Nothing came running through the trees, and after a minute of silence, with even the birds in the branches halting their songs to watch the woman below, Annie lowered the gun. She listened for the scraping sound, but it had ceased, and in its sudden absence, the silence was thicker, even more suggestive of a dangerous presence than it had been before.
A knot of fear, deep and instinctive, tightened in Annie’s gut. The forest around her was still. Not a breath of wind stirred the fir boughs, but all at once, every single hair on her forearms rose at the same time.
She was being watched.
Slowly, she turned in a full circle, every muscle tensed and ready to fly to her defense at the first hint of danger, but she could not locate the source of her fear. No eyes peered at her from beneath the brim of a camo hat half hidden behind a tree trunk. No hunter was perched high in a blind, looking down at her through a rifle’s scope, but the chill that traveled from the nape of her neck to her tailbone and back again whispered that she was not alone.
Her father’s voice came again—soft with warning.
Go back, Annie. Turn around.
Annie took a single step backward, and another. She had confronted enough of these men in her line of work, the particular brand whose signs warning trespassers away had been ignored. They were a special breed, those men, with dark, bearded faces and hooded eyes that held something more threatening than any ordinary man’s.
No. She wasn’t risking buckshot to the butt, or anywhere else for that matter. She needed access to this land, and part of her job was towarn citizens in the area when a wildlife threat was present, so one way or another, she would have to confront the man who had posted these signs, but not like this.
As with encountering a predator in the woods, some men were better approached face-to-face. She would hike back out the way she’d come and drive around by the road up to the boathouse instead. It would take the rest of the afternoon, but if she made good time, she could be up to the lake by sunset, armed with her Ruger instead of a tranquilizer gun, to warn the man at the end of the road about the cougar and insist politely but firmly that she be given access to his land.
Annie turned her back on the signs and walked away, replaying in her mind that odd conversation she’d had with Laura Proudy, the glint of warning in her eyes when she’d told Annie about the man in the boathouse. The strange outsider who had chosen isolation over community for reasons known only to himself.
Chapter 5DANIEL
Sunlight fell through the alders, dappling the rust-colored heap of fur on the stump, and the man who sat in the old Adirondack chair, staring at it.
Daniel tracked the dancing patches of light as he made swift, sure strokes with his pencil on the sketch pad. He had carried the fox outside late in the morning and draped it over the tall pine stump before heading into the woods to dig the grave.
He’d walked all the way around the lake to the firs that bordered the southeastern shore and dug the hole there; far enough away that he might forget about it in time, where the briars grew wild in the summer, and it would be hidden under leafy blackberries.
When he returned from digging, he’d taken his seat next to the stump, and in the two hours since, he had not moved, his brows pulled together in concentration as he sketched the animal’s likeness. When he was finished with his drawing, he would carry the fox around the lake to the grave and fill in the dirt around it, then put the memory of last night out of his mind for good.
The tip of the charcoal pencil snapped against the paper, and Daniel brushed his hand over the mark it had left. He was pressing toofirmly, trying too hard to get the face just right. He had once heard that the aim of art was not to represent the outward appearance of a thing, but its inward significance, and that was proving easier said than done.
The trouble was the eyes. Those extraordinary red-brown eyes just a shade deeper than the fox’s fur were foggy now, flat, like the false glass eyes of a taxidermied animal. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to give them life on the page.
He wanted them to be as deep and lucid as they had been at the moment he turned on the light. He wanted to remember the look that met his gaze from the other end of the hall, so that every time he flipped to this page in his pad, he’d have a reminder to not lose control in the heat of the moment. The truth was, he couldn’t afford to.
It could have been a person—a human being, lying there dead on the floor. It could have been a burglar or, far worse; a kid, some runaway in the same trouble he’d been in at sixteen. And, sure, maybe he hadn’t broken a window while seeking shelter, but close enough. What if the place hadn’t been empty when he showed up? What if someone had been waiting for him on the other side with a copper pipe?
Daniel leaned forward in his chair, adjusting the fox so that its face fell into shadow.
There was some sort of justice in it, or penance, maybe, sitting for hours on end, staring at the creature he’d killed. He brought the tip of the pencil back to the paper and traced it around the outside of the eye again, darkening the feline markings that gave the pointed face that clever, cunning look.
Daniel reached for the plastic sharpener on the arm of the chair and gave the pencil a few quick twists, glancing up at a familiar sound coming from behind the trees.
Clear, musical notes were floating on the wind, the whistling preceding the man walking up the road, and Daniel scanned the pines that flanked the clearing.
Jake climbed the gate with ease and emerged with his hands in hispockets, sandy hair curling out beneath a Mariners cap that shaded his eyes in the open sunlight.
Daniel raised a hand in greeting and Jake returned the gesture, his gaze falling on the fox as he approached with a long, low whistle.
“You kill that thing so it would sit still for a portrait?”
Daniel forced air through his nose, the closest thing to a laugh he could muster, then nodded toward the animal. “You ever see a fox this size?”
Jake chuckled. “Of course not. That’s not a fox.”
Daniel looked up from his pad as Jake lowered himself into a squat beside the animal, reaching out to lift one of its dark paws.
“You ever seen a fox with legs this long? It’s a maned wolf.” Jake released the paw, and it fell softly against the stump. “Ronnie Boyd down the road got it into his head to open an exotic zoo on his property. He’s been buying animals illegally from all over the country, then has the nerve to come down to the station a couple weeks ago to tell Bud and me his maned wolf got loose and it’s our responsibility to find and trap it for him.”
