice the pain he was in. He couldn't feel the cut, but his shoulder was screaming with pain and his ankle throbbed hotly, his hands stung and he was horribly cold.

"I don't have a phone," the boy admitted, "And I don't want to leave you alone with... with that. Do you think you can walk?"

Before Danny could answer, the quiet was shattered by a sudden electronic trilling, loudly approximating the theme to Star Trek. Both boys jumped at the sound and stared at the corpse, whence the sound was coming.

"It's his phone," Danny breathed, oddly fascinated that a dead man would get a phone call.

"Should we answer it?" the strange boy asked, moving toward the body. Without waiting for Danny to reply, he knelt down beside the corpse and reached a little hesitantly toward its pants, then plunged his hand into the front pocket and pulled out the ringing phone; swallowing hard, he opened it and said, "H-hello?"

The caller had apparently hung up, as the boy stared at the phone, nonplussed; he looked to Danny for guidance.

"Who do you think it was?" Danny wondered, the bizarre situation beyond his grasp.

"The caller ID said 'Home,'" the boy answered quietly, "Maybe his wife?"

"Do you think we should use his phone to call for help?" Danny asked the boy, grateful that there was someone there with him.

"Here, you do it," the boy handed him the phone, a cheap little silver plastic thing with lighted buttons, "I don't know what to tell them, I don't know where we are."

"Hello?" Danny said into the phone after he'd dialed; it didn't ring, but sounded as if the call had connected anyway.

"Nine one one," a brisk woman's voice came on the staticky line, chaotic noises in the background, "What is the nature of your emergency?"

"This is Danny Vandervere," Danny said haltingly to the woman, "Do you know who I am?"

"No, sir," the voice said, "This is the cellular dispatch in Redding, not the Vandervere police. What is the nature of your emergency?"

"There's a dead body here," Danny sobbed again, trying to keep control of his voice but failing, "It's Mr. Janacek, he's my teacher... or he was my teacher. And I'm hurt, I need help."

"Where are you, exactly, sir?" the voice asked calmly, seemingly uninterested in the news.

"I'm on the walking trail that belongs to the Lake Augusta Hotel in Vandervere, about a mile and a half from the hotel," Danny said, looking around himself to make sure of his location, "and an equal distance from my house. My parents' house, at the end of the Lake Road. I don't know the bearings, but I'm just north of the big meadow off the bridle path."

"Local police and an ambulance are on their way, sir. Do you want me to stay on the line until they arrive?"

"No, thank you," Danny said after thinking it over for a moment, "I'm not alone, there's another boy with me, he can keep me company until they come. Thank you for your help."

"Be brave, honey, help is coming," the woman's voice dropped its bored professional tone, letting a slight southern accent creep in, before she disconnected the call.

"They're sending someone right away," Danny said, looking at the phone sadly. It was Mr. Janacek's phone, something personal and intimate belonging to a man Danny had liked, someone with whom he'd been having sex fairly regularly over the last two weeks.

Danny just about jumped out of his skin when the phone rang again, but pulled himself together enough to answer it, "Hello, who is this?" The caller hung up immediately, but the caller ID said "Home" again, so Danny hit the redial button and waited for the party to answer.

"I'm sorry to bother you," Danny said to the silent person on the other end, "But something terrible has happened. Mr. Janacek is... oh, perhaps I shouldn't tell you on the phone, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think he's dead."

There was a horrified gasp, but the person at "Home" hung up again without saying anything. Danny folded up the phone and handed it back to the strange black-haired boy.

"I know you, don't I?" Danny cocked his head, trying to remember.

"Probably not," the boy said, looking down at his own feet in beat-up Army boots.

"I know you from school," Danny decided, chasing the memory down, "You're always drawing and taking pictures, but you're not on the Yearbook Committee or in Art Club. Is your name Ashton or Ashley or something like that?"

"Just Ash," the boy said, looking at him with wonder, "I can't believe you know who I am."

"I try to know everyone," Danny shrugged, wiping his wet face reflexively with the back of his injured hand and smearing blood and dirt all over himself, "But you don't hang with a clique, so I haven't had a chance to meet you in person yet."

"Wow," the boy said simply, then returned his attention to Danny's injuries, gesturing to his skinned shoulder, "Doesn't that hurt?"

"Like fury," Danny said, sobbing again when he looked at it and saw his beautiful skin broken and seeping pus and blood, "And I think I twisted my ankle. Oh, my hands!"

"It's OK," Ash was alarmed at the sudden crying jag that shook Danny's body, "It's just abrasions, it'll heal in no time."

"But my hands," Danny groaned, gaping at the cuts and bruises on his long delicate hands, his piano-playing hands that he was so proud of.

"Here, I have some water," Ash rummaged in his bag and pulled out a plastic bottle, "Let me wash them off, you'll see it's not as bad as it looks."

"Thank you," Danny eventually coughed out, looking up into the boy's face, or what he could see of it behind that curtain of black hair, "You're being very kind."

"It's nothing," Ash replied, blushing a little.

"No, it's everything. Thank you for staying with me."

"Are you cold?" the boy wondered, shrugging out of his outermost layer of clothing, an oversized faded-black hoodie, to drape around Danny's shoulders.

"I'm freezing," Danny whispered, shivering so hard his teeth rattled against each-other, "Thank you."

"I hear people coming," Ash said after a long silent pause, then stood and turned around to yell for the approaching vehicles, "HEY! We're over here!"

Soon they were surrounded by flashing lights and authoritative men in uniforms hustling them up and away from the dead body. Danny was half-carried to the back of the ambulance, where two paramedics (one of whom he knew intimately) cleaned and dressed his wounds, which were minimal and less than skin deep, though they hurt incredibly and looked ghastly; they bound his swelling ankle and put a cold-pack on it, but it would have to be x-rayed at the hospital and might well be sprained. They wrapped him in a silvery padded blanket and gave him some painkillers and a warm cup of electrolyte solution to drink.

While Danny was being ministered to, Ash was being questioned by a police officer, who wanted to know why he was in the woods that morning, what exactly he saw when he came around the bend, and what he and Danny had said to each other and to the mysterious caller on the dead man's phone. The boy was calm and thoughtful, answering all of the questions clearly and succinctly; the officer wrote everything down in his little notebook, took Ash's contact information, and then walked across the path to talk to Danny.

"What's your name, son?" the officer asked Danny solicitously, his pencil poised above his pad; he was a handsome man, in his mid-thirties and fit, with neat sandy brown hair and warm hazel eyes, not quite as tall as Danny, impressive in the sharp navy-blue uniform of the Vandervere town police.

"What?" Danny goggled at the man, confused by the question.

"What's your name?" the officer repeated.

"You must be new," Danny decided, peering into the man's face.

"Yes, I joined the force a couple of weeks ago," the officer explained impatiently, "I was on the force in Yreka for ten years before I moved here. Now, what's your name?"

"I'm Danny Vandervere," he said, gazing curiously at the officer, memorizing his features.

"Oh," the officer looked up at him sharply, suddenly embarrassed, "I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you, sir."

"Don't start with that," Danny sighed wearily.

"But you're the Mayor's son, Marc-Daniel, aren't you?" the officer was puzzled by the name that differed from what he had been told.

"My family call me that. My whole name is Marcus Daniel Vandervere, the Fourth," he smiled self-deprecatingly, "But please, call me Danny."

"OK," the man agreed, scribbling all the different names on his pad, then pulling himself back into his professional demeanor, remembering that this half-naked youth was a Vandervere and had to be treated with kid gloves, call-me-Danny or no, "Can you tell me what happened here?"

"I don't really know, he was like that when I came," Danny said, his voice breaking a little, "I was running, and I saw a hand, and then I tripped and fell badly, next to the body. It's Mr. Janacek, he's my calculus teacher. At the high school."

"And the boy over there, how do you know him?" the officer gestured at Ash, who was standing off to one side, not allowed to leave but not being watched; he had his camera out, Danny couldn't tell if he was taking pictures or just fiddling with it, but he seemed more comfortable with it in his hands.

"I don't know him, I mean I didn't before this morning, but he goes to my school."

"Was Mr. Janacek his teacher, also?"

"I don't know," Danny shrugged, turning to look at the officer's badge, "Officer P. Kelly? What does the P stand for?"

"Pete," the officer answered in surprise.

"Not Peter?" Danny wondered, cocking his head at the officer.

"No, just Pete," Officer Kelly smiled.

"You're very handsome," Danny sighed wistfully.

"Huh?" the officer was startled.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Danny blushed, "I think the painkillers just kicked in."

"It's OK, Danny," the officer laughed uneasily and took a tiny step backward, then put his professional voice back on, "That's all for now, I'll ask you some more questions after you've had a chance to rest. Is there someone you'd like me to call? Should I call your Mom to meet you at the hospital?"

"My mother?" Danny scoffed, then remembered that the newcomer wouldn't know about his relationship with his family and couldn't be expected to see the ridiculousness of the suggestion, "You should probably call my father, he'd have you fired if something happened to a Vandervere and he wasn't the first to know. But before you call him, call Mrs. Espinosa, that's our housekeeper, she'll come to the hospital for me, and you can tell my father that she's coming so he won't have to worry about me. Do you have the number?"
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