Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

Worthy turned to leave. “Just give the keys to my deputy. If he ain’t there, toss ’em on the desk. Guess they’ll be safe enough.” He shook Gus’s hand and left.

Much later, Gus exited the rear of the house and gazed around the expanse of land surrounding the back porch. The property was bordered by thick woods, early buds beginning to sprout on some of the mockernut hickory trees. Gus’s eyes fell upon the abandoned outhouse. He stepped off the porch deck and crossed to it.

After a cursory examination of the dank, cobwebbed interior, Gus closed the door and turned away. His eyes fell on the woods to his left, at the very rear of the property. There, where wild shrubbery met the property line, the nearly obscured opening of an old, long-unused footpath was visible. Gus’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at it.

Born and raised on the rural, pristine lands of Long Island, Gus had spent many childhood hours exploring the woods, streams, and lakes surrounding his hometown of Central Islin. He had learned something as a very young boy: A path in the woods always led to somewhere. A tadpole-and-frog-laden pond, a clear, cool-water swimming hole, a shimmering crystal stream, or a scary, haunted-looking hunter’s cabin. Somewhere.

Gus crossed the property, noting the remnants of an old-fashioned, homemade cinder-block barbeque pit now choked with weeds. It seemed identical to the one he recalled behind his grandfather’s old green-and-white bungalow on Connetquot Avenue.

Smiling with his memories, Gus set out onto the path, following its meander for some hundred feet through the woods. The path was heavily overgrown, having not seen regular use in many years; Gus reasoned it dated back to the days when this house and property had most likely served a growing family. As he neared the end of the path, his suspicions were further confirmed. Some twenty feet above him appeared the remains of a roughly built treehouse, constructed from differing sizes and types of lumber, the skeletal remains forming a rough triangle amidst three ancient oak trees. The lumber was mostly rotted away, dangling in some places from large, heavily rusted ten-penny nails.

Gus stood there looking upward at the sight for long moments. Long ago, as a boy, he and his cousin had built just such a treehouse. Their constant foot traffic to and from that treehouse had created a path through the woods very similar to the one where he now stood.

Glancing around one final time, he noticed something else. A few more yards ahead, the woods seemed to open up. He followed the path a bit farther.

An old dirt lane, heavily rutted and about ten feet wide, ran parallel to the rear of the McAdams property. Its existence did not surprise Gus. Long Island was veined with many such lanes, none of which appeared on road maps. They served the hunting blinds and trout streams, fishing holes and hidden copses of hardwood trees that provided locals with firewood for long, snowy winters.

Most had originally been cut through the woods as fire breaks and access routes for local fire-district volunteers. In the event of a wildfire, the lanes allowed pumper trucks and personnel to get in close to fight the flames.

Gus had seen many such lanes in his lifetime and knew they always intersected with main roadways. Much like the narrow, winding footpath he had just trod, the narrow dirt lanes always led somewhere.

Glancing around, he saw a flat expanse of grassy area bordering the lane. It was some fifteen feet long and just wide enough to accommodate an automobile.

He ambled over to it. Unlike the badly rutted lane itself, this patch of flat, weed-strewn grass had once been pristine. But now, as Gus frowned down at it, his eyes narrowing in thought, it was not.

Cut into the flat ground were what seemed to be a set of tire tracks. Though worn and weathered from months of exposure, they remained quite visible. Under the warm March sun, the tracks were dried out but appeared to have been originally cut at a time when the ground had been soft and muddied.

Gus recalled the weather-bureau information he had gathered: Around the time of the murder, there had been an abundant accumulation of rain.

Something about the tracks seemed very odd to Gus, and he bent to one knee for a closer look. After thirty years of policing, he had seen his share of crime-scene tire tracks. But nothing quite like these.

Based on dried remnants of sprayed mud, Gus was able to identify the vehicle’s drive wheels. But, as he knew, a car had only one drive wheel, either left or right rear, depending on car make and model. The spray pattern he was looking at indicated two drive wheels, not just one. And even more perplexing, they each appeared to turn in unison as front-steer wheels do. The mud splatter fanned out to the left in a broad, semicircular pattern. The way Gus read the tracks, the car had first pulled off the lane and onto the clearing, then at some point had accelerated sharply away, spinning its wheels forcefully and spraying grass-clumped mud some ten feet into the low-lying surrounding brush. But the drive wheels appeared to be at the front of the vehicle — the steering wheels, not the fixed rear wheels.