Excerpts

OCTOBER 2019 What baffled them was the skeleton. The other bodies were weird, but they couldn't figure out the fucking skeleton. Just bones, no soft tissue: Not one scrap of skin left. No sinews, no rotting brain, no nothing . The bones were arranged together, each one of the two hundred six in its place, a kneecap hidden by new fall leaves. Had the group resorted to cannibalism? It was one of the early guesses. But even that did not seem to fit. The bones wouldn't be so clean, arranged perfectly, as if they belonged to a knocked-over classroom display, sans bolts. There were no scorch marks, no scratches or other signs of instruments, and surely any form of cannibalism that left such a pristine skeleton behind would have required at the very least a blade to peel the flesh. And besides, the group had been experienced hikers. The coroners and first responders could make guesses about the state of the other bodies--animals, perhaps, though they had not observed wildlife in the area, had not even heard the flap of wings overhead or the crunching of leaves beneath a swift mammal's paw--but this fucking set of bones. It was wrong to move them, the investigators thought, even as they placed them into the evidence bags, each bone lifting away like gravel, no tendons or fat to hold them together; like putting a complicated puzzle back in the box after hours spent piecing the cardboard together. Was the skeleton from a decades-old death, some hunter who shot himself in the woods? That had been the second guess, that the dried bones belonged to another of the numerous missing persons from the surrounding area, but dental records confirmed that the immaculate set of bones belonged to Sylvia Burnett, a graduate student studying native plants and geology at the University of Kentucky. She'd been part of a research trip with another student, Clay Foster, and two climbers. She had last been seen at a diner in Livingston, Kentucky, seven months prior with the other two hikers whose bodies they'd found, both bizarrely well preserved, and, like Sylvia's skeleton, odd enough to keep the first responders who had packed them into vans and the coroners who autopsied them conjuring theory after theory. Had a squirrel plucked out Luke Woodhaven's eyes, thinking them a rare breed of nut? But how had his tongue been removed, they wondered, staring into his decaying mouth, inhaling the worst case of halitosis. Their sense of wonder overrode their sense of smell as they examined, once again, the entirely too-straight line that was the end of his tongue, terminating just beyond his last set of molars. Had a coyote feasted on the intestines of Clay? But how had his rib cage come to be folded outward like cabinet doors, as if a set of hinges existed on either side of his body? And why was his blood missing? Had it evaporated? Why was he naked? And where was the fourth hiker? Was she roaming the woods? Or had they simply not pressed far enough into the trees to discover her? All they had recovered of Dylan Prescott was a set of blood-soaked clothing at the abandoned campsite that raised further questions. The largest stains came back from forensics as unidentified and belonging to none of the four campers. Their theorizing continued long after the morticians had pushed the bodies into the crematorium and placed the resulting cremains in boxes. Each spare moment at work no longer spent idly scrolling their phones, but puzzling over the detailed logs and the thousands of photographs. It was not uncommon for the coroners to become so engrossed in this work that they would stay past their shifts, alerted to the passing time only by a buzzing in their pockets from spouses waiting at home with cold dinner plates. But still they had zero plausible theories as to how Sylvia Burnett had entered the area in March and lost all of her skin, muscles, and organs by October of the same year. In their obsession, they'd even scoured the theories touted online, the lights of their phones burning their retinas late at night: drugs, cults, poisonous plant matter, wild animals. Cryptids. Cannibals. Murder. Another odd piece of the puzzle was that one of the bodies had been found just one hundred yards from the road, nestled in autumn brush. How had the camper not heard the rush of trucks loaded to the brim with cargo roaring down the highway every forty seconds? Another coroner guess: delirium, brought on by exposure and dehydration. Vloggers and content creators thought darker, theorizing that Dylan, the missing camper, had murdered the rest of them and was hiding out in the woods. This theory was pushed to its limits when skeptics asked, How would she have removed all of Sylvia's flesh? How did she preserve Clay's and her boyfriend Luke's body? Why? Too many odd pieces that didn't fit, more discovered every few nights as a detective or coroner or first responder sprang upright in bed, struck by another revelation. But, above all, that fucking skeleton. Excerpted from This Wretched Valley by Jenny KIEFER All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.