* * *
I follow him home and his taillights in the dark stare back at me. Why am I doing this. Why spend night after night watching him? What is it that I expect to see? The only thing I am able to recognize is the instinct to survey I have felt when hunting. You watch to learn.
I expect him to turn down his driveway, expect that I will carry on past to my own little cottage, done for the night. But he doesn’t, he drives further, and I think Shit, is he going to my house? And does it matter if he’s going to my house? It does, somehow. But I see his brake lights and then he is pulling onto the side of the road. Heading into the woods on foot. I park in my driveway and double back along the road until I reach his car and plunge into the trees.
The world flashes, a streak of lightning above. There’s no tracking in the dark but I am quiet and still and soon I can hear his footsteps crunching through the underbrush. Then the light of his phone, and I see him searching for something. No, just walking, covering ground.
He’s looking for Stuart. I know it. And he’s really damn close.
I step into his path and he jumps in fright. “Fuck, Inti. What are you doing out here?”
“What are you doing out here?”
“You been following me again?” Duncan asks.
My face flushes. That’s mortifying. Instead of denying it, I nod.
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to learn you.”
“To what end? I thought you wanted us over.”
That’s not what I want.
But.
“I suspect you killed Stuart.”
He is silent.
“Did you?” I ask.
Lightning, and in it he has seen something of me. “You’re bleeding,” he says.
“What?”
He shines his phone light at my face and I wince. “Your nose.”
I lift my hand and it comes away bloody. I’ve never had a bleeding nose before. It disorients me. “Did you kill Stuart?”
“You wanted something done, didn’t you?”
“For you to arrest him! Or help her get away from him! Not murder him, Duncan, Jesus Christ.”
“Would it matter?” Duncan asks. “If I did?”
I’ve asked myself that a million times now. I breathe that question. Because didn’t I want to do it myself? Wasn’t I fantasizing about it like some kind of psychopath?
The answer I keep coming back to is that there is a difference. Between thinking and doing. I have seen violence and I have seen what it takes and what it leaves behind. There is no coming back from it.
And honestly? I don’t care about Stuart. He can rot. What I do care about is how he was killed, and whether whoever killed him meant for it to look the way it does.
“It’s being blamed on the wolves,” I say, and my voice breaks.
Duncan says nothing and maybe it’s because he doesn’t care and in this moment he seems callous.
“If they come to harm over this,” I tell him clearly, “I will make sure you pay for it.”
“I think I’m already paying for it, aren’t I?” he asks.
I don’t know what to say. I can taste iron.
* * *
When I get home my sister is hunched on the cold kitchen floor with a knife in her hand.
“What happened?” I say, forgetting about the need to stop my nosebleed and crossing straight to her. She doesn’t let go of the knife until I pry it from her grip, and then her hands shake so much she can barely sign. She has to repeat herself several times before I can see what she’s saying.
He’s out there.
“What?”
I heard something.
“No, he’s not,” I say. “Come on. Come with me.”
She shakes her head.
“Aggie, come outside and I’ll show you.” I am trembling with frustration, and without warning Mum’s words spew from me. “Toughen up!”
Betrayal in her eyes. She knows how painful that instruction was to me growing up. She knows how small it made me feel. She makes for the bedroom but I grab her arm and start pulling her toward the front door. “You need to see there’s no one out there!”
Aggie struggles, a freaked animal. I manage to pin her down and then take her foot and start dragging her to the door. She bucks, kicking me in the leg and I grapple with her and we go to the ground, wrestling madly. The blood from my nose is dripping on both of us. “Aggie, stop!” I grunt. “Just—fuck—come outside, I need you to see!” If I can’t get her to come outside right now I am going to go as insane as she is.
Let me go, she signs. Inti, let me go.
The air goes from my chest, and from hers, too.
“I can’t,” I say, and then we both sag to the floor, exhausted.
It hits me: what I must tell her. What I should have told her from the start.
“He’s not out there,” I say, “because he’s dead. I killed him.”
Aggie stares at me. But you can’t kill.
I shake my head. “I never wanted to.”
She searches my face for the truth and must find it, and then her body slumps against mine with the weight of her relief. She makes one sign, the motion for thank you, and then she takes herself to bed. Not realizing, I suppose, that she isn’t the only one who needs help. Leaving me here to lie on the kitchen floor, to bleed onto it, and think of what it takes to kill a person. Only the flesh of you, only the soul.
* * *
He is lying on their bed when I find him, where she lay not long before, on a bed that moved beneath her, and I climb on top of him now and there is fear in his eyes as I lower my mouth to his neck and tear it open—
* * *
I wake in agony. My muscles have stiffened on the tiles and the scent of the dream lingers; blood is smeared beneath me and crusted onto my hands and face. The first morning light hurts my eyelids and through the window drifts the sound of a horse’s distress. At first I think I am still dreaming, that I’m a child again and Dad is about to take the beast in hand. But it’s no dream, it’s my poor horse who is upset by something, whinnying and rearing skittishly. Something has spooked her and for a second I think: wolf.
I am moving for the door when through the kitchen window I see Aggie.
She’s outside.
My feet stop.
I watch my sister walk to the horse and reach up to Gall’s mane and swing herself onto her back. She presses her body and my body against the horse’s spine, laying herself flat and heavy and ardent, calming her with our heartbeat, our firm, gentle hands, our breathing. Gall’s hooves fall still on the grass, her whole being falls still, one with the woman on her back. Bewitched by that whispering touch, that knowing my sister was born with. When Aggie places her face against the neck of the creature and smiles, I sit down on the kitchen floor and weep.
* * *
I am the first to base camp so I’m the one to discover it. The two mortality codes.
When they arrive, Evan, Niels, and I head out on horseback to find the bodies and work out what happened. The two members of Tanar Pack, wolves Number Four and Number Five, are lying dead well within the boundaries of a territory that doesn’t belong to them. Ash’s territory.
“There’s been a fight,” Evan surmises, because the two wolves have been torn at throats and guts and this is clearly the work of a fellow wolf.
No shit, I manage not to say.
I feel deep sadness at the look of them, but there’s no anger. It’s the nature of things that has brought their lives to an end.
We will bring the bodies in, but first we trace the blood trail back to the center of Ash’s territory and discover that she is alive but bleeding from the muzzle, and that her daughter Thirteen and new mate Twelve are with her, both also injured. Instead of creating a new pack of their own, the newly mated pair must have come here to join Ash’s. Thirteen has come home to her mother and they’ve fought a battle together. I don’t breathe as I scan the forest for any sign of the pups, because
if they are dead then I don’t know what I’ll be. But a movement catches my eye and I see all six emerge from a thicket, wrestling happily as though nothing has happened, and I know that Ash and her two grown wolves managed to fight off a pack of five to protect them. It would make sense for Twelve and Thirteen to lay claim to her dominance as the new breeding couple of the pack, but I don’t think they will do that. I think Ash is the strongest wolf I have ever come across.
* * *
Evan, I can tell, is rattled by the dead wolves. He is as sensitive to their deaths as I was when I first started the job. Back then, even when they killed each other or died from an illness, the grief was as profound as discovering one killed needlessly by a human. So I take him for a walk and we pick wildflowers, which he has always loved as much as the animals.
“I never get used to it,” he admits.
“That’s not a bad thing, not really. Grim thing to get used to.”
“But I should be. We see it enough. It’s why we don’t name them.”
I shrug. “Still. There is too much love for it to ever be easy. Forgive yourself for that.” I squat to point out little yellow flowers, each with five petals and not unlike a daisy.
“Ranunculus flammula,” Evan says. “And some Filipendula ulmaria.” He picks a few of each and we walk on. A marshy field stretches before us and we go off the path.
“Are you going to Glasgow this weekend?” I ask. Evan’s whole family lives there, and I think he might be seeing someone there too, since he’s been ducking down there every chance he gets. This is a family that fully supports his work; he told me once that they love having a cause to rally behind, with as much noise and fuss as possible.
“Not now,” Evan says. “There’ll be too much to do, with the packs fighting.”
“Go,” I tell him. “I won’t need you over the weekend, but I do need you rested.”
“You gonna take your own advice, boss?”
I ignore that.
“Have you been going out to the survey spot?” he asks me.
I nod.
“Me too. I go there all the damn time. Staring at the ground, willing the wee things to pop up, shouting at them sometimes, like a right lunatic.”
I laugh. “Maybe they’re staying below ground to spite you.”
“Aye, maybe. At what point do we decide this hasn’t worked?”
“We’re a long way from that yet.”
“I know, but is there a point?”
I shake my head slowly. Not for me, not really. But there will be for the locals. I say, “Give the wolves time, Evan. They just need a bit of patience.”
“Never my strong suit. Ooh, look here. This is a beauty. Dactylorhiza incarnata. A marsh orchid.”
Sitting alone in the marshy grass, about thirty brilliant spotted pink orchid flowers shoot off the one upright stem. It is more vivid than any of Werner’s colors, but in the family, I think, of lake red, the shade of red tulips, Rosa officinalus, and the mineral called spinel. No animals are this shade, except perhaps some lucky birds. It is almost strange to see such a vibrant hue out here in this land of browns and grays.
“That’ll make a beautiful bouquet,” I say.
But Evan straightens without having picked it. “I think we’ll leave this solitary sweetie. It has its own role to play here.”
* * *
I phone Mum and get her early in the morning before she’s left for work.
“How are the wolves?” she asks. I can hear her coffee machine in the background.
“Killing each other.”
“Sounds about right. How about Aggie?”
“Yeah, she’s … good.” The best she’s been in a long while. This morning she was outside. “Mum, can I ask you something?”
“I expected you’d like to.”
“How’s that?”
I can almost hear her shrugging. “Tone of voice.”
That gives me pause. “You’re really good at reading people, aren’t you?”
“Is that what you’re asking?”
“No.”
She laughs a little, an exhale.
“What’s the first thing you do when someone’s been murdered?”
There’s a pause. “You all right, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine.”
“And you’d tell me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you.”
“I’d have thought you’d just want me to toughen up.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while. Then, “Darlin’, you’re going to figure this out one day, but we’re most fallible when trying to raise our children.”
This is, I think, the closest I’m going to get to an acknowledgment of poor choices on her part. About as close to an apology as she’ll ever come.
“You were right, you know,” I say abruptly. “I did need to toughen up.” And I have, I’ve toughened so far up I’m wrinkly old leather now.
She sighs, but doesn’t argue.
“You need a timeline,” Mum says, and as she speaks pieces of this float back to me from childhood; these are things she has already taught me, but I’d tried to forget them. “Make a timeline of your victim’s movements, their habits, their routines. Make a detailed picture of their life so you can see anything that sticks out. Whatever doesn’t fit is your first clue. Look at people you might not have thought of. Look for motive. Look for lies.”
“How do I spot the lies?”
“Assume it’s all lies, and then prove what’s true.”
“That sounds like a lot of work.”
She laughs. “Yep. Now I’m going to imagine to myself that you’ve taken up a new career writing crime novels, all right?”
“Yeah, all right. Thanks, Mum.”
She waits, but I don’t know how to word it.
“What else, Inti?”
“Is there a reason you do this work? Because I know it consumes you. I know you haven’t got space for much else. And it must be a pretty dark place to go voluntarily, particularly because you don’t think all that highly of most people. So I’ve just been wondering if something happened to you.”
Mum doesn’t say anything. I can hear her pouring her coffee, adding the milk and putting the bottle back in the fridge. The sliding door opens and closes and I listen to the sound of her lighting a cigarette. I can picture the concrete balcony she’s sitting on, can see in my mind’s eye the crashing ocean she must be watching, the sun rising slowly behind, burning everything.
“Your dad didn’t beat me up, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No,” I say quickly. I hadn’t been asking that, not directly, but a great pressure lifts off my chest.
“You don’t have to be a victim to care,” she says. “You just have to have empathy in bucket loads.”
I breathe out. “Yeah. Thanks. Sorry for asking that.” And I mean it genuinely. This is her business. I just wanted to know if she’s like Duncan. If her need to protect people exists because she wasn’t protected herself.
“My stepdad,” she says suddenly, softly, breathing out a long lungful of smoke.
I’ve never met any grandparents, or stepgrandparents.
“Oh,” I say, on a long breath of my own. “I’m sorry. How long, Mum? How long until you got past it?”
“Sweetheart,” she says, “I sleep with dead women watching me from the walls.”
* * *
But I cannot accept that. That hers is the only way. Aggie will be different. There has to be a way to heal, and if she has not the will for it, then I will be strong enough and sure enough for her. She can have my soul in place of hers, if she needs it.
19
Despite the faint, ever-lingering nausea that’s been hanging around for the last few weeks, I must try to build this timeline. In a lilac-hued twilight I knock on Red McRae’s door. His father answers.
“Sorry to bother you. Red home?”
“He’s out with the sheep. Come in. I’ll radio him.”
I step inside and wait by the door w
hile the old man gets on a walkie-talkie and tells Red the wolf lady is here to speak with him.
“No phone service out here either?” I ask when he returns to me.
“Not a hair. Come in, come in, it’s rude to lurk by the door. I’ll make us tea. Unless you’d like coffee?”
“Tea’s good.”
“I won’t ask what you’re doing here.”
“Okay.”
The stone house is cozy and well lived in. I’d guess it’s been in the family a long time. “I’m Inti,” I say. “Let me make the tea.”
“Douglas,” he replies, then lets me bustle my way around the little kitchen.
“Just the two of you live here?”
“Aye, since Quick passed.”
“Who was Quick?”
“Red’s wife.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” As the kettle boils he points me to the cupboard with the tea bags. “Good name, Quick.”
“Aye, and well deserved.”
“Why’s that?”
“Quick on the draw.”
“And from the Wild West?”
“She was witty,” he clarifies with a chuckle, “and she could lay down a fatal insult with ease, quicker than you could blink.”
I smile. “She sounds great. You been here a long time?”
“All my life and my pa’s life before me.”
“All sheep farmers?”
“That’s right, and even further back than that. We’ve all of us been sheep men, at least half a dozen generations of us. You ought to come into town more, missy. Be good for you to get to know some folk.”
Once There Were Wolves Page 17
