by Tess Grant
* * *
Kitty finally found the courage—and the time—to face Phinney the next day. She spent the morning in a meeting with her mom, sorting out the summer schedule. Now that Anne was back at the hospital five days a week, Kitty was supposed to be in charge of the house and Sam.
She found herself bargaining over a to-do list including things like feeding Sam lunch, getting him to the library at least once a week for the summer reading program and starting supper. “Starting supper? I don’t even know how to cook.”
“We’ll start today,” Anne said. “I’ll leave you a recipe every day. Or I’ll leave you the ingredients and you can throw them in the Crock-Pot.”
“I don’t know where the Crock-Pot is. I don’t even know what the Crock-Pot is.”
Anne motioned Kitty into the kitchen for a tour. Kitty glanced back to the table where Sam was already starting on a second breakfast.
It was going to be a long summer.
Kitty put Sam on his bike shortly after lunch and sent him up the hill to Joe’s house. He could hang out with Joe’s little brother, Eric, for the afternoon. Kitty eyed the ingredients on the counter and wrinkled her nose. Condensed soup, a pound of stew meat, some veggies. It didn’t look like it would add up to much but her mom said it would. She started throwing it into the Crock-Pot one by one.
Maddie sat at her feet, looking up at the counter. “I know,” Kitty said to her. “It looks pretty glurpy. Maybe if I stir it?” She ran a spoon through the Crock-Pot and took a second look. She looked at the dog and shook her head. “Not much improvement.”
She laid the spoon down in the sink and sank down, back against the cabinets. Maddie lay down against her leg, head in Kitty’s lap. “Well, Mad, if we don’t burn the house down, we’ll be doing pretty good.” Kitty let her head fall backward with a thump against the counter. Maddie’s tail swept the floor, loose hairs scattering across the linoleum. “I know, ol’ critter. I’m pretty skeptical about the whole thing too.” She rubbed her hands nervously against the legs of her shorts. “Mostly, it’s that deal up there,” she told the dog, tilting her head toward the woods. Thump, thump from Maddie’s tail. “My stomach hurts. Again.”
It was a long time before she made her way into the woods.
Kitty came up on the cabin from the east, pausing under the shadow of the trees to gather her courage. Assessing the situation, that was what her father called it. Across the bending grass of the meadow, she could see the cabin. Of course, he was there. She could see him sitting on the porch, newspaper half-folded next to his feet. She didn’t see the gun everyone talked about. Probably somebody had seen it once, and in this town, that meant always. There wasn’t much to see, only the porch with its glider couch and Phinney on his green metal shellback throne.
What had she thought she would see? Werewolf hides tacked to the walls? Some superhero sitting on his porch waiting for the full moon? But it was an ordinary old man sitting there, so still she thought for a minute he might have fallen asleep in the sun. Then she realized his head was turned her way, and he was watching her. Maybe not her exactly, but the woods anyway.
How does he know I’m here? she thought with a sudden chill. Maybe she had been wrong about that superhero bit. Then she saw Maddie, already halfway to the cabin, fat rear end waving happily.
Stupid dog.
Green paint flaked from the metal frame of the old chair Phinney sat in. Today he was in a chambray shirt with his Dickies. “Hello, Kitty Irish. And you too, Maddie, old girl,” he said roughing up Maddie’s ears.
“Mr. Phinney,” Kitty said stiffly.
“I only let people I don’t like call me Mister. You can call me Phinney. I was wondering when I’d see you.”
“You should have been looking for the police.” That was a lie, but what did he know? She certainly wasn’t going to tell him she paid her baby brother twenty-five cents so she didn’t have to face the big bad dark by herself.
He smiled, teeth yellow from decades of coffee. “Generally speaking, the police don’t deal in the paranormal. I’m guessing you found that out when you talked to them.” He gestured toward the glider couch. “Have a seat. That one’s pretty comfy.”
Kitty stood with her back tight against the porch column. Its firmness was comforting, but if she moved, it grated against the scrape on her back. The pain reminded her why she had come. “I think it’s time to face up to what happened out there. You need to be honest.”
“Indeed I do.” He nodded and picked up a pint jar of brown liquid from near his feet.
Ah, at home, he doesn’t need the flask—he just pours it in a pint.
He held the jar up. “Want some sun tea?”
Kitty bit down on her lip to keep herself from yelling, stamping her feet, shaking him. “I know that’s your thing. Kill something, have some coffee. Confrontation? How about tea? Stop it. You need some help.”
He actually laughed out loud, and Kitty felt discomfited. She thought she sounded pretty grownup.
“You are absolutely right. I do need some help. But I think we may be talking different kinds of help.” He rocked back in his chair, bouncing a little on the legs as he studied her. “I’ll make a deal with you.”
Kitty watched her idea of Phinney turning himself in float away with some butterflies over the meadow. It had never even come up. Had she expected it to? Really all she wanted was to hear that the whole mess would never happen again. “What’s the deal?”
“Come inside. I’ve got coffee or tea, your choice. I’ll tell you the whole story, or at least what I know of it. You can do whatever you want. I figure you got three options. Do nothing is always the first. Go home, forget it. Or you can talk to the police again. Hell, escort ‘em up here if you want to.” He rocked back in his chair again, using the bounce of the legs to propel himself out.
“And the third?”
“You can give me that help you’ve been talking about.”
Chapter Eight
Kitty hesitated as Phinney held the door of the cabin open. He shot her a look, shrugged and walked in ahead of her. The screen swung back toward the frame as she ran through the options in her head. Of the two things she’d encountered in the woods that night, Phinney had been the safe choice. The screen slapped against the frame and bounced. Of course, maybe he was just lulling her into a false sense of security. She almost laughed at herself. How stupid was that? Save somebody from a werewolf so you can kill them yourself? She caught the door on the second bounce and scooted into the dark interior. Blinking, she let her eyes adjust from the sunny porch.
“Tea or coffee?” he said from the corner of the room that passed as the kitchen. Placing his own pint on the ridged metal sideboard next to the sink, he pulled a two-quart jar out of the fridge and refilled it. When she didn’t answer, he looked back over his shoulder. “Thought maybe you’d run off home. You’d be back though. They always come back.” Phinney turned around and pulled a clean pint out of the cupboard. “Except for Kevin,” he mumbled. “That boy won’t ever come home.”
“Who’s Kevin?”
“Shit.” Phinney’s hand slapped down on the countertop and he sighed.
Kitty could tell he hadn’t heard her moving closer, hadn’t expected her to hear the words he’d said under his breath.
He shook his head. “Nobody. Nothing but bad history.” He came to the table holding the two pints in his hand, gesturing at the table with his elbow. “Have a seat.”
Kitty pulled the chair closest to her out from the table, testing the wobble.
“It’ll hold you,” Phinney said, settling into the chair opposite. He slid a pint jar her way.
She scooped her hand around it and pulled it in. She wasn’t sure what the protocol was while having tea with someone her mother had warned her to stay away from. Still, Anne had harped about manners until it was automatic. “Thank you.”
He nodded, his eyes concentrating on her. She tilted her face a little, jutting her chin out so he wo
uld see she wasn’t afraid. Somehow, that seemed to satisfy him, and his eyes dropped. He leaned forward, elbows akimbo on either side of his tea.
“I don’t know where this all started,” he said. “Some people say Russia or Romania. Some say the Khyber Pass.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. I don’t care much about that—don’t care about a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand.” His eyes strayed to the window, to the sun slanting across the kitchen sink. He took a swallow from his tea. “Oakmont used to be a pretty unhealthy place to live. Always been a small town, but around the time of the Vietnam War, it seemed like the population was dropping like flies.” He made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “I had this buddy from high school, Thompson. We used to sit down in the bar with the weekly newspaper, trying to put faces to all the names in the paper. He’d say, ‘That’s one of the Cooper kids from Birch Road, isn’t it?’ I’d look at the next obituary and say, ‘Wasn’t that one of Lem Cahill’s boys?’ We used to drink to every one of them. Always came home drunk on a newspaper night.”
Now Kitty was the focused one. She wasn’t sure Phinney even remembered she was there, but the story fascinated her.
“Seemed like half the obituaries in the big city paper were from Oakmont. Everybody figured it was the war. Kids running from the draft hiding in the woods.” Still looking out the window, he shook his head, flapped a hand in the air. “Didn’t make much sense though. If kids were hiding out in the woods, you’d think they’d die of starvation or eating a bad berry or something. But every time we found one of them, they were ripped up. Mangled.”
Kitty thought of the dead deer in the woods, of the detached head lying under the ferns.
Phinney’s eyes slid back her way, and he looked almost surprised that she was there. “And the missing—nearly as many as the dead. We all said it was girlfriends moving away after their boyfriends left or parents giving up on small town life now their kids were gone. We used to joke about it—all us old-timers down at the foundry. There’s more MIAs in Oakmont than the ‘Nam, we’d say.
“Farmers were having a tough time too, getting put out of business. Go to bed at night, get up the next morning to a blood-soaked pasture and half the herd slaughtered.”
Blood coating the pastures sounded like some Biblical plague. The thought made her a little queasy. She tightened her lips. He was just trying to scare her, and she’d already seen the worst out in the woods the other night. She wasn’t going to freak out in front of him.
“Thompson and I—we joined the Army together in December of ‘41. Thompson became a paratrooper.” Phinney rolled his eyes. “I’m not stupid that way. I figured I’d just as soon die on the ground, so I went straight-leg infantry. You know, on my feet. Normandy and all that. We both came home to Oakmont after the war was over.” Phinney stopped long enough for a drink.
“About 1980, he invited me over to this very spot.” He tapped his forefinger on the rickety table. “We were drinking beer on the porch—middle of the night—and he wanted to go take a few pot-shots at some raccoons.” Phinney huffed out a breath. “I thought he was nuts. He gives me this loaded .45. Seemed like a mighty big gun for a coon.”
Phinney was a good storyteller, but Kitty was no fool. She let a small smile escape, the first since she’d arrived. “I don’t think you were hunting coons.”
“Well,” he said, waving his finger at her. “You’re smarter than I was. Out there in the woods, I’m stumbling around, making noise, hooting like an idiot. I look over at Thompson, and he’s silent as the grave, watching.” Phinney squinted in concentration. “He looks like he’s actually hunting. So I say to him, ‘See a coon?’ I’m laughing, slapping my knee, and I realize I’m the only thing in the entire—and I mean the whole damn place—making noise. Like you could cut the air with a knife.” He was so deep in the memory, his eyes wandered the room as if they were scanning for what might be hiding in the corners.
“Then this thing comes down on us like a house on fire. Big and ugly and screaming. He shoots it, and it dries up and blows away. Disappears. I got down on my knees in the grass and scrabbled around, looking for it, wondering the whole time whether it was ever real in the first place. Because I know—I know,” he bounced his forefinger off his chest and frowned. “Things with a hole through their heart don’t just whisper away into the air. And Thompson,” Phinney hissed in exasperation. “Thompson—he’s got this deep voice like some TV preacher—he says, ‘Don’t look for it, friend. It’s gone to the next plane.’ That’s when I figure out he knew all along it was out there.”
Kitty picked up her tea. She almost wanted to laugh at the thought of Thompson preaching to this man. “What’d you do then?”
Phinney laughed and curled his hand into a fist. “Laid him out flat. I was so mad. Thought maybe I’d send him to the next plane.”
Kitty did laugh then.
Phinney released his grip, splaying his fingers out flat on the table as if they hurt. “Left him sitting there on his butt in the leaves with a sore jaw and marched out of the woods. I took the .45 for insurance.” He scrubbed a hand at the stubble forming across his cheek. “After, I was just like you. Didn’t come back for three days.”
“How did Thompson know? You know, what they were?” Before, Phinney had been talking, now it was her turn for answers.
Phinney blinked a few times. He looked tired and picked up his tea, chugging half of it. “Thirteen years before I ever saw the things—back in ‘67—Thompson and his kid were here at the cabin. Those two were like oil and water. Sure enough, they get in a doozie of a fight, and the kid lights out into the woods. Thompson would have let him run, but the boy was leaving for Vietnam in two days.”
“So he went after him?” Kitty leaned forward into the table.
Phinney mirrored her, coming forward onto his elbows, nodding. “Yup. He finds the kid and they’re on their way out when the woods gets all weird, quiet-like, and they can hear something coming up on them from behind, moving fast. Thompson always carried a gun with him when he went into the national forest—said he’d seen cougars up there. Cougars.” Phinney snorted. “Wasn’t a cougar following them.”
Kitty nodded. She knew well enough what was following them.
“Thompson managed to keep it off them, but he couldn’t kill it. He and the boy spent the rest of the night holed up here, watching for it out the window. Next morning, they went looking for it but couldn’t find a trace.” Phinney got up, went to the fridge and pulled out the two-quart jar. Bringing it back to the table, he poured a little more into his pint and topped off hers. Beads of sweat started rising on the jars almost immediately.
“Thompson starts putting two and two together. Dead cows, dead kids, ripped-up corpses. Missing people. Starts to wonder just what we got living out there.” Phinney jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trees. “The more he checks into it, the more he sees that it comes in waves. A big kill, a couple people missing—maybe dead, maybe werewolves themselves if they got bitten. Then quiet for three weeks or more.”
“It always comes down to the full moon,” Kitty said. “My mom says that’s when the crazies come out.”
“She’s got that right.” Phinney shifted in his wobbly chair. “Thompson starts hunting and the killings start slowing down. Everybody thinks it’s ‘cause the war is ending, but it’s Thompson.”
“Why didn’t he ask for help when he first figured it out?”
“Figured I wouldn’t believe him. He was right. I hardly believed it even when that thing almost killed me.”
Kitty knew that feeling. She barely believed it now. “Where is he?” Kitty asked. She knew the answer—dead. Still, it was best to get all the cards on the table.
Phinney grinned. “Florida.”
Kitty wrinkled her nose in confusion. That wasn’t the answer she’d expected.
“The wife wanted to retire someplace warm. Plus that’s where the grandkiddies are. So I got the job. Been
doing it now for twenty-six years.”
“Why here?” she asked. “Why don’t they live…hunt…in the big city?”
“You know this town. Manistee National Forest makes up three borders. Your own place butts right up to the trees. It’s the closest thing to wilderness out there in this day and age. Guess it calls to them—the space, the trees, the dark.” He smiled grimly. “Hem it all in with the river on the fourth side and you’ve got a nice little smorgasbord for them.”
Kitty raised her eyes to him. “Can’t we just…” she started. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted. To ignore it, to let the wolves do their thing? Her eyes roamed around the room—she needed to look anywhere but at Phinney—and she bit her lip.
“What?” he said, and his voice sounded harsh. “Put a collar on them and reform them? Pen ‘em up so they don’t hurt somebody? Once these people are infected, they’re already lost.” He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Look, kid, if you can come up with a better way, I’ll be the first to try it. But for now, this is the only thing that works. For us and for them.”
Kitty sat in silence. He’d drawn her in all right. All that detail, like a good storyteller should put in. The skeptical part of her wanted to laugh, get up and leave forever. But a small voice whispered in her ear, Remember it? Jumping at you, wanting to see you dead? Remember even the trees were still with the horror of it? Her inner skeptic still wanted to deny it. “This sounds like a bad TV movie. It’s not real.”
He shrugged. “I’d love to be able to tell you that. It’s too damn bad the real world isn’t childproofed. But I’m betting after this spring you know that.”
Kitty felt some anger spark. What did he know about her spring? What did he know about being left behind? She tapped her Mason jar of tea, feeling the beads of sweat cling to her fingertips. It gave her enough time to focus. “Say this is true, all I can do is not call the police. There’s nothing I can do to help you. And where would I even start to figure out if this is true?”