Free Web NovelChapter 115: Looks Recent
"Are you sure, ma’am?" Ken asked.
"Yes." The woman nodded firmly. "They headed... um... that way."
"That way?" Ken repeated. "You mean west?"
"I don’t know my directions, kid." She shrugged before pointing toward the road outside. "That way."
"So west." Ken nodded slowly. "Got it."
"Who are we talking about?" I asked while walking closer.
"I asked her about the people who came here the day Jelda was murdered," Ken explained. "Since this tavern barely gets visitors, she remembered most of them pretty clearly."
I looked toward the old woman. "Whoever they were, they had a carriage, right?"
Ken blinked at me. "How’d you know?"
"Jelda’s shoes had mud on them," I explained. "Not her clothes. Not her skirt. Just the shoes. That means they probably transported her carefully instead of dragging her around outside. A carriage makes the most sense."
I crossed my arms while thinking it through.
"The mud also wasn’t thick enough to suggest she struggled much. They probably knocked her unconscious quickly, loaded her into the carriage, and took her somewhere remote."
"Gods take them," Ken muttered under his breath.
I turned back toward the tavern owner. "Can you describe exactly what happened?"
"Two gentlemen came in together," she explained. "I can’t remember the time. But the sun was going down. Anyway, then one of them stepped outside for a few minutes. When he came back, he whispered something to the other man, and both of them left in a hurry, getting on their horses... oh, one of them had an S-shaped horseshoe. My memory is bad, but I got the eye of a god."
"Horses?" I asked.
"There was a carriage," she corrected. "But it was one of those smaller ones. Barely enough room for a coachman and a tiny compartment behind it. One of the men rode alongside it on horseback."
I exchanged a look with Ken.
"Maybe we can follow the tracks," I suggested. "Two horses, huh?"
Ken immediately frowned. "Do you know how many trade caravans use this road every single day?"
I nodded. "Yeah, but we’re not looking for every track. We’re looking for a small carriage with narrow wheels traveling alongside a single horse. If we find matching tracks leaving the road together, we might still have a chance to follow them."
I glanced toward the window where dark rainclouds continued gathering overhead.
"But we need to move now," I continued. "Once the rain really starts pouring, the road’s going to turn into sludge and wash everything away."
Ken slowly nodded. "You’re right."
Then he looked back toward the tavern owner.
"Whatever your name is, ma’am, thanks for the help."
"Brianna," the old woman corrected with a snort. "And good luck, boys. I hope you find those bastards and chop their balls off so I can cook them."
Ken stared at her for a second before shaking his head. "Ambly’s tits," he muttered. "Chill out, lady."
We left the tavern a few seconds later and stepped back out onto the dirt road while the sky continued to darken overhead. The air had grown colder already.
Ken pulled his collar up a little while I looked down the road and tried to ignore the growing frustration in my chest.
"All right," I said, adjusting my grip on the rolled-up map in my pocket. "Brianna said the carriage went west, and she mentioned one of them had a horse. The carriage itself was small, so we should be looking for a narrow wheel track, not one of the big trade wagons."
Ken nodded and squinted at the muddy road ahead. "That does narrow it down a little. Still, there are a lot of tracks out here."
"Yeah," I muttered. "But we are not looking for every wheel mark. We just need the ones that match a small carriage and a single rider. If they left in a hurry, the tracks should still be visible somewhere near the edge of the road."
We started walking west along the dirt path, moving slower now and keeping our eyes on the ground. The road had turned softer from the earlier drizzle, and every few steps our boots left fresh prints in the mud. On both sides, the land stretched out into low grass, shallow ditches, and occasional fences marking off farmland near the city’s outer edge. Farther back, the city walls loomed behind us like a shadow. Up ahead, the road split and curved a little toward the countryside.
Ken crouched down first near a patch of churned mud and brushed some of the dirt aside with his hand. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom
"Hold on," he said. "Look at this."
I stepped closer and crouched beside him. The mark in the mud was shallow but clear enough to make out the shape of a wheel groove, narrow and slightly uneven. A second track sat a short distance beside it, the kind left by a horse’s hoof striking the road over and over again.
"That’s it," I said. "That looks like the one Brianna described. S-shaped horseshoes as well."
Ken nodded. "The wheel marks are small, and the hoofprints match a horse walking beside it instead of pulling something large."
"Good," I said. "So we follow these before the rain wipes them out."
We stood again and kept moving, and the weather only got worse as we went. The rain came down harder now, not enough to flood the road yet, but enough to start blurring the tracks whenever we lost sight of them for a few seconds. Every time we stopped, I had to crouch down again and check the mud closely so we would not lose the direction.
The problem was that the road was already full of old tracks.
Every few feet, we found prints from wagons, carts, horses, boots, and everything else that had passed through the area that day. It made the search miserable. Sometimes we would think we had found the right marks only to realize they belonged to a merchant cart or a farmer carrying supplies. We kept having to stop, compare the wheel spacing, and check the depth of the hoofprints against each other.
"Gods," Ken muttered after another false lead. "This is awful."
"Tell me about it," I said while wiping rain off my face. "The road’s a mess already."
We kept going anyway.
After a while, the road opened out a little more, and I started seeing the westward split Brianna had mentioned. One path continued straight while another curved sharply into the forest. The forest road was older, narrower, and barely maintained. Rain had already softened the surface there, and the edges of the trail were beginning to blur into the dirt and grass around it.
Ken pointed ahead before I could speak.
"There," he said. "That road into the trees."
I looked up and followed his finger. The track looked rougher than the main road, but it was still visible enough to show that someone had taken it recently. The deeper wheel marks angled toward the forest, and there were hoofprints alongside them, though the rain had already started breaking them up.
"Yeah," I said slowly. "That has to be it."
Ken frowned as he looked at the muddy split. "This is getting too quiet."
"You wanted a murder investigation," I reminded him. "This is what you get."
"I thought there would be more talking and less mud."
"That part was apparently a lie."
"Ugh."
We approached the forest road carefully and stepped under the first line of trees. The ground changed almost immediately. The road inside the woods was still technically dirt, but it had compacted into a darker, damp surface with roots pushing through in places. Rainwater slid off the leaves overhead and dripped down in small bursts while the wind rustled through the branches. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
The carriage tracks were still there, but they were harder to follow now. The trees had dropped leaves, fallen branches, and clumps of wet debris all across the path. Some sections were nearly destroyed from the rain, while others had been blurred by wagon ruts from older traffic. Still, every so often, we found fresh marks that matched the wheel and horse prints from the tavern road.
"Looks like it came this way," I said, crouching near another set of tracks.
Ken leaned over my shoulder and pointed at the mud. "Yeah, but this is barely readable..."
We moved forward again, slower now, both of us scanning the ground for anything that matched the track Brianna had described. The forest swallowed the sound of the rain a little, and the deeper we went, the more the trees closed around the path. At least there were still signs that we were following the right route. The carriage tracks were damaged, but they were still there, and every now and then we found fresh hoofprints on the edge of the road to confirm we were not wasting our time.
Finally, the road split again deeper inside the forest.
This time, it was not a proper fork so much as one path becoming another dirt trail that vanished between the trees. The rain had nearly destroyed the shape of one side of it, but we could still tell that the carriage had gone that way. The tracks bent into the woods and kept moving forward, just faint enough to follow if we stayed alert.
Ken looked from one path to the other and then back at me.
"Well," he said, "that one definitely looks recent."
I nodded. "Yeah, and the mud is still soft. If we wait too long, we lose it."
He exhaled slowly and adjusted his stance. "Then let’s go before the storm ruins the rest of it."
I looked into the forest road one more time, then back at the fading wheel marks and the half-washed hoofprints leading forward between the trees.
"Right," I said. "Let’s keep moving."
We kept following the tracks until the rain finally ruined them.
