Pete shrugged. “They were supposed to check in with friends today, but the last time anybody heard from them was three days ago. Buzz and a couple of the other guys from town went to help with the search. He asked me to stick around.”
“The far northwest side of the preserve,” I said, doing some distance calculations in my head. “Near my house?”
“Yeah,” Pete said, shrugging.
“We’d better put some coffee on.” Evie sighed. “When they wrap up for the night, they’ll head back here. Alan’s place is too small for a debriefing.”
“That’s a scary, official-sounding word.” I grimaced.
Pete nodded, patting my shoulder. “We take missing people seriously around here. All it takes is a turn in the weather, a minor injury, or a fall, and people can die after just a day’s exposure.”
“They probably just got off the trail and got a little lost,” Evie assured me, though she didn’t sound convinced herself.
I stuck around to help prepare for the search party. The temperatures hovered in the twenties, and I worried about Alan, Buzz, and my friends. I wondered what manner of idiot would want to hike in weather like this and whether it was worth the risk of my friends’ safety to look for people who’d put themselves in such danger.
I made biscuits because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Folding the dough, rolling it, and punching through the buttered surface with a cup seemed to ease the tension in my head. Long after it turned dark, Buzz led the charge into the saloon, the men coughing and groaning and stomping the icy mud from their boots. Evie and I passed out mugs of coffee as if they were lifelines.
“Are you all right?” I asked as I nudged a mug toward a pale, exhausted Alan. He’d been atypically distant for the last few days. I’d been prepared for him to ramp up his flirting, with Cooper out of town, but he’d hardly spoken to me, keeping his eyes wary and downcast whenever I approached. I worried that he sensed that something had happened between Cooper and me, that he was going to give up any pretense of being friends now. But he seemed happy to see me as I plied him with caffeine and buttery carbs. His tired smile was genuine, if a bit apprehensive.
“I’m better now,” he admitted, drinking deeply and wrapping his hands around the warm mug as I poured a cup for Abner.
“Any sign of them?” I asked, giving him a refill.
Alan grimaced. “The kids who reported them missing gave us directions to where the boys planned to camp. We found their site. The tent was torn to hell. Sleeping bags, food, everything they had was thrown around like a tornado had swept through. There were tracks, big tracks.”
My stomach dropped, and I had a heavy feeling of déjà vu. I tried to concentrate on breathing deeply, on the musical clanking of spoons and cups and male grunts as my neighbors warmed their bellies.
“Wolf tracks?” I asked, not really wanting the answer. Alan nodded. “Like the wolf that attacked Susie Q?”
Alan nodded again, looking stricken. “There were smears of blood all over that campsite. But no bodies, not even, uh, parts. It’s like the kids put up a fight and were dragged out of the site, kicking and screaming. They had rifles with them. There would have to be more than one wolf to surprise and then kill two full-grown boys like that. But you normally don’t see packs behaving this way. Even packs of wolves will shy away from humans if given the opportunity to run. Normally, when a human is attacked, it’s by one sick or scared animal. This seems . . . organized, like the wolf knew how to get in and get what he wanted without getting hurt.” Alan laughed hoarsely, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry. I ramble when I’m tired.”
“You need one of us to drive you home?” I asked.
Alan beamed at me. Seriously, his lips parted, and it looked as if heaven had opened up. Sweet, simple, strictly platonic heaven. Please, Lord. “That’s sweet of you. But I have to have my truck at my place. I’m heading out again in the morning. The state Department of Wildlife is sending out reinforcements at first light. We’re going to search a little deeper in the forest than I was comfortable going with volunteers.”
“Can I get anything else for you?”
“Nah.” Alan patted my hand and then seemed to think better of it, pulling away from me. “This has been good, though. Thanks.” He cleared his throat and added, “So, I’ve been meaning to ask . . . We haven’t talked much since the party, and uh, I’ve just wondered, did I do something to offend you?” He lowered his voice. “I know I had a couple of beers the other night, and I might have been a little . . . forward.”“Oh!” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering Alan’s mild case of Roman hands. I laughed, which seemed to startle him. “No, no, don’t worry about it. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve just been a little preoccupied the last few days, that’s all.”
“So we’re OK?” he asked, his brow creasing, as if he still wasn’t hearing exactly what he wanted.
Hmm. How to define “OK” between Alan and myself? Were we still friends? Of course. But now that I’d started some semblance of a relationship with Cooper, whatever I’d been heading toward with Alan was completely derailed. It felt unfair, wrong, to make him think otherwise. But he was exhausted, stressed, and sitting in the middle of a gaggle of his closest manly-man friends. Now was not the time to try to explain anything to him.
I gave him a quick nod. “We’re going to be fine, Alan.”
He seemed to relax, drinking deeply from his mug and sagging against the bar for support. And I felt like an awful, awful person.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, the dining room was buzzing about the missing hikers, Craig Ryan and Jacob Bennett, and how they might have met their gruesome end. With the pawprints found at the campsite fueling their paranoia, the locals were getting restless. Walt wanted to organize a “wolf shoot,” which I guessed was similar to the turkey shoots my high school used to fill local food pantries—only, you know, much scarier. One more thing to worry about, my boyfriend getting shot by an angry mob of our neighbors.
On the opposite end of the spectrum was calm, cool, and collected Nate. He was worried about the potential loss of tourists to the area. I tried not to think badly of him. Nate was a big-picture kind of guy. And he was right. All it took was a couple of news stories about killer wolves and missing hikers, and Grundy’s tourism-based economy would dry up. Tourists brought money into the town without using its tax-funded resources, and losing that would be devastating. As jobs dried up, families would move away, and the town Nate had spent his life preserving would slowly die.
In the middle of this kaleidoscope of worry was yours truly. My brain was caught in an almost constant loop of contradicting explanations. The most cheerful opinion was that the culprit was indeed just a sick, injured wolf that was straying too close to people. A tiny, needling voice in the back of my head reminded me that I’d seen Cooper sink his teeth into John Teague myself and that he would be the most likely suspect. I tried to keep a lid on that voice as much as possible. Stupid voice.
I rubbed my eyes and remembered with fondness the days when my biggest worry was my mother sneaking into my apartment to toss my junk food.
I hadn’t thought of my parents in weeks. I hadn’t heard from them in almost two months. They’d stopped calling, stopped leaving voice mails, and it was . . . fine. In her e-mails, Kara mentioned seeing them, so I knew they were OK. I wasn’t wracked with guilt for not calling. I wasn’t worried about whether their electricity, phone, or water had been turned off. They were grown-ups. If they didn’t pay their bills, that was their problem. I chuckled, just a little bitterly. I wished this level of emotional maturity hadn’t come at such a high price.
I didn’t help my maternal guilt issues when the day after the search party returned empty-handed, the parents of Craig Ryan and Jacob Bennett arrived at the saloon with stacks of neon-yellow fliers that screamed, “Have You Seen These Boys?” Evie and Buzz readily agreed to display them at the bar, although the fliers were already plastered on every available surface. They were just kids, really, nineteen years old, with braces-perfect teeth and a sprinkling of acne across their cheeks. Their photos smiled out from the flier with the invincible confidence of the young.
“They were here, weren’t they?” Mrs. Bennett demanded of Buzz, her voice skating that hysterical edge between shouting and shrieking. She was a thin, fine-boned woman, who was probably very pretty when she wasn’t wracked by despair. “You spoke to them? How were they? Did they seem like they were all right?”
Evie shook her head, choosing to gloss over the fake-ID story for obvious reasons. “We didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them—”
“Did they seem like they were OK or not?” Mr. Ryan shouted, plunging the already quiet dining room into silence.
“They were fine,” Buzz said gently. “Just a couple of kids, glad to be heading out on the trail. Happy to be out of school.”
Mrs. Ryan’s lip trembled. “So they were happy?”
Faced with their wild-eyed, hopeless grief, I took the coward’s way out. I hovered in the kitchen. Knowing that it was possible that I knew something about their sons’ death, that I could speak up, and that I wasn’t made me feel guilty and useless. Then again, what would I say? “Hi, I think it’s possible your children were eaten by werewolves”? How would that help them?
I told myself it was sympathy for the parents that kept me from sleeping, because it felt criminally self-indulgent to think about an absent lover when people were missing their children. Still, I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, tangled in sheets that smelled like Cooper. I stripped the bed, but the clean sheets left me unable to sleep and missing his scent. So I ended up putting the Cooper sheets back on.
I was not proud.
Instead of sleeping, I searched the Internet for stories of wolf attacks in our area, but the last proven mauling within one hundred miles was in 1987. And it involved a hunter who tried to chase a hungry wolf off the elk he’d just shot. It didn’t exactly fit with our wolf’s pattern. It was far more common for campers to be injured by bears or moose. I read about the various species of wolves living in the state but couldn’t find anything that looked like Cooper, who seemed to be a cross between a black-furred wolf and a common gray. I read about their diet, scent marking (ew), and body language, hoping to be able to decipher Cooper’s moods better when he was in wolf form. For instance, I learned that if Cooper folded his ears back and ducked his head, he was scared. And even if he was scared—which would be an indicator of something pretty bad, since he was an apex predator and all—I shouldn’t run like hell. If we were facing another wolf, running would decrease my chance of survival. I didn’t find this to be very helpful information.
Unable to channel my energy elsewhere, I was eager to get to work every morning, hoping it would help spin out the hours, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I threw myself into cooking, hopping on every ticket the minute it came through the window. I practically launched the plates out of the serving pass for Evie. But I’d look up at the clock and only a few minutes had gone by.
At least, I could count on Abner to keep me entertained. On the fourth and final day of Cooper’s trip, Abner smiled broadly as I slid the plate in front of him. He inhaled the fragrance of home cooking, took my hand in his, and pressed it against his bony, flannel-covered chest. “OK, gal, this is my final offer. Come live with me and cook like this every day. You’ll get a toilet seat that’s always down, warm feet, color TV, and I’ll even install central heat.”
I giggled. “Abner, I’m holding out for a convertible. I’d only be able to drive it for a month every year, but I think it would be worth it.”