Free Paskagankee by Alan Leverone Page B

through the thickly forested woods along a little-used hunting trail, and then back to her house along the side of the sparsely populated road. The entire route was over six miles long, and Carolyn ran it practically every day.
    By now, she was deep inside the massive forest pressing in on Paskagankee from all sides. The steadily falling sleet and freezing rain coated every surface in rapidly thickening ice. Tree branches drooped dramatically, some blocking the path. Several times already, Carolyn had been forced to jump over or detour around huge limbs.
    The disturbing thought crossed Carolyn’s mind that should she slip on the ice and fall; she probably would not be found until spring. Cell phones were useless because coverage was virtually nonexistent out here. She shivered, only partly from the bitter cold and freezing rain.
    Rounding a corner and concentrating all her attention on navigating the path, Carolyn almost missed seeing the large mass of dark red, partially frozen liquid—it was almost brown, really—flashing past in her peripheral vision under the trees to her right. Several yards beyond the odd-looking splatter, some instinct she couldn’t identify made her circle back. Curiosity overrode a vaguely-formed feeling of dread in her gut.
    Reaching the spot where she had glimpsed the reddish-brown slush, Carolyn peered into a stand of trees now off her left. She had glimpsed the strange sight for just a half-second and then only out of the corner of her eye, but she could have sworn it looked exactly like a pool of blood. But of course it wasn’t a pool of blood, it couldn’t be, because how in the world would a pool of blood end up way out here in this isolated area?
    Carolyn stopped and looked and almost couldn’t find what she was certain she had seen just moments before. The freezing rain was driving hard now, slanting sideways, dripping off the brim of her New England Patriots baseball cap and obscuring her vision.
    There! Under an oak tree denuded by the season, a large puddle of what did indeed appear to be partially frozen slushy blood covered the ground, diluted by the elements but still quite possibly blood.
    She examined her discovery with equal parts curiosity and revulsion and then leaped back, nearly losing her footing on the slippery ground, choking off a scream as a drop of the liquid fell from above onto the growing puddle, narrowly missing her neck. Horrified and confused, Carolyn forced herself to look up into the trees as her heart pounded out a beat she was certain could be heard way off in Paskagankee.
    Alone in the forest, Carolyn Scherer let loose a scream. Impaled on a dead branch high above her was a human head.
    A man’s head.
    Its eyes were open with a look of terror frozen on its face as blood dripped slowly but steadily onto the ground at Carolyn’s feet. Strings of tendons or muscles or ligaments, Carolyn didn’t know which and didn’t care, hung several inches below the grotesquely severed neck, and the blood rolled sluggishly along them before gathering into bulbous balls at the ends and falling thickly to the ground.
    And Carolyn screamed.

11
    PROFESSOR KENNETH DYE’S HOUSE was located in a modest Orono subdivision of small ranch homes. The neighborhood was within easy commuting distance of the University of Maine, and Sharon guessed the homes had all been slapped together at the same time, maybe a half-century ago, to provide affordable housing for university students and staff. The street was quiet as the Paskagankee Police Department Ford Explorer worked its way up the professor’s driveway, easing to a stop behind what Shari assumed to be the professor’s car, a Toyota Prius of recent vintage.
    Smoke curled out of the chimney on the east side of the house as she double-checked the address she had written on a slip of paper, matching it with the number screwed in tarnished brass to the wood frame next to the front door.