by Atha, DL
“Hey, Mom, be right back,” I said. Mom just nodded and poured more ketchup on Ellie’s plate. She hadn’t paid attention to a word Lisa said. She was too focused on me. “Lisa wants to talk to me.” I pointed towards the waitress, who was already halfway to the door.
I cringed at the sight of Lisa’s back as I stood to follow. This was not going to go well. It would be just the two of us, and I still remembered the way I’d reacted the first time I felt Asa behind me. I waited for her to step across the threshold before I followed, hoping she’d turn to face me once outside.
“What’s up?” I said, pushing the large oak doors open. She stood to the right, leaned against a column. Smiling my best ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ smile. I let the door close behind me and we were effectively shut off from the rest of the world.
“Is everything okay with you?” she asked pointedly, and not wasting any time.
The Screamin’ Eagle had placed benches along the front of the large porch that surrounded the old building. When Ellie and I had first moved there, you could still see the original hitching posts from a bygone era. Against everyone’s advice, the owners had pulled them down and replaced them with a large wraparound porch. The non‐rotting remains of the hitching posts had been incorporated into the benches. I ran my hands along the smoothly worn wood for a moment before I answered.
“I guess it depends on your definition of okay. My favorite neighbor, a good friend actually, is dead. I’m sure you’ve heard about it by now, and there’s been a murder a few miles from my house.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I heard about Ms. McElhaney a couple days back. I took over a chicken casserole yesterday, and her nephew asked about you at the funeral this morning. He was surprised that you didn’t come. He said Ms. McElhaney was very fond of you and Ellie.”
Mentally I cringed. I’d forgotten to make a casserole, and I had no good excuse that I could give to the family either. I’d completely forgotten about the funeral too. Not that it mattered; I couldn’t have gone, but I should have sent flowers. I could hardly pull the ‘I’m an undead vampire’ card. My social mistake was going to look very strange considering how close Ms. McElhaney and I had been as neighbors. On the upside, Lisa hadn’t run screaming back into the restaurant. She didn’t seem to be afraid of me. Her heart rate was stable; her breathing easy. “I haven’t heard anything about another murder though,” Lisa said.
“It’s been all over the news,” I answered, surprised she hadn’t heard about it. “That hunter who died in the woods.”
Lisa’s eyes widened for a split second and then narrowed. “I thought that was a bear attack. Not a murder. Why would you say that?”
I realized my mistake then, but it was too late. “Well, that’s what I meant. Death by animal, but it’s still a murder. I’m going to have to watch Ellie so closely now and be more careful about the forest. We hike quite a bit, you know.”
Lisa nodded her head as she processed what I said. She was trying to believe me, and I could see it in her face the moment that my subterfuge worked. She looked over her shoulder towards the parking lot before she started speaking again. “Detective Rumsfield was in here earlier in the day. About lunchtime. He had a lot of questions, mainly about you and that man you were in here with a few days back. He came in earlier in the week and asked around, which I thought was odd, of course. But today was different. The last time he was in here, he seemed worried about you. He was more interested in the guy. Today, he was interested in you. Like you were a suspect.”
“A suspect? In what?” I acted shocked, even though I was under no illusions that I’d heard the last of Detective Rumsfield. The medical examiner’s office had ruled the hunter’s death an accident—a bear attack. Mom and I had listened to the radio news on the way into town. Not a common occurrence in Arkansas, but not impossible. The state had a large and thriving black bear population, nearly three thousand by the estimate of the state park agency. Normally timid around humans, the bears ransacked a few campsites and quite a few gardens every year. I’d even seen one while out on an afternoon horse ride this past summer. Of course, the bear hadn’t bothered me. It had shuffled away no sooner than we’d laid eyes on each other.
“He didn’t mention any specifics, just that he was following some leads he found in the woods. I assumed he was talking about that hunter, but like you said, the state medical examiner was clear that the man died of a bear attack. So I’m not sure what the detective was referring to. I mean what could you possibly have to do with that?”
More than you know, I thought. For starters, a dead neighbor with her throat ripped out, a dangerous and supposed ex, a certain Detective Rumsfield, who’d been thrown around in what appeared to be my empty yard by an unseen force, and a hand‐ carved wooden stake next to a clothing‐filled grave.
The stake. If my heart had been beating, it would have sunk in my chest. My entire future was wrapped up in a piece of wood that I’d accidentally left in the forest after I’d staked Asa. I’d planned on going back for it as soon as I had awoken, but after seeing Ellie and Mom, I’d forgotten it completely.
I shook my head at Lisa and raised my hands questioningly. “Lisa, honestly, I have no idea what has gotten into Rumsfield’s head. There was a break‐in at my house last week, and from the few meetings I’ve had with him, he acted like I was the criminal. I think he’s warped or something. But thanks for the warning. Although I imagine the detective won’t be too happy that you’ve told me.” I appreciated the fact that she’d gone out on a limb to help me.
“You are okay, right? I don’t need to worry about you,” she asked. In the parking lot, a two‐door sedan had pulled in and parked. She turned around and smiled, telling the couple that she was glad they’d come. She’d have their drinks in no time. The couple must be regulars, I thought, but I didn’t recognize them.
Lisa sidestepped in front of the couple, pulling open the heavy door as she did so. The motion put her back to me; the breeze of the opening door blew the hair away from her neck and her scent hit me hard. I sucked in air as if I’d been harpooned, and I felt myself go rigid as the hunger spread outward from my chest, flooding my arms and legs with a surging want.
The entire world was reduced to one girl holding a door. For a short time, I forgot about the crowd in the restaurant, my daughter sitting at a table waiting for her mother to come back, the waitress I’d known for three years who had a child of her own, or a detective who was eyeing me for murder.
All that existed was a girl. Her name was immaterial, and my left hand pushed the door from her hand with a resounding boom. The floorboards shook under foot. The parking lot was barren, and no one inside the restaurant had made a move towards the slamming door. The wind could be strong this time of year, so how were they to know?
She wanted to turn, but she was frozen, a statue in clothing. Her diaphragm hung up somewhere between breaths. She didn’t swallow, and I doubted she could even blink. The only active muscle was the one left of center in her chest, and it was racing.
I’d come so close to her that I could feel the static electricity bouncing across the hair on her arms. My hands moved to her shoulders. It was only a short sprint to the dark corners of the parking lot. I could be done and back before anyone noticed we were missing.
“Annalice, your family’s waiting for you.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, and it shook with the knowledge that death had its cold fingers on her. Where she found the courage to speak I will never know, but hearing my name brought some sort of remembrance to me of who I had been—who I still hoped to be. I thought of Ellie watching the door for me to come back, and I wondered how my mom would care for her around the clock if I wasn’t around.
My hands pulled away from Lisa’s skin, her shoulders falling in relief. “I’m fine,” I said, answering her previous question. “I’m just fine.”
I walked around her, my shoulder knocking her roughly out of the way as I pulled the door open and went back
inside. She was still standing out there, her heart rate slowly returning to normal as I sat back down at the table with my family.
The rest of dinner was stilted except for Ellie’s lively chatter. Lisa had eventually returned to waiting tables, but she’d given our table the slip, and we had a newer, younger waitress. I caught a few frightened glances from her in my direction that eventually morphed into confused looks as logic began to convince her that what had happened could not possibly have happened.
Mom asked a couple of times if I knew why Lisa had ditched us, but I just shrugged my shoulders and mumbled about how my last tip might not have been big enough. Mom eyed me suspiciously, continuing to glance back and forth between Lisa and me as she worked the other tables.
But I couldn’t think about a frightened waitress anymore. I spent the rest of the meal obsessing over the stake, and once dessert was finished, I was very grateful to leave the restaurant and head home.
I left two tens on the table when we left. One for the new waitress and one marked for Lisa.
Chapter 2
The highway home was quiet, the road nearly empty. And while it was cool outside, my windows were covered with the fog from Mom’s hyperventilation. It was bad enough that I had to turn the wipers on. I tried to ignore her fear, but all I managed to do was become more irritable by the second. Her fear made me angry, which was ridiculous. She had every right to be wary.
The only one who’d managed to remain calm was Ellie, who’d plucked away at her smartphone the entire trip home. We passed a couple of semi drivers who were still brave enough to drive the Pig Trail, the winding road that led north out of town, and a few local cars owing by the amount of dust and mud on them, but otherwise the highway was abandoned. Once I turned off onto the dirt road that led to my house, the already scarce traffic died away completely and the deafening silence between my mother and myself became all the louder. By the time I made the first curve on the one-lane road, my mom was a terrified mute, and I was a powder keg holding a firecracker.
Only a handful of houses dotted my dirt road, and all of them were scattered along the first two miles. After those brief marks of civilization, there was nothing but the dead quiet of the Ozark National Forest. The dirt road would end in my front yard—my house cocooned by the woods. In the height of summer, the canopy of trees was like women’s petticoats turned upside down; you could scarcely see the sky. In winter, they might as well have been skeletons with their naked white arms held up to the moon in some sort of pagan dance, and Mom acted like I was delivering her as the sacrifice. She startled at every shadow that fell across the car, her hands gripped so tightly they looked like wax in her lap, ashy white and devoid of blood. The dash lights lit up her face, her lips moving in a silent prayer.
I tried to think of something to say, failed, and instead looked over my shoulder to check on Ellie, who’d fallen asleep, when a string of blue lights met us as we rounded the next curve—the kind of blue that can only indicate bad things. Someone’s died. Someone’s had a wreck. Someone’s been turned into a vampire. Tonight, those lights were parked and flashing at Ms. McElhaney’s house.
Mom looked at me for the first time on our drive home, her eyes wide and questioning. “Another break‐in?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I lied as a patrolman stepped out of a Madison County Police cruiser positioned roadblock style across the dirt road. He held up a hand for me to stop and ran a large spotlight across my car. There were four police cars parked—the one in the road and the other three lining the edge of Ms. McElhaney’s drive.
Tonight, her house seemed out of place against the backdrop of the forest. I’d never seen the place look like this. Ms. McElhaney had gone to bed every night at seven o’clock, season and time changes be darned. This evening, the lights were on in every room, and her front door was thrown open to the wind. She would have been appalled at the waste of electricity. She’d always been a welcoming woman, and despite her advanced age, she’d kept the front door open in the summer with only the screen door to protect her. Ellie would press her face against the screen, peering inside for her when we’d stop in for a visit.
Tonight, the flimsy screen shuddered and shook, defenseless against the wind. Probably the way Ms. McElhaney looked in Asa’s grasp, I thought. She’d suffered at his hands, and now dead, she still wasn’t left in peace. Ms. McElhaney would be outraged that all these men were stomping around in her house with not even the good sense to shut the door. They should have some respect for her. I turned back towards the officer as an excuse to look away from the sight of the house. It brought back too many raw emotions from the last several days. Hold it together, I told myself. You can’t help her now.
The officer took his sweet time getting to us. He turned once like he was coming to our vehicle but then disappeared back into the darkness of his car. Probably running our tags. Not exactly legal, I thought, but I was no specialist on police procedure. Either way, he kept us waiting for several minutes, and I was getting angrier each time a minute ticked by on my dash clock.
“I don’t need this shit,” I hissed under my breath. Mom sucked in her breath at my language but stared straight ahead. I don’t think she needed this shit either.
Finally, and only seconds before I threw the car door open to ask what the hold‐up was, the officer emerged from the front seat of the police cruiser, his form a dark shadow behind the high beam of his flashlight. It danced around in front of him as he walked before landing square in the front seat of my car. In a split second, I was staring into a painfully bright light. The leather casing of the steering wheel balled up under my fingers as I struggled not to bolt from the car. I felt trapped, and I’d gotten a bad case of the jitters after the incident with Lisa at the restaurant. Where the ride home with Mom had ratcheted my nerves to the next level, the spotlight pushed me fully over the edge. I shut my eyes tightly and looked down towards the floorboard. Mom lifted a hand to shield her eyes and rolled down the window.
“Where are you two heading?” the officer asked, leaning down towards the window. He was a tall, lank man who could have passed for the ripe old age of twelve. I wasn’t convinced he could even grow a beard yet. He used the flashlight to check out the floorboards and the back seat as well as our laps and the dashboard.
“Aren’t you up past your bedtime?” I asked through the window, bringing the flashlight back to the front seat. I winced but didn’t look away.
Mom was mortified. “What has gotten into you?” she whispered under her breath as she turned towards me. She still didn’t make eye contact when she spoke to me, but she did at least look in my direction. It was a start.
“That’s real funny, ma’am. I haven’t heard that one before.”
He brought the light full into my face, one hand resting casually on his left hip. “I’ll ask again. Where are you two heading?”
“There’s three of us actually,” I said, motioning into the back seat. “And she’s asleep. So can you keep that blinding light to yourself?” Cops can be bullies, I’d always thought from my interactions with them in the ER. But then again, if my job was to always be in the line of fire, I might be a bully, too.
“Just being safe, ma’am,” he said flicking the light into my back seat. Ellie cringed but didn’t wake up. In a split second, I was more than just nervous, I was simmering. The spotlight in his hand didn’t help anything nor did the little smile that played across his lips when he flicked the light back to my eyes. Keep it together. Keep it together. I struggled to hold on to logic over emotion.
“People who are afraid of their own shadows shouldn’t be cops,” I answered. Like doctors who live in fear of malpractice attorneys, they lose their effectiveness. Mom’s eyes went supernova at my smartass remark.
“Where are you three heading?” he asked again, his tone harsher, but he turned the flashlight off at least. “Home.”
“You live around here?”
Isn’t that what I just said?
“Nah, we just thought we’d see what you boys were up to out here and…”
Mom cut me off mid‐sentence. “She lives at the end of the road, Officer. I’m her mother, and I’m staying with her for a few days.” Mom cut her eyes at me while she smiled sweetly at the baby‐face cop. I was still simmering. It was an antsy feeling, like having poison ivy between your fingers.
“Oh, you’re the doctor Detective Rumsfield’s been looking into,” he said, a big smile spreading across his face. He eyed me more closely as he bent closer to the car. “I should’ve recognized the name.”
“You mean when you illegally ran my tags?” I asked. “Reasonable suspicion, ma’am.”
“The only thing Rumsfield shares with reasonable is the letter R,” I answered.
He smiled a little too smugly, raising his eyebrows sarcastically. “Sure thing, ma’am.” He turned and hollered over his shoulder. “Hey, Rumsfield, that doctor you were looking for is right here.”
I exhaled harshly. Just my luck. The teenage cop smiled sweetly, winked me a good‐bye and walked back towards his car.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
My mother looked at me like I’d sprouted horns, and for all
she knew, maybe I had. Directing her eyes off of me, I pointed to Rumsfield striding towards my car, smiling almost as big as the baby cop.
At least he rescued Mom and me from our awkward silence. “Annalice, what a surprise,” he said. He’d leaned down to block my window, his hands resting casually on the doorframe like he owned the thing. The warm vanilla of his aftershave and the oddly beautiful smell of horses and old barns floated through the car and made my mouth water. My gut clenched, and I didn’t dare look him square in the face. The steering wheel leather balled up further in my hands. I couldn’t afford another incident like the one I’d had with Lisa at the restaurant. The fact that he could get this reaction from me only made it worse, so the edge in my voice came easily.