by Mia Sheridan
He remained still for another few seconds and then he blew out a breath, seeming to come to some internal conclusion. He stood and walked to a place near the front corner of the cabin, kneeling and lifting a board from the floor. Harper watched, confused, as he lifted something from it, the turquoise color causing her to put her hands over her mouth. I was right. She’d remembered correctly. She stood quickly, then knelt next to him, taking the backpack and hugging it to her chest. “Thank you,” she whispered. Another piece of my mother.
But as he stared at the backpack, there was a look of acute loss in his eyes . . . as though it’d been as precious to him as it was to her. “It was your mother’s. You should have it,” he said, as though convincing himself. “I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you when I gave you the necklace.”
She took in his expression, feeling as though her intention was to give to him, yet she was somehow always taking instead. She slowly opened the backpack, removing a few loose papers, and a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. Tears filled her eyes as she leafed through the notebook on top, her mother’s handwriting immediately familiar even though it’d been so long since she’d seen it.
As she took a moment to look through the pages, she noticed they were wrinkled and dog-eared as though they’d been read over and over and over. Some sentences were faded as though a finger had gone over them repetitively, underlining, memorizing maybe. In many places, there were identical lines written under her mother’s words, as though someone had sought to recreate the writing, or perhaps practice his own. There were drawings in the margins too, renderings of trees, leaves, a wolf, and other forest animals all connected, swirled together so that you had to look closely to single out the individual elements. As Harper looked through, she saw that the practice lines of text went from boyish to more polished, and the doodled artwork got better too, crisper and more realistic. He was no Picasso but there was a loveliness in the simplicity of his artwork. And she knew what she was seeing: Lucas growing up right there on the pages. Her chest felt tight.
Near the end, there were questions written in his handwriting. He had gone over and over her mother’s notes and questions and realizations about life and love, friendship, vengeance, forgiveness, and all the themes Harper knew were in her mother’s favorite literary work.
When she looked up at him and met his eyes, he was blushing, an acute look of shame in his expression. “Sorry,” he said, his tone remorseful, glancing at the place where he’d drawn a wolf howling at the moon.
She shook her head. “It’s okay. Lucas, I . . . I love them.” She tilted her head. “Was the book in here too?” she asked, peering into the empty backpack, seeing only a few pens that looked as though they’d been used until the ink ran out.
He shook his head. “No book. Just her notes and pens.”
Harper raised her eyes to Lucas again, who knelt watching her go through the pages, what had surely been a form of human connection when he was so very alone. The thing books—emotions she could relate to in other people’s stories—had been to her. Her heart twisted, half joy, half sorrow as she realized that, yes, the forest had nourished his body, but her mother’s words had nourished his soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Get over here, you,” Rylee called, shaking out the hair salon cape quickly and tossing it over the back of the chair. “You didn’t have to come in for a cut to see me. I would have come over to your place later.”
Harper grinned, wrapping her arms around her friend and squeezing her tight. “I couldn’t wait. And I could use a trim.” Rylee raised a brow. They both knew that wasn’t true, as she’d had one right before Rylee’s wedding two weeks before. “How was Mexico? I want all the dirty details.” She sat in the salon chair at her friend’s station and met her eyes in the mirror, raising one finger. “Wait, maybe not all the dirty details.”
Rylee smiled, picking the cape up and securing it around Harper’s neck. She moved Harper’s hair aside and put her hands on her shoulders, looking at her in the mirror in front of where Harper sat. “It was dirty. In all the best ways.” She winked. “And amazing. I hardly wanted to come back.”
“When I was here waiting for you?”
“You, and about ten feet of snow.”
“Good point.” Harper smiled. “So married life is good so far?”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand around. “But we’ve been living together forever. It hardly feels like anything’s changed now that all the hoopla’s over with. Anyway, enough about that. I can’t believe I’m just now getting the details about finding your parents’ car.” Her eyes widened and she leaned forward slightly. “How are you, Harper? Really? I mean, I almost fell over dead when I got your text.” Rylee glanced back at Moira, the owner of the hair salon where she worked and then grabbed a comb off the counter, running it through Harper’s hair.
Harper sighed. “I’m okay. I’m good.” Better than she’d been before.
Rylee began sectioning Harper’s hair and clipping it up. “I just can’t believe it. After all these years. And how was it found? You don’t usually go out searching in the winter, do you?”
Harper paused, going quickly back over everything that had happened since Rylee left on her honeymoon. It was like life had turned upside down since then. “No, it wasn’t me who found it. I was led there.” She paused, thinking about where to start, realizing all the ways life had changed in the short time her friend had been out of town. “Did you hear about the murder in town? At the Larkspur?”
Rylee frowned as she clipped the ends of Harper’s hair. “Yeah. As soon as I got back. Some woman passing through town, right? I heard someone said it was a boyfriend she might be traveling with or something?” She shook her head. “Seriously awful. But what does that have to do with your parents?”
“Nothing. Well, sort of nothing.” It was all seemingly connected to Lucas—some in bigger ways, some in smaller. Some in ways she possibly didn’t understand, because he wasn’t the most forthcoming man. But Lucas stood right in the middle of everything that had happened or come to light in the last couple of weeks. What does that mean? Does it have bigger implications than—
“Earth to Harper.”
“Sorry.” She began telling Rylee about Agent Mark Gallagher, about Isaac Driscoll, about Lucas, and then about the necklace and how he’d led her to her parents’ wreckage, including her mother’s backpack. When she mentioned her mother’s notes on the Count of Monte Cristo, she left out the way he’d treated them as though they were the Holy Grail. She wasn’t sure why, it simply felt like something that should remain between them. Now who’s the secretive one, Harper?
But Harper had always had secrets. She was used to keeping them.
Rylee continued trimming her hair, her eyes wide, a look of disbelief on her face when Harper was done. “Wow.”
“I know. It’s . . . crazy.”
“So, if your Tarzan has been ruled out for the moment, there are no suspects in either of the murders?”
Tarzan. Harper rolled her eyes. “He’s not my anything. And no, not as far as I know, although I’m not really privy to every single lead the police are working on. Agent Gallagher’s been nice enough to keep me in the loop about my parents’ case, and has answered a few questions I had about Lucas, but it’s not like I’m actually working every angle of the investigation.”
“Even so”—she smiled—“your dad would be proud.” She used her hand not holding the scissors to squeeze Harper’s shoulder, her smile dimming. “I know I’ve mentioned it before but . . . my dad’s still sorry he didn’t take you in,” she said softly. “He regrets it. I can tell by the way his mood shifts whenever he asks about you.”
Harper shook her head, making a small sound of denial. “You were barely making ends meet. The loss of your mother was still fresh, Rylee . . . I get it. I get why it wasn’t an option. I don’t blame him.” Was that true? She hadn’t really worked that out in her mind. She didn’t want to blame anyone, but
the real truth? It had hurt. From what she knew from school reports and things her parents had always said about her, she hadn’t been unruly. She’d been well behaved. Subjectively, she couldn’t understand how no one in her community, people who had known and cared about her parents, had been willing to keep her.
The years she’d spent in the foster care system were at times terrifying and lonely, and she’d wished with all her heart that her parents hadn’t been torn from her, and that she didn’t have to suffer the additional trauma of being placed in the home of a stranger—a stranger who had been anything but safe. Her uncle had been in college and then beginning his life, so he hadn’t been able to offer her a home, and her best friend had lost her own mother to cancer six months before, leaving her father to raise two daughters by himself while grieving the loss of his wife.
Some people felt guilty, she knew that too. It was why Dwayne always offered her jobs that came up at his office, for instance. Why Rylee’s dad had insisted she stay at their home during the summers in high school and then bent over backward to help her start her guide business, even securing her first several clients, ones who’d booked with her again and again.
But, she understood why they hadn’t offered to adopt her after the accident, she did. Or at least, the adult Harper did. She just didn’t know how to explain it to the little girl inside her who still ached when she revisited that time in her life. In her heart of hearts, she still felt like the little girl no one wanted.
She didn’t like to think too much about the first several years after her parents died. But later . . . well, later she’d been placed with an older woman who had been kind to her. She’d settled into a new school and . . . she’d been okay.
Rylee pressed her lips together, the look that always came over her face when she talked about Harper going into the social services system.
“Anyway,” Harper said, wanting to change the subject, “I’m still waiting for the coroner to release their remains, and then I’m going to have a burial.”
“The whole town will be there.”
“I hope.” Harper mustered a smile. “My dad would have liked that.” Her smile widened. “My mom would have wanted to stay home reading.” Harper was such a combination of them, she realized with gladness. Outdoorsy like her dad, and a lover of books like her mom.
Rylee moved in front of her, bending forward and holding the ends of Harper’s hair up on both sides of her face to measure the evenness of the trim she’d just finished. She met Harper’s eyes and smiled. “She did love her books, didn’t she? I remember her asking me if I missed the characters when I told her we’d read Charlotte’s Web in class. I had no idea what she was talking about. She literally missed people who didn’t exist.” She straightened, stepping back to assess her work.
Harper smiled. Yes, that sounded exactly like her mother. She had loved literature. And she had inspired others to love it too. That thought brought Lucas to mind, the way he’d looked so sorrowful as he’d handed the backpack to Harper containing her mother’s notes, giving them to her to keep.
I should have left them with him.
Yes, of course she should have. What had she been thinking? Well, she’d been thinking that it was another precious piece of the past she was desperate to hold. Something tangible. But, it seemed that those notes had sustained Lucas when to her, they were a special keepsake. Had she just done the same thing to him that had been done to her? Taken away something cherished that brought light? Her heart sank.
“So what’s going to happen to Lucas now?” Rylee asked as she peeled the Velcro apart and removed the cape from around Harper. “Is he going to stay in the woods?”
Harper’s brows came together as she again met Rylee’s eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know that he has a lot of options. I mean, the guy has no family that he knows of, no formal education or job experience . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know. But . . . there’s something about him . . . God, it’s hard to explain. He’s this combination of wild and, I don’t know, innocent? No, that’s not right. Thoughtful?” She shook her head, frustrated that she couldn’t describe him accurately, or do him justice. “Sensitive.”
“Your eyes are all funny right now,” Rylee noted and when Harper looked at her, she saw that her friend was watching her with an expression that was half-puzzled and half-amused.
Harper rolled her eyes. “All right. He’s an enigma.”
“Well yeah, of course he’s an enigma. He grew up on dirt and snow and class notes on The Count of Monte Cristo. He’s probably confused as hell.”
Despite that it felt slightly mean, Harper laughed. “Who wouldn’t be?” she asked, attempting to defend him, though she knew Rylee was mostly kidding. “Can you even imagine, Rylee? The loneliness he must have lived with all these years? I don’t know if I could have survived.”
“Of course you could have. You’re the strongest person I know.”
Harper gave Rylee a small smile. She appreciated the vote of confidence, but she wondered if anyone was strong enough to survive that without some major lasting effects. “Anyway”—she stood, taking the few steps around the chair and giving her friend another hug—“I’ve gotta run, but thank you for this,” she said, pointing to the trim she hadn’t really needed but that had allowed her to visit with her friend under the watchful eye of the salon owner.
“Stay warm,” she said as Harper handed her the money for the cut and a tip, folding it into her hand so she didn’t try to give the tip back like she always did. “And let me know what I can do to help with arrangements for your parents.”
“I will.” Harper waved goodbye to the other stylists she knew, the bell over the door tinkling as she left.
She’d only made it a block down the street when her phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket, and when she saw who it was, her heart picked up speed. She stopped, stepping close to the side of a building, so she wasn’t in the middle of the sidewalk. “Hello?”
“Hi, Harper. I was calling . . . well, are you sitting down?”
Harper’s breath caught and she leaned against the wood siding of the hardware store. Agent Gallagher sounded . . . off somehow. “Yes.”
“The coroner called me. Harper, there’s evidence that your parents were shot.”
“Shot?” For a moment the word didn’t make sense, as though he’d spoken in a foreign language she couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either, but their case is now being treated as a homicide.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Drip. Plunk. Ping.
Winter was melting all around him, falling from the forest. The ground drank it up, taking it deep down where the life of the trees and the plants and the flowers waited to live again. Jak stepped on the soft ground, his eyes looking for some mushrooms, or something else to fill his empty belly. Soon there would be enough food again, and that thought brought a faraway gladness, though the heavy feeling that had weighed him down since Pup died, felt like it was crushing all happiness, making it smaller, not important. The heavy feeling was bigger, shadowing everything.
Pup.
A lump moved up Jak’s throat and he swallowed it down, his steps slowing.
The wind moved, a terrible smell making his nose wrinkle, his attention turning right before he heard a low grunt. Something moved in the brush to his left. A boar. He went into a slow crouch, waited for the fear to come, but it did not. That heaviness inside him made that small too.
Pig is going for lots of money in town. Bring me one, and I’ll give you a bow and arrow. It had been a long, hard winter without Pup. He’d gone hungry often. Scared. Alone. His ribs could be seen easily under his skin. He needed the bigger weapon now if he was going to live. Not only to have meat, but to kill animals big enough for the furs he needed to survive the freezing cold. And if he wasn’t going to live, then why wait for starvation to take him, slowly and hurting? Why not let the pig do it with one angry, squealing stab to his gut
? Wouldn’t that be better anyway? Quicker?
He knelt down next to a mossy tree trunk, going still and waiting for the pig to come out of the brush. He let his breath out slowly. Pinging water. Pig stink. The low growl coming from his own throat.
But the snuffling of that wild pig was not soft. It let out squeals—the ones that had always scared Jak before now. It sounded like a monster, or something he had thought might be under his bed when he was a little boy. The thing he’d asked his baka to check for but that she’d told him, he must face himself if he was strong boy like she thought.
He’d done it then. He’d do it now. Face the monster. Even if it felt like he’d already faced too many monsters.
And he couldn’t figure out if he hoped to win against this one. Or lose.
The pig came out from the brush. A huge male that had to weigh more than ten Jak’s. Prickly white hair covered his black and white body. Short, sharp tusks sticking from his mouth. He had the biggest set of balls Jak had ever seen on any living thing. He grunted when he saw Jak, letting out one of those high squeals and shaking his head back and forth.
Pig stink. Crazy stink. The scent of decay coming from his nostrils like his brain was rotting. As crazy and mean as Jak had ever seen before.
Jak moved toward him, taking out the pocketknife, the blade worn small after many winters and summers of using and then sharpening it again and again against rocks. But he hadn’t known he’d be facing down this beast today, and hadn’t brought the hunting knife.
The sharp gift of life the dark-haired boy had given him so long ago was all he had. It would help him live or help him die. Either was okay.
The pig raised its head, squealing again—the scream of a devil—and Jak felt the first sprout of rage begin to grow, wrapping around his insides. Jak raised his own head, letting out a scream that rang through the forest. He laughed, a crazy sound that came from deep inside his soul, a mix-up of the loss and fear and hurt and suffering he’d lived through. “Come and get me, you DAMN pig!” he screamed, rage exploding in him. “Do whatever you want!”