Ashgrove Moon

The Road Back

The rain followed Mara Kessler all the way up the mountain. It began in the valley outside Tillman as a thin gray drizzle that beaded on the windshield of her rental car, and by the time she reached the weathered sign for Ridgemoor it had thickened into something steady and patient, the kind of rain that does not expect to leave.

She slowed at the sign. Someone had shot it years ago, three neat holes punched through the letter R. Her father used to say the holes were the town's official welcome. She had laughed at that as a child. Now the memory sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.

Population 1,204, the sign said. It had said the same thing when she left at eighteen, and she wondered whether the number was a fact or only a habit the town refused to break.

The road narrowed and began to climb between walls of Douglas fir so dark and dense they seemed to hold the night inside them even at noon. She kept both hands on the wheel. Eleven years in the city had taught her to drive fast and think faster, but the mountain had its own rhythm, and her body remembered it before her mind did. Ease into the curve, let the car drift wide, tap the brake before the culvert where the guardrail had never been fixed.

The culvert came and went. The guardrail was still bent.

Ridgemoor appeared all at once, the way it always had, a scatter of tin roofs and woodsmoke tucked into a shelf of land above the river. There was the feed store with its faded green awning. There was the diner, Dell's, with a pickup parked crooked out front. There was the sawmill on the far edge of town, silent now, its great rusted blades sleeping under a skin of moss.

She turned onto Birch Lane and found the sheriff's cruiser already waiting at the end of it.

Hollis Brandt stood beside the car with his hat in his hands, which was how she knew he had been rehearsing. He had been sheriff of Ridgemoor for as long as she could remember, a broad slow man with a gray mustache and the careful posture of someone who had delivered bad news too many times to enjoy any version of it. When she stepped out into the rain he did not offer an umbrella. He crossed the wet gravel, put his big hand on her shoulder, and left it there.

"Mara," he said.

"Hollis."

"I'm sorry I couldn't do more over the phone."

"You told me enough." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "A fall. Out on the east ridge trail."

"That's what it looked like."

The phrase snagged on something. She studied his face. His eyes slid away to the house, to the porch where her father's rocking chair still sat angled toward the trees, and she understood there was more to the sentence than he meant to say standing in the rain.

"Looked like," she repeated.

"We'll talk inside. You're soaked."

The house was smaller than she remembered. That was the first betrayal. In her mind it had been a tall, creaking, golden place full of bootprints and radio static and coffee gone bitter on the stove. In truth it was a low cedar cabin with a sagging porch and a roof patched in two colors of shingle. The front door stuck, as it always had. Hollis put his shoulder to it and it gave with a groan, and the smell of the house rolled out to meet her.

Pine resin. Old woodsmoke. Gun oil and wet dog and the faint sweet rot of apples left too long in a bowl.

Her knees nearly went. She caught the doorframe and stood breathing through her mouth until the dizziness passed.

"Take your time," Hollis said quietly.

Her father had not been a tidy man, but he had been an orderly one, and the difference showed in every room. Boots lined up by the stove. Maps pinned to the wall in overlapping layers, each annotated in his cramped square handwriting. His coat hung on its hook, the green canvas one with the state wildlife patch on the shoulder, and when she touched the sleeve it was still faintly damp, as though he had only stepped out a moment ago and meant to return.

"Nobody's been in here except me," Hollis said from the doorway. "I came by the morning after to check the stove and feed the dog."

"Biscuit is alive?"

"Alive and sulking. She's been under the back porch since Tuesday. Won't come out for me. I figured she might come for you."

Mara went through the kitchen and opened the back door. The yard sloped down toward a wall of trees she had once believed went on forever. She crouched at the edge of the porch and looked into the dark gap beneath the boards. Two eyes looked back. Then a low sound, half whine and half grief.

"Hey, old girl," she whispered. "It's me."

The dog was a brindled mutt gone gray around the muzzle. She crept forward on her belly, pressed her whole face into Mara's open palm, and shook so hard the boards rattled. Mara stayed there on the wet steps until the shaking slowed. She did not cry. She had the odd sense that if she started she would not be able to stop.

Back inside, Hollis had made coffee in her mother's good mugs. He sat across from her with his hands folded like a man in church.

"Tell me about the fall," she said.

He took a while. "Your father went out Sunday before light, the way he did most mornings. When he hadn't come back by dark, I organized a search. We found him the next day at the bottom of the draw below Widow's Point."

"That's a forty foot drop. My father walked that ridge for thirty years. He could have done it blindfolded."

"I know."

"So what aren't you saying?"

Hollis turned his mug a quarter turn on the table. The motion was small and precise and it frightened her more than any speech could have.

"The medical examiner says the fall killed him. But there were other injuries. Deep ones on his back and left arm. She says bear, most likely. Maybe cougar." He rubbed his jaw. "I've seen both kinds of wound, Mara. These didn't look like either. And his rifle was found at the trailhead, locked in the truck. He went up that ridge unarmed. In thirty years I never knew him to do that."

She had no answer. The coffee had gone cold and she did not remember drinking any of it.

"The state is sending someone next week," Hollis added. "Until then I'd ask you to keep this between us. People in town are already talking, and I'd rather they talked about a tragic accident than about the other thing."

"What other thing?"

He stood and settled his hat on his head, and for a moment seemed about to say more. Then he shook his head. "Get some rest. I'll check on you tomorrow."

His cruiser pulled away down Birch Lane and the sound faded until there was only rain and the tick of the clock above the stove.

She did not intend to search the house. She told herself she was only putting things away. But her hands kept finding drawers and her eyes kept finding corners, and by dusk she had been through every room. In her old bedroom, someone had tacked a new map of the east ridge above her childhood bed, and across it ran a line of red pins. She counted them. Fourteen.

The last room was his study, which was really a closet with a desk in it. The door had always stuck, but this time it moved without a sound. The hinges had been oiled. When she stepped inside she smelled something beneath the old smells, something sharp and rank and wild.

In the center of the desk, squared carefully to the edge as if set there for her to find, lay a black leather journal with a rubber band around its middle. She slid the band off and opened to the last page.

The handwriting was her father's, but ragged in a way she had never seen, the letters leaning hard to the right as though the pen had been dragged. The entry was short, pressed so deeply into the paper that she could feel it with her thumb from the back.

It is not an animal. I have known for a month and told no one. If anything happens to me, do not trust the sheriff, do not trust the mill, and do not come home. Mara, if you are reading this you did not listen, and I am sorry, and I love you. Keep the dog inside when the moon is full.

She read it three times. Through the small window the clouds had parted, and a pale shape hung low over the ridge, enormous and almost round, one thin slice from perfect.

Beneath the desk the dog began to whimper.

Then someone knocked on the front door.

Three knocks, slow and deliberate, loud in the silent house. Mara went still. She held the journal against her chest and listened to her own heartbeat. The knock came again, patient, unhurried, as though whoever stood outside had all the time in the world.

She took her father's flashlight from the desk, heavy as a club, and walked to the door. She did not open it. "Who is it?"

"Elias Thorne." The voice was low and rough at the edges, as if used sparingly. "I owned the mill your father tried to shut down. I'm sorry for the hour. I heard the dog from across the valley and thought someone should check on you."

"Across the valley is three miles."

"Yes," the voice agreed, with no apology at all.

Every instinct she owned told her to stay behind the wood. She looked through the narrow window beside the door instead, and what she saw undid her resolve before she knew it was happening.

He stood on the porch in the pouring rain without a coat. He was tall, taller than the doorframe seemed built for, and the rain had soaked his charcoal shirt until it clung to the long lines of his chest and shoulders. Dark hair was plastered to his forehead. Water ran down the hard line of his jaw and along the open collar of his shirt. And he was not shivering. He stood in that cold mountain downpour as though it were a warm bath.

His eyes lifted to the window, found hers, and held.

They were the color of old honey held up to a fire.

Mara unlocked the door.

The cold hit her first, then the scent of him. Cedar and cold water and something darker underneath, like turned earth after lightning. He did not step inside. He stood on the threshold with rain dripping from his hands, and he looked at her for a long moment in a way that no stranger should have been able to look at anyone.

She felt it low in her stomach, a slow and unwelcome heat. She was twenty nine years old and burying her father in the morning, and her body had chosen this moment to remember it was a body.

"You have his eyes," Elias said quietly. "Wendell's. Stubborn, and too clever for their own good."

"You knew my father."

"We argued every season for ten years. It was the best part of my winters."

A sound escaped her, half laugh and half sob. He did not move to comfort her, and she was grateful, and also, treacherously, disappointed.

Biscuit appeared at her knee. Mara braced for the dog to bolt. Instead Biscuit crossed the threshold on trembling legs, pressed her whole body against Elias's wet jeans, and leaned there with a long shuddering sigh. His hand dropped to her head as if it had done so a hundred times.

"She is not afraid of you," Mara said slowly.

"No."

"She is afraid of everything else."

"Yes." His gaze lifted to hers, and the gold in it seemed to move. "That is worth thinking about, Mara Kessler."

He had not told her his name for hers. She had not given it. A cold finger touched the back of her neck, and still she did not close the door.

"Why are you really here?"

"Because it is almost full." He glanced past her shoulder toward the window, toward the pale swollen shape over the ridge, and a muscle tightened in his jaw. "And because I made promises to your father that I intend to keep, whether you want me to or not."

"What promises?"

"That you would not die here." He said it simply, as one states a fact about the weather. "Lock the door behind me. Keep the dog inside. Do not go up to the ridge, and do not trust anyone who tells you this town is safe."

He turned and stepped off the porch into the rain. The darkness took him in four strides.

She stood in the doorway with her pulse hammering until the cold forced her to move. She shut the door and locked it, then went to the window to watch the yard.

There was nothing. Only the black trees and the silver rain.

But in the porch light, in the mud at the bottom of the steps, she saw where he had walked. Bootprints, broad and deep, leading away toward the trees. She followed them with her eyes, one after another, across the lawn.

At the edge of the grass they changed.

The boots became something else. Something wider, and clawed, and sunk much deeper into the earth. Something that had gone the rest of the way on four legs.

Beside her, the dog lowered her head and licked her hand, and Mara understood with perfect, terrible clarity that she was not afraid.

She was something worse. She was curious.