Gabriel shut the door and went to sit next to Whiskey.
Squeezing his eyelids tightly, his tears were hot and salty along his lashes.
He wasn’t opposed to men crying—it could be cathartic—but it wasn’t a good look in the Hoover Building.
His therapist said he should let his emotions bubble up and spill over.
Gabriel had explained that wasn’t part of his day-to-day.
So he was told to go out into the wilderness where he liked to challenge himself, and there his challenge should be to howl to the moon and yell at his fire, to find ways to express his grief for Daniel and all of his military brothers killed or severely wounded from their days at war.
Now that Gabriel had a bloodhound, he felt less ridiculous doing just that.
Gabriel scratched behind Whiskey’s ears. “Maybe we can make our way up into the mountains this weekend. I bet we can find someplace secluded enough we can let loose without frightening anyone.
That was a good plan.
Get away. Get outside beneath the trees.
Focus on something other than the underbelly of humanity.
Chapter Nineteen
Gabriel
Tuesday
Reaper had arrived to pick up Whiskey, but instead of collecting her lead, he shut Gabriel’s office door and slid onto the chair. “Do you have a minute? I needed to check in with you about something.”
Gabriel glanced up at the wall clock before focusing back at Reaper. “If it’s another search and rescue, I can do it, but I'm going to be here at least another couple of hours,” Gabriel said. “I’ve got something on my desk.”
“This isn’t about a rescue, but it is about Whiskey,” Reaper said. “I’ve solved the mystery of Whiskey’s howling.”
“Ghost possession?” Gabriel pushed back in his chair with a grin.
Reaper held out his phone to show Gabriel a video that opened with the image of a thirties-something woman from the shoulders up, dressed in what he imagined continued down to become an old-fashioned, romantic dress. Her hair swept across her cheek, giving just the suggestion of her features. A mahogany music stand in front of her, she stood next to a window surrounded by classical books, and on the shelves were the kinds of shiny objects that a raven might bring as gifts—rocks and twigs, and little silver trinkets. She was singing opera. A song that Gabriel had come to know well.
Just a few notes into the song, she was suddenly accompanied by howling. The video switched to a doorbell camera. In the foreground, the image was framed with foliage on the right. To the left was the graveyard under a full moon. Andthere in the background, a silhouette under a streetlight, Gabriel stood with Whiskey at his feet, her nose in the air, singing a half-note behind the woman.
“Well that’s damned disappointing.” Gut punch, if Gabriel were being honest. “Not everyone gets to have a brother haunt them from the grave. And here I thought I was one of the lucky ones,” Gabriel said, marking the name, Mourning Notes, and handing the phone back to Reaper.
“I went back in the feed and looked at this account from the beginning. Apparently, this woman has had this thing up since about the time we were up on Sweet Gum. So that was a couple of weeks after Daniel died.”
“The first time Whiskey howled was the day I brought her home. I got custody of Whiskey the day we went on the search. ”
“When we were on the trail, you asked me the difference between baying and howling, and you were telling me that Whiskey started howling at the graveyard—”
And Gabriel said, “Still does. Not every time, when I take Whiskey for a walk, sometimes she chooses the direction of the park. If we go to the graveyard, she’s going to sit and sing.”
“Certain time of day?” Reaper asked.
“There’s no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell, say from pre-dawn to after midnight. From the angle of the camera that’s on us, this is from the house across the street from the church. What are the chances that she sings the songs that Whiskey knows?”
“She posts under Gothic hashtags. It may be her vibe, but I think it’s more likely that she was inspired by the full moon and the graveyard and was singing a song that was in that general theme. When Whiskey started howling, and she caught it on tape. Did she sing the same song the next few times?”
“She did.”
“Then she would have already been posting, and I bet she made a list of other songs in that same thread that Whiskey might know. Did Whiskey ever howl and it not sound as song-like as at other times?”
