THERE TURNED OUT TO be five bridges in Starling Point...and no homeless people beneath any of them. Instead, we found a very different sort of surprise hidden in the dim recesses where the railroad tracks turned into an extended cavern cutting beneath one of the encircling hillsides.
“Oh s**t,” I said, startled into speaking aloud by the scent that belatedly reached my nostrils. Robert and I had walked twenty feet into the tunnel by that point, far enough so the already dim winter illumination faded to twilight in front of our eyes. Only then did I pick up on a very important aroma that had been muffled by the damp stonework cupping us on all sides.
Flinging a straight arm out in front of my human partner like a parent preventing her kid from flying through the windshield, I hoped agains
