The Roasted Bone Broth And The Vanished Child Scent Trail
CHAPTER 5: THE TUMBLE INTO THE HYDRANGEAS
Julian Vance was still bent double, scrubbing his soaked trousers with a crumpled paper napkin, when the deep, vibrating roar of Copper’s bay rattled the fillings in his teeth.
He jerked his head up, his eyes widening in sheer terror behind his mirror sunglasses.
Bearing down on him at thirty miles an hour was ninety pounds of pure, ecstatic, meat-crazed bloodhound. Copper was not attacking out of aggression or malice; his tongue was lolling out of the side of his mouth, his heavy tail was whipping back and forth like a metronome, and his entire focus was fixed on the two steaming, broth-soaked leather delicacies attached to Julian’s feet.
“NO! WAIT! CALL HIM OFF! CALL HIM—”
Julian never finished the sentence.
Copper hit him at knee height with the momentum of a runaway bowling ball. The hound buried his massive, wrinkled muzzle directly into Julian’s right sneaker, furiously licking the rich marrow broth while planting both of his massive front paws squarely against Julian’s chest for leverage.
The physics were entirely unforgiving. Julian’s slick combat boots had zero traction on the wet, moss-covered flagstones. His feet flew out from under him, rising four feet into the autumn air.
With a high-pitched, feminine shriek of absolute panic, Julian cartwheeled backward off the elevated edge of the stone path.
Below the trail lay a steep, three-foot drop into the park’s untreated botanical drainage hollow—a soggy, stagnant marshland fed by natural runoff, currently filled with two feet of black, decaying leaf muck and choked with an immense, overgrown thicket of prickly wild hydrangea and thorny wild rose bushes.
SPLAAAASH.
Julian landed flat on his back in the center of the muddy hollow.
A massive geyser of foul, stagnant, black swamp water and decayed hemlock needles erupted into the air, showering down over his high-visibility neon vest. His expensive smartphone on its motorized gimbal broke from his grip, arced gracefully through the air, and vanished beneath the surface of the black mud with a faint, final gurgle of ruined electronics.
Julian thrashed violently in the muck, his legs tangled in thorny hydrangea vines, his arms flailing as he tried to stand. The decaying vegetation in the botanical runoff pool had fermented over months of summer heat into a pungent anaerobic sludge. Every kick released bubbles of sulfurous marsh gas, coating Julian’s neck, chin, and hair in thick black organic sediment. His livestream chat, still active on the cloud server, had exploded with tens of thousands of laughing skull emojis, clips of his backward dive already circulating on rival internet forums. Every movement only sank him deeper into the knee-deep black silt. Dark, slimy bog mud coated his face, filled his open mouth, and caked his designer sunglasses, while tangled thorny briars ripped into his safety vest and hair.
“HELP! I’M DROWNING! GET THIS DOG OFF ME!” Julian gagged, spitting out mouthfuls of swamp muck as Copper, utterly unfazed by the mud, leaned happily over the edge of the stone embankment, furiously licking the remaining broth off Julian’s upturned boot heels with joyful, rhythmic snorts. The physical humiliation was absolute. Julian’s high-visibility vest was saturated with black organic sediment, his three-hundred-dollar designer trail boots were weighed down with forty pounds of foul marsh mud, and every desperate attempt to scramble up the slippery clay bank sent him sliding straight back into the tangled roots of the prickly wild roses with an undignified squelch.
Deputy Miller did not waste a single second.
He stepped over the caustic ammonia puddle, whistled sharply with two fingers between his teeth, and tapped his thigh. “Copper! On by! East gate! Find Toby!”
The professional command, combined with the hound’s olfactory receptors having been completely cleared by the rich protein scent, worked like a charm. Bloodhounds possess an innate neural mechanism that allows them to compartmentalize distinct scents; once the intense craving for the broth was satisfied by those frantic licks, Copper’s working drive instantly reasserted itself, locking back onto the delicate juvenile pheromone trail. Copper gave one final, satisfied lick to Julian’s shoe, spun around with athletic grace, and bounded back up onto the clean gravel trail leading toward the eastern perimeter, his tail held high and proud.
Silas Thorne walked up to the edge of the stone path, leaning comfortably on his hickory cane as he looked down at the mud-soaked agitator thrashing in the bushes like a speared carp.
“My, my,” Silas remarked, his tone mild and conversational as he picked up his thermos cap. “That sidewalk looks pretty clean to me now, young fellow. Just be careful with those three-hundred-dollar shoes down in that ditch. The snapping turtles in that hollow get awful territorial this time of year.”
Curiosity Lock: Leaving Julian howling in the muddy swamp, Miller, Silas, and Copper sprinted down the winding trail, rounding the hemlock bend until they came face to face with the weathered wooden pickets of the east berry gate, swinging open in the cold wind.
