“I have a job for you,” Tallient continued.
“I’m listening.”
I had no choice. Though my parents were incredibly wealthy, they thought I was nuts and had stopped speaking to me the instant I married Simon. After all, what could a handsome, brilliant, up-and- coming zoologist from Liverpool see in a not-very-pretty, far too sturdy grad student unless it was her parents’ millions? He already had a green card. That Simon had told them exactly what they could do with their money had only made me love him more.
In truth, I fit into Simon’s world better than I’d ever fit in my own. I stood five-foot-ten in my bare feet; on a good day I weighed a hundred and sixty. I liked the out-of-doors—didn’t mind dirt or sun, wind or rain. I’d joined the Girl Scouts just so I could camp. I’d done pretty much anything and everything I could think of to emphasize my differences from the never-too-rich, never- too-thin lifestyle of my mother.
“Can you access the Internet?” Tallient asked.
“Hold on.” I tapped my laptop, which sprang from asleep to awake much quicker than I ever did. “Okay.”
Tallient recited a www-dot address. An instant later, a newspaper article spilled across my screen.
“ ‘Man Found Dead in a Swamp,’” I read. “Not unusual.” Swamps were notorious dumping grounds for bodies. If the muck didn’t take them, the alligators would.
“Keep going.”
“Throat torn. Feral dogs. Huh.” I accessed the next page. “Child missing. Coyotes. No body. Seems straightforward.”
“Not really.”
Tallient recited a second address, and I read some more. “Wolf sightings.”
My heart increased in tempo. Wolves had been Simon’s specialty; they’d turned into his obsession. Now they were mine.
“Where is this?” I demanded.
“New Orleans.”
If possible, my heart beat even faster. Once red wolves had roamed the Southeast from the Atlantic to the Gulf and west to Texas. They’d been sighted as far north as Missouri and Pennsylvania. But in 1980 the red wolf had been declared extinct in the wild. In 1987 they’d been reintroduced, but only in North Carolina. So...
“There aren’t any wolves in Louisiana,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“There’s a legend, though....” I struggled to remember it. “Honey Island Swamp monster.”
“I doubt that Bigfoot-like footprints found thirty years ago have any relationship to death, disappearance, and wolves where they aren’t supposed to be.”
He had a point.
“Could be an ABC,” I said.
The acronym stood for “Alien Big Cat”—a cryptozoological label given to reports of out-of-place felines. Black panthers in Wisconsin. A jaguar in Maine. Happens a lot more than you’d think.
Most of the time ABCs were explained away as exotic animals released into the woods when they became too hard to handle or too big to fit in an apartment. Funny thing was, no one ever found them.
If they were pets, wouldn’t they be easy to catch? Wouldn’t their bones, or even their collars, turn up after a truly wild animal killed them? Wouldn’t there be at least one record of an ABC being hit by a truck on the interstate?
But there wasn’t
“This is a wolf, not a cat.”
I was impressed with Tallient’s knowledge of crypto-terminology but too caught up in the mystery unfolding before my eyes to compliment him on it.
“Same principle. Could be someone dumped a wolf in the swamp. Nothing special about it.”
Except wolves weren’t vicious. They didn’t attack people. Unless they were starving, wolf-dog hybrids, or rabid. None of which were a good thing.
“There’ve been whispers of wolves in and around New Orleans for years.”
“How many years?” I asked.
“At least a hundred.”
“What?”
Tallient chuckled. “I thought you’d enjoy that. The disturbances don’t seem to occur in any particular month, or even a common season. But they always happen during the same lunar phase.”
“Full moon.”
No matter what the skeptics say, full moons drive people and animals wacko. Ask anyone who’s ever worked in an emergency room, psych ward, or county zoo.
“Not full,” Tallient said. “Crescent.”
I glanced at the thin, silver, smiley moon visible from my window. “What was the date on those articles?”
“May.”
Five months ago. “And since then?”
“Nothing.”
“Could be because the bodies weren’t found.”
“Exactly. Things that hunt under a certain phase of the moon do so every month. They can’t help themselves.”
I wasn’t sure about “things,” but I was sure about animals. They were nothing if not creatures of habit.
“A body was found yesterday,” Tallient continued. “Hasn’t hit the papers yet.”
I looked at the moon again. Guess I was right.
“What’s your interest in this?” I asked.
“Cryptozoology fascinates me. I’d love to go on an expedition, but I’m... not well.”
I stood. My feet literally itched. I bounced on my toes as excitement threatened to make me jump at this chance. I had to remember: What seemed too good to be true often was.
“You want to pay me to find a wolf where a wolf isn’t supposed to be. Once I do, then what?”
“Trap it and call me.”
Not an unusual request in my line of work. The people who hired me usually did so in the hopes that they would become famous by revealing some mythical creature to the world, and they wanted to be the ones to do the revealing. I had no problem with that as long as the disclosure took place. All I wanted was to prove Simon hadn’t been crazy.
“I can do that."
“You do realize this isn’t just a wolf?”
I hoped not, but my hopes weren’t often realized.
“They call it a loup-garou. That’s French for—”
“Werewolf.”
The rush of adrenaline made me dizzy. Though I took jobs searching for any paranormal entity—beggars couldn’t be choosers—the true focus of my quest should have been a lycanthrope. As Simon’s had been.
The only problem was, I just couldn’t believe. Even though my maiden name was O’Malley and my father’s family hailed from the land of leprechauns and fairies, in Boston, where I grew up, the only fanciful thing was the city’s rabid belief in a curse on the BoSox.
In my youth there’d been no nonsense allowed—no Santa, no tooth fairy—I had to fight to read fiction. Which might explain why I fell so in love with a man who dreamed of magic.
I glanced around our apartment near the campus of the University of Chicago. I hadn’t moved a book, hadn’t given away his clothes, hadn’t realized until just this moment how pathetic that was.
“I find it strange,” Tallient murmured, “that odd things happen under a crescent moon in the Crescent City, don’t you?”
I found it more than strange. I found it irresistible.
“Are you interested?”
Why did he bother to ask? He had to have heard how Simon had died. He had to know Dr. Malone’s sterling reputation had wound up in tatters. Tallient might not be aware that I’d vowed to make everyone who’d scorned Simon eat their words, but he had to suspect it considering what I’d been doing in the four years since my husband had died.
My gaze fell on the only picture I had of Simon— knee-deep in a Canadian lake, slim, scholarly, blond, and brilliant—his grin still made me yearn. My stomach flopped as it did every time I remembered he was gone forever. But his hopes, his dreams, his work, lived on in me.
“I’ll be on a plane in the morning.”
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Copyright
Dark M
oon
Copyright © 2005, 2016 Lori Handeland
Cover Art
The Killion Group, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Just Once
Just Once is Lori’s next release, her debut women’s fiction novel available in the US in January, 2019
Frankie
Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin – June, 2016
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Francesca Sicari started up from sleep, disoriented. Her cell phone was ringing.
The TV flickered a rerun of Two and a Half Men, casting just enough silver-blue light across the coffee table to reveal the remnants of her take out supper, her MacBook and her Canon Camera. No sign of her iPhone.
Nothing new there. Frankie misplaced her phone a lot. Usually because she held her camera in both hands, and she was more interested in what she saw through the lens than anything that might appear on the display of a mobile device.
She followed the sound of her ringtone ‘Whooooo are you? Woo-woo, woo-woo!’ which indicated the caller was not in her contact list. She should probably let it go to voicemail, but anyone calling in the middle of the night must have a good reason. Or a bad one.
Frankie hurried into the kitchen, thrilled to see her phone plugged into the wall where it belonged, though she had no memory of doing so.
She’d come home from work, set her Kung Pao on the counter and become fascinated
with the way the setting sun turned the cut glass vase on her farmhouse dining room table the shade of blood.
She’d spent the next hour photographing the vase with various props—a green pepper, a white tennis shoe, a yellow begonia yanked out of the garden—as the colors shifted from red, to orange, to fuchsia, gold and finally blue-gray.
Then she’d warmed up her ice-cold supper and taken it, along with the camera and her computer into the living room. Setting everything on the restored wooden trunk that served as a coffee table, she’d uploaded the pictures she’d taken that day of the Basilica of St. Josaphat on the south side of Milwaukee and started editing. Several hours later, she’d closed her burning eyes ‘just for a minute.’ Next thing she knew, the phone was ringing.
Woo-woo, woo-woo!
That ringtone was getting on her last nerve. She’d have to change it.
Frankie snatched up the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Francesca?’
She knew that voice. Considering she’d met the woman once and talked to her on the phone never, Frankie wasn’t sure why.
‘Hannah?’
‘Is Charley there?’
Frankie had divorced Charley Blackwell twenty-four years ago. He’d married Hannah soon afterward. Considering he’d been boffing her, that made sense. Or as much sense as anything had made back when Frankie had discovered the love of her life loved someone else.
‘Why would he be here?’
‘He was supposed to fly in from Africa tonight. When he didn’t show, I tracked him there.’
Frankie tightened her lips over the words how do you like it? Not productive.
‘By there you mean Milwaukee?’
‘Yes.’ Hannah’s voice was clipped, but she sounded more scared than pissed. Why?
‘How’d you get any info out of the airlines?’
Frankie had always had a heck of a time hunting down Charley when he didn’t show. With TSA and privacy laws, she couldn’t imagine it had gotten any easier.
‘He was shooting for National Geographic. They made the reservation so they were able to pull some strings.’
Funny. They hadn’t been all that willing to pull strings for Frankie.
‘Maybe he got another assignment,’ Frankie said.
‘In Milwaukee?’ Hannah didn’t exactly sneer the word, but she might as well have.
‘I know it isn’t the Congo, but we do have worthwhile images to photograph.’
For instance the Basilica, which was modeled after St. Peter’s in Rome and had one of the largest copper domes in the world. The structure was exquisite, as were many other local churches, such as the Greek Orthodox Church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Frankie planned to go there tomorrow.
But Charley was a photojournalist. One of the few left in an era where everyone had a camera on their cell phone and speed trumped technique. That he was still employed at sixty-three was a testament to how good Charley was at his job.
In the last few decades since they’d called it quits he’d become even more famous. If Frankie took one of his more well-known pictures onto the street and showed it to the first person who passed by, she’d bet a hundred dollars Joe Public would recognize it.
Charley had begun his career as a combat photographer in Vietnam. He’d been drafted shortly out of high school, then re-upped for a second tour. Once the troops had been withdrawn following the Paris Accords, he’d stayed on, which meant he’d been there at the end, and the photos he’d taken of the fall of Saigon had landed him a job with Associated Press. From there he had moved to Time Magazine, then National Geographic, eventually becoming a freelance photographer so he could pick and choose the best jobs from each of them.
‘Charley wouldn’t fly off on another assignment without letting me know,’ Hannah said.
Interesting. He’d done that often enough to Frankie. She wondered how long it had taken Hannah to train the asshole out of him.
‘You still seem to have lost him.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Hannah said, and Frankie laughed.
Hannah didn’t seem the ‘be that as it may’ type. But what did Frankie know? As previously mentioned, she’d met her once. The circumstance had shown neither of them in their best light. How could it, considering?
Hannah had been a kid, which had only contributed to the unpleasantness. Not only because she had no idea how to handle the situation, but because her age had made the situation even more of a . . . well, situation. She hadn’t been too young—as in pedophile young—but she’d been young enough to really piss Frankie off.
Charley had asked her if he’d fallen in love with a woman his own age, would that have been better? Frankie punched him in the mouth. She still had the scar from his front tooth on her middle finger. She recalled holding that finger up, dripping blood, waving good-bye with it as Hannah fussed over his soon-to-be-capped front teeth.
Ah, good times.
‘What is so goddamn funny?�
�� Hannah asked.
‘Nothing.’ Frankie didn’t plan to share anything more with Hannah than she already had.
The woman on the other end of the line bore little resemblance to the Hannah Frankie held in her head. Soft voiced, a bit meek, not Charley’s type at all. Of course Frankie had been as wrong about Charley’s type as she’d obviously been about Hannah herself. Tonight Hannah sounded anything but meek; tonight Hannah sounded a bit ball busty.
‘If he shows up there would you call me?’
‘Why would he show up here?’
‘Why does Charley do anything?’
Once Frankie had thought she understood Charley Blackwell better than she understood anyone, even herself. She’d been wrong. But she’d have thought, by now, that Hannah might. They’d been married longer than Frankie and Charley had.
‘Are you two having problems?’ Frankie asked.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Maybe twenty-four years ago—even fifteen—Frankie might have enjoyed hearing that Charley and Hannah were on the outs. She’d have called her BFF, Irene Pasternak, and chortled. But now?
‘I couldn’t care less.’
Hannah snorted, and irritation danced along Frankie’s skin. While she didn’t have any feelings about their marriage one way or another, apparently she still hated Hannah.
‘If he shows up, I’ll have him call. That work?’
If anyone had told her back then that she’d be having this conversation—any conversation—with Hannah Blackwell—that there’d be a Hannah Blackwell—Frankie wouldn’t have believed it. She almost didn’t believe it now.
‘I’m not sure,’ Hannah said. ‘You might have to—’
‘You know, it’s almost three in the morning here. I don’t have the patience for you.’
‘That makes two of us.’ Hannah hung up.
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