Jonathan laughed mirthlessly as he saw the elegance of his father’s solution. “Ask the man whose livelihood is tied to the locals how long it’s been since he’s seen someone. Nicely done.”
“Thank you,” said Alexander. “Sadly, the news wasn’t as good as we’d been hoping. It would have been easy to roust these ‘relatives’ if they’d been here for only a few days, but according to what we found in the town, they’ve been here for at least a month. That’s assuming they’re the reason Herbert stopped going to the market for milk and tobacco.”
“It’s a fair assumption,” said Jonathan. “Let me tell you what we found…”
He was describing the pit trap that he and Fran had filled with soil when Fran herself stepped into the clearing, with two dead rabbits slung over her shoulder. She stopped to listen to the rest of his recitation, waiting until he was done before she cleared her throat and added, “What Johnny didn’t say is that I was in favor of marching right back up to the house and shooting a few dinosaur rustlers. It’s illegal to do that to a man’s cattle, it should be illegal to do it to a man’s pet monsters.”
“Sadly, the law is less enlightened,” said Alexander, eyeing the rabbits appreciatively. “Rabbit stew for dinner?”
“That was the plan,” said Fran. “I left the guts a ways back. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the rustlers’ll step in them.”
“Now Fran,” said Jonathan mildly. “The people may be pond scum, but their footwear has never done anything to harm you.”
Fran wrinkled her nose at him as she walked over to Alexander and handed him the rabbits. “Is there anything I can do to help you get them ready?”
“You caught them; that’s enough,” Alexander said. “If you really must do more, wild carrots and screaming yams both grow in this area. See if you can find some for us to add to the pot.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Jonathan, rising. The two of them shortly vanished into the trees, leaving the elder Healys alone in the campsite.
“This isn’t good, Alex,” said Enid.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed, pulling out one of his knives. “Let’s get started on dinner. I have the feeling it’s going to be a long night.”
It didn’t take Fran and Jonathan long to find the wild carrots Alexander had mentioned. The screaming yams were a bit more trouble—as was only natural for a vegetable capable of uprooting itself and running away when it felt threatened—and after the fourth yam had escaped capture, they settled for gathering some ramps that Jonathan had spotted growing alongside a patch of ostrich fern. That, along with a few stalks of wild mallow, would more than thicken up the stew.
“How long did it take you to learn everything in these woods that you could eat?” asked Fran as they walked back toward the camp.
“My parents started teaching me when I was four or five,” he said. “It was a game at first—identify the plant, guess the name of the bird, remember where the wild onions grow. It got more serious as I got older. I suppose I realized that they were preparing me to survive by any means necessary when I was twelve or so, and they finally taught me just how much the Covenant hated us.”
“That’s a lot to put on a little boy.”
“How young were you when you started learning how to ride?” Jonathan asked mildly.
Fran paused. “Four or five,” she finally admitted. “I guess everyone puts a lot on their kids.”
“It’s the way of the world.” Jonathan leaned over to kiss her temple. “But we do all right, I think. As long as we stick together, we do all right.”
Fran was opening her mouth to answer him when she stopped, shoulders going suddenly tight. Jonathan took a half-step more before he stopped as well. He looked at her curiously. She pointed up into the trees above them, and he frowned as he finally understood her meaning:
The frickens had stopped again.
“You can come out now,” he said, pitching his voice so that it would carry into the wood around them. “We’re not afraid of you, and we would greatly prefer to do this like civilized adults, assuming that it must be done at all.”
A branch broke in the wood off to his left. He turned, frowning. The basket of wild vegetables was impeding his shooting arm; a bad decision, all things considered, but not one that he had made expecting to be facing a shootout in the woods. That was foolish, he silently chided himself. You knew that they were out here. True enough. He also knew that he was with his wife, and while he was an excellent shot, her knives were sometimes even faster.
“You certainly are bold for people who could be thrown off our land at any time,” said a male voice, and Paul—assuming that was actually his name—stepped into view. He was carrying a shotgun.
“I’d be very interested in watching you try,” said Fran pleasantly. Jonathan glanced in her direction, unsurprised to find that her hands were suddenly full of knives.
“I think we could manage,” said the woman from the lakeside, stepping out of the trees to their right.
Jonathan’s frown deepened. “You were following us,” he accused. “We have permission to camp on these lands. There’s no reason for you to be stalking us around the forest.”
“There’s every reason, you mean,” said the woman. “Those things in the lake seem to like you. You’ll bring them out for us sooner or later, or you’ll decide to protect them and you’ll leave.”
“That’s about the most ‘I am the bad guy’ I’ve ever heard a bad guy actually be,” said Fran, sounding baffled. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true,” said Paul. “If you stay, we’ll follow you until you bring those things in the lake up to the surface for us. If you go, we’ll have plenty of time to find another way to get them out of the water. We win either way, but this way, no matter which you choose, you know you’re helping us.”
The woman smiled. “Neat, isn’t it? We figured it would make you miserable, and maybe then you’d get out of our hair sooner.”
“Rustlers,” murmured Fran, almost too softly for Jonathan to hear.
“I really don’t recommend taunting my wife,” he said. “She’s very fond of the creatures in the lake, and she can be a touch difficult when riled.”
“There’s two of us and we both have guns,” said Paul. “I’m not overly concerned.”
Jonathan sighed. “No, of course you’re not. Look, maybe we’re all on the same side here. Why do you want the things in the lake? If it’s for research purposes—”
“There’s twenty traveling carnivals in this part of the country,” said Paul, cutting him off. “More, if you count the circuses and the pure freak shows. And then there’s Ripley’s, the amusement parks, the museums—Uncle Herbert’s been sitting on a gold mine for years, refusing to let anyone get close enough to go prospecting. He’s a stupid old man who doesn’t deserve the fortune he’s leaving to swim around in his lake. We can make much better use of it.”
“Alive or dead doesn’t matter,” added the woman. “A stuffed beastie is still a beastie, and people will pay to have a look at it. People are predictable like that.”
Jonathan nodded slowly. “So you’re planning to kill them. Maybe the last relict population of plesiosaurs left in the world, and you’re going to hunt them for sport. No, worse than sport; for profit.”
Paul smiled brightly. “I knew you were a smart fellow. You’ve managed to grasp the idea quite nicely.”
“I don’t think we can let you do that,” said Fran.
“I don’t think you have a choice, sweetie,” said the woman. “We’re here legally, and you’re here because it amuses us to watch you try to decide how you’re going to help us get what we want. You can’t go to the police, because the monsters aren’t real. Make them real, and we’ll just have more bidders. You’re stuck. We win. Admit it.”
Fran tilted her head slowly to the side, expression going calculating and cold. Jonathan didn’t move at all. Everything seemed to stop for a moment, at least for the two of the
m, as they assessed the situation and came, finally, to a mutual, if unspoken, conclusion about how to best proceed.
“You’re quite right,” said Jonathan. “You win. We have no defenses against you, and no way of proving our case to the authorities, assuming we were willing to reveal the location of the lake to anyone who was not already aware. Your removing one or more of the creatures will not result in the extinction of the species. You are victorious, and my parents are waiting for us to return with the rest of the vegetables for our supper. If you don’t mind, we should be going.”
“Besides, it’s rude to gloat in front of a lady,” said Fran. “The sooner we’re gone, the sooner you can get started.” She linked her arm back through Jonathan’s, and together the two walked off into the forest. Jonathan tensed slightly, waiting to be shot in the back. It didn’t happen, and they walked safely on.
When they had gone far enough that they wouldn’t be overheard, Fran murmured, “We’re going to smash their teeth in, right?”
“Oh yes, dear,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Her smile would have made a strong man’s blood run cold. “Good,” she said.
Jonathan regaled his parents with the encounter in the wood as Fran chopped vegetables and added them to the stew. Alexander had done an excellent job of butchering and lightly browning the rabbit; all that remained was to add the rest of the ingredients and let the fire have an hour or two to work. Enid made lemonade as she listened, a frown seeming permanently etched on her face.
Fran looked up when Jonathan was done, and asked, “Can they really do that? Can they really take a dinosaur out of the lake and just sell it to somebody like that?”
“Nobody’s going to stop them,” said Alexander. “It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If we conceal the wonders of the natural world for their own protection—both from the Covenant and from people like these—then there’s no law to keep them safe when situations like this one inevitably arise. If they were cows or horses, or even pets, this would be poaching. As it stands, you can’t poach what doesn’t exist to begin with.”
Fran muttered something under her breath and went back to chopping ramps for the stew.
“Is there any reason we shouldn’t shoot them and throw their bodies in the lake?” asked Jonathan. “I’m sure Bessie and the others would be happy to take care of the evidence.”
“While it’s always good for a mother’s heart to hear her child sounding so bloodthirsty, there are problems with that plan,” said Enid. “We don’t know who knows they’re here. They may be telling the truth. Herbert may have given them permission to be on his property—and unlike plesiosaurs, horrible people are protected by the law. More’s the pity.”
“So we’re back to needing to find Mr. Wilson in order to proceed,” said Jonathan. “I realize this is probably a case of my stating the obvious, but we should move quickly. These two don’t strike me as the patient type, and if our presence brings the plesiosaurs out of the water…”
“Somebody’s going to get shot,” said Alexander grimly. “I agree with you, Johnny: we need to sort this out. We know Herbert hasn’t been seen in town for a month. We know he’s not in the hospital. So either they’ve killed him, and we can stop worrying about anyone knowing that they’re here, or they’ve got him up in the house.”
“They have guns,” noted Enid. “We can’t just walk up to the front door and demand to see him. Somebody’ll do something stupid, and someone will wind up getting shot.” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t overly concerned about one of her people being on the receiving end of a bullet.
“No, but they really, really want to bag themselves a dinosaur,” said Fran, dumping the last of the ramps into the pot. “I bet if one of us goes down to the lake—maybe two of us, we don’t want them thinking they can try anything—we can lure them down there and leave the house unguarded. After all, they don’t get paid for keeping an old man locked in the attic. They get paid for bringing in a lake monster.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” said Alexander. “Johnny, you and your mother will take the house. You’re better with locks than I am, and she’s our best tracker. She’ll be able to figure out if he’s in there faster than Fran or I could, and she’s good enough backup that I won’t worry about you in there.”
“I take it that means you’ll be heading down to the lake with Fran?” asked Jonathan, raising an eyebrow.
“That’s the plan, assuming she doesn’t object.” He turned to his daughter-in-law. “Care to help me vex some rustlers, dear?”
Fran smiled brightly. “And here I thought you forgot my birthday.”
Alexander laughed.
It seemed unwise to approach the house directly: none of them were sure how long it would take for Paul and his nameless accomplice to figure out that something was happening down by the water, and the last thing they wanted to do was get caught before the plan could be put properly into motion. Alexander and Fran had made their way toward the water, guns concealed in their clothing and large hunks of stale bread carried in the vegetable basket to lure the plesiosaurs to the surface faster. Enid and Jonathan waited in the bushes behind the house, bodies low to the ground, listening.
The sound of a plesiosaur lowing drifted up from the lake, followed by the sound of a door slamming and footsteps running across the porch. Jonathan started to straighten. Enid put out one hand, stopping him before he could come fully out of his crouch. He glanced at her, and she shook her head, signaling for him to wait.
Enid Healy had survived more ambushes and outright battles than he ever hoped to see. Jonathan hankered back down, watching his mother and waiting for the sign to move.
Seconds ticked by, each one stretching like a drop of honey until it seemed like time itself was standing still. Finally, just as he thought he might scream from the frustration of it all, Enid rose, drawing the pistol from her belt, and began walking calmly toward the house. She didn’t hunch over or move with any particular caution; anyone who saw her would have assumed that she had every right in the world to be where she was. But there was no one to see. The sound of the house’s illegitimate occupants crashing through the trees had faded, and the song of the frickens once more filled the early evening air.
The front door was locked. Enid paused, tilting her head as she considered it. “Now why is it, do you think, that two folks in the middle of nowhere who believe that we’re all down by the lake would take the time to lock their door?”
“That’s easy enough,” said Jonathan, producing a lock pick from his pocket and waving for his mother to step aside. She moved easily out of the way, half-turning to watch the approach to the house while he knelt and started working on the tumblers. “The only reason to lock your door in a situation like this is if you’re trying to keep something in, rather than keeping something out.”
“I wonder what that might be,” murmured Enid.
The lock clicked free and Jonathan straightened, pushing the door open with one hand. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
Enid smiled.
Bessie had been the first plesiosaur to emerge from the water. Fran was pleased to realize that she could recognize the prehistoric beastie, telling her easily apart from the other heads that snaked up out of the water and blinked at her with enormous golden eyes. Their mottling was distinctive, once you adjusted yourself to looking at it the correct way, and she could no more have confused the great beasts for one another than she could have misidentified the Aeslin mice that came to her room for their nightly observances.
“We should’ve brought the mice,” she said, passing a chunk of stale bread to Bessie, who made it disappear with a single almost dainty motion. “They would’ve loved this.”
“We’ve never brought them here,” said Alexander, handing her another chunk of bread. He smiled as she offered it to Bessie. “They’d make it a ritual and want to come back every year, and they wouldn’t understand when we told them that it was too risky to take
them into the woods. Lots of snakes and foxes here. Lots of things that think of a mouse as a tasty treat.”
“I guess I can see the logic, but that isn’t going to make me like it,” said Fran with a small pout. “It’d just be so damn cute, you know?”
“I do indeed.” A branch broke from somewhere inside the nearby brush. Had it been an animal, it would have been followed by more sounds: rustling leaves and snapping twigs. Alexander smiled a little. “Speaking of company, I think we may have some.”
“About time,” said Fran. She took the basket of bread and started wading into the lake. The plesiosaurs followed her, the ones that had beached themselves returning to the shallows and the ones that had been waiting in the shallows slipping a little further out into the deeps.
It was the sort of bait no rustler could resist. “Hey!” Paul and his nameless accomplice burst from the bushes, he with a tranquilizer rifle in his hands, her holding the shotgun. “You get away from our monsters!”
“Do you have a bill of sale on these beasties?” asked Alexander, dropping into the thickest British accent he could manage after all his years of living in Michigan. He turned to face the pair, his hands empty and an intentionally befuddled expression on his face. If their suspicions were correct and these two were holding Herbert captive, they were probably used to dealing with helpless old men. “They certainly look like their own creatures to us. No man owns nature unless nature lets him, after all.”
“That’s pure foolishness,” snapped the woman. “A thing belongs to the person that takes it. Get out of the way before somebody gets hurt.”
Behind him, Bessie lowed, and Fran laughed. It was a bright, musical sound, and it put steel in Alexander’s spine. What he did here, he did for the girls who loved monsters, and the monsters who were worthy of their love.
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