The Hotel – 27

Before I could ask anything more, Orville said, "Shall we get down to business while Austin tries to come to terms with what he's learned?"

He went over to the heap of fallen aspen, circling until he came to where they had found Tessa. He knelt, out of my view, while the other men watched from behind him.

"Definitely not an accident," Orville said, his disembodied voice coming from somewhere behind the pile. I saw a flash of light, then several more, and thought he might be using his phone to take photos of her body. I was right. He came back into view, snapping more pictures of the pile and the surrounding area. Then he said, "All right, let's get her out."

With Henry's assistance, he and Orville retrieved her body, laying it gently on the ground where the sun shone through the trees.

"This," Orville said, "was not inflicted by her running into something like a tree branch."

I got up my nerve to go join them. He was kneeling, touching the side of Tessa's head. Even I could tell someone must have hit her with something hard since her temple was stove in. Probably a rock, I thought. There were enough of them around.

"If she'd hit her head that hard, she'd have died where she fell," Orville continued. "There's no way she could have crawled in there." He gestured toward the space where she'd been found when Henry had moved some of the smaller trees. "Besides which, she was in feet-first."

"So Henry and I noticed," Edwin said. "Because of the way she was laying we didn't see the wound, although we could smell her blood."

I shuddered at that idea, earning me a compassionate smile from Edwin.

"We should get her out of here, now," Orville said. "It would help if we could rig up a stretcher of some sort."

"We can," Logan replied. "As long as a couple of us are willing to sacrifice our jackets to the cause."

Henry and Edwin immediately removed theirs while Logan got two long branches. It turned out to be easy enough to make what they needed. Inverting the sleeves inside the buttoned jackets, Logan inserted the branches through them. Then he and Orville carefully put Tessa's body on the jerry rigged stretcher, picked up the ends, and we made our way back to the parking lot at the side of the hotel where Orville had left his van, and he and Logan moved the body into it. He handed the keys to Henry, asking him to take her back to town. "Tell the doc to put her on ice until I get back."

I could picture her being stashed in the freezer of the local grocery store and hoped that wasn't what he meant.

Had I accepted all this, that they were shifters, too easily? Maybe, but then I'm a pragmatist. I couldn't deny that what I'd seen had happened, so why fight the reason behind it. If nothing else, it gave me something to take my mind off Tessa's murder—at least until we got back inside the hotel.