Season of the Wolf

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Morris walked toward her, up the walkway to their front door, and he was definitely depressed. She opened the door before he reached it. “Was it bad?”

  He’d already called her with a brief report, but he had left out the grisly details. “What’s left of him was.”

  She opened her arms and scooped him against her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was awful, Christy. Animals got to him.” His voice, ordinarily gravelly, was lower than usual. She had to strain to hear him.

  “Can you take it easy for a while? Have a cup of coffee, decompress?”

  He kissed her cheek and backed away, coming inside and shutting the door. “No, I can only stay a minute. Just want to splash some water on my face. I’ve got to go talk to Marie Hackett before she hears about it from someone else.”

  “Oh, no, she doesn’t know yet?”

  Morris met her gaze briefly. “I hope to god she doesn’t.”

  He moved away from her like a sleepwalker, and she watched him go into the bathroom and close the door.

  She had been on her way out when she saw him drive up. She had put her purse back on the entryway table, shucked her jacket and hung it back up in the closet. He didn’t need to know where she was going, or why.

  She busied herself for a few minutes. When he came out, his face was freshly scrubbed, cheeks red. A few droplets of water clung to his bushy mustache. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he was striking, with riveting blue eyes and a commanding nose and that black ‘stache. His purely masculine physical presence was impressive out of proportion to his size—he wasn’t especially tall or broad, but he projected strength and vitality. People voted for him, she believed, as much for how he made them feel when he walked into a room as for what he said or did.

  When he emerged, his eyes were minutely less sad. He had steeled himself for the task ahead, and that cut some of the edge off his depression. She knew it would be a bad night for him. “I’ve gotta go,” he said.

  She hugged him again, kissed him on the lips, holding it for an extra couple of seconds. “You’ll help her,” she said. “You’re good at that. The dependable shoulder to cry on.”

  “I guess.”

  “I know it’s hard on you. But you do it anyway. That’s why you’re the man I love.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He offered a smile, but it was forced, lifeless. He opened the door and went back to his car. Notifying people that a loved one had died was always hard on him. He genuinely liked Marie Hackett, and Mike too, and that would make this one worse than usual. She liked them too, enough that she was glad she didn’t have to make this visit. She stood in the doorway and watched until he was gone.

  Then she put on her jacket again, grabbed her purse, and hurried to her Camry.

  * * *

  Eighteen minutes later, Christy Deeds pulled into a parking space outside the Church in the Woods. The church blended into its surroundings so well that someone could drive right past without knowing it was there, just off the highway. The walls were dark brown wood with native stone accents, the roof a forest green that matched the pines almost precisely. Behind the chancel was a floor-to-ceiling window, clear, rather than stained glass. She had seen deer walking behind it during services, and on most Sundays birds flitted around, up into the trees and back down to the ground.

  On the far side, an addition to the church edged toward the woods. Gilbert Calderon, the church’s pastor, lived there, in a four-room rectory added in the late 1980s. His quarters had a separate front door as well as a door leading to the office that connected church and home.

  The church’s front doors were usually left open. Christy pulled on the right one, heavy and cool under her hands. It swung freely, and she stepped into weighty darkness broken only by the emergency exit lighting over the door. The building was silent. She went to the swinging doors that opened into the nave. “Hello?” she called.

  Gil appeared at the far door, the one that led toward his office. “Who’s there?” he asked. He was looking right at her, and the nave was better lit than the lobby.

  “Gil, it’s me. Christy.”

  He smiled as he approached, up the aisle between the pews. “Christy, hi. I couldn’t see you. The light—”

  “It’s not good in here,” she agreed. She didn’t point out that the nave’s light should have been falling on her, illuminating her against the dark background of the lobby area. Gil’s vision had never been good, but could it have deteriorated so much in the weeks—no, that was wrong, it had been two months, at least—since she had seen him?

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said. He had always seemed able to read her mind. He took her hands in his, giving them a gentle squeeze. A ministerial squeeze. As ever, she was aware of the softness of his hands, so different from her husband’s.

  “I’ve…I’ve been staying away.”

  “I gathered that. It’s probably best.”

  “That’s what I thought. But…Gil, have you heard about Mike Hackett?”

  Up close, his gaze found her face, locked on it. A straight brow shadowed deep brown eyes, made only somewhat less profound by thick-lensed glasses with tortoise-shell rims. His lips were thin but expressive, his chin firm with a cleft like someone had sliced it out with a pocketknife. “I heard he was missing. I spoke with Marie, earlier.”

  “They found him. He’s dead, Gil. Morris said it was bad. Really bad.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s with Marie now. She’ll need you.”

  “I’m here for her.”

  “You always are.” She twisted her hands together. She wanted him to say more, do more. She wanted her cheek to scrape against his afternoon whiskers, wanted her breasts pressed against his broad chest, wanted to breathe in his clean, male scent. But unless he offered, she didn’t dare.

  He had made that abundantly clear.

  She was here, putting herself in front of him. A word, a gesture, and she would be in his arms.

  He just stood there, though, arms at his sides, hands clenched almost into fists. Like it was taking a physical effort not to touch her.

  The thing was, he made the effort.

  “You and Marie were always friends,” he said.

  “That’s right. That’s…I needed to see you. I needed comfort.”

  “I can pray with you.”

  Not that kind of comfort, Christy wanted to say. That’s not it at all.

  “Christy,” he said. “I can’t…”

  “Yeah.” She shouldn’t even have come here. She tore her gaze away and hurried from the church.

  9

  The day had been more tiring than Alex expected. He’d experienced a jolt of adrenaline when Mike Hackett’s body was found, but on the drive back into Silver Gap that had faded, leaving him drained. They stopped at the Cup & Cow and ordered some take-out, since the place was filling fast. Back at the Mountain High Lodge, they broke it out and dug in, sitting on chairs that the Durbins had set outside the cabin Peter and Ellen shared.

  Mountain sun had pinked Peter’s face even more than usual. His whiskers looked white against it. He slouched in the chair, elbow on the armrest, chin resting on his fist while he picked at an order of baked ziti. The sun had dropped behind the hills, plunging the valley into premature evening.

  “What’s up for tomorrow?” Ellen asked.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to find the guide that couple in the restaurant recommended. Robbie Driscoll. If he’s available, I want to go back up into the high country, do some location scouting and research.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “I want to get some core and bark samples. Something’s killing trees up here, and it’s been pretty convincingly established that it’s bark beetles. Just the same, I want to have an independent lab confirm that. The results will give the film more weight, and we might get some back-door publicity by promoting the research separately.”

  “Long as you’re not talking about a bunch of talking head gee
ks in lab coats,” Peter said. “Or charts. Nothing kills a documentary faster than fucking charts.”

  “I promise we’ll keep charts to a minimum.”

  “Dude, you know I’m down with whatever you got in mind. And I think you’re right on about getting location footage from the fronts of the climate war that people aren’t talking about. I can get you some brilliant shit up here.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “But you gotta let me tell the story visually.”

  Alex had already had this discussion, or some variation on it, with Peter several times. Peter was all about the eye, the lens, and he would make a silent movie if he could get away with it. But Alex needed this film to do more than just thrill the eye; he needed it to reach a wide audience and deliver an important lesson.

  Coal money was paying for it, and Alex hoped it would go some distance toward making up for the destruction his family business had caused. But there was a lot to make up for, and he wanted it to be done right. If that meant overruling Peter, then that’s what he would do.

  * * *

  Howie Honeycutt drove both ways, up to where Mike Hackett’s body had been found, and back again. George Trbovich had been assigned to recover the remains; Howie had volunteered to go along. He’d be working a graveyard shift, but he didn’t mind being awake. Not for this.

  Coming back, especially, George was kind of gloomy. Howie chattered, because he always did when he was excited. Whenever the conversation waned, when he let the chatter die, his mind drifted back, to Hackett and to something else. Something that Hackett reminded him of.

  The first dead body Howie had ever seen was that of an accident victim. But she was also a girl he knew from school, and he had sometimes wondered if that had been the key thing about her.

  He had just missed seeing it happen, though he’d heard it.

  He had been riding home on the school bus, outside Collinsville. The Little Egypt part of Illinois, people called it, mostly country and small towns, closer to Kentucky and Missouri than Chicago. He had enjoyed growing up there, as much as he would have enjoyed it anywhere with his momma being dog-poor and hooking up with a succession of losers, men with quick tempers and hard fists, sometimes men who didn’t like making love to a woman in the same room as her son was sleeping, and sometimes ones who liked it too much.

  But when he was outside their tiny house, at school or on the bus or even just walking in the open fields, free from the smells of his momma’s bad cooking and cheap smokes and spilled liquor, he figured he was happy as anybody. Every adult he knew struggled to buy groceries and pay rent and keep the kids in clothing and shoes. He had a few friends and he liked being around farms, watching animals being born, growing up, finally being slaughtered. That part was best; the powerful feeling that came from seeing a human being snatch the life from a big animal, a cow or a pig, the brutal finality of the killing blow, the almost godlike roar of the saw.

  So on that afternoon, on the bus, he had been sorry he’d missed the impact. Karen Carty, a senior who was just about the sexiest female he had ever seen, with her long, bleached hair and the way she switched her hips when she walked, had gotten off the bus at her usual stop. She was flirting with a couple of the football players and didn’t see that a pickup truck was racing past the bus, ignoring the flashing lights and the little stop sign that extended from the side. The pickup’s driver, drunk and hurrying to get home from his mistress’s house before his wife got off work didn’t see her in time, or didn’t think she would step away from the open window that boys’ arms were hanging out of. He hit her head on and smeared her across forty feet of roadway.

  Howie missed the impact, but he got a good look at the aftermath. The bus had to wait for the sheriff to come out, and although the driver told everybody not to look, some of the football players forced open the door and piled out. Howie joined them. He saw Karen Carty with her eyes open and her clothes mostly shredded and torn off, saw her jubblies and the tuft of hair over her ladybits and the guts that had spilled from where her stomach had opened up wide.

  He’d had to walk home from the bus stop with his books held in front of him that day, to hide the stain on the front of his pants. His momma wasn’t there when he arrived, so he took jelly from a jar and smeared it all over the pants, and told her he had spilled it trying to make a sandwich. She had turned her current boyfriend loose on him that night, for wasting food.

  But from that day on, whenever he touched himself in the john or in his bed while his momma grunted and rutted in the next bed, he thought about Karen Carty. Not how she had looked in life, with her makeup and her hips shaking and her behind encased in tight-fitting jeans, but the other way, in death, naked and spread for everybody to see.

  Even then, he had known that one day, the memory would no longer be enough.

  10

  “Wolves, you say?”

  Morris Deeds sat in the mayor’s office, on the second floor of the century-old Town Hall, with large windows facing Main. Alden Stewart could stand at his window and watch traffic in and out of his wife’s restaurant, if he wanted to. Morris was pretty sure he did just that on occasion, maybe even going so far as to tabulate the average check so he would know how much she was taking in.

  Alden had a big wooden desk and wooden filing cabinets, a table covered with folders and blueprints and plans for the various town improvement projects he had going, most of which had stalled out when the economy did. The hardwood floors squeaked and there were rust stains on the ceiling that looked like a bison had been slaughtered in the attic and bled through. Morris sat on a low-slung couch covered in some kind of hideous gold-and-brown fabric that should have been burned in 1979. He hated sitting there, because he had to look up at Alden. The only other chair in the room was a wooden ladder-back, however, and that was piled high with volumes of municipal code.

  “Wolves,” Morris replied. “That’s the conclusion I reached.”

  “You realize wolves officially don’t exist in Colorado.”

  “Yes, Alden, I do. But I didn’t have a chance to check their visas.”

  Alden peered at him from behind the big desk. He didn’t always appreciate Morris’s sense of humor. “If wolves killed Mike, what do you propose we do about it?”

  Morris had known this question was coming. “I don’t know that we do anything about it. Wolves aren’t criminals, even if they’re trespassing across state lines. And Mike was well beyond town limits. If wolves killed him, they didn’t do it within my jurisdiction, or yours.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And since Colorado doesn’t have wolves, stands to reason they were just passing through, right?”

  “That might be true.”

  “We have no reason to believe it’s not.”

  “We didn’t think there were wolves around at all until this afternoon, Morris. We’ve got to consider the possibility that they’re here, and that more people might be at risk. Not to mention livestock, pets, and what have you.”

  Morris had been afraid the mayor might take this approach. As far as he was concerned, Mike had run up against some bad luck. He was sorry it happened, but he didn’t think it had to make his life difficult.

  Morris Deeds was not a lazy man, but that didn’t mean he wanted life more complicated than it had to be. He had expected Alden to go along with his take, not to twist things around so that wild animals became a law enforcement matter.

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be watchful, Alden. I’m only saying I don’t want my officers running patrols up in the hills outside of town when they should be here. We’re stretched plenty thin as it is. If there are wolves and they become a problem, then I’ll deal with it. But we shouldn’t go looking for trouble.”

  “I understand, Morris. Resources are limited, especially these days.”

  “Exactly. Any wolf shows his furry ass around here, we’ll blow it off, no matter what their ‘protected’ status might be. But traipsing around the for
est—that’s not police work.”

  “I read you. There’s only one additional concern I have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wolves nowadays are like rock stars to the tree-hugger set. A pack of wolves attacking a man, especially in an event as vicious as you’ve described—that’s going to make the news. Statewide for certain, and likely national news. International, if the cable networks get their hands on it. We could find ourselves deluged with wolf advocates. They could get, I don’t know, Sting, out here for some kind of save-the-wolf benefit. Or, or, who’s that other one, Bono.”

  “Kind of money these fruits make, you’d think they could afford two names.”

  “But you see my point, right? We’ve got to play this right. We have to protect our own, but we have to be careful about the wolves. The key is to limit contact between us and them. Maybe they’ll move on, become someone else’s problem.”

  “We can hope that,” Morris said. “But one comes into my town, I’ll make a rug out of it.”

  Alden Stewart rose to his feet, his palms flat on the desktop. His gut lapped over his belt. Morris was disturbed by people who didn’t take care of themselves. Between the two of them, Alden and Belinda carried enough extra pounds to make most of a third person. “If it comes to that, just make damn sure you bury that thing outside of town. I don’t want Silver Gap becoming the centerpiece of a battle over wolf rights, unless it’s going to be good for the economy. A lot of attention in the right way could spark a whole new tourism boom here. But the wrong way…why, that could be the last nail in our coffin. Are we clear on this?”

  “Oh, we’re clear, Alden,” Morris said. He didn’t like having to hold the politician’s hand, but the man carried a lot of weight with the council, and he wanted to keep his job. “Don’t you worry about a thing. No wolf is going to show its face here, and I’ll make sure our people don’t run afoul of them out in the hills, either.”