Fingerprints

Amber knew something was off, and it had everything to do with how quiet it was. She was in a forest wilderness, but no birds or squirrels were chirping, insects buzzing, or gusts of wind. The high-pitched scream of a mountain lion would be welcome. It was late, and it had taken longer than anticipated to get to this point. Amber wanted to be sure of the coordinates. She checked her GPS, then pulled out a small black notebook from her pocket. The notebook was quality-built but old, at least seventy years.

After snapping off the elastic band, the book flipped open to a page that stopped Amber cold. Fingerprints filled the ivory paper, stamped in black ink. Who made the prints was unknown. Except for the two front pages, the fingerprints covered the book back to front. Amber had been inspecting this book for a year, and it always sent her neck hair on end. After a moment of recoiling at the prints, she thumbed to the front pages. The pages bore strange markings in jagged ink drawn across the notebooks’ ruled lines.

Two years earlier, Amber’s Grandfather, Rowan Harkin, had passed away. Amber aspired to be like her Grandpa, who had been a detective, so she recently had entered Quantico. Rowan left the notebook to Amber in his Will (With that being the first time Amber had ever known about it.) Also, he left an audiotape informing Amber about the book's past. The tape concluded with Rowan warning Amber to leave the book alone. Solving the book's mystery was a debt owed though, and he believed Amber was the only person capable of ending it.

Once upon a time, Rowan was an FBI homicide detective. His father before him, Allan Harkin, was a sheriff for the small town of Norwood, Colorado. Allan was the first to encounter the notebook back In 1953. A realtor had found blood splattered all over the living room of a vacated country home she was selling, and called the sheriff. Before entering the house, Allan heard a man screaming in agony. The cry was coming from inside the house. Then came, what Allan could only describe as, a growl. Allan searched the house but there was nobody inside. Aside from the blood inside the house, the only other evidence Allan found was the notebook. After searching the area around the house again, he found the notebook laying in the woods a mile away. The fingerprints in the book were never matched to anyone.

In less than a year the case went cold, but Allan couldn’t shake it. He invested his off time studying the book, trying to crack that strange code on the front pages. He then went against his commitment to the law and stole the book from evidence.

Over twenty years Allan’s obsession with the book eroded his life, almost costing him his family. He spent all his time hiring private detectives and code breakers, but no one found a lead. Allen could still hear those unbearable screams. He thought of how close he came to deciphering the code. Most of all, the growl he had heard haunted him to the end of his life.

One fateful day, Allen was helping his son, Rowan, study for a geometry test. Rowan was trying to solve for the sum of a polygon. Allan then had a revelation. Most of the symbols were odd geometric shapes. The number of sides a shape had, stood for a singular number. For example, four sides would mean the number “four.” This was a quantum leap in the case, but those specific shapes made up only two-thirds of the book's markings. Allan’s wife, Sylvia Harkin, gave him a final ultimatum. After going to therapy, he finally put the notebook aside and went on with his life.

The book then passed to Rowan. Fresh out of the academy, he discovered the book while helping his parents move. Allan sat Rowan down and told/warned him about the notebooks’ mystery. Rowan was too occupied at the FBI to even consider the book until he was in his mid-thirties. Like his father, the notebook usurped Rowan’s life over the course of fifteen years. He would divorce his wife and become estranged from his children. Finally, the Bureau had to relieve Rowan of his duties due to his disheveled mental state.

During that haunting time, Rowan was only able to transcode two of the glyphs. Those two symbols being circles and elongated ovals. He realized the numbers “One” & “Two” weren’t among any of the numbers his father had decoded. Rowan had translated the circles as “one.” The elongated ovals, despite not having sides, had two rounded ends which had to mean the number “two.” There were still several unrelated symbols to solve. After Rowan’s failed suicide attempt, he knew it was time to finally move on. He put the book away, resuming his life as a private detective. He rekindled the relationship with his children and their children.

The remaining symbols were clusters of horizontal dash marks. The book was now Amber’s, and for ten months she had become enslaved by it. One evening, Amber was entering a public restroom to take some pills that kept her awake and alert. She stopped, noticing the restroom sign. Below a stick figure, representing a woman, was braille spelling out “Women’s Restroom.” Alarms lit up in Amber’s head: the dashes were in the same layout as braille.

The dash marks read as five letters “W” “N” “E” “S”& “D”. It would be another two months for Amber to figure out the letters stood for North, East, West, and South. As for the elusive “D,” Amber observed the pattern was always in smaller clusters above the lines. The “D” was “degrees.” The entire front two pages of the black book were coordinates.

A quick search on the internet pinned the coordinates in Colorado. The location was somewhere in the Uncompahgre National Forest. Norwood, where the book was first found, was right on the foothills of the Uncompahgre. Amber outlined her course by hunting down and studying several old county road maps. The coordinates were three miles off of an old logging road abandoned in 1976.

It had been three days since Amber had parked her jeep and hiked off-trail. She finally found the abandoned road on the evening of the first day. Dead aspen and pine trees had strewed the road for miles, turning a days’ long trek into two.

A post-it note was stuck on the back cover of the notebook, with the final coordinates written down. Amber compared the coordinates in the book with the ones she had entered into the GPS. The destination was off the road. She had to go the last three miles into the dense woods. The sun was setting behind an overcast sky with the forest canopy further veiling the light. It would be dark in the next few hours but she was too close now to stop and set up camp. The 70-year-old mystery was too important and had gone on for far too long for her to stop because it was dark. It was still too quiet though, and she wasn’t looking forward to spending the night alone there. The land rose to a hill above.

As she climbed the hill, an epiphany sprang into Amber’s mind, jolting her to the bone: “What if the coordinates didn’t lead to anything, but instead were bait.”

Amber looked up the hill, and about eighty yards away, a shape, silhouetted by the sky, came into view. It looked human, some bush, rock, or a combination of both, synchronized to look like someone. Amber stood frozen, seeing if the shape would move. She thought it must be an illusion of her paranoia. She moved and positioned herself in various angles, but the shape remained human. Climbing the hill revealed another form, hidden out of Amber’s sight by a Spruce tree. She halted but realized there was still no movement. This thing was opposite, facing the other. Amber had to squint her eyes. The dim light made the land still visible for miles but turned shadows into black holes.

The GPS then beeped a sharp tone. Amber had arrived at the coordinates. Now she could see the shapes without the sky blasting them into shadows. What she saw made her gasp. They were skeletal remains of two people. The skeletons each sat ten yards apart facing one another. Chains attached one of the corpses against a tree. The chained skeleton sat slouched over in its shackles, its jaw wide open with an eternal scream. Amber, electrified with shock, took a moment to collect her wits and observe the scene.

The second corpse had no chains and sat locked in its position by the tree branches. This person’s clothing was more intact. Amber had studied enough bones in her training to conclude that both the skeletons were male. The body chained to the tree was older, by at least twenty years, the clothing almost rotted to nothing. How had they remained intact? There were even remnants of flesh and sinew dripping over their earth-dyed bones.

The clouds then opened. The setting sun jousted out its’ final rays, intensifying the mood. The sunset cast a deep red glow, backlighting the skeletons with light shafts of crimson. With the brighter light, Amber noticed something. The body chained to the tree, had something in its lap, covered by twigs, leaves, and bushes. Amber leaned down and cleared the flora blanket to uncover a small leather bag. She gazed in paranoid curiosity at the duffle bag, then up to the skeleton holding it. The head was facing away, a third of its skull lit by the red sun. Face to face with this memento mori, Amber unzipped the bag. Inside the bag, were bundles of $100 bills. The leather bag had protected the cash, which was an older print. Amber’s breath stuttered as she counted the bundles. There was $20,000 altogether.

Amber wondered if she should keep the money. This mystery had sent her family into a labyrinth of self-destruction over the years. She was now on the edge of that abyss. The Harkin family lineage had earned this money. But her discovery was new evidence. There was finally a body now, two of them actually, so the case had to reopen.

Regardless of whether Amber kept the money for her own or handed it over to the FBI, the $20,000 was coming with her. She thought about how much the value of $20,000 was seventy years ago, with inflation, that was equal to $200,000. The stretch of time had devalued the money, like the state of these bodies. The bones would collapse and turn to dust, and that $20,000, would devalue to $2,000.

What would endure, if Amber had any children, was the notebook's mystery. Even if the pages of the book decayed into dust, as the skeletons would, the unknowns of the case would endure. With these thoughts, Amber admired how the human race had found a way to preserve the intangible. Evolution passed down an individual fingerprint of skill & temperament. Our ancestor’s unique approach to the truth, chaining us to the present.

Lost in thought, Amber started walking away on auto-pilot, carrying the bag of money. She thought of her past and future. At that moment, something made a sound. Amber jerked out of her thoughts and looked back. The light was so faded, she could only see abstract shapes of the forest engulfing her. She patted her pocket, trying to find her flashlight. Something in the distance charged through the forest crunching leaves and twigs. The maddening quiet of the woods amplified the approaching steps to explosions. A voice registered amongst the commotion. Amber sunk to the ground as she heard something growl.