Wolf at the Door: A Novel of Suspense

by JD Salyers

  And the poor babies' coats had backed him up - they were matted and stinking with something Quinn didn't want to think about, much less touch. One of the pups - the smallest and weakest of the three - had a large gash along his hindquarter. It looked infected.

  “This one is mine, then,” she'd told him. “This little guy right here.”

  “Girl.”

  “Fine. Girl, then. She's mine.” Quinn had scooped up the injured pup, shot him a smile as the warm little nose nuzzled against her neck, and then carried her inside for a good hot bath.

  The pup was too scrawny, too weak. Quinn named her Daisy, fed her via dropper for three days, then took her to the vet. An hour later, with real sadness in his eyes, he was putting her down. Then he had asked for the contact information of the breeder, promising Quinn that it would never happen again.

  So only Retro and Burns were left, and they had grown enough to make up for the weight of their little sister. They ate enough to make up for her, too.

  But not this morning. She walked over to check their bowls, and was completely shocked to see that they were empty. They watched her and whined. They needed food, and they needed to be set free. They needed to run. Why hadn't Ethan taken them? He always took them. A small part of Quinn wanted to cry, but she swallowed it back, fed the chickens.

  She was probably blowing things all out of proportion. She did that sometimes. Ethan might have gone to help their elderly neighbor Cap with some farm chore or another. Or maybe he had gone to town. She walked to the side of the house and checked the driveway. Nope, the truck was still there beside her SUV, frosted over and gathering fat flakes of new snow on the windshield. It hadn't been moved at all.

  She walked back to the dog pen while she checked her coat pocket for her keys. Then she clicked the little fob and watched the waist high pen door swing open. The dogs exploded through the gate, falling all over each other and their own feet, racing to greet her. “Hey boys,” she said softly. Retro started to jump, but she held out her hand, palm front, and he remembered. “Sit.”

  Both dog plopped onto the grass, their tails thumping. She smiled - Ethan was doing a good job, training them. They were smart pups, too, and they seemed to have a great connection with him. She reached down to scratch their ears, first Retro and then Burns, who tried to snap his head up and catch her hand. She felt his teeth graze her fingers and jerked back, out of his reach. He did that nearly every time, like he was trying to keep her there, petting him. It was one of the few things Ethan couldn't seem to train out of him. The best they could do, when he did it, was to stop petting.

  Ethan had put their wide orange collars on them at some point, she noticed. It was hunting season, and he didn't want them to get shot accidentally. It didn't happen often around here, people were usually careful with their weapons, but it did happen. Cap had mentioned it, back in December when they'd first moved in, else they wouldn't have known either.

  She was finding that there was a lot of nuance to the country life, and it was going to take some adjustment. From the jostle and buzz of Atlanta to the slow lull of a life in northern Virginia, well, it was a leap. But it was Ethan's dream.

  She threw feed to the chickens and watched them scratch after it and cluck their appreciation. Then she turned and scanned the edge of the woods again.

  The dogs were still sitting, so she snapped her fingers and said, “Go,” releasing them to play. They took off across the field, chasing one another.

  Their cabin sat on top of the mountain, a hundred yards from the cliffhugger road they took to get there. “Like a wedding cake centerpiece,” Ethan had said, when they first saw it. Surrounded by fields on all sides, and then woods beyond that, the property seemed to float near the clouds. The woods went on a little and then fell away, down the mountainsides to the river. The only trees between the house and woods were a stand of cedars over to the west, near the gate.

  Someone had chosen right – the site was a beautiful spot for a home. They could hear any car coming long before it got close, which had come in handy a couple of times when the less than friendly neighbors down in the hollow by the river had stumbled onto their property.

  Quinn had long believed that everything had a Catch - if something good happened in her life, the Catch was bad. It worked the other way around, too – when something bad happened, she was usually able to see a silver lining of some sort, no matter how thin the lining or how dull the silver. But the Catch, when she thought of it capitalized like that, was usually bad.

  Here in the land of open fields and peace and quiet, those neighbors were the Catch. It wasn’t that they caused a lot of trouble, but Quinn was always aware that they were down there, and she was aware that they were the kind of neighbors that wouldn’t last ten minutes in the tight-buttoned suburbs of Atlanta. They were a young family (she thought) with three kids, but there always seemed to be others staying in their house, too. She didn't know the dynamics, but she had wondered a few times where everybody slept.

  They weren't a huge problem, but they liked to crank the music and get their drink on, as Ethan said, more days of the week than not. Mostly, they kept to themselves, and that was good. The kids were nice enough. Two boys and a girl, all between the ages of ten and fifteen, if she had to guess. They were the best of the family, and all three of them were well-mannered and cute. She watched them walk by every morning to get on the school bus at the bottom of the mountain. Their clothes were old, but clean, and they always waved when they spotted her at the window.

  The parents were, she supposed, typical country folks. Sometimes Quinn and Ethan heard four wheelers and trucks gunning their engines and spinning out in the mud at all hours of the night. That was OK, it wasn't like they were in the front yard, but it was interesting. Wild and crazy was apparently the motto on those nights. Ethan had offered to go down, ask them to be quiet, but Quinn hadn't liked that idea at all. She couldn't say why, but she worried that the neighbors who kept to themselves might turn nasty if somebody tried to interrupt their good time.

  The wind bit at her face. She lifted a hand to feel her frozen cheek and noticed that the dogs weren’t close by anymore. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the dead yellow fields. The cedars stood tall and stark against a white sky chased by gray. The clouds were moving faster, carrying the storm. There was no sign of Ethan.

  The dogs were bounding along the edge of the far field, wrestling and tripping over themselves as they ran. It was good for them to stretch their legs, good that they had so much space to run. Ethan loved big dogs, but he refused to have one back in Atlanta. He said it was cruel to keep them penned up in their little back yard, and she agreed. They didn't start looking for pets until they were sure about the move.

  Retro saw her watching and came running across the field at breakneck speed. He slid to a stop near her feet, his tongue lolling and his breath whitening the cold air. “You ready for some breakfast?” she asked him. He stood up, sat again, and whined. His thick red tail brushed the grass until Burns wandered over and stepped on it. Retro jumped up, highly offended. Quinn laughed.

  “Where is Ethan, boys?” she asked them, starting toward the house. The big blue trash can where he kept their food sat on the covered end of the back deck. Its orange ACE Hardware logo stood out in the shadows. She decided on her way across the yard to leave the two of them loose until he came home. She doubted they would be much use if there was real trouble, but having them around made her feel better.

  The thought made her pause. Why would she be thinking about trouble? It was a perfectly quiet morning in rural Virginia. Everything was fine. “Get a grip, Quinn,” she fussed. To shake off her growing dread, she turned and stomped back into the house, leaving the dogs to amuse themselves with squirrels and deer and whatever else dogs usually found fascinating. They wouldn't go anywhere - Ethan had trained them well.

  Besides, she liked the idea of strangers meeting those teeth before they got to the house.

  Ins
ide she stripped off her outer clothes and made the bed and straightened the house, not that it needed it, and then she turned her attention to a project that she'd been putting off since before the move: their picture albums.

  She didn’t know why she wanted to do this right now. Maybe because she missed Ethan. Maybe, probably, the word Alzheimer’s had something to do with it.

  Even at home, during their average day-to-day, Ethan was a photo hound, snapping pics of anything and everything that caught his eye. Sometimes the subject was Quinn, sometimes it was a random stranger he noticed at the grocery store. He liked taking pictures of open markets, too. All those long stalls of food and fabric and people, there was no way he could resist. He was like one of those annoying artist types when he did that, taking nine pictures of the same thing because the light was different over there, or asking people to ignore him so that he could catch the 'local color', as he called it. Surprisingly, most of them obliged.

  She laughed at him when he acted this way, calling him the art-teest and trying to make him wear an old beret she had picked up at a flea market somewhere. He'd slap it away and say it was silly, then go on to take the boxes and boxes of photos that she was staring at here on the dining room table. She had quite a job ahead of her.

  The boxes were half-stacked, half-tossed on the corner of the wooden farmhouse table nearest the wall. She dug them out of the closet the night before, promising to get them sorted by the end of the week. It was only Tuesday, but she still didn't think she would make the deadline.

  Ethan didn't know why she bothered, and to be honest she wasn't sure, either, but it was a good way to get her mind off...well, things. She would swim around in their memories for a while, then Ethan would come home and explain, and then she would make a roast for supper. She would make him promise to never do that again without leaving a note. He would agree, and they would snuggle in for their long winter's night.

  She saw one of the dogs race past the kitchen window and remembered that they were loose. Hurrying to the back door, she opened it just in time to see both of them headed right for the gate. “Retro!” she called. “Burns!”

  They skidded to a halt.

  “Come,” she said. They did.

  The gate gave way to a field and several outbuildings, but that wasn’t the problem. The fields were theirs, but beyond that, if the dogs kept going, another farmer’s field butted up to theirs. Those fields were full of new calves. The last thing Quinn needed today was a phone call from a farmer telling her that her dogs were gnawing on his livelihood. She called them to her and locked them up in their kennel. They flopped down in the hay and looked ashamed.

  Chapter Four

  By the time the afternoon sky began to darken, she had given up trying to concentrate on her task and gone to sit in his big recliner near the window. This window offered the best view of the property in general, with emphasis on the gravel road that ran past the house. There was no traffic, and the kids had long since made their meandering way toward home, not bothering to wave at her after their long day at school.

  A half peanut butter sandwich sat uneaten on a saucer beside the chair, and her coffee cup was empty again. Good, because she was drinking way too much of that today. There was still no sign of Ethan, and she was thinking about calling their friend Cap. Maybe Ethan was there, helping with some chore or another. Quinn didn't think that was the case, because he would have called by now. But it was the first thing she thought of, without thinking the unthinkable.

  And the unthinkable was gaining ground. Accident? Animal attack? Either of those things were very possible. Quinn was well aware that in the country, things like this happened. Ethan could be lying somewhere with a broken leg or a damaged head, if he fell on one of the paths on the west side of the property and rolled into the ravine that cut sharply through the earth and led, eventually, to the river.

  She stared out the window toward the road, wishing for Ethan to come in, strolling across the fields, patting the cedars as he went by. He loved those trees. “Old men standing guard,” he called them. “Been here since before the Revolutionary.” Of course, neither of them knew that for sure, but he liked to imagine it that way.

  Once, not too long before their wedding, he he'd bought a bottle of wine and led her out to the deck at their house in Atlanta. It had been early afternoon, she remembered. They had just finished lunch. There in the lawn chairs, between sips, he had gone over everything, his whole life. Every single foster family, every single friend he’d ever had, every time they had stood together against the world.

  When his voice finally trailed off, her eyes were bleary and the sun was starting to come up. She was flattered - and exhausted - by the end of his story. Flattered because he had chosen to share all of it with her. She could tell that the time was a way to grieve. A way to purge any unhappy memories, dismiss any missteps, and cement his life before Quinn in a kind of memorial block. He would, she knew, put that block away now and let it be. And that's what he had done.

  Maybe he was out in the woods now, remembering, the way he had then. He wasn't sharing this time, but maybe the idea of losing his memories was too painful for him. Maybe he needed time. But it would be dark soon. When was he coming home?

  She couldn't just sit here anymore. She put down her sandwich and grabbed up the phone, quickly dialing Cap's number before she could rethink it. She knew it was a long shot, but it was the easiest place to start. He answered on the third ring, croaking a loud, “What?”

  “Cap? Is Ethan there?” she asked. “This is Quinn.”

  “I know who it is,” he yelled back at her. She couldn’t help a smile. He was the kind of old man who never really trusted the crazy technology of these newfangled telephones. If he yelled, it worked better. “He ain't here.”

  “Oh, OK. Sorry to bother you.” She fought the urge to cry, even though she’d already known the answer – the distance to Cap’s, on the other side of the mountain, was too far to walk. Ethan would have taken the truck.

  “Heard some gunshots up your way this morning,” Cap said. “Figured it was either Ethan or those mossyheads down in the holler,” he said.

  She frowned. Ethan wouldn't have gone hunting, she didn't think. “When this morning? What time?”

  “Bout five, I guess. You know I don't sleep no more.”

  “Sure, I understand.” Her heart was drumming again. She eyed her pills, across the open room on the kitchen counter. She sank back down onto Ethan's chair and gripped one arm with her free hand. “Cap, thanks for the information. I've got to go.”

  “Sure, sure. Tell Ethan to come around, either tomorrow morning or the next. Got a gutter down at the back of the house, and ladders ain't my friend these days.”

  “Of course. I'll tell him.” If I can find him, she thought.

  They hung up, and she immediately went to the closet and put her coat back on. She stepped into her heavy rubber boots, and slipped on her gloves. Only then did she open the front door, grab the flashlight off the bookshelf by the door, and step out onto the wide front porch.

  She stopped at the top step and looked around. Looked at the road, followed it with her eyes. It went to the house at the bottom, she knew, and stopped at the river. She should go there, and ask those people if they had seen Ethan.

  She knew she wouldn’t. Part of it was general anxiety, but another part, the part that looked at the shadowy, rough road that disappeared down into the dark trees, told her that going there would be a bad idea. A very, very bad idea.

  It had started to snow again, those thick gray clouds from earlier finally dumping more than two inches of snow since she'd put the dogs away. It was colder, too, and she was glad for the fur lining of her rubber boots. Still on the porch, she reached into her pocket and pressed the button on the key fob. Twenty seconds later, the dogs came racing around the side of the house and thumping up the wood stairs, falling over each other to get to her. They almost knocked her down before they got stopped compl
etely.

  “Retro!” she snapped. “Burns!”

  They sat immediately, snowflakes clinging to their dark fur. Burns whined a little.

  She felt bad that she'd forgotten to pen them up this morning. What if something had happened to them? They could have been hit by a car, or lost in the woods. Did dogs get lost? Couldn't they just follow their own trail back home? She didn't know, and now wasn't the time to worry about it.

  She released them to go play for a few minutes, letting them get their energy out by chasing each other around the front yard for a while. They tackled each other and snapped at the snow, making her smile. Finally, she called them back to her. She was running out of time.

  “Retro, stay.” She said it firmly, then curled her fingers around Burns's collar and led him around the side of the house to the pen. She put him inside, made sure the gate was locked, and went back to where Retro waited. “Come on, boy,” she said. “You're with me.”

  This wasn't the Catch. It couldn't be. The snow was beautiful, the night was crisp, and the air was fresh and clean-smelling. Her own growing fear aside, there was nothing to worry about, and when she found Ethan she would see just how foolish she had been.

  She spent a moment or two looking around, then started off, deciding to follow Ethan's daily footsteps. Every morning he crossed the road and walked across the field, his tall form stark against the frosty trees. If she was awake, she watched him until he disappeared into the woods on the far side of the property. After that...well, she didn't know exactly where he went, so she would be winging it.

  She clicked on the flashlight. “Come, Retro,” she said, her words loud in the silence. The commands still felt foreign to her, a girl who had grown up playing with the mutts in her family, instead of teaching them anything. Of course, those dogs were nowhere near as smart or expensive as these two, and her family had never depended on them for security, either. She was glad about that - the goofballs her mom tended to bring home probably weren't capable of protecting anyone from anything. Retro and Burns, on the other hand, were their first-warning system and last-resort weapons, if the situation got out of control. That was the point of the key fob release, after all.