by Beth Hoffman
When I grabbed the card away from Inez, she let out a hoot. “So it is Sam Poteet.”
“No!” Olivia bleated. “Son of Miz Sticky-Fingers Poteet? But you said he was a toad.”
“That was before I met him.”
Inez asked, “How long have you been dating him?”
“Just a few weeks.”
Olivia flashed me a look. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I wasn’t ready to tell you. It’s not a big deal.”
“Of course it is. He’s sending you flowers.”
Inez leaned against the doorframe, her lips curving into a knowing smile. “You like him. I can see it in your eyes.”
I lightly touched a hydrangea. “Yes. I do.”
I walked home from work that evening carrying Sam’s flowers. They were so heavy that by the time I set them down on my front porch and unlocked the door, my shoulders ached. After I played ball with Eddie and fed him supper, I carried the flowers upstairs. Just as I set them on my bedside chest, the phone rang. I flopped onto the bed and smiled when I answered, hoping it might be Sam.
“Teddi. It’s Gabe.”
“Hi, I was just thinking about you and Sally this morning. How are—”
“Teddi, are you watching TV?”
“No. Why?”
“Good. Whatever you do, promise me you won’t watch any news channels.” Gabe let out a long breath. “I hate having to tell you this, but it’s better you hear it straight from me and not from some newscaster.”
“What?”
“Remember when we talked last month and I told you about the poaching going on in the Gorge? Well, it was worse than I led you to believe. A lot worse.”
“What do you mean?”
There was no response.
I pressed the phone tighter to my ear. “Gabe?”
“I don’t want to talk details, and believe me, you don’t want to hear them. But some sick psycho was . . . was slaughtering wildlife.”
My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh, no!”
“On Sunday the rangers closed off all entrances to Daniel Boone Forest and shut down access to the Gorge. About sixty of us started to hunt for whoever was responsible. Yesterday a group of climbers found . . . Well, it was so bad that CNN came out and filmed parts of the area where one of the slaughters took place. I don’t think they’ll show much of the footage, but they did several interviews with the rangers.”
As Gabe talked, I pushed myself up from the bed and began pacing around the room.
“Early this morning four us set off for Clifty Wilderness. I guided the group—Doug, a buddy of mine who’s an ace tracker, and Mike and Ben, two marksmen who volunteered in the hunt. Doug picked up some tracks that led us into a really rugged area between sheer drop-offs that had to be two hundred fifty feet. Anyway, we found the bastard.”
“You did? Oh, thank God. Is he in jail?”
“No, he’s—”
“What! Why isn’t that son of a bitch behind bars?”
“Because he’s dead.”
I shook my fist in the air and cheered, “Good! Was it Mike or Ben who did him in?”
“Neither. Someone shot him, but we don’t know who. Not yet anyway. It looked like he’d only been dead for a couple hours when we found him. Does the name Leland Boles sound familiar?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“He was a notorious poacher from West Virginia. In one year alone, he killed eight bald eagles. Back in 1980 he was convicted of twenty-one counts of multispecies poaching. He served seven years in the West Virginia State Penitentiary. According to his ex-girlfriend, the minute he got out, he started poaching again.”
“And you’re sure he’s the one who was slaughtering—”
“Oh, yeah. No question about it. The investigation is under way, so I can’t tell you what all we found, but it was the sickest . . . Well, anyway, he was the guy all right. A handgun with a silencer was lying not far from his feet, but Boles obviously didn’t have time to fire. He was shot with an arrow, and whoever did it was either one heck of a marksman or just plain lucky, because the arrow wasn’t high-strength carbon or even aluminum. It was handmade.”
I lowered myself to the edge of the bed. “Handmade? What did it look like, do you remember? I’m . . . I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I remember. I’ll never forget it. Boles was lying on his side with the arrow sticking out of his back. And by the look frozen on his face, the bastard got a real good look at who sent him straight to hell. He was shot from the front.
“Doug’s an archer and studies Native American artifacts. He said the arrow was expertly made. The arrowhead was a Clovis point—very sharp and lethal. The fletching was made from black feathers. Probably from a crow, but I couldn’t get close enough to be certain without disturbing the scene.”
Squeezing my eyes closed, I leaned my forehead against the bedpost. Thank God I’d never told Gabe about the arrow I’d discovered in the barn. “Are . . . are handmade arrows rare?”
“No, I wouldn’t say they’re rare. I’m really sorry I had to call and tell you this, but Sally and I didn’t want you seeing it on the news. All the animals were dead except for a young female bobcat that somehow managed to crawl away. Sally and Doc Waters worked on her for hours. They had to amputate her right front leg. We named her Lucky.”
“I pray that poor creature lives up to her name.”
“We do, too.”
“Gabe, if you hear anything that you can share, anything at all, will you call me?”
“I will. ’Bye, Teddi.”
I returned the phone to its cradle and looked out the window.
THIRTY-SIX
NOVEMBER 1971
Snow. It began after supper. From the kitchen window, I watched fluffy snowflakes blanket the fields and build on the barn roof. The timer dinged, and I pulled a sheet of oatmeal cookies from the oven. While I was sliding them onto the cooling rack, Mama came up from the cellar. “Teddi, where’s your brother?”
I turned, spatula in hand. “I think he’s in his bedroom.”
Daddy walked in and poured himself a cup of coffee. “He’s in the barn, Franny.”
“Doing what?”
“Setting up his sleeping bag.”
Mama’s eyes flared. “He is not sleeping in the barn. It’s twenty degrees outside. He’ll get sick.”
Daddy glanced out the window. “I told him he could, so let it be.”
“Now, why would you go and do something like that?”
“Franny, he’s a boy. If he gets too cold, he’ll come in. It’s good for him to harden up.”
With a scowl on her face and her lips pressed tight, Mama walked out of the kitchen.
When the cookies had cooled, I put a handful into a paper bag and filled a thermos with hot chocolate. Buttoning my coat, I tucked the cookies into one pocket and the thermos into the other.
The snowfall was so heavy that I could hardly see the glow of the light above the barn door. Other than the muffled sound of my footsteps and the dry scrape of a tree branch rubbing against the house, the landscape was hushed.
I gave the barn door a tug, opening it just enough to squeeze inside.
“Josh? Can I turn on the lights and come up?”
“No, wait a second.” A moment later my brother shone a flashlight on the floor in front of my feet. “Leave the lights off. Just follow the beam to the ladder.”
I stomped the snow from my boots, the thermos warm and heavy against my thigh as I climbed the ladder. When I reached the hayloft, Josh pointed the flashlight toward a shelf of hay topped with his sleeping bag. “It’s nice up here.”
I pulled the thermos and bag of cookies from my pockets. “Surprise.”
“Wow, thanks.” He took a big bite of a cookie and grinned.
> We sat next to each other on the sleeping bag while Josh scarfed down another cookie. After he drank some hot chocolate, he jammed the flashlight into a bale of hay, sending a soft circle of light shining high above the rafters.
“Teddi, watch this.”
A quick shadow of a bird moved through the circle of light. I smiled while my brother adjusted his fingers and made a hand shadow of a bird diving from a rafter.
“That’s a hawk,” he said. “They’re wind masters. Did you know they dive at a hundred twenty miles per hour?”
I nudged him with my elbow. “You’re making that up.”
“Nope.” He thumped his finger on a book resting on his pillow. “Read it right here. And peregrine falcons are even faster.”
As I opened my mouth to ask a question, Josh sat upright. “Shhhh. Did you hear that?”
My eyes widened. “What?”
He switched off the flashlight and whispered, “Follow me.”
We tiptoed to the back of the hayloft, and without making a sound my brother undid the latch and inched open the loading door. He stepped to the edge and motioned for me to come look. We were more than thirty feet aboveground, and I held tightly to the doorframe and peered out. At first I didn’t see what Josh was smiling about, but as my eyes adjusted to the shadows and falling snow, I smiled, too. Below us was a bobcat.
I turned toward my brother and whispered, “What’s he munching on?”
“Leftover chicken.”
Josh lowered himself to a sitting position with his legs dangling out the door, and I joined him. We sat in the moonlight and watched the bobcat eat his supper. When not a morsel was left, he turned and limped into the woods.
“Poor old guy. I’m tryin’ to help him along by giving him food every night. But I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.”
I leaned against my brother. “I love your big heart. There’s a special place in heaven for you.”
Josh shrugged. “I don’t much care where I go when I die, as long as it’s where the animals are.”
We fell silent, our legs dangling free as the vapors of our breath clouded together. Minute by minute the snowfall increased until the woods became a lacy blur. Giant flakes swirled through the open door, and from the corner of my eye I watched my brother turn white in nature’s benediction.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Down the hall and into my office I went, my legs rubbery as I turned on the lamp and opened the closet door. Unable to reach the uppermost shelf, I dragged my desk chair across the room and stood on the seat. Stretching my arm, I removed a cardboard mailing tube and then brought down the old shoe box.
I pulled the chair to my desk and sat. The lid of the mailing tube went pop when I opened it. Angling the tube, I let the arrow slide into my hand. The black arrowhead had been honed to a razor-sharp tip with serrations along each side.
I held it for a moment, feeling its weight before placing it on my desk.
It took me several minutes to gather the strength to untie the white ribbon and lift the lid off the shoe box. All the notes my brother had ever written me were folded and neatly stacked in chronological order, the one at the top being the last I’d received. Blood pounded in my ears when I drew the box close and reached inside.
The edges of the paper had yellowed and felt brittle. For the first time since 1977, I opened the note.
The feather slipped out and landed lightly on my desk. It was just as I remembered—smooth and shiny and pitch black. Holding the note in the lamplight, I leaned forward and read the words:
When shadows take flight
and the moon turns away from the stars,
the raven delivers divine law
Slowly, I ran my thumb over the five words my brother had written at the bottom of the paper—words that had forever altered so many lives:
Don’t come looking for me.
I set the note down, removed a phone book from my desk drawer, and riffled through the pages until I found what I was looking for. Then I dialed the number of the nearest library.
“How late are you open this evening?” I asked the woman who answered.
“Eight o’clock,” she said.
The hands on my wristwatch read 7:25. I thanked her, raced down the steps, and grabbed my keys. At 7:38 I pulled my car into the library’s parking lot. My heart drummed so wildly that I could hardly think straight, but with the help of a librarian I found what I was looking for and was back home by a quarter past eight.
After pouring myself a glass of water, I climbed the stairs and returned to my desk. Opening the book, I leafed through the pages until I came to the chapter on Clovis points that read:
“Clovis is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture that first appeared 11,500 radiocarbon years before the present. Archaeologists believe this age is 13,500 to 13,000 calendar years ago. The Clovis is the first point type to appear in North America and is not found elsewhere in the world . . .”
From one page to the next I searched, holding my brother’s arrow against the photos for comparison. But of the hundreds of photographs I examined, I couldn’t be certain if the arrowhead in my possession was a Clovis or not. If I had to guess, I would have said it most resembled those called Copena.
There was no disputing that two feathers of the fletching were from a red-tailed hawk. The third was solid black. Whether from a raven, a crow, or a blackbird, I didn’t know.
So what did all this mean?
I pinched the bridge of my nose and let out an anguished sigh. During the past hour, I’d learned more about arrowheads than I cared to know, yet I had no answer to the questions that were squeezing the air out of my lungs. A man named Leland Boles had made a decision to inflict unspeakable torture on animals. Someone else had made a decision to bring that torture to an end. As of this moment, that person was nameless.
Rising from the chair, I put everything away and turned out the light.
While hot water thundered into the tub, I lit a candle and slowly undressed. A cloud of steam rolled in to the air as I sank deep into the water. Submerged to my chin, I closed my eyes.
Let go. Just breathe out and let go . . . Heavenly Father, full of grace, please help me through this night . . .
THIRTY-EIGHT
While sitting at my workbench munching on apple slices, I leafed through an old issue of National Geographic and came upon an article featuring the big cats of Africa.
It was a quiet Thursday afternoon in early October. Albert was repairing a split in an Irish console table, and I was getting ready to paint a Gothic-style chair I’d come across at a garage sale—a massive old thing with wide arms and a high, solid back. I wanted to do something unexpected with it, something daring that would make a statement in my front window. After deciding on a bold cheetah print, I tore a picture of the exotic cat from the magazine and thumbtacked it to the wall above my bench. Pulling out a bin of oil paints, I was busy selecting the colors I’d use when the bell above the door rang. I heard Inez leave her office to see who it was.
Just as I picked up a tube of burnt umber, Inez stepped into the workroom. “Teddi,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “there’s a very nice-looking man asking for you.”
“He’s not a salesman, is he? I don’t have time to listen to—”
“Just go,” she said impatiently. “He’s tall and has gorgeous eyes, and he smells good.”
Albert shook his head and chuckled. “Smells good?”
Removing my smock, I smoothed my hair and set off for the front of the shop.
I walked around a pine linen press and came to a halt when I saw him. Dressed in a dark blue suit with a crisp white shirt and a tasteful striped tie, he looked handsome and perhaps a bit ill at ease in an endearing, boyish way.
“Sam! What a nice surprise.”
He put down the jade turtle paperwei
ght he was admiring. “Your shop is beautiful, Teddi.”
“Thank you.”
I was about to invite him to take a tour when he said, “Listen, I know you’re busy, and I’ve got to get back to the office for a meeting, but I’d like to ask you something. Would you have breakfast with me Saturday morning?”
“I’d love to, but I have to open the shop, and—”
Inez practically yelled from somewhere behind me, “I’ll be here early Saturday morning!”
My cheeks grew warm as Sam peered over my shoulder in the direction of Inez’s voice. “Well,” I said, “then I guess the answer to your question is yes.”
“Great. But I’ll need to pick you up at six-fifteen.”
“Where are we going so early?”
“It’s a surprise.”
He looked at me for a moment, as if there were more he wanted to say, and then he leaned forward and kissed my cheek.
Wearing my favorite gray herringbone skirt, black tights, and a lightweight wool turtleneck, I stood at the window and watched for Sam. Yawning, I looked down at Eddie. “Where do you think he’s taking me so early?”
Eddie tilted his head as if to say, Beats me.
At precisely six-fifteen, a pair of headlights cut through the predawn mist. As Sam pulled up in front of my house, I gave Eddie’s ears one last scratch and stepped out the door.
“Good morning,” Sam said, walking around the side of his car.
I leaned against his chest for a moment and closed my eyes. “It feels like the middle of the night.”
He gave my back a brisk, wake-up kind of rub. “Ah, but it’ll be worth it.”
For a moment I remained there with my face buried in his neck. He smelled of Ivory soap. Stepping back, I took in his worn jeans and canvas jacket. “I think I’ve overdressed.”
“You look great. Better than great,” Sam said, opening the door. He turned his car north, and we left the deserted streets of downtown Charleston behind.