Cold Moon

by Tess Grant

  “You know Phinney. He hatched a plan to handle it.” She laughed mirthlessly. “It went off without a hitch.”

  Except for the part where you’re left fighting alone.

  She swallowed hard. “Melville’s got a list of dead and missing an arm long, and he thinks Phinney’s disappearance—I don’t know—is like the others, is connected somehow. He can tell something is wrong. And it is, but it’s not even close to what he thinks. He knows Phinney and I spent the summer together.”

  If Joe still had questions, he let them go for the moment. “Now what?”

  “Phinney and I thought we had finished it, but we didn’t. There are more. That’s why I needed the duffle. All my gear’s in there.” She desperately needed him to believe now; she didn’t know why. “Come to the house. I’ll show you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kitty hoisted the duffle out of its hiding spot and moved it into the center of the room. Joe crouched next to Maddie, idly rubbing at her ears. His lack of chatter seemed to confuse the retriever, and she prodded his arm with her muzzle. Kitty could have told her to give it up. She had tried to talk to him on the way home and had gotten a big fat zero too.

  She unzipped the duffle, pushing the fabric sides wide. What was it her English teacher said? Show, don’t tell. He may have been talking about short stories, but Kitty figured it worked in this situation too. She had done all kinds of talking on that rock above the river; now she was going to show Joe.

  She had put the maps and legal envelope in on top when she’d repacked the duffle so they wouldn’t get squished. Now she pulled the folded rectangles of green and brown squiggles dotted with splashes of blue and spread them across the closest surface. Joe didn’t stand, but she caught the slightest movement out of the corner of her eye. He’d turned his head.

  “These are the maps,” she said. “I can show you how I plot something on them later and what all the lines and colors mean. Right now, the red and black circles are what you want to concentrate on. Those are Phinney’s markings—red for something killed by a werewolf, black for a dead werewolf.” Kitty scanned the red circles. Phinney’s block letters filled the one closest to her—January 3, 2007, Stacia Nowell, police notified. It’d been all well and good for Phinney to do his civic duty and inform the authorities, but now she was the one reaping the benefits via Melville’s attention. She vowed to use the Silent Observer number when she called in to report.

  Kitty set the propane torch, crucible and metal shears down with a clatter closest to Joe. The gear garnered no response other than a little more ear massage for Maddie.

  She gathered the bullets and spread them on a table that was still touched by the dying rays of light coming in the door. Opening the knotted-up rag where she’d wrapped the ones hidden in the wall, she added them to the pile. Their twinkle pulled Joe to his feet.

  The .45 went down on the workbench with a thunk, and Joe moved closer. Slowly she pulled the M1 out of the duffle, taking care not to scratch it on the zipper. The little gun brought actual words out of his lips. She could always count on the M1.

  “Is that a carbine?”

  Kitty extended her arm, holding it out to him. “World War II. Straight from a paratrooper.”

  Joe wrapped his hands around it, caressing the stock the same way Phinney had. Must be a boy thing, Kitty thought and turned back to organizing. She set the legal envelope aside to bring into the house later.

  Joe began to wander from pile to pile—picking up, putting down, touching everything. Kitty let him go. “I can’t believe it,” he said again, shaking his head in disbelief. “I thought you made it all up.”

  Kitty didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t expect a reply. Joe was trying to believe, and that he would have to do on his own. She remembered drinking tea in Phinney’s kitchen while she examined every nuance of the veteran’s story in the hard light of day, searching for holes before she decided to become a hunter.

  Joe pinched the bullets between his fingers, testing their hardness, making sure they didn’t disintegrate. She smiled. Everybody came to it in their own way.

  She swung herself up on the workbench. Joe had slung the leather strap of the carbine over his shoulder and held one twinkling projectile in his fingers. With the other hand, he flipped through the maps, examining Phinney’s handwriting, the dates, the fading circles of ink marking the kills.

  Kitty studied the workshop while she waited for Joe to make a decision. Her mother had cleared out the Sharpies and poster board she used to make protest signs, so now the only new things in the space were the hunting gear Kitty had laid out minutes before and Maddie’s bed. Otherwise, the workshop was exactly as it had been when her father left. Even the calendar was stuck on the month of his depart date. Kitty went to it now, flipping through the six intervening months until she hit September.

  “Full moon next Tuesday,” she said to no one in particular. “You can tell by the dark circle on the calendar.”

  Paper rattled behind her. “My dad used to take me out in the woods all the time. I hated it. Too many mosquitoes and brambles.”

  Kitty turned to face Joe. She almost smiled at him—gun on his shoulder, crucible in his hand—but the sadness on his face wiped it away. “Mine too,” she answered.

  “All this time, I thought he was teaching me stuff because he wanted to. How to identify a print and how to climb a tree in ten seconds flat and how to find water.”

  Kitty’s own father had been the same. While the other girls in her grade could hang by their knees from the monkey bars, Kitty could walk a downed tree over a stream without falling in. While her classmates could jump rope, Kitty could tie a bowline knot that could anchor a shelter.

  Joe laid the M1 across the maps. “All he was doing was looking for kills for Phinney. That other stuff was to keep me busy. It had nothing to do with me at all.”

  Poor Joe. Stuck forever in the shadow of the other Joe—the dead Joe. Thank God she didn’t have that legacy. “That’s not true. He taught you those things so you would survive. So you wouldn’t end up like his brother.” As she said it Kitty knew it was true. That’s why my dad taught me. Their fathers might have hidden the reason, but they had laid the groundwork to keep their children safe in the woods. In the Manistee National Forest…where not everything was as it seemed and some nights were more deadly than others. “He loves you, Joe. The rest is just something that goes with the territory.”

  Joe closed the distance between them. Taking Kitty’s wrist, he slid his hand down until he twined his fingers through hers. His shoulders sagged, and he looked defeated. “Dad’s still not over Uncle Joe. And Phinney? I thought that fire was going to put him over the edge.” His voice wavered. “How long has it been and he’s still not done with it?”

  “He’s not done with it because it’s not done. I need him this time too.”

  Joe leaned in close enough that Kitty felt his breath brush her cheek. His dark blue eyes hardened. “Then you get two-for-one. ’Cause this time I help too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Kitty sat on the workbench beating out a nervous tattoo on her legs with the red and black ballpoint pens Phinney used to plot kills. Talk about one of Melville’s goat ropes. She’d packed away the contents of the duffle bag last night and now it was strewn from one end of the workshop to the other. The silver bullets glittered against the paint-spattered plywood of the table next to her. The M1 and the .45 lay next to her dad’s radial arm saw. The topo maps fanned out one on top of each other across every other available inch of table space. Joe bounced from pile to pile checking every detail, then started the rounds all over again.

  Kitty had three nights and a wakeup before the next full moon. She had no information from spotters to plot a killing zone on the maps. She had no clearing in which to set up the punji sticks. Not like it mattered—the spears were still buried up at the rock. How had one World War II veteran made such a difference in this operation? More importantly, how had one se
venteen-year-old screwed it up so badly?

  “So what do we do? Full moon is Tuesday.” Joe turned from the topo maps to the calendar hanging from a nail driven into one of the barn beams.

  Kitty had flipped the pages last night and pointed out the dark circle that signified the full moon. She knew darn well how close it was. She pinched at her forehead. “Give me a couple minutes to think.”

  Joe pawed through the sparkling stack of bullets counting them again. “My grandma’s old silverware is in a box in the attic. My mom would never miss a few pieces.”

  Kitty held up her hand. “Joe, give me two minutes to freak out. Okay? Two. Then we’ll start from the beginning and run this down.”

  Joe started counting again, sorting the bullets rapid-fire into piles of ten and shaking his head as if he didn’t like the tally.

  “And no,” Kitty said, wanting to nip this silverware raid in the bud. “We’re not taking any of your grandma’s silver. Phinney left me a serving dish in the duffle.”

  “Shall I start cutting it up?”

  Kitty blew out a breath in exasperation and held up two fingers. “This many minutes.”

  She rubbed at her head again. It had been pounding since she’d crawled into bed last night and everything had finally sunk in. Now, on top of everything else—the homecoming pseudo-date and the police trouble and the werewolves—she had an assistant. An assistant who bubbled with excitement; who oohed and aahed at Phinney’s carbine because “it was a piece of living history”; who now was ready to toss his grandmother’s treasured heirlooms into the crucible without a second thought. It’d taken him awhile, but when that boy finally decided to believe he went whole hog.

  She wasn’t sure who was worse: Herself—dragging her heels and crying and screwing up one thing after the other? Or Joe—twitchy enough to blast the first thing that moved under the full moon?

  She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath through her nose, counted to three and blew it out her mouth—hypnosis style. One more time and she was ready. She opened her eyes. “Got some paper?”

  Joe rooted through the maps and came up with a yellow lined pad of paper.

  “Catch.” Kitty tossed him the black pen. “Let’s make a list of things that have to happen every month then we’ll figure out what we’ve got and what we haven’t.”

  Joe flipped through the pad to find a clean sheet. “Go.”

  “I need to contact the spotters. Get them rolling again. They probably think with Phinney missing, there’s no one to report to. Once we get them back in the loop, they should contact me shortly after each full moon to fill me in on kills, missing person reports, obits, stuff like that. We’ll plot what we can on the topos.” Kitty jumped off the table and started pacing. Ten steps to the wall, think, turn around, ten steps back, think.

  Joe’s pen scratched on the paper. “Who are they? I’ll contact half—”

  Kitty cut him off. “It’s on a need-to-know basis. It’s my intelligence team, not a social club.”

  Joe rolled his eyes. “I’m not asking them on a date.”

  “You know, I said almost the same thing to Phinney.” Kitty kept pacing. Why was she keeping it secret? That had been Phinney’s rule, not hers. If she went down, she didn’t like the thought of Joe digging through her underwear drawer, which was where the manila envelope was now ensconced, to find the list. “On second thought, I’ll take that one under consideration.”

  Joe grinned. “What’s next, Sarge?”

  “Bullets. And silver. Or vice versa.” She regretted that as it came out. Poor Granny’s forks were in constant danger. “Obviously we’re set on both for a while.”

  “Check.” Joe moved over to where Kitty had been sitting a few minutes before and hoisted himself up. He poised his pen over the page. “I feel like your secretary. Next?”

  “And a hot one too. Make a note of this.” Kitty waved a finger in the air. “Once we’ve got the kills plotted, we find a good spot near them to lay out the safe zone.”

  “Wait, wait,” Joe shook his head. “Back up. Let’s revisit that hot thing. We are dating.”

  Kitty stopped in her ten-step trudge long enough to laugh. “Yeah, only it’s a fake date.”

  Joe shrugged. “I’m just saying…it doesn’t have to be.”

  Kitty smiled at him. In another place and time, she would gladly have made it real. He was less than three feet away and she could see how blue his eyes were….

  Joe gave a crooked half-smile. “Safe zone,” he reminded her.

  “Right.” Kitty mentally pinched herself. “We need a clearing. Something big enough to let the moonlight in so we can see. Something big enough for the werewolves to have a clean run at us.”

  Joe reached over and picked up a bullet, spinning it between his thumb and forefinger. “Look boss, maybe this sounds stupid, but I thought we didn’t want them to have a run at us?”

  Kitty’s hands started illustrating her words in the air. “It’s the only way we can take them down—open up some shooting lanes, get them in the open. If we’re in the trees, they’ve got the advantage. We can’t maneuver, we can’t see. Here’s the part that’s key. We need something—a rock, a deadfall—something to put our back up against.”

  “Ah, like the granite boulder in the clearing.”

  “Exactly. And that’s where the punji sticks come in.” Kitty reached the wall and turned. “Ring ourselves in with spears.”

  Joe whistled. “You mentioned those and I forgot all about them. This gig keeps getting better and better.”

  Kitty thought the job left something to be desired, but if it worked for Joe, it worked for her. Not that he needed bolstering, but she threw in a little reassurance. “They’re tipped with silver for a little extra.”

  “Excellent.” Joe wrote another line on the tablet. He cocked his head toward the door leading to the main barn. “Are they in there?”

  “That’s the problem. They’re still in the ground up where the bag was. I don’t know how we’re going to get them up between now and then. Even if we have them, I don’t know where we’re setting up.”

  Joe laid the pen and pencil down. “So I guess that brings us back to the original question. What do we do?”

  Kitty eyed the calendar. Now that it was all out on paper in black and white, she could see there wasn’t enough time for it all. She wasn’t sure there was time enough for any of it. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. You don’t have time to practice. I don’t have time to scour the woods for a safe zone, even if I knew where to look.”

  Joe tapped his forefinger against his upper lip. “You know, I seem to be the gung-ho one here but maybe if we can’t do it right, the answer is we don’t do it.”

  Joe had a good point. Maybe they should wait a month. Wait until she was really ready, until Joe was really ready.

  What happened the last time you took a month off, Kit?

  She sorted through the maps on the table pushing them this way and that.

  “What you looking for?” Joe stepped up behind her.

  Kitty found the front page she had torn out of The Observer about Austin Harris. A map sheet further down, she found the plastic baggie containing the folded yellowing square of newsprint that Joe had given her. Carrying them both over to the calendar, she spiked them onto the nail above the calendar with its dark moon circle. Joe Zubowicz’s obituary swung slowly from side to side, the plastic magnifying individual words of the headline behind it, “Gruesome. Death. National. Forest.”

  She backed up and studied it.

  “That stinks,” Joe whispered behind her.

  “That’s to remind us what happens when we take a month off.” Kitty faced him. “I go out on Tuesday. Alone.” She raised a hand to his objections. “No safe zone, no spears, no you. Just me and that M1. Next month,” she gestured to the equipment spread across the room, “we go full bore. And that means a lot happens between now and then.”

  “Kitty,” Joe put his hands o
n her shoulders and leaned down to put his face close to hers. “That’s insane. I know you think I’m a little cavalier, but that doesn’t make me an idiot.” He shook his head and his hands tightened their grip. “What you’re talking about is a recipe for disaster.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kitty closed the bedroom door behind her. Even with the lights off, she could easily navigate her way to the closet in the moonlight streaming in the window. She checked the clock on the bedside table. Ten fifteen. She had fifteen minutes to get ready and the same amount of time to hope and pray that her mom could wait until tomorrow for Lizzy Bennett and Mr. Darcy to get their misunderstanding sorted out.

  Go to bed, Mom. She beamed the thought downstairs.

  She stripped off her PJ pants and threw them next to the clock. Her mom’s scrub shirt got piled on top. She had set out her hunting clothes earlier in the day and tucked them in the corner of the closest. Now she pulled them out—a pair of jeans and heavy socks, a black turtleneck, and a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt. Downstairs, she had hung her dad’s flannel-lined jean jacket near the door and put her hiking boots out on the mat.

  Her mother would hear any walking around she did, so she sat on the side of the bed to get dressed. Pulling on her socks, she checked the time. She checked it again after her jeans and again after her turtleneck. The numbers ticked down and still she hadn’t heard her mother come upstairs.

  At ten thirty she gave up looking at the clock. She couldn’t very well go out the window, so she would have to wait. She sat in bed with the covers pooled around her waist and watched the angle of the moon’s light across the floor change as the time ticked by.

  Kitty ran over the plan. Grab the gun and hike out into the woods. That was it. After that, it was all up for grabs. The M1 was hidden in the crawlspace under the porch. She couldn’t risk leaving it in the workshop and disturbing Maddie when she went for it.