Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  Owen stepped back, heart and guts slamming into his throat. “Jesusfuckingchrist.”

  “See? I told ya.”

  Owen turned away, keyed his radio. “Base, this is Delta Five. Come in.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket for his card of codes. There wasn’t a fucking code for what he wanted. There was one for animal carcasses, but nothing for Fuck! I found a human body!

  “Delta Five, this is Base.”

  “Base, I’ve got a 10-78 . . . uh, 10-79.” According to the card in his shaking hand: Need assistance. Notify coroner.

  “Delta Five, you need assistance with . . . a 10-79? Confirm, please.” Cindy clearly thought he’d lost his card or his marbles.

  “10-78,” he repeated. “10-79.”

  “Roger that. Hold your position.”

  “10-4.”

  He released the radio key, took ten paces away, and vomited into the shrubbery. The vomit obliterated some of the black goo on his shoe, for which he was thankful. After emptying the contents of his stomach, he took a deep breath and turned back to the well.

  Larry was just standing there, staring at the skull, looking shocked.

  “You should back away from that,” Owen said, without much conviction.

  Larry stayed rooted in place.

  Owen didn’t push the issue. He made himself peer into the well, shine his flashlight down into the darkness. He could see nothing but black water reflecting the noonday sun.

  Within an hour, the whole place was crawling with cops. Owen returned to the cruiser, where he filled out every form he could find, in longhand, on the dashboard.

  The passenger door opened and Owen’s father slid into the passenger seat. He put his hat on the dash and rubbed his brow.

  “Helluva first day,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Owen agreed.

  “You did good,” his dad said.

  “Yeah.” Owen wasn’t convinced. Mostly because that was the only time his dad had ever told him that.

  He drank himself into oblivion that night. He stopped at the drive-through liquor store on his way home, filled his trunk, and drank so much when he got home that he passed out on in his own bathtub, fully dressed. He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking, but he awoke in his clothes in a pool of tepid water, staring up at the buzzing fluorescent light with the world’s worst headache. It was quite probable that he’d pissed himself. A lot.

  Something moved behind the shower curtain.

  Owen splashed in the water, reaching for a gun belt that wasn’t there. He knocked over his shampoo bottle and soaked the floor.

  A little girl stood on his soggy bathmat, peering in at him.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Gah!” Owen said. “What . . . what are you doing here?”

  “I’m not sure.” She screwed up her face and stared into the bath. “I think I came home with you.”

  “Where are your parents?” Owen panted.

  “I don’t know.”

  And the little girl faded right in front of him, like a photograph bleeding ink into water.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Owen clambered out of the bathtub. He’d clearly been hallucinating. Water rained from his clothes onto the tile floor, and he reached down to drain the tub. He stripped off his waterlogged clothes and wrapped himself in a robe. He ripped open the medicine cabinet and stuffed his face with aspirin.

  He promised never to drink that much again. But he failed.

  Five days later, the coroner got back to the office with her report. The body had belonged to a nine-year-old little girl. Anna Jean Sawarski. She had blond hair and blue eyes, and her school picture looked just like the girl who appeared in Owen’s bathroom. She’d been missing for seven months.

  Owen had insisted on going along with his father to break the news to her parents. There was shrieking and howling and wailing to Jesus. The couple got divorced right afterward, and then the dad killed the mom in a murder-suicide in the parking lot of a waffle shop at two a.m. The patrons said they were arguing about whose fault it was that Anna was dead.

  The other night had been hallucinatory coincidence, he thought. He had fully dried out after his bender and even made himself sit through a church service. He went directly home, didn’t watch the news, and went to bed.

  He awoke in darkness, under that prickly blanket of feeling that someone was watching him.

  He opened his eyes. The blond girl was leaning over, peering at him. He bit his tongue, and could feel it. He wasn’t dreaming.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Are you Anna?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.” She had a piece of hair tangled in her fingers, picking at the mold on the ends.

  “Why aren’t you in . . . in heaven?” He struggled to sit upright. He clicked on the lamp, and the girl remained standing there, in her pink hoodie, jeans, and one sneaker.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I just know that I’m here and not in that cold place.”

  Owen was never able to solve her death. Any usable evidence had rotted away, and the coroner couldn’t even give a good cause of death, declaring it “undetermined.” The bucket and the rope still sat in a banker’s box in Owen’s office. The case haunted him. And so did Anna, literally. At first, she appeared only at night. Then, during the day. And then she’d disappear for a week. Some days, he was convinced that she was just a projection of his own guilt about not being able to solve the crime. Other days, he was convinced that she really was a ghost. He wasn’t sure which possibility baked his noodle more.

  But he threw out the pair of boots that he’d vomited on. And Sharella’s number from the feed store. She was blond and had blue eyes, and Owen couldn’t stomach the possibility of dating a blond girl who might someday, if the stars aligned right, give him a blond child who looked like Anna.

  Anna had haunted Owen for ten years now. He was used to it, he guessed.

  Anna swung down from the tree. “Do you care?” she asked.

  “Do I care about what?”

  “Do you care if Sal’s dead?” Anna was nothing if not direct.

  Owen shrugged. “I don’t like him.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Owen was sure that was the question on the lips of everyone behind his back. He had the most to gain from Sal’s death, as the next in line to inherit the Rutherford Ranch. The cousins tolerated each other publicly, and Owen did his best to sweep Sal’s messes under the rug whenever he could. But there was no love lost between them.

  “Nope.” Owen looked up at the sky. “But I’m sure gonna find the sonofabitch who did. And when I do . . . I’ll shake his hand before I ship him off to the electric chair.”

  Chapter 3

  The View from Above

  Petra hadn’t yet gotten used to the sound of Gabe breathing.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly breathing. It was more like snoring.

  Moonlight reflected off the snow through the Airstream’s window blinds, rendering night as bright as a cloudy morning. She glanced at Gabe sleeping beside her on the futon. From a century and a half of sleeping in the glowing embrace of the Alchemical Tree of Life, he was clearly accustomed to sleeping with the lights on, and bright moonlight didn’t faze him. He’d somehow figured out a way to snore softly with his mouth closed. It was intermittent and shouldn’t have been too terribly annoying, but she found it disconcerting. He had a pulse now, one that she could hear if she turned her head the right way against his shoulder. She wasn’t sure whether to be happy for him now that he was mortal, or worried about him. Maybe it was because it seemed to her that he hadn’t yet decided for himself if becoming human was a good thing.

  Sig did not think this was a good thing. He sat on Petra’s stomach and stared at Gabe as he snored, eyes shining in the dark. He cocked his head and looked at Petra, as if to say, This is all your fault.

  Petra sighed, trying to shift her bladder out from under Sig’s back foot. Gabe had chivalrously offered to sleep on the floor when he’d come to
stay. Perhaps she should have let him do that. Sig certainly seemed to think so; he resented the loss of his sprawling area on the futon, and had expressed that displeasure by sleeping on Gabe’s chest with his ass in the man’s face more than once.

  She wondered if Gabe dreamed. Wondering about his internal workings kept her from thinking about her own problems, which she was determined not to face. Not yet. Not today.

  She watched the light grow less sharp as the moon set, and eventually slipped out of bed to shower and get ready for work. Sig rolled over to her side of the futon with a dramatic harrumph, but got up when she’d dressed and was ready to leave.

  She leaned over Gabe to kiss him. She knew she needed to explain to him what was happening. It seemed they were in a moment of stasis in their lives right now, and she knew that it couldn’t last.

  His lips curved in a smile as she kissed him. She resolved to tell him about the diagnosis when she got home from work. For now . . . he’d been through a lot, and it was worth so much to see him peacefully sleeping. Letting him sleep, Petra slipped out into the cold winter with Sig.

  She pushed the snow off the Bronco with a broom and climbed into the truck to start it. She let it warm up for several minutes, watching the stars fade through the windshield. Sig snuggled into his fleece blanket on the cold bench seat, rolling about as if to make the point that he was pleased to finally have room to stretch out.

  The engine chattered sluggishly, and she tooled down the gravel road that led into Temperance, the nearby town. There were no other cars on the road at this hour, and the one main street was dark. The only light emanated from the single stoplight set permanently on flashing red, and Bear’s Gas ’n Go convenience store. She stopped at Bear’s to fill up the Bronco. She meant to get a coffee for herself but decided to buy orange juice and a yogurt cup, instead. She also picked up a bottle of multivitamins. The only kind Bear had in stock were the animal-shaped ones for kids, but she figured they were good enough. Her body was going to be going through hell soon, and she needed to get a head start on getting healthy.

  Bear gave her a lifted eyebrow. It was intimidating, coming from a big, bearded man who could have been a lumberjack in a previous life. “You aren’t dieting, are you?”

  “No.” To assuage his concerns, she picked a sandwich out of the case that she intended to feed to Sig. She made a face at the coyote, who had delicately plucked a stick of beef jerky off a low-hanging display.

  “You don’t need to lose any weight.” The burly man stabbed the keys on the register. “You wouldn’t believe the girls that come in here, looking like Popsicle sticks, refusing to let a carb pass their lips, but smoking like chimneys.” He pointed at her. “You are not allowed to get on that bandwagon, young lady.”

  Petra lifted her hands. “No worries. You know I can be trusted to do the right thing with a hoagie.”

  “I’m watching you.” Bear slid an oatmeal chocolate chip muffin across the counter at her.

  She took a bite to be polite and it melted in her mouth in warm, chocolate lava. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes out of the oven. “Oh my fucking God, Bear . . . when did you start with these bits of heaven?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, a grin spreading above his beard. “I’ve been experimenting with doing a breakfast spread since I started watching those cooking shows on the Food Channel. You’re my first guinea pig for the muffins.”

  “You must make these.” She nearly leaned over the counter to threaten him.

  “Come early. They roll outta the oven around five. I’ll set another aside for you tomorrow.”

  “Deal.” She reached over the counter to shake his hand.

  The muffin had disappeared by the time she got back to the Bronco. It felt like warm, gooey love in her stomach, like optimism. She opened the vitamin bottle and dumped the first one into her hand. The candy-flavored purple bear-shaped vitamin made her feel like she was eight years old again at her mom’s kitchen counter.

  “Maybe today will be a better day than yesterday,” she chirped at Sig, who had crawled under his plaid blanket, exposing only his tail. His tail wagged, which was a good sign. She opened his sandwich and delivered it under the blanket. The tail continued to wag, while chewing sounds emanated from Sig’s nest.

  The sun was beginning to lighten the horizon by the time they got back on the road, headed to Yellowstone National Park. Snow had smudged the borders of the road, pushing across in waves. Petra glanced at the snow markers beside the shoulder, which recorded wintertime snow levels by colorful marks on poles. She wasn’t looking forward to four feet of it.

  The old dinosaur of a truck plunged forward, winding into the park with sure traction on brand-new snow tires. Just in case, she had chains rattling around in the back, a shovel, and a bag of kitty litter. She hoped she wouldn’t need them, but better safe than sorry. Winter so far had been relatively mild for this part of the country, but she didn’t expect it to last.

  The summer and fall had seen the roads packed with tourists. This time of winter, the park felt abandoned. She passed no traffic on the road in, and the only sign of human habitation she saw was a couple of snowmobilers in a distant white field. The economy had taken a nosedive lately, but she expected to see more winter-sports enthusiasts than were here. Lodgepole pines bent under the weight of snow, nodding at each other in what looked like a conspiracy of trees. A herd of bison meandered through a valley, and a lone tourist was taking pictures of them with a telephoto lens.

  She stopped off at the Tower Falls Ranger Station, her home base, to gather her paperwork for the day. There were only two ranger vehicles parked outside today, covered in a blanket of snow. The old log structure looked like something out of a Currier and Ives china pattern, a spot of darkness in the white, with smoke churning from the chimney.

  She hoped to get in and out, to pick up some of her geology gear without talking to anyone. Her friend, Ranger Mike Hollander, worked here, but she wasn’t much up for company. But when she opened the door, he was sitting at the counter with another ranger, the two of them squinting at an upturned plastic cup on the counter.

  “Morning, gentlemen.” Petra stomped snow off her boots on the mat inside the door, as Sig trotted around her legs to find his water dish in the back conference room.

  “Morning, sunshine.” Mike wagged his fingers in a wave and continued to stare at the cup.

  “It’s a little early for beer pong, isn’t it?”

  The men made noncommittal noises and didn’t look up from the cup. Petra had noticed that things got weird late in the season here, when tourists were few and far between. Most rangers used the time to catch up on paperwork, futz around with neglected indoor projects, develop education programs, and the like. But there were always moments of sheer boredom. Last time she’d popped in, she’d interrupted a game of chess played on the floor with pine cones and pop cans on squares made of legal paper. She wasn’t sure what the rules were for ranger-chess, but there was a moat of potato chips and something that looked like a porcupine made of sticks that seemed to have the ability to knock pine cones off the playing field with a rubber-band catapult.

  The cup slowly moved across the counter.

  “I was not shitting you,” Mike confirmed to the other ranger.

  Petra peered over Mike’s shoulder. “What the hell is that?”

  “It fell out of the ceiling.” Mike pointed upward to the rafters.

  Petra squinted. She had a hard time imagining that termites got big enough to move cups on their own.

  The other ranger lifted the cup, while Mike laced his fingers like a cage over the critter beneath.

  “It’s a bat,” Petra exclaimed. A tiny one, not much bigger than Mike’s thumb. It was light golden brown, and had a pair of large crested ears.

  “Yep.” Mike scooped it up, and the bat crawled around his fingers. “It’s a Townsend’s big-eared bat.”

  The other ranger, a mustachioed fellow named Sam,
inspected its wings gently. “I don’t think it’s hurt itself. No sign of white-nose disease that I can see. Do you wanna swab him anyway?”

  “Is that the fungal disease that kills bats?” Petra asked.

  “Yeah. We’ve had a lot of problems with that out here.”

  “It seems small . . . is it full-grown?”

  “Yep. He should be hibernating this time of year, but maybe he rolled over a bit too far in his sleep.” Mike rubbed the back of the bat’s head with a pinky finger. The bat squinted. Petra couldn’t tell if it was an expression of happiness or displeasure.

  “What are you gonna do with him?”

  “Well . . . much as I’d like to keep him down here as a pet, we’re gonna go find a ladder and tuck him back into bed,” Mike said.

  Petra grinned. It was nice to see that some part of the world was still running as it should. She left the two men cooing over the bat to ditch her bags and gather her gear. Sig had nearly drained his water dish in the conference room, and she topped it off for him while she collected her forms and plastic vials for geological samples. When Sig had slurped down his fill, he trotted out to the main room behind her.

  Mike was crawling up on an extension ladder held by the second park ranger. The bat peered out of his shirt pocket as he ascended.

  “I’m off, fellas,” Petra said, adjusting her pack over her shoulder.

  “Where you off to?” Mike asked.

  “Northwest. Sampling near Mammoth Springs and the terrace.” She rattled her bottles. “This is probably the only time to get there that the place isn’t completely overrun by tourists.”

  “You know that the roads are closed up that way, right?” The northwest part of the park was off-limits to the public every winter, owing to the snow and hazardous conditions.

  “I brought chains. Science, man. It’s gotta get done.”

  “You should be all right going to Mammoth. Road’s always open between here and the north entrance. But stay on the paved roads and keep in touch.”