An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  — from DARK SHORES: A HISTORY OF CANAAN LAKE, by Remy Welser

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE STEPS to the office had been rigorously cleaned; Victoria Wallace, if she was still around, wouldn’t have to be offended by the damp marks Rob McKidder’s body had left behind.

  Peter took a sideways step. Had the body been right there? Or more to the left? He couldn’t stand the thought of walking where it had sprawled.

  “Dr Bajowski, I’d like a word with you.”

  Sheriff Vargas’s voice was pleasant as ever, but Peter felt ice creep down his back. He turned around, slowly. She wore her big-brimmed hat and a completely unnecessary pair of mirrored sunglasses. Deputy Paul Wu stood behind her, looking uncomfortable.

  “Sure. You want to come into my office?”

  “That’d be lovely.”

  The pair followed him inside. He wished he’d come to work early today. A woman from engineering stopped on the staircase and stared at him for a long moment before scurrying up to the third floor. He paused on the second floor landing, half to let her get upstairs ahead of him and half to play for time. “You need a cup of coffee or anything?”

  He hoped those bastards in accounting heard him. He sounded as collected as a museum catalog.

  “No, I’m fine. You, Paul?”

  Deputy Wu mumbled something unintelligible. Peter assumed it was a negative and took them up to his office. As Peter unlocked the door, a couple of millwrights passed the little group, eyeing them curiously as they headed toward the skybridge that connected the office building to the mill. By lunchtime, the whole town would know Vargas had been up here.

  He offered the sheriff and Paul seats on the two plastic chairs he usually used as gear drying racks and then perched on the edge of his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  Sheriff Vargas crossed her ankle over her knee and put her hat on her lap, looking as comfortable as she would have been on a bespoke sofa. He had to admire that level of class.

  “We understand you were one of the first on the scene yesterday.”

  “Rob McKidder’s body?”

  She nodded.

  Surprise flitted on cool wings through Peter’s chest. He thought this would have something to do with Duncan. “Yeah. I got here just as Lou was calling it in. Hell of a thing.”

  “Can you describe the state of the body?” Deputy Wu got out a little notepad.

  Peter thought carefully about the morning and then described the stairs, the body, Lou and Standish’s position. The sheriff asked him to repeat a few key details, like the teeth marks in the boots. Remembering the state of the corpse made Peter glad he’d skipped breakfast.

  The sheriff pushed her shades back on top of her head. With her heavy curls pulled back, she looked a good five years younger. Her eyes were sad. “The dogs have been getting worse and worse,” she admitted. “I’m thinking about organizing a hunting party, although no one seems to have any idea where they hole up during the day. I’ve put in a request with the governor’s office for the funds to bring in some trackers. Nobody local’s got the skills for this.”

  She stood up, and Paul stiffly unfolded himself from the too-small chair. Peter knew this was his chance.

  “Sheriff? Can I ask you something about Duncan Chambers’ murder?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Why did you never bring me in for questioning?”

  She raised her other eyebrow. “Your whereabouts have always checked out in your favor. Belinda told us you were at Heinrich’s the whole night Duncan went missing. You kept bugging her about staying off her feet.”

  “She had that cut on her foot,” Peter said slowly, trying to remember that night.

  “Well, Belinda’s word is a good enough alibi for me. Plus, it’s always looked like a suicide. That note we found in his office was pretty clear that he felt bad about working for Songheuser all these years. I figure his new boyfriend tried to turn him into one of those ecoterrorists and it broke him. Duncan couldn’t have ever hurt anybody.”

  She turned to the door and Peter leapt to his feet. “A note? You never mentioned a note.”

  “It was private information, kept sealed for the case. Now that I’ve declared him a suicide, I figure it’s safe enough to mention.”

  He tried one last time. “But if it was a suicide, wouldn’t the gun have been right there?”

  “The dogs, Peter.” He opened his mouth to protest the stupidity of the claim, but she raised a hand to cut him off. “They mess with everything here in Canaan Lake. Right?”

  “I don’t see why dogs would—”

  “These dogs don’t act like ordinary dogs. Sometimes they do things we just can’t explain.”

  There was an odd note to her voice, and her expression seemed pained. As if she believed the words coming out of her mouth as little as he did.

  She settled her sunglasses and hat back into place and gave him a nod. Then they were gone.

  Peter went back to his desk and sat down, his stomach twisting. He reached for the breakfast bar in his pocket and then dropped it on his desk. His stomach didn’t hurt because he needed breakfast. The sheriff wasn’t the only one telling tall tales about Duncan’s case.

  He turned on his hand unit and brought up his record from the motor pool. He didn’t take many trips to Space City, and the mileage would jump out at him. He scrolled back to April and brought up his calendar in the corner. There was the night Duncan disappeared. There was the trip to Space City, a week before. He doublechecked the calendar and the mileage log.

  He put down the hand unit, his gut gone hollow.

  Belinda’s story — Peter’s alibi for the night of Duncan’s death — was phony.

  Peter had almost certainly spent part of the night at Heinrich’s because nine nights out of ten he went there for dinner and a beer, but a week after treatment, Belinda’s cut should have been well on its way to being healed, and even if it wasn’t, he didn’t know her well enough to exchange more than a few pleasantries. So why had Belinda lied to Sheriff Vargas?

  He tapped the breakfast bar, turning the question over and over. It made no sense. Neither did the note the sheriff had found on Duncan’s desk, or her lie about the dogs taking the air bolt gun.

  He needed to talk to Standish.

  SHE’D SPENT the morning answering work orders, and to be honest, she was glad to be out of the office. Everyone in the building was either morbidly focused on the discovery of Rob McKidder’s body or still blathering about Victoria Wallace, and she wanted to put both of them out of her mind. Victoria Wallace made her think too much about her parents. When she’d been young, her house had been filled with women like Victoria Wallace, perfect women who used their faces and wits with equal success. If her mother had gotten her way, Standish would have turned out just like her.

  Standish wiped a smear of mud off her hand onto her pants and laughed out loud. She certainly hadn’t turned out the way her parents planned.

  She pulled up to the motor pool just as Peter was coming out. He stood beside the back door and waited for her to park.

  “Turning that machine in? I’d rather have that one than the crap heap I’m going to get stuck with.”

  “You baby,” she said with a grin. “It’s good for you to drive something with no suspension. Strengthens your back muscles, going over all those potholes.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder, steering her away from the building. “Got a second?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking about heading to my place and fixing some lunch. You can come.”

  “Great.” He didn’t say a word until they were well past the guard shack and alone on the path leading back down to the lake, Standish’s favorite shortcut home. She let Hattie off her leash. The dog bounded into the trees, sniffing the ground intently.

  “Sheriff Vargas stopped by this morning.”

  “Is that good?” She studied his face. He looked worried.

  “She told me why she’d never had
me down as a suspect in Duncan’s murder. Belinda said I spent the whole night at the bar, trying to keep her off an injured foot.”

  Standish raised an eyebrow. “That’s sort of specific and weird.”

  “Yeah, well, I did give Belinda a lift into Space City when she needed stitches in her foot one night. But it was more than a week before the night Duncan went missing. I can’t think of any kind of reason she’d tell a story like that.”

  “Maybe her memory’s shit.”

  “Belinda?” He shook his head. “Six people can order different drinks and she never mixes up a one. She might be just a bartender, but she’s a sharp cookie. And weirder than that, Sheriff Vargas said my whereabouts had always checked out. Which meant she checked the logs for the travel pool. So why did she believe Belinda’s story?”

  “But you’re off the suspects list. No matter what that says about Belinda, that’s good news for you.”

  They came around the last turn in the path, the lake stretching out like a silver sheet. Standish stopped, remembering something Julia had said one night. “Actually, that’s not the first weird Belinda story I’ve heard. I just remembered hearing that people have seen her lurking on this trail.”

  “This trail? It only goes from the beach to the office.”

  “Right? Julia said Belinda was carrying a spotting scope, like a bird watcher.” He made a confused face. “Maybe she’d see a few canopy snakes, but they’re usually so well camouflaged you can’t see them unless you’re climbing trees. And I know Belinda’s interested in nature, but that still seems far-fetched.”

  “We should definitely keep an eye on her,” Standish said. Hattie raced back from the edge of the water, eager for a petting. Standish worked her fingers into the dog’s thick fur and realized, for the first time since landing, that it wasn’t damp. “Hey, it’s not raining.”

  “It’s nearly the dry season,” Peter reminded her. “We get more and more rain breaks until poof! We get three solid weeks of sunshine.”

  He picked up a stick of driftwood and tossed it for Hattie, completely oblivious to Standish’s discomfort. She took a deep breath. The dry season. She could handle the days, she supposed. It was the stars she’d have to watch out for. Maybe she should have filled that prescription, after all.

  Hattie trotted up to her, tongue lolling, and Standish shook off the tendrils of anxiety. She had Hattie. She’d be fine.

  “Come on, Peter, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  They went up to her house and she let them in, wondering just what to put on a vegan sandwich. She hoped he liked lettuce.

  “I don’t know what comes next,” he admitted. “The sheriff still claims Duncan killed himself and that dogs took the air bolt gun. I tried to press her on it, but she just cut me off. I think she’s hiding something.”

  Standish found some hummus and added that to the sandwich. Vargas had never seemed too eager to investigate. It was almost as if she had a reason to want to sweep Duncan’s death under the rug.

  Maybe she did. Didn’t Songheuser underwrite the sheriff’s department? Didn’t they pay for just about everything in Canaan Lake?

  Standish dropped the spoon back into the hummus. “Shit.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m fine. But I’m pissed. Think about it: Sheriff Vargas doesn’t want to find Duncan’s killer,” she explained. “She’s covering for someone with deep pockets.”

  He took the hummus from her. “You really think so?”

  “It makes as much sense as anything. There are just so many loose pieces.” She nodded her head toward the diary resting beside the coffee pot. “Things here in Huginn go wrong somehow. I’ve been reading about the first colonists — they were literally starving to death trying to get a foothold here.”

  “I can’t imagine that their problems have any connection to Duncan’s murder.”

  Standish shrugged. The colonists and Duncan both had problems with Songheuser. The company’s evil was like a strand of yarn sticking out of a crocheted sweater. If she could just work that end free, she could pull out the whole thing.

  She knew the diary mattered somehow. She had only read a few pages, but she could tell there was something bigger going on than just an unexpectedly cold wet season. And the Believers themselves held another mystery. The names, for one. She didn’t think they were just tradition or a coincidence. How many Mei Lins could there be in a hundred years of Believer colonization? And how many Shanes and how many Orrins?

  But if she told Peter, he would look for a logical reason behind the repetitions, and she wasn’t ready for logic just yet. For now, she would read, and observe, and figure out how the past was going to help her catch Songheuser.

  HUGINN, Day 198

  We found Craig Thomas on the beach this morning, the skin ripped from his limbs and his insides strewn across the sand.

  Doc stooped to examine the body and just sat down on the rocks, crying hard. I helped him up.

  I couldn’t hold back tears, either. I tried to make myself look at Craig, but it was nearly impossible. It wasn’t just the raw meaty hollow of his ruined torso — all of him looked wrong, the flesh stripped from his arms so that the bones showed clean and white in half a dozen places. Leather birds didn’t do that. They didn’t even have teeth.

  I thought of Soolie and my stomach went tight.

  Doc spoke to himself, his voice low and cold and emotionless, and it took me a little while to realize that his words meant Craig had died sometime in the night from his head injury.

  Something had done this to him after his body had gone stiff and cold.

  “But what did it, Doc?” I had asked. “What could have stripped the meat off his bones?”

  “It must have been an animal,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he believed it.

  If it had been an animal, then it had been Soolie. And if it hadn’t been Soolie… well, that was worse.

  “PETE!”

  Joe Holder’s voice boomed down the hall. Peter turned slowly, pinning a smile on his face.

  “What can I do for you, Joe?”

  Joe came out of his office, grinning hugely. Not for the first time, Peter thought the man’s teeth looked too big for his face. The elegant figure of Victoria Wallace appeared in the doorway of the office, leaning casually against the frame.

  “Glad I caught you before you headed out in the field. I have some good news.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re always complaining about the roads, right? Well, we had a town council meeting last night. You must have overlooked the notice on your hand unit. You used to come to every meeting!”

  “I’ve been a little behind.”

  “You missed a great meeting,” Joe pushed on. “Right, Victoria?”

  The sleek blonde head gave a nod.

  “We’ve approved a new property tax measure for road work and city improvements. After what happened to that little Alvarez boy — no one wants to see that happen again. The vote will be coming up next month.”

  A few weeks ago, Peter would have danced to hear such news, but after his meeting with Matthias his perspective had shifted. “A new property tax? Are you sure that’s such a good idea? The last one failed pretty spectacularly.”

  “It was actually fairly close,” Victoria Wallace interjected.

  Peter turned his gaze on her. “You keep up with Canaan Lake politics?”

  She smiled. “It was discussed at the meeting. It’s a fascinating town you have here. I’m glad I’m learning more about the communities outside Space City. After all, these small towns are vital to Songheuser’s lumber production.”

  “Thought you’d be a bit more excited, Pete. This is good news for all of us.”

  Peter raised his hands as if to shake off a misunderstanding. “Oh, I’m excited. I just don’t want to get my hopes up. Last time the measure seemed like a certain win. I’d hate to see this one come to the same bad end.”

  Joe chuckled. “I have every con
fidence that this time, property taxes will be going up.”

  He was still laughing as Peter stepped out into the motor pool. The sound made Peter’s neck hairs prickle.

  He’d forgotten that Joe sat on the town council. In fact, mill department heads made up the majority of the positions; Heinrich Chu was the only business owner on the council Peter could think of. It hadn’t seemed important in the past. Now it represented Songheuser’s death grip on the community.

  What did Songheuser want with another property tax measure? They’d shot down the last one as part of their deal with the Believers. And the farming community would be just as badly hurt by this measure as the last one. The Believers were not going to be happy when they learned about this.

  Peter turned onto the logging road that zigzagged through Sectors 11 and 10. He was driving behind some of the biggest of the Believer farms, headed for the deep forest of Sector 14. The road petered out in a square turnaround just big enough for a truck and a loader.

  He parked the rig and got out. Forest surrounded him, but he could still hear the deep bellows of someone’s cows. Peter headed for the trail he’d cut through the underbrush. He hadn’t thought about the farms when he’d set up the test sites. Sector 14 was steep, undeveloped country, not much good for anything but timber, but he knew it held the headwaters of two or three big streams. Those streams were the primary water source for the Believer households in the flat land below.

  He hurried toward the first test site, thinking hard. This wasn’t just some boring test, another boost for the company’s bottom line. This was big science. What the company did up here could have real effects on the entire town.

  On Friday afternoon, he’d dosed horsetail trees in two of his meticulously cataloged test sites, and now he was ready to collect the first batch of data. It would be weeks before he could be sure of an effect on the horsetail trees, but the smaller creatures would surely be responding to the degassing compound by now.