Bear Sin

by Isadora Montrose

  He bent down and removed her shoes. He looked at them as if they were something he’d stepped in, but he didn’t make any more personal remarks. Maybe he was trainable. If she was the kind of girl who had wanted a trainable husband. Seemed you were better off to start with one that you liked, rather than hoping you could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Boar’s ear. Whatever.

  She didn’t think she would be able to sleep, not after the excitement and the terror of the morning and afternoon. She closed her eyes and saw again her Uncle Bobby’s angry face. Heard the nastiness he and his sons had shouted at her. Suddenly she wasn’t sleepy anymore. Her eyes popped open. The plastered ceiling of the best suite of the French Town Inn soared above the bed. She was safe here, even if she didn’t feel safe.

  “They’re not going to bother you anymore,” Patrick said. “Go to sleep.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him she didn’t take orders, but it seemed like too much effort to start her fight again. She let her lids fall and this time she drifted off.

  * * *

  Dr. Robichaud promised that he would stop by on his way home. He didn’t sound enthusiastic. But Patrick insisted. It couldn’t be right that a girl of twenty-two should be so sick just from being pregnant. It was true that everyone said she was having triplets, but why should that make her sick all the time?

  She was a big girl, with wide hips and long legs. Built on a robust scale that his ancestors would have admired. He had trained himself to prefer his women constructed on more modern lines. Now he was stuck with the sort of cozy armful that Zeke and Gil had always told him suited bears best. The kind they always said were built for birthing bear cubs. So why was she so sick?

  For a man who’d spent his entire life making sure his beast was never in the ascendant, he had certainly fucked up. For the foreseeable future, he was stuck with Heather Dupré. Heather Bascom. Even if they wound up divorced, as seemed probable, those kids would always be a tether binding them together. He rubbed his forehead and sighed. He had hoped to do better by his children than his father had done by him.

  Jeremy was on working on his latest divorce. His stepmother Diana had taken her dismissal reasonably well. She had gone back to Chicago and left the house she had spent so much time redecorating to her successor. Patrick hadn’t officially met Tiffany yet. But he had a feeling he had encountered her last year while she was dating his cousin Calvin.

  Now there was a nice dysfunctional mess to drop his little backwoods bride into. What the hell was he going to do with Heather? She wasn’t going to fit into his world. Compared to French Town, Denver was Paris, France. She would stand out there like blue jeans at a ball.

  The one thing about her having married him was that he could buy her new clothes. Shoes that didn’t have cracked soles. A coat that wasn’t threadbare. Maternity clothes. Get her hair done so she didn’t look like a teenager.

  Not that she was far removed from one. It was all very well and good to say she had lured him that day in the woods, but the truth was she was nothing more than a kid. He was older than her in every way, and it was his fault that she was pregnant. His fault that she was going to have to leave her rural home. His fault they had been married at the point of a gun.

  It was a relief to have his musing interrupted by a rap on the door. He expected room service. It wasn’t. It was a different set of hillbillies. Laughing and jostling and roaring. They ignored him when he asked them to be quieter.

  One of them produced a sack. They were faster and trickier than their elders had been that afternoon. He fought back, but they had him trussed up like a pig in a poke before he could say ‘unhand me, you villains.’ What the hell were they doing to Heather?

  He kicked and tried to shout. But someone had stuffed a foul rag in his mouth. Jocular voices ordered him to behave himself. A fist drummed on top of his head to the accompaniment of cackling. They carried him out into the damp late-afternoon air. They manhandled him into what he assumed was the bed of a pickup.

  “You just lie still, Bascom. Enjoy the ride.” A few voices made crude jokes which were greeted by raucous, drunken laughter.

  The pickup drove off. The driver made a special effort to connect with every rut and pothole. Patrick was jounced around. His head kept banging against something hard and irregular. What the fuck where they up to? What the fuck had they done with his wife? He wriggled around but he couldn’t undo the ropes that bound him.

  The bag they had thrust over his head made it hard to breathe, but provided no cushioning from the bumps. He was going to have a concussion if his head didn’t stop ramming into that hard object.

  He squirmed away from whatever it was his skull had been banging against. His feet hit the tailgate hard. He deduced they were going uphill and when he was flung sideways, that the road was winding. Which was about like saying they were on Yakima Ridge.

  The ride seemed to go on forever, Patrick tried to keep track of the time, but without being able to see, and not knowing where they were headed, he didn’t have much idea. If they were planning to hold him for ransom, which seemed a bit strange for a bunch of drunks, they were going the wrong way about it.

  Unless the person they planned to hold for ransom was Heather. It didn’t bear thinking about. He could only hope that Dr. Robichaud would arrive before they could hurt her. But judging by the way no one at the hotel had stopped his abductors, he couldn’t hold out much hope for that.

  Eventually the bumping and joggling and sliding stopped. Patrick slid headfirst into whatever spiky object was stationed up by the cab. Clumsy hands grabbed his heels and hauled him over the tailgate and held him upright.

  He was thumped between the shoulder blades. “This here’s a Yakima Ridge custom, cousin.” a boozy voice roared in his ear.

  He was spun this way and that as the yokels argued how best to get him out of his bindings. When they took the bag off his head he could see it was most of the party that had taken him from the hotel.

  Someone took out the gag. “Where’s my wife?” he croaked.

  This time the laughter was mean. “She’s up mountain,” said a dirty youth with cracked front teeth. He smacked his knee as if pearls of wisdom had fallen from his unclean mouth.

  “This here’s your shivaree.” Pat thought he recognized the bellman. He had taken off the French Town Inn livery and was wearing jeans and T-shirt. “Heather’s snug as a bug in a rug up in the Dupré hunting cabin. All you have to do to have your wedding night is find her.”

  By the laughter that greeted the bellman’s instructions, this task was not supposed to be easy. Maybe not even possible.

  “Is she alone?” Patrick wanted to bang their leering faces together.

  “Course she’s alone. Wouldn’t be a wedding night, if your bride had a chaperone.” There were more guffaws and back slaps. “You best see if you can track her, Bascom. That is if you’re worthy of her.”

  “You know I’m a stranger. How do I do that?”

  A dirty scrap of paper was pushed into his hand. “We gotta get home to supper,” said a wit. Guffawing, they all piled into the pickup and drove away, leaving him staring at an inadequate, hand-drawn map.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Heather was glad to see the Dupré hunting lodge. It was both familiar and strange. Since the last time she had been up here, Uncle Bobby had replaced the front porch. It now ran the full width of the sturdy, log cabin.

  Lots of folks on Yakima Ridge had hunting camps. Disreputable was considered venerable and authentic. She had been afraid they were headed to one of those disgusting male retreats. But Uncle Bobby kept his place in good repair.

  The excitement of being snatched by her cousins and brought up here had mysteriously settled her queasy stomach. Probably because she was distracted. The Dupré camp was situated in a grove of oak trees. Not much of a view what with all the oak, but it was green and lovely whichever way you looked. She could hear the rippling of the stream. The squabbling of the blue jays sound
ed like a welcome.

  She filled her lungs with good pine-scented Kittitas County air. Jenna had suggested that her continual morning sickness might just be homesickness. And that leaving Portland might be the cure. Even though Jenna was a trained nurse, Heather suspected that was just superstition and wishful thinking. But she felt better up here than she ever had in Hanover.

  She had been scared to death when she had awakened to find her cousins hustling Patrick off. And she’d been more scared that the ones who stayed behind would be handling her in the same rough way. But Elijah and Logan had let her put on her shoes and go to the bathroom before they helped her into Logan’s pickup and drove her up to the mountain.

  She hadn’t wasted her breath trying to reason with them. The clan Dupré had decided that even though she hadn’t had much of a wedding – none whatsoever in fact – she and Patrick still deserved a good old-fashioned shivaree. And they were going to see that it was a special one. She only hoped that Patrick would survive whatever ordeal they had set up for him. Generally, a shivaree had two parts. The groom’s task was followed by a rowdy march on the happy couple.

  She half expected to find more rowdy Duprés waiting for her when she went inside the cabin. But it was empty. Elijah and Logan brought in boxes of what they called supplies.

  “You should be fine until Bascom gets up here,” Logan said grinning. “My mamma sent clean sheets – you could make up the bed.” He and Elijah howled at this witticism.

  And then they drove off, leaving her stranded miles from French Town with night coming. She wasn’t exactly frightened. As long as she could remember the woods had been a place where she felt peaceful and contented. And since she had come into her bear, they had been a place of true refuge. But she couldn’t take bear now that she was pregnant. She had talked to Jenna about it. Jenna had had a lot of experience with she-bears in her midwifery practice. And she had babies of her own.

  “I didn’t take bear once I knew I was pregnant.” Jenna pursed her lips. “To tell you the truth, Heather, I was scared to take the chance. They say if a woman turns into a bear when she’s too far along, that her babies will come into their talent right off – instead of at puberty.”

  Heather didn’t need Jenna to say more. Babies were enough of a handful, without risking that they could transform into bear cubs before they had any sense. She didn’t want to be climbing trees to get her babies down. It was true that only experience would tell if taking bear sped up the acquisition of shifting, but she wasn’t going to be the woman to run that particular experiment. Better to play it safe, than to risk wild cubs.

  The Dupré cabin was just two rooms. A bedroom with built-in bunks and a combination sitting room and kitchen. There was no running water, of course, because there was nowhere to get running water from. No one was permitted to tap into the river. The striped mattress on the sitting room bed was rolled up on its platform. There was no fridge. Uncle Bobby usually brought up a couple of coolers, but Logan and Elijah had not left her one.

  On the other hand, Aunt Marlene had insisted that a chemical toilet be installed in the cabin’s lean-to, so she didn’t have to stumble out to the outhouse in the middle of the night. The Duprés might have their faults, but shoddy construction was not one of them. The cabin was clean and tight. Heather sniffed. No mice. No shrews. Just the faint smell of a place locked up too long.

  She opened all the windows and let the fresh air in, while she inspected the rest of the place. The mattress wasn’t even that old. Not even stained. She unrolled it and flipped it over to be sure that mice had not crawled inside. There wasn’t a single hole. It didn’t even sag. How could it with a sheet of plywood instead of a box spring? Likely it wouldn’t be that comfy to sleep on, but it was clean.

  Time to look inside those boxes the boys had hauled inside. The promised sheets were there. And a folded fleece blanket. It didn’t take long to make up the bed and to discover that Aunt Lily had not thought about pillows. Well, it wasn’t the end of the world if you had to sleep without one.

  At the bottom of the cardboard box that had held the bedding, was a red waterproof jacket. Heather pulled it out. It wasn’t new, but it fit. Probably when the temperature dropped she would be grateful for it. She was starting to get thirsty. She hoped she wouldn’t have to go to the creek to fetch water. Her cousin Asher Bascom the Forest Ranger always said that the water in it was clean enough to drink – but to boil it first anyway.

  Which reminded her, she ought to check the stove. Likely Uncle Bobby, or whoever had been up here last, had turned off the propane at the tank before pulling out. The sun was going down, although it wouldn’t be dark for a while yet. It didn’t take her long to turn the propane back on. The stove lit first try.

  And a good thing too. It seemed decidedly unlikely that her unwilling groom was going to go to the trouble of hiking through the woods to find his missing wife. Patrick wasn’t a man who relished his bear. He was a man who preferred to be smooth and citified. The day she had laid eyes on that hairless chest she ought to have known that he was just a city boy and no real man at all.

  She couldn’t imagine what her cousins had done with him. A shivaree was a raucous, physical business. The groom’s rite of passage. He had to prove his worth – his love – that he deserved his bride. The idea of Patrick Bascom participating in any such primitive hijinks was mindboggling. It just wouldn’t happen. And it was all the less likely because he didn’t give two hoots for her.

  If Patrick didn’t park his city ass on a log and wait to be rescued from whatever pickle her cousins had landed him in, she was the Queen of Sheba. He was far more likely to head back down the mountain to the French Town Inn and the extravagant suite and fancy supper he had paid for, than to struggle through the forest in quest of her.

  She opened the flaps on the other box. Elijah and Logan had packed it with an amazing collection of non-food. Heather stacked up Twinkies and chips and boxes of things she didn’t even recognize. There was a six-pack of beer, and a big bottle of pop. No water. Not even a can of soup. Just a teenage boy’s fantasy supper. Thank goodness for that jacket. Looked like she was going to be foraging.

  She flipped on the overhead light. Nothing happened. She had forgotten that the generator needed to be started. She hoped there was fuel for that too. Just in case, she began to open cupboards. She found a nice collection of cans. Nothing she would eat at home. But good enough in a pinch. Beef stew, evaporated milk, tomato soup, pork and beans. Not her favorites, but better than Twinkies and cardboard. Her cousins were morons.

  In the cupboard over the stove she found a collection of lanterns. Her heart sank. Right at the front were the old-fashioned kind with green glass shades. The kind that you had to pump up. But behind them were a couple of LED lamps still in their boxes. Probably someone had decided they were too newfangled and shoved them to the back. Which meant there would be no batteries and she would be cleaning lampshades and finding fuel for the old ones. But no, whoever had bought these LED devices had taped batteries to the inside of the box.

  It didn’t take but a moment to get them working. She kept on looking for the flashlights she knew had to be someplace, but she didn’t turn them up. She put one of the LED lamps on the table where she could turn it on with a smack and carried the other one out to the shed.

  Spiders had spun webs from toilet to rafters. And the generator took some figuring out. But once she realized you had to turn the fuel source back on as well as yank the pull-cord, it started up sweetly. The light switch on the wall illuminated the lean-to enough that she could clean up the commode.

  The sun was even lower now. With all these trees, dusk would come earlier up here. If she wanted water, it was time to go fetch it. She tied the red jacket around her waist and wished she had a weapon. There wasn’t so much as a bow and arrow in the cabin. The gun cabinet was unlocked and empty. She wasn’t used to being defenseless in the woods. When you could take bear in the twinkling of an eye, there wasn�
�t much you were afraid of. But she had a feeling that today – tonight – she was a soft, tasty dinner.

  She grabbed a couple of plastic buckets from under the sink, and headed to the creek. It wasn’t much of a walk even in her old sneakers. She wouldn’t have chosen to wear running shoes to go hiking in the woods. If it rained, she would have wet feet. She picked her way with care. Patrick had been correct when he told her the treads were gone. Correct and mannerless.

  The creek was lower than it had been in early spring, and she had to kneel on the rocky bank to rinse her buckets and fill them. But when she stood up she had water to boil and enough to wash with too. She hadn’t been hungry in weeks, but the sight of big, fat, juicy blackberries growing on the bushes beside the creek made her mouth water. She looked up at the sky. Not yet twilight. She had time carry the water back and return for the berries.

  Bears and deer had been eating from these bushes. But they had left her plenty of ripe fruit. She picked until her bowl was full, all the while keeping an eye out for critters. The blue jays continued to quarrel with each other, and a pair of cardinals announced that their love was eternal, but she saw no mammal bigger than a squirrel.

  Long before dark she was heating up her supper. It dawned on her that she was content. She didn’t feel sick. She didn’t feel worried. She didn’t feel exhausted. She was enjoying herself. Primitive as it was, the cabin suited her better than the French Town Inn with its glossy opulence. Better than Dougie and Maddie’s modern house in Portland. For the first time in months, she had an appetite for the supper warming on the stove.

  She spared a thought for Patrick. Likely he was lost. But there wasn’t any way she was going looking for him in the dark. Not when she couldn’t take bear. She had her babies to think of. It was unlikely he would be disturbing her peace of mind tonight. But the sight of his ring on her left hand made her feel – not married – but guilty. She reminded herself that she had to turn off the generator before she went to bed to conserve fuel. She could set one of her LED lamps in the window, in case he wandered this far.