Part eight
Meryl took a long, satisfying swallow from her canteen, eyes squinted against the setting suns. Desert stretched out as far as she could see, little interrupting the uniform sterility of the landscape. She became acutely aware of the ache in her feet and legs, her cape hanging heavy on her shoulders. All she wanted was to go back to the room, take a long, relaxed bubble bath and forget all about bizarre murders and pacifist gunmen.
The day was spent in a futile search for Vash's mystery girl, their first and only lead. They checked boarding houses, saloons, and finally started going from door to door, asking anyone if they had spotted a young blonde woman with a silver cross. Every time the same answer: never saw anyone like her.
It didn't help that they had to avoid the sheriff either. Vash had thrown Buck off their immediate trail for the moment, but Meryl had been around the outlaw long enough to know their luck wasn't going to last much longer, especially with the amount of questions they were asking.
In a fit of frustrated inspiration, she dragged Millie and Vash on a tour of the crime scenes, hoping that there may be some evidence they had missed, anything to point them in the right direction. But the desert had already begun encroaching up on the town again, erasing any sign that a dead girl had been found there only yesterday morning.
God, had it really only been two days?
Meryl grunted and kicked at a rock. "Nothing."
"We should probably head back," Vash suggested, eyes drifting towards the horizon. "It's almost nightfall."
"I know, I know," Meryl sighed. "It's just – I hoped there would be something here. Maybe we should head out to the farmsteads. They could know something…"
"Fine. Tomorrow," he nodded. He was usually quite good at hiding his anxiety but something out here was making him nervous. She sighed and followed him as he started back toward town, taking one last lingering look out to the desert.
Wait a second…
She stopped and stared. Her companions paused, noticing her distraction.
"Meryl?" Millie frowned. "What's wrong?"
"Millie, what do you see?"
The younger woman blinked, looking back in the direction Meryl was facing. "Um, nothing. Should I see something?"
"No. That's the problem."
She jogged out again past the town gates, ignoring the protests coming from Vash. She stopped about a dozen yarz away and took a long, careful look at her surroundings. The girl had been returning from one of the farms when she was murdered. But operating on her previous hypothesis, she couldn't have been killed there without leaving bloodstains. Which meant her murderer had ambushed her out here.
Yet there wasn't anything here, no where to hide, no where to stash the body before dropping it off in town for the horrified populace to discover the next morning.
"So where the hell did he come from?" she muttered to herself, never noticing the suns as they finally slipped below the horizon, the last of their direct light vanishing.
Something grabbed her leg and she felt herself fall.
End part eight