by Молли Харпер
“Oh, yeah, that’s likely.” I snorted. “Does Buzz know about this whole wolf thing?”
“It wasn’t really something I could work into our dating conversations,” she said, smiling as she shook her head.
“But if he didn’t know, why did he get so wound up over not telling the police about the wolf attacking Teague?”
Evie gave me a sheepish little smile. “He thought maybe you imagined the wolf. He didn’t want that to get around. This is a small town. You don’t want to become known as Crazy Mo.”
“I knew it!” I exclaimed. “I knew he didn’t believe me.”
Evie shook her head at my incensed tone. “Mo, my family, the pack, we don’t tell outsiders our secret. For Cooper to have trusted you with this, it means something.”
We pushed our way back through the kitchen entrance. I sighed. “Evie, don’t start—” I stopped short when I saw Buzz, Abner, Walt, Nate, and Gertie gathered around the counter, looking stricken. Nate’s arm was around Gertie. Gertie was wiping tears from her face, leaving streaks of mascara on her round china-doll cheeks. Walt looked as if he wanted either to cry or to punch something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Buzz.
Buzz squeezed Evie’s hand. “There was an attack, out at Susie Q’s place. Gertie found her in her driveway this morning. Susie’s pretty messed up. Her throat’s practically torn out. If Gertie hadn’t come along when she did . . .” He cast a sidelong glance at Gertie, who let loose a little sob. “The ambulance took her to the hospital in Dearly. She’s in intensive care.”
I pulled Buzz and Evie aside, my voice low. “Did someone beat her up?”
“No,” Buzz said, his jaw clenched. “This wasn’t a person, Mo. It was an animal. There were tracks everywhere and some fur. It looks like Susie was attacked by a wolf.”
My stomach flipped. How could it be a coincidence that the morning after Cooper went on a “wolf run,” Susie was found bleeding and bitten in her driveway? Honestly, how many giant wolves could there be running around Grundy?
Wolf-Cooper hadn’t so much as snapped at me, even in the painful aftermath of the trap. He’d been gentle, friendly. And he hadn’t had a speck of blood on him besides his own. But what if he’d just been too weak to want to eat me? Maybe werewolves knew better than to bite the hand that bandaged them. What if I’d rescued the wolf that had attacked Susie Q?
People came and chewed over Susie’s attack with their burgers and fries, and each seemed to have some story about seeing a wolf or chasing one off their property. Walt grumbled that the “damn tree huggers” and their programs that declared wolves a protected species increased the population, and now we were all going to be overrun with predators. Alan gently reminded Walt that the government had instituted bounty programs for hunters who brought in wolf carcasses and allowed hunters to shoot wolves from aircraft as “predator control.” Abner retorted that maybe we should start our own bounty program in Grundy. The conversation had me reaching for my Tums and praying for a distraction.
I was grateful when Gertie mentioned that someone needed to go by Susie’s place to take care of her dog. I volunteered to go on my lunch break. I loved to scratch behind Oscar’s ears whenever I visited Susie at the post office. The idea of him padding around the house, alone and confused, was a little heartbreaking.
As I pulled up to Susie’s neat little A-frame house, two miles outside town, I could hear Oscar frantically scratching at the door. He was used to being out and about all day and seemed indignant about being locked up. I walked to Susie’s door, ignoring the obvious bloody patch of grass near the driveway, and used Gertie’s key to let Oscar out.
Oscar was a pitiful black-and-tan specimen of dachshund-hood. If you looked in the breeding manuals for dachshunds and saw all of the things professionals try to eliminate from their lines, you’d have a description of Oscar: barrel-chested, with a wide, fat head and flat, chubby paws and a perfectly rounded stomach that refused to arch. He looked like a Rottweiler that had been shrunken and then stretched out horizontally. And to top it off, he’d lost part of his ear in a fight with an unnamed woodland suspect, so it was permanently stuck out, a spade-shaped sail on the side of his head.
At the moment, Oscar was wearing a seafoam-green doggie sweater with a turtleneck. When I opened the utility-room door to look for his food, I saw that this was just one of many sassy ensembles for Oscar. There were little doggie sweaters, a doggie parka, even a little dog-sized bumblebee Halloween costume.
Yikes.
I let Oscar run for a few minutes while I filled his food and water dishes. I walked along the perimeter of Susie’s yard, looking for . . . something, some proof that Cooper was innocent of postmaster mauling. Near the edge of the driveway, I found tracks, huge paw prints in the mud. They were big enough to be Cooper’s, but for all I knew, they could be bear prints.
“What are you looking for?”
“Shit!” I yelped, turning to find Cooper standing behind me, his hands shoved into his pockets. He looked so upset—scared and upset and pretty pissed off to see me crouching over wolf footprints as if I was some cross between Nancy Drew and Steve freaking Irwin.
“Have we talked about your tendency to sneak up behind me?” I growled.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I’m checking on Oscar.”
“Oscar’s over there.” He jerked his head toward the driveway. Oscar was on his belly, crouched down near the spot where Susie must have been found. He looked miserable and confused, peering up at me with those brown-black eyes. “What are you looking at?”
I stepped out of his way. “You tell me.”
He looked down at the ground and, with a pained expression, said, “It’s a wolf print. A big one.”
“What do you think of that?”
“What do you think I should think of it?”
“Look, let’s just cut through the bullshit, OK?” I cried. “You show up at my house after being caught in a bear trap as a wolf, and the next day we find out that one of our neighbors was mauled by a wolf. The timing, to me, seems a little weird. So I’m curious, Cooper. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, his face downcast. “I don’t remember being here last night. I don’t smell my scent here. I just smell . . . blood. Susie’s blood. I don’t know what to think.”
The hollow anguish in his voice let all of the steam out of my good old-fashioned storm cloud of mad. I was deflated and helpless, which seemed to be how he felt as well. I took a deep breath and stepped closer to him. He mirrored my movement, backing away. “For right now—just for right now—I’m going to choose to believe you didn’t have anything to do with this. You can be a real jerk sometimes, but I don’t think you could hurt a defenseless woman—even knowing what you did to John Teague.”
Much to my frustration, Cooper looked away and shoved his hands into his pockets. His mouth was set in a thin, unyielding line to keep any errant words from escaping. I lowered my voice and stepped closer, almost close enough to touch him. I kept my hands at my sides. “You’ve had plenty of chances to hurt me, in human and in wolf form, and you haven’t. So I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. I’m not going to tell a soul what happened at my house. I’m not going to behave any differently toward you. But so help me, Cooper Graham, if I find out that you’re taking advantage of that trust, if you’re the one who hurt Susie Q, I’ll tranque-dart your ass myself and deliver you to Alan’s front porch wrapped up with a little pink bow.”
His lips quirked. “You’ve got a dark streak, Mo Wenstein.”
I jabbed my finger into his shoulder. “Don’t you forget it.”
Oscar let out a long, plaintive howl. I turned to him and called, “Hold on just a second, Oscar.” I continued with Cooper, “I have a couple of questions, though, about being a werewolf. Now, what do you mean—” I turned back to where Cooper was standing.
He was gone. He’d managed to disappear into the
woods without making a sound.
I grumbled, “And now I’m talking to myself. Damn werewolves.”
I ambled toward Oscar, muttering to myself about Cooper’s poor social skills and how easily ipecac could be slipped into a certain werewolf’s chili special.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I said, scratching behind Oscar’s ears. “Susie’s not going to be coming back for a while. But we’ll take care of you. Come on, let’s go get you something to eat.”
I tried to coax Oscar into the house. No dice. I tried carrying him in, and he trotted right back outside. I took the doggie dishes out to him, and he rolled onto his back and turned his nose away from the bowl. “Not hungry?” I asked, holding a few pellets up to Oscar’s snout. Oscar rolled away.
Stupid cylindrical dog.
“OK, Oscar, I’ve got to go bye-bye, so if you’re not going to eat—” The moment I said “bye-bye,” Oscar hot-footed it toward Lucille . . . just in time for me to realize that in my haste to get the caterwauling Oscar out of the house, I’d left my driver’s-side door open. “No, no! Gah! Oscar, out of the truck!”
Who knew that dachshunds could leap five times their height? Oscar, who had made himself quite comfortable in my passenger seat, woofed as if to say, Too late. I called shotgun.
“Crap.” I laughed and shook my head at the silly dog. I doubted that Gertie would be in any shape to come back to Susie’s house after what she’d seen that morning. So my feeding Oscar was probably going to be a long-term arrangement until Susie got out of the hospital . . . if Susie got out of the hospital. It would probably be easier for me just to take Oscar to my house anyway. I rolled my eyes and ran back into the house for Oscar’s bag of food and bed. Oscar’s tail was thumping impatiently against the seat when I climbed back into the truck.
“No loud parties. No smoking. And you get no remote-control privileges,” I told him. Oscar yapped and turned in a circle, which I took as an OK.
“I’m a cat person,” I grumbled, pulling the truck into gear.
SUSIE Q’S PROGNOSIS was good, but she was still in intensive care. She had suffered extensive damage to her trachea and jaw, broken ribs, and internal injuries and had lost two fingers from her right hand trying to fend off the wolf. The doctors didn’t know whether she’d ever speak again. The idea of never hearing that bawdy twang again struck me as the saddest part of this ordeal. Between the injuries and the painkillers, Susie hadn’t been able to scribble more than a few words for the state police: “big wolf bit me.” For days after the attack, Alan hiked in circles around Susie’s house, searching for signs of the wolf, but he said the trail dried up a few miles into the woods.
“The tracks just disappeared, like the wolf sprouted wings and flew away,” he told me one day at lunch.
“Um, they can’t actually do that, right?” I asked him.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, shaking his head, but the idea seemed to lighten his foul mood a bit. “I called an expert in wolf behavior at ASU. He said it’s not unusual for a wolf to attack a lone, defenseless person if they happen to be out at night. But he said an attack like this is usually preceded by signs that the wolves are circling closer to town, problems with livestock being killed, pets going missing.”
“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said.
Alan shrugged. “He said he’d send me a bunch of articles that should help me try to predict the wolf’s behavior patterns, unless, of course, it’s sick or wounded, in which case there’s no way to predict what it will do. I just want to find it before people go looking for it. This is the sort of thing that can get people crazy.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Have you seen Jaws? All those crazy fishermen going after a twenty-foot shark with a dinghy and a flare gun? It’s like that. People get all fired up about protecting their own. They’re far more likely to hurt themselves or each other than catch a monster.”
I shuddered at the image of my neighbors forming a torch-toting mob and hunting Cooper.
“Hey,” Alan said, seeing my stricken expression and squeezing my hand. “It’s OK. Don’t worry. I’ll catch it before anybody else gets hurt.”
I smiled, a little shaky. “I know you will. Is there anything I can do?”
He shook his head. “Just stay inside at night. Don’t leave the house after dark, even to take out your garbage. And carry that bear mace I gave you—at all times.”
“That doesn’t really help you.”
“Knowing you’re safe will help me considerably,” Alan told me. “I hear you’re keeping Oscar for a while?”
I nodded. “Gertie asked if I wouldn’t mind keeping him until further notice. And I don’t. He’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. He doesn’t eat my carefully labeled food or run up the phone bill. I don’t have to fight for TV or computer access. As long as we keep rent out of the equation, I think we’ll be fine.”
Alan grinned at me. “I think you might have been getting a little lonely. Oscar will be good for you.”
“You’re probably right.”
I liked coming home to Oscar every night. I’d open the door, and he would be sitting there at the stoop expectantly, tail thumping against the floor.
Oscar liked to watch me cook. He’d sit politely at the kitchen doorway until I dropped something, then helpfully snarf it up before I could reach for it. At night, he slept over my feet, keeping them warm as I read. We made a habit of taking a short walk near my house before sunset. It tired Oscar out and kept my thoughts from constantly circling around Cooper.
My not-quite-friendly neighborhood werewolf had been spending a lot of time at the Glacier lately. I think he was trying to figure out whether I could keep my word or spill the beans about his furry little problem. We kept our conversations short and what could pass for amicable . . . in a Robert Altman movie. Every word had a double meaning. Every exchange left me wondering why Cooper bothered to keep coming in, day after day, when I’d made it clear I had no plans to “out” him. Part of me was just glad we could stop being blatantly hostile toward each other. It took too much energy to keep thinking up all those clever insults.
Even more astounding were Cooper’s efforts to have actual conversations with people besides Buzz and Evie—which, again, likely had more to do with keeping tabs on what I was telling people than with a desire to get to know his neighbors. While it made the regulars a little uncomfortable at first, they soon figured out that Cooper told some pretty great stories when he wasn’t snarling or growling at people. And good storytellers were always welcome at the Glacier.
For instance, that afternoon, I overheard Cooper telling Walt about taking a group of pharmaceutical reps from Alabama moose hunting and getting them to coat themselves in moose urine and mud to disguise their human scent. He sipped his coffee and guffawed over one of the hunters asking if the urine had been pasteurized.
I slid their orders in front of them and, before I could stop myself, commented, “I don’t get how someone who is so hostile to outsiders could make his living off taking them hunting.”
Where Cooper would normally scowl or just stop talking, this morning he smirked. “Oh, it’s hardly hunting. I’m just trying to keep the tourists from devastating the ecosystem or shooting each other. I stall them until we find something worth their time, and then I put them in a position where it would be impossible for them to kill it. I give them the big talk about being spirit brothers with the animal they missed, so they’re responsible for protecting the species. They’ve got a good story to take home, I get paid, and everybody goes home happy.”
“What happens if they manage to actually hit what they’re shooting at?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Hasn’t happened yet. Hey, I’m not a total fraud. If they go out with me a couple of times and prove that they’re not total assholes, I start taking them to better spots, putting them in better positions. If they’re decent shots, they have an honest chance of a decent kill. Until then, I see myself
as a conservationist, protecting the local wildlife from idiots with firearms.”
I rolled my eyes. “You just get a kick out of getting middle-aged men to rub mud on their faces, don’t you?”
“And the moose urine. Don’t forget that.”
I refilled his coffee cup. “You are a sick man.” I glanced down at his breakfast, a bloody steak, six links of sausage, six strips of bacon, a slab of ham, and a tiny piece of toast. The toast was for appearance’s sake, I guessed. “Can I get you anything else? Maybe something leafy and green? A pamphlet on the nation’s worsening heart-disease epidemic?”
“If God didn’t want us to eat the animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty, Mo.”
“You know, I got grounded once for wearing a T-shirt that expressed that very sentiment to an animal-rights rally,” I said. Cooper flashed a wide, sincere grin at me. It knocked me back on my heels. He’d never smiled at me before, unless he was mocking me in some fashion.
It felt as if someone had dropped a Malatov cocktail at my feet. My whole body became flushed, hot, uncomfortably tight. I muttered some excuse about burning eggs and ducked back into the kitchen. Cheeks aflame, I made a beeline for the walk-in freezer, slammed the door behind me, and braced myself against a rack of frozen beef. Maybe I was coming down with the flu, I told myself. Please, Lord, I prayed, let it be the flu.
It was not healthy for one man’s smile to make my panties spontaneously combust.
I did not want Cooper to have that sort of power over me, especially when I was on such shaky ground with him. I just had to concentrate on other things, other people. Alan, for instance, who, as far as I could tell, had only one corporeal form.
I spent a good five minutes in the freezer, fanning cold air onto my face. I was careful to spend the rest of the afternoon in the kitchen. I cooked with my back to the dining area and worked like a dervish to keep the kitchen clean so I could leave the minute my shift ended, a rarity for me.
