“Smoky?” Shadow asked softly.
“My bird.” Sighing, she sat down on the last rung of the ladder. “When I was little, I rescued a cat bird from my tabby, Mittens. She was just a barn cat, but I loved her.”
“Somehow, I’ve no doubt of that fact,” Shadow chuckled, leaning against the pole as he crossed his arms across his chest.
“I took care of that bird for weeks, feeding it, just until it was strong enough to fly. My mother told me that I was doing God's job for him, and it wasn't right, that I should let the bird go. She said my job was to look after my younger brother and sister. But I told her that God must not be doing his job if he let the bird get hurt.” She paused wiping another tear that had slipped down her cheek. “She switched me for saying it.” Bethanie turned around, lifting her khaki shorts high enough so that Shadow could see the scars criss-crossing the backs of her thighs.
Shadow’s eyes darkened and narrowed on the welts still visible on the backs of her legs. How could a mother beat her own child for loving an animal? Murderous thoughts crossed through his mind. Perhaps the woman belonged exactly where she was. “How old were you?” His deep voice was sympathetic.
“Eight.”
Shadow closed his eyes in an attempt not to say something that might offend her. He knew that she had lost her dad, and that her mother was the only parent she still had, but it took quite an effort. He knew something of the pain she was in, losing her father. And even though she had never revealed anything about it, he knew from her records that her mother's address was the West Virginia Women's State Penitentiary. He could only assume the connection.
“But I didn't care that she switched me,” Bethanie continued bravely. “I didn't even let it stop me. Smokey needed me. But I did hide him in my daddy's barn. Put the cage beside a window so he could look out. But he never did fly again, because his wing never did heal right. So, I just kept him out there in the cage I made myself out of old fencing wire.” Bethanie's voice nearly broke. “Then one night, I guess a coyote got in cause it ate some of our chickens that roosted in there. I found my bird's cage knocked over in the morning. Smokey was gone. And I never forgave God for it. I knew he was punishing me for disobeying my mother.”
Shadow reached up and brushed aside a lock of chestnut hair that had fallen across Bethanie's forehead. “You have a special gift with animals,” he said softly. “And that gift went overlooked for most of your life. Until now.”
Bethanie looked down at the ground, unable to meet his eyes, unwilling to feel the strong feelings that Shadow was raising inside her. She felt weak and helpless, like all the energy was drained from her standing this close to Shadow.
He cleared his throat when she would not meet his eyes. “Well, let's get back.” He looked up at the sky. “Looks like we're in for another storm. Everything always comes in threes.”
That night, from her darkened bedroom window, the moon spilled in through the slats in the shutters and Bethanie could feel the restless stirring of the branches outside. A coyote in the distance howled at the silver moon on the horizon but she barely took notice of it, so absorbed she was in thoughts of self-pity. How could she complete her research now? Barn owls had been known to produce offspring year-round, unlike other owl species, but it was too close to graduation to pin her hopes on that happening. What would her teachers think of what had happened to her owls? She wondered. Would they blame her for it? Her entire future seemed to her to be in jeopardy.
“I can't stop thinking about what's going to happen to my research now. And those precious nestlings,” she said when she heard Shadow at the doorway. “They didn't even have their feathers yet.” His hair was falling loose about his shoulders, something she had never seen before. It looked so soft she wanted to reach out and touch it. “They were so sweet. So innocent. They didn't deserve what happened to them. I can't understand how God could let something like this happen.”
He strode into her room, bringing the intoxicating scent of sandalwood with him. “You might be assigning blame where none exists.” Shadow reached down to where she sat with her hands tucked beneath her knees. He hooked a finger beneath her chin, finding it hard to resist the urge to kiss her and help take some of her pain away. If the skinwalker had anything to do with their deaths, he would be sure that he paid for it.
“Maybe.” But she doubted it. God had never done a thing for her, but always took opportunities to punish her. “I'm going to find out tomorrow.”
“And just how are you going to do that, n'ya?” Shadow asked softly, looking down at her, a smile touching his lips, glad to know that the spark had not left her. Sometimes tragedies had a way of extinguishing the life force in a person, but she was proving to be tougher than most. After all, she had endured a family tragedy of her own, even though he did not know the details.
“I'm going to get the memory card out of the trail camera that watches the owls,” she said, trying to ignore the way his smile made making them appear so very kissable. “And I’m going to plug it into your computer to see if the skinwalker is responsible.”
“I don't like the idea of you climbing up that pole to reach the camera. That's more than twelve feet off the ground.” Shadow knew she was perfectly capable of climbing safely, but his concern for her safety was only second to what he feared she might see in those pictures. He did not want to see her get hurt any more than she already had. “Why don't you let me check it out for you?” He stroked his thumb across her cheek, finding her skin incredibly soft. When she looked away from him, he cleared his throat, quickly removing his hand from her face and moved towards her bedroom door. “You need to get some sleep.”
She did not want to feel this attraction for Shadow because it frightened her, but she really hated handing the task of retrieving the pictures over to him. But her old programming kicked in and she relented, letting go of her legs and swinging them down from the window seat as she sighed. “Yes, sir,” she said, her childhood programming taking over.
Shadow spun around on his heel, not believing what his own ears. Had she just called him sir? He shook his head in puzzlement at a grown woman speaking to him that way. He had thought her so strong willed, and up to now, she had been. This side of her was a shock. “Would’ve been better if you’d saluted,” he said, then strode from the room, wondering what kind of life she had lived before that made her so compliant now.
“There's something here you should see,” Shadow called out from his office early the next morning to Bethanie who was still upstairs in her room getting dressed. He swung around in his chair when he heard her pad into the room below the stairs.
When she saw him sitting there in his leather office chair, jeans stretching tightly over strong thighs in front of his flat-screen computer monitor, she was taken back. She did her best not to stare, but her eyes had taken on a mind of their own. He made her look at men in a whole new way. The way his t-shirt tucked into the tapered waist of his jeans, and the way his exposed forearms flexed as he squeezed a rubber ball in his left hand sent her pulse racing.
“I pulled the game camera down first thing this morning,” he began as Bethanie tried to clear her head of the pleasant thoughts seeing him had evoked enough to concentrate. “Because the camera is motion activated, it only takes pictures when something moves in front of it.”
Bethanie nodded, taking a chair next to his with a view of the computer's monitor and tried to ignore the way her pulse had kicked up being so close to him. So she forced herself to look around the room that was tastefully decorated, surprisingly so for a man who lived alone. The desk was a proper one, not a makeshift piece of wood suspended over two filing cabinets. On the wall above the desk hung his high school diploma and next to it, his diploma from Ferra College. Bethanie was again surprised that he had chosen to spend so much of his life at this school, first studying and living here, and now working here. The place must mean a great deal to him, she thought. Atop his desk was a statue Bethanie did not recognize
with a giant bosom and full belly extending out in front of her. There were several stacks of graded papers with handwritten comments at the top of each one. Bethanie remembered that about him, that he was the kind of teacher who took the time to care whether or not his students got what he was teaching them. Beside the papers was a picture of a blue-eyed, blond-haired Shadow as a child next to a strikingly beautiful, dark-haired woman. He must have been five or six years old when it was taken. His smile lit up his whole face, and the way he held tightly to the woman's hand told Bethanie that she must be his mother.
“There are lots of shots of the male owl, Mike,” Shadow said, emphasizing the use of the owl's proper name, “flying in and out of the nest all evening with voles in his mouth and the occasional shrew up to the time of your,” Shadow paused, looking for the right word, “intuition... last night. That's when camera stops working.”
“How can that be?” Bethanie said, her eyes round and wide in question.
“It's proof that someone did this intentionally. It had to have been someone who knew that the camera was up there, despite their being well camouflaged and their locations not made public knowledge to prevent theft, and that they were pointed at the owls' box. So, he made sure that he wasn't photographed.”
“So you don’t believe it’s cannibalism anymore?” she said as chills ran up and down her spine. She had not wanted to believe that someone had actually set out to do this. But she had known.
“This doesn’t look like Mother Nature to me. This looks sinister. Has anything like what happened last night ever happened to you before?”
She shook her head, causing her brown hair to fall into her eyes. “Not if you mean seeing my owls being murdered without actually being anywhere near them.”
“That's exactly what I mean.” Shadow hoped that whatever connection Bethanie had with her owls, be it psychic or karmic, that it would serve her in finding out who was doing this. “Whoever did this, knew that there were motion-activated cameras installed there. This is someone familiar with the school. Close to the school. Possibly even someone who works for the school.”
Bethanie rubbed her arms to try to fend off the sudden chill that came over her. The possibility that the person responsible was on the inside did not rule out anyone... not even Shadow.
Without the soothing sounds of a television to put her to sleep, Bethanie found it harder and harder each night to drift off, and the nightmares of her father's death continued whenever she was asleep. Now, in the dreams, the skinwalker was killing him as well.
She was sure the skinwalker was responsible for the death of her owls, but she wanted to be able to prove it. And as she lay awake in bed that night because of the pounding in her chest every time she thought about her owls dying, she decided to do just that, prove it. Who could be so cold, so calculating? Certainly none of her classmates, they had been the primary targets of the terror the skinwalker had inflicted. Now that she thought of it, the skinwalker's victims had been small animals certainly, and those animals had also belonged to female students. There had to be a connection between this and those killings that took place before the school was closed. This also added to Shadow's theory that the killer was still on campus.
She had thought more about her father since his death than she ever had while he was alive since they had never been close to one another. Most days, her father was so busy that he was indifferent to her. Usually working at the bakery from morning to night, coming home smelling of yeast, he was preoccupied, withdrawn into his own world.
She did not allow herself to think about the night he died, and she certainly did not want to start now with the loss of her owlets so fresh. But as she drifted in and out of the beginning stages of sleep, try as she might to stop them, her thoughts kept taking her back to that horrible night when she had been alone in her room before she had become afraid to be alone. Alone with the quiet of the house surrounding her just as it did in Shadow's house, wishing for the escape of a television to fall asleep with so that she could imagine herself home again with a house full of voices. As crazy as it seemed, she dearly missed living in a house full of brothers and sisters. Being alone with her thoughts each night tortured her, returning her to the night her father was killed. She wondered if this was just another way that God was punishing her.
The next day was her seventeenth birthday, not that anyone had yet taken notice of the fact. She lay in her bed, enjoying the jasmine scent of her new shampoo in her freshly washed and dried hair. She had just purchased it at the drugstore today with her very own money she earned babysitting. The scent of it was a singular pleasure for her.
Her mother had been in a particularly foul mood that day. So, when she heard footsteps in the hallway, outside her bedroom door, she assumed they were her father's footsteps, sent to her room by her mother, to use his belt on her. For the past few weeks, Bethanie had successfully avoided any beatings and she wanted to keep it that way. That was why tonight, she had elected to go to bed early to avoid her mother.
She had gone to bed without any hope for neither a birthday present nor a party. But there would be the ceremony, Inclusion Into Womanhood, as their church called it and her participation in she had no choice. All the girls turning seventeen in April were to be paraded in front of the church on Sunday morning like cattle up for auction, and her time had come. She had always known the day was coming just as she knew she would take her next breath, but she resented being forced by the men in charge of the church to take part in something so degrading. Its main purpose was to introduce eligible woman to the eligible bachelors in the congregation who had been kept separated up to then. She hated the whole notion.
Her bedroom door stood open a crack, the way she preferred it at night so that light could spill inside from the hallway. A figure resembling her father stood in the doorway. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The room was cast into total darkness, preventing her from seeing his face. She heard him move to the edge of her bed.
“It's time for you to learn something,” he said, an eerie silence hanging in the air.
“What Daddy?” she asked, squinting at the figure looming over her. When he did not answer right away, she feared another beating and looked past him at her closed door, feeling fear begin to tighten her throat.
The sound of his belt buckle clanking as he undid it pressed even more fear into her blood.
“I didn't do anything wrong today, Daddy. I promise,” she pleaded, sure now that she was in for another whipping.
“Melinda Vera and Debbie Hamilton. Both of them eighteen-freaking-years-old.” President Bord cursed, closing the manila envelope in front of him, slamming it down on his desk. “I've been on the phone with both of their parents. I don't have to tell you, that was not a conversation I’d ever like to repeat.”
Shadow sat quietly across the man's desk from him, allowing him to vent his frustrations.
“So, I've got two missing girls and some blasted animal carcasses. I shut down my school over some dead deer!” He cursed again. “For all I know, these two girls decided to go home without telling anybody. It's happened before. But apparently not in this time. Neither of their parents has seen them or heard from them.”
It was Thursday morning. It had been a little over forty-eight hours since the deer carcasses had been found and mistaken for the missing girls' bodies. Shadow thought that the likelihood was pretty slim that those same two girls would both leave for home at the same time, but he did not argue with President Bord's point. This was too big of a mess, and he wanted to do everything he could to help.
“And it's only a matter of time before I start hearing from the family's attorneys, and this whole mess gets even hotter. You know as well as I do that the school can't afford that kind of bad publicity. Someone's got to take responsibility for this, and fast.” He got up from his oversized leather chair and walked around to the front of his desk, leaning his large frame against the front edge of it. “Mr. Walker, you've
been my right hand man through every semester for the past eight years since you came here to do your graduate work. You know that I couldn't run this place without you. That's why it pains me all the more to have to say this.” The older man steepled his fingers in front of him and took an audible breath. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, son, but your hunting knife was found in the barn. It was covered in blood. The Sheriff wants permission to search your truck. I told him that wouldn't be necessary, as I have complete faith in you. But,” Bord paused, taking another deep breath, “he's insisting. I've held him off as long as I can.”
Shadow did not flinch, he just continued staring him straight in the eye, refusing to give away the slightest hint of emotion.
“In addition to that,” President Bord continued, “the board of directors wants this thing wound up. And they need to see some kind of proof that I'm handling the situation. All of the suspicion that surrounds you right now is making them very nervous.”
Shadow could only guess as to who had put that suspicion in their heads. He only had one enemy he knew of and that was the President’s very own son.
“I'm afraid I'm going to have to put you on administrative leave.”
At hearing President Bord finally come out with it, disbelief ran through Shadow, despite his suspicion that the conversation had been heading in this very direction.
“There's one more thing.” President Bord took a deep breath. “Something I hate to have to even bring up. But it might help you to understand my predicament.”
Shadow nodded.
“In the bed of your pick-up truck. Along with your hunting knife, the one with your initials carved into the handle, the police found a hatchet.”
“A hatchet makes me guilty?” Shadow asked, finally unable to contain his consternation at his truck having already been searched without his consent. As far as he knew, that hatchet had been missing since the previous semester when the president himself had asked him to cut down a tree.
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