“Has there been any trouble? With the dogs?”
“Not with the boys but with their old man,” she said. “Back around maybe twenty years ago, maybe less, there was a group of girls who decided they were going to skinny dip on that side of the Keller property. I guess a couple of the dogs came down and drove the girls into deeper water. Or least that’s how they told it. I’ve my doubts. Snooty, you know? The kind of girl that likes to make trouble just so people feel sorry for her. Was a whole bunch of those kinds, and it’s easy enough to point the finger at a dog and say they scared you. I’ve seen those dogs on and off over the years, and not once have they done more than look in my direction before going on their way. But the sheriff had to investigate, and Gregory came out with a shotgun and some hot words. After that, we saw the Kellers less and less up until the oldest boy built his cabin.”
“Yeah, one of those dogs is up there now with Gibson.” Zach felt odd lying to the woman, but he could hardly call the wolf Ellis, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to mention Gibson’s brother driving him into the lake, mostly because it was own damn fault for running. “He seemed gentle—the dog—well, Gibson too, but the dog was definitely well behaved. What I don’t understand is those cops that came by weren’t around back then, right? They would have been too young to have been involved.”
“That one named Harrison isn’t from around here, but the one with the mustache is Pat Brown, the son of the sheriff Gregory threatened twenty years ago.” Martha sighed heavily. “Right after the Kellers left the mountain that summer, Sheriff Brown was killed in an animal attack on a car accident call a few miles down the road. Whatever got him was big, something vicious enough to rip out his throat and stomach, but it didn’t eat him. Something that strong and that aggressive usually is driven by hunger, but this time it just killed a man, then walked away.
“Someone started the rumor that Gregory Keller had come back with one of his dogs to kill the sheriff, but there was no proof of it. ’Sides, it was too clean, too neat to be an animal attack. From what I heard, it was focused, savaged right at the throat.” She made a face, disgusted by a horrific memory. “See, animals are messy. They like to play with their victims, play with their food. Whatever—whoever—killed Sheriff Brown came knowing they were going to murder. And Pat Brown has been convinced the Kellers were a part of it ever since the cops picked his father’s cold body off of that bloody blacktopped road.”
ZACH COULDN’T recall the last time he drove.
Avoiding the driver’s seat of any vehicle hadn’t started off as something he did on purpose. In the beginning, it had been impossible, his limbs wrapped in casts and stitches keeping him from bending for long periods of time. Then after he healed, he’d developed a general reluctance to sit in the driver’s seat and an aversion that soon turned into a light phobia. He hadn’t even driven up to the inn after he bought it. His favorite aunt—Dawn, a bohemian wild child the family often didn’t acknowledge—appointed herself his driver then gently bullied him all the way up.
“You have to climb back up on this horse soon, Z,” she’d said over the rattle of her VW bug cliché. “Don’t let your mind put you into a box you can’t get out of. If you’ve got to talk to somebody about it, do that, or maybe just get really stoned and find your center again. Either that or hire a hot chauffeur and bang the fuck out of him when he isn’t driving around.”
She’d driven off in a plume of dust and patchouli, leaving him choking and alone in the middle of the driveway.
The old bed-and-breakfast came with an SUV that had seen better days, but Martha’d assured him it was in tip-top shape, despite looking as if it had barely survived the Khitomer Massacre. More Frankenstein than car, the utilitarian vehicle was made up of a patchwork of different-colored fenders, quarter panels, and a hood painted with tiny dinosaur silhouettes. If he survived the trip up the mountain, the first thing Zach was going to do was get the damn thing painted.
“I can’t believe Martha or Ruth uses this to go shopping,” he muttered, climbing into the torn-up and duct-taped driver’s seat. It creaked underneath him, and if pressed to answer, he would reluctantly admit to hearing definite signs of rodent infestation coming from the back. “Forget painting. I’m just going to set this thing on fire and buy a new one.”
The inn’s SUV had a full tank of gas, and there was really only one road to maneuver, the same winding blacktopped ribbon Gibson drove down only a week ago. The bed-and-breakfast was too far from where the cabin’s road let out for Zach to see if the brothers had moved out, so he was truly depending upon Gibson’s promise to be there. The roar of the engine when he turned the key made Zach jump, and his stomach clenched in an odd rolling anticipation, a mingle of fear and excitement. He couldn’t decide if it stemmed from being afraid to drive or seeing Gibson Keller again. It was easier to focus on returning to the cabin than worrying about handling the SUV, especially after putting the car in drive and easing the vehicle onto the road.
He didn’t remember the road being as uneven as it felt under the SUV’s tires or how the sun-dampening trees crowded the curved pavement. Patches of snow banked long stretches of the blacktop, and the forest’s canopy filtered off much of the sun with its thick bramble of branches, leaving a leopard dapple of light and shadows on the road. It was slow going, or at least Zach didn’t trust himself or the road enough to drive quickly. The SUV’s brakes grabbed at the wheels every time he tapped the pedal, their responsiveness surprisingly alarming instead of reassuring, but the large square-bodied vehicle handled well, negotiating the turns in the road with ease.
It seemed to take forever to get up the mountain, and it wasn’t even that large of a mountain, more of a craggy hill thick with evergreens and other trees Zach couldn’t identify to save his life. He supposed he would eventually learn what he was looking at over time, but for right now everything was a sea of verdant hues, bark, and the occasional dark shape of an animal.
Much like the giant black wolf that suddenly appeared in the road in front of him.