When I undressed the woman in that clearing, I’d made observations that I need to follow up on before April begins her autopsy. So I tell her what I noticed. She listens and frowns and then nods and checks.
“Your observations are correct,” she says when she finishes. “This woman is not the infant’s mother.”
“Fuck,” Dalton exhales.
“Seconded,” I murmur.
When I’d first removed the dead woman’s shirt, what caught my attention was her breasts. I might not know much about babies, but I’ve worked alongside breastfeeding mothers, and I understand the basic physiological changes that go along with breastfeeding. This woman … well, she looks like I’d expect of a middle-aged woman with a D-cup bosom. In short, her breasts are not buoyed by mother’s milk. That could mean she was unable to breastfeed, which is why I hadn’t mentioned my suspicion to Dalton. It threw a huge monkey wrench into this scenario, and I wanted to be sure. Now I am.
“This woman has never given birth,” April says.
“She could have a child without breastfeeding,” I explain to Dalton. “But April is talking about her pubic bones. During pregnancy, they separate. The ligaments tear, which you’d see in a recent birth. There’s none of that. Long-term, that heals, but it leaves pitting, which I learned from that forensic anthropology text you got me. That’s why April believes this woman has never had a child.”
“So she isn’t the baby’s mother,” Dalton says. “I don’t even know where to go with that.”
“I do,” I say. “Because I’ve been considering it since I got a good look at her. Unfortunately, that path goes in a million directions.”
“I believe a million is overstating the matter,” April says.
“It’s rhetorical hyperbole,” I say. Before she can argue, I continue. “The woman could be related to the baby. She could be a caretaker. She could have stolen it. Of course, if she’d been caught stealing it, whoever shot her should have taken the baby back. If she’s a relative or caretaker, I’d expect the parents to be combing the woods looking for her, and we didn’t hear anything.”
“Does it matter how this woman obtained the child?” April asks, and her tone makes it sound like an accusation but I’m learning not to jump on the defensive.
“It does,” I say. “Because if she knows the baby, then her body may provide clues to the baby’s home. If she doesn’t know her…”
I don’t finish. This woman is my only link to the baby’s origins. If she has no relationship to the child—if they aren’t from the same family or settlement—then I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’s like dropping a naked baby on a church doorstep. I need something to work with, and this woman is all I have right now.
I will find my clues here. Pretend I really am living in the nineteenth century and channel my inner Sherlock Holmes to tease out the threads leading to a connection that will, ultimately, take this woman and—I hope—the baby home. For that, my best clues might be contained in the literal threads that surround her: the woman’s clothing. I force myself to set that aside for now and focus on what her body tells us instead.
This woman was not born in the wilderness. There are fillings in her teeth and the dents of old ear piercings. She also has a mark that may be a belly button piercing.
I take photos of the ritual scarring and tattooing. Both seem unfinished, and the scars are old. She hasn’t been a hostile in a while. My mind automatically seizes on this and wants to start extrapolating potential information on the nature of hostiles. But that’s not what this is about. File it for later. Focus on the clues for this woman as an individual, not as a general exemplar.
She’s lost the tips of two toes to frostbite. The bottoms of her feet are callused and thick-soled. I also note that one of her wrists is slightly crooked, and April confirms that the bone has been broken and healed poorly. That could have taken place with the hostiles or afterward—medicine outside Rockton is primitive, and the fact that it healed at all shows she had basic medical care.
On to cause of death. April confirms it wasn’t the blow to the back of her head. That’s ugly, and it left a mark on the bone, but it wouldn’t have been incapacitating. The wound on her leg is indeed a bullet hole. A pellet hole, to be exact, from a shotgun. We find a buckshot pellet. There’s only one, which suggests the gun was fired from a distance. That’s not how you use buckshot—if you’re hunting large game with a shotgun at a distance, you’d use a slug and, arguably, you should be using a rifle, but out here, people take the weapons and ammo they can get. At that range, a buckshot pellet isn’t usually fatal, but if you hit the right spot—like the femoral artery—it can be.
Struck by a blow to the back of the head. Puts on her hat afterward. No time to treat the injury? Trying to get somewhere first? Then she’s shot. I don’t see any signs that she’d attempted to treat that or even stop the bleeding.
Mental confusion from the head blow? Shock? Hypothermia? She’d been escaping someone in the forest, possibly at night, snow falling.
I remember her position, fetal on her side, protecting the baby.
I’m just going to lie down for a minute. Rest.
That’s a classic sign of hypothermia. Someone accustomed to life out here would know better, but add the blow to the head with the baby clutched to her breast, and she had good reason to succumb.
Running. Fleeing. Lost. Exhausted. Drop and curl up … and bleed out in the snow, too befuddled from a head injury to tend to your injured leg.
The woman’s stomach has food in it. Not much, suggesting she hadn’t recently eaten. There’s nothing for me to analyze there. I don’t know what I’d be looking for anyway—ah-ha, she ate hare, and from the semi-digested bits, I can tell it was a specific subtype, found only on Bear Skull Mountain. Yeah, no. She isn’t starving, but neither had she just eaten before her death. That’s all I need.
Speaking of eating, that makes me realize the dead woman didn’t have any supplies on her. No backpack. Nothing to feed the baby either. Does that suggest she fled unexpectedly? She was properly dressed, so it wasn’t as if she grabbed the baby and ran out into the snow.
I check her clothing pockets. Only her parka has them, and I find a knife in an interior one.
Clothing next. The most interesting piece had been around her ankle—her sole jewelry. A braided leather anklet inscribed with “Hope. Dream. Love.” The letters have been burned in with painstaking care. The leather edges show faint wear. It’s not new, but it isn’t old either.
Most of the woman’s clothing is basic in its construction. It shows a knowledge of tanning and sewing at a journeyman level. It’s sturdy, and it does the job. Her jacket and boots are different. They’re serious craftsmanship. The parka is done in the Inuit style—caribou with the fur inside, the hollow hairs adding extra insulation. The hood is framed in ermine. Her boots are also caribou, and her socks are mink. Warm and luxurious. All three have decorative flairs not found on her clothing. The jacket buttons are polished stones. The laces on the boots and jacket end in bone carvings of fox heads—gorgeous work that I didn’t even notice until now.