Unbound (11 page)

Ranger put his head on the table to stare at her.

“You know,” Alyssa said. “Cursed.”

“Curses aren’t real.”

Everyone at the table shared awkward glances.

“
What?
” Sachie repeated.

“Uh,” Lori said. “How much attention have you been paying, lately?”

“I don’t know,” Sachie replied, his face coloring. “Paying attention to what? Why?”

“Have you covered curses in class yet?” Lori asked Alyssa.

Alyssa shook her head. “Not yet. I think we start next month.”

“Ah, that explains it.”

Sachie looked like he thought that didn’t explain anything, but Lori silenced him with an imperious glance. She was good at those, the wolf had noticed. It was a look Ranger had seen on her mother more than once – a single slightly arched eyebrow, a bored expression, like she wondered why the peasants around here were still making noise.

She
definitely
hadn’t learnt the skill from her father, Deputy Hunter, who frequently appeared somewhat hapless, even if he would make a good detective one day.

Ranger ducked back under the lunch table to lick at the mashed potatoes on the floor, his belly aching with hunger. Evan, that saintly child, held out one of his homemade chicken sandwiches, and Ranger took it delicately from his fingers then snapped it up in a couple of bites before going off to scavenge around the rest of the cafeteria, taking Victoria Meadowbrook’s peas and an apple from that boy Eli seemed to find intolerable, Stephen.

The wolf napped through afternoon classes, waking only long enough to trot from class to class whenever the bell rang and then falling asleep again. The teachers ignored him, for the most part, though the art teacher muttered something about dog hair in the paint.

After school, Sachie walked with Lori and Alyssa to Eli’s house. There was still a single police cruiser parked out front. One of the deputies was sitting in the driver’s seat, a book propped open against the steering wheel. She was one of the deputies the wolf knew mostly by face, from afar, than because he’d had any real interaction with her. He recalled, somewhat distantly, that her name might’ve been Meger.

A tarp had been nailed over the broken windows of Eli’s house, and most of the glass outside had been cleared away. Ranger could still smell hot, tangy deer blood, though, and there were dark stains on the weatherboard that hadn’t been washed away by the rain.

Eli answered the door with tousled hair and sleepy eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “Come in. We can’t use the living room. It’s still considered a crime scene. But we can go up to my room.”

Ranger left them to it and went out to see Deputy Meger. She saw him coming down the garden path, put her book on the dash, and wound down the window to speak to him.

“Hey, Ranger,” she said to him.

Ranger snorted and wagged his tail, yowling.

The corners of her mouth twitched a little, but she didn’t smile. “Glad to see you’re still alive. Detective Bower thought the killer might’ve got you last night, after you didn’t come home.”

The wolf warbled at her indignantly.

“All right, all right,” she conceded. “Look, Sheriff Hostler thought you might like to know, since no one’s seen you all day. Last night, while you were gone, there was a murder over on Moonshadow Crescent. Old Maude Siegel’s dead. Not sure how well you knew her, she hadn’t lived here in Tamarack long, but she lived in the house next door to Claire Bower’s. Claire’s the one who reported the disturbance. Was that what you wanted?”

He barked, lashing his tail backwards and forwards to show his appreciation, then skittered away down the street, the tag on his collar jingling.

Claire Bower was Detective Bower’s mother, and Sacheverell’s grandmother, and Granny Florence’s younger sister. She made the best homemade preserves in town. Her husband, Alexander, was a retired woodworker who’d dabbled in sculpture – he’d carved Professor Seybold’s cane. Ranger knew the Bowers’ house. He used to be fascinated with it because the railings of their porch were intricately carved with flowers and vines, little woodland animals like rabbits and squirrels, ladybugs and dewdrops.

The wolf ignored the crime scene next door and went up to Claire Bower’s kitchen door where he started barking to be let in. She opened the door within moments, an apron tied around her waist, her hands sticky with sugar, and he supposed she must’ve been in the kitchen already.

Her kitchen was warm and smelled like apples and cinnamon and nutmeg, and flowers. There were several bunches of flowers hanging upside down from a rack on the wall, underneath the decorative plates. She was in the process of preserving apples. There were several diced apples piled up on her bench, along with a half dozen jars, and a bubbling pot of sugar syrup on the stove.

“Do you want an apple slice?” she asked him, then picked one up from her chopping board and held one out to him anyway. Ranger took it carefully between his teeth, crunched it up, and licked her fingers clean of sugar, even though she tried to take her hand away.

She whacked him gently on the muzzle with the back of her hand.

“No,” she said. “Bad dog. I’ve got to wash my hands again, now. If there are any germs, the apples will go bad in the jar.”

The wolf tucked his tail up under his belly and whined miserably as she scrubbed her hands with detergent at the sink, and she chuckled quietly to herself.

“It’s all right, boy,” she told him. “Washing my hands isn’t the end of the world. Now, did you come to visit this old woman just for my apples, or are you here for another reason?”

Ranger glanced towards her window, at Maude Siegel’s house.

“Ah,” Claire said. “Well, that’s a nasty business. I didn’t see anything, if that’s what you wanted to know. I just heard breaking glass and Maude screaming, and I went over to check on her.” A dark look passed over her face, and then it was gone as quickly as it had come. “She was always a little nervous living over there by herself after Clark died. Clark was her husband. They moved in next door three years ago, retirees out from New York City, and he died last year. Stroke. It was very sad.”

The wolf had never met Maude Siegel, or her husband Clark for that matter. He curled up on Claire Bower’s kitchen floor, tucking his nose under his tail, and listened to Claire ramble about the times she’d had Maude and Clark over to tea, and about their grown-up son Joshua who lived down in Washington DC in some government job.

“She didn’t
know
, of course,” Claire said, dropping a handful of diced apple into a hot jar and pouring steaming sugar syrup in over it. “Well, she knew I was a witch, but I think she thought I was a bit of an old crackpot. One of those hippies from the ‘60s, you know the free spirited young things that used to follow those musicians around, and perhaps I just never grew out of it.”

She paused to look over her island counter at the wolf thoughtfully, then went back to chopping apples.

“Funny thing about that,” Claire said. “I was the youngest of three girls, so I grew up the fastest, always wanting to copy my older sisters. Really, though, I suspect Maude just thought the whole town was a bit potty. Not many places around about with bona fide apothecaries in this day and age. And it’s a bit hard to explain away all the odd rituals we hold out at the cemetery on days that oughtn’t to be holidays.”

For several minutes she said nothing as she finished the last of the apples and began the process of sealing the jars and setting them in a tub of hot water.

“You do let an old woman talk a lot about nothing,” she said, at length. “You wanted to know about what happened last night, and I got side-tracked, but you didn’t stop me.”

Ranger’s tail twitched a couple of times.

“Well, I heard Maude scream, like I said, and I went over to check on her. But she was already bleeding on the floor when I got there. It was – awful. You know better than I what the other murders looked like, I assume? Well, she didn’t even last long enough for me to get back from phoning the ambulance in her kitchen. She’d stopped breathing by the time I returned. It was a blessing, to be honest. Living on after that would’ve been… Well.”

Ranger knew. He’d heard of people coming back from war, surviving horrific injuries, and he couldn’t quite imagine it.

“I didn’t see the killer, so I couldn’t tell you who it was, but I can tell you that it smelled
terrible
. It was the smell of something that’s died on the inside, but is still living on the outside – a soul so twisted and corrupt that you can practically taste it on the air. It takes a monstrously evil act to twist someone up like that.” She frowned, glancing out the window. “I think we’ll have our first snow soon.”

The wolf lifted his head to sniff the air, but he couldn’t smell the dry, dusty scent of snow. He had no idea what made Claire Bower suddenly think of it.

“Evil like that,” Claire went on, like she hadn’t changed the subject at all. “It isn’t like the taint. The taint is a curse, a mark that you and I bear and will for the rest of our lives, yes. But the taint is like a tattoo or a birthmark, maybe. It isn’t necessarily
bad
. It’s just the place where an angry god touched us. The evil that’s eating up the killer? It’s a bit like one of those flesh-eating diseases they’re always going on about these days. An infection, a terrible one. It devours you one piece at a time, and it’s entirely of the killer’s own doing.”

She fell silent again for a long moment.

“You should talk to the Leshy,” she said, eventually, just before she let the wolf out the door. “He will know more. He always knows about the terrible things happening in and around the woods.”

That was a good idea, Ranger supposed, but the Leshy wasn’t always willing to talk. And when it wasn’t willing to talk, the wolf ran the risk of getting clawed in the side by going anywhere near it.

On Wednesday night, Sachie and Detective Bower had spaghetti. Sachie wouldn’t let Ranger have any of the spaghetti sauce, because onions and garlic were terrible for dogs, and the boy didn’t want to give the wolf hemolytic anemia, which he’d read about online. Detective Bower backed his son up in the face of Ranger’s begging, stating that he didn’t know what hemolytic anemia was, but it sounded like a very painful way to die.

Ranger ended up with a plate of cold roast chicken, meticulously deboned because cooked bones could splinter and perforate canine stomachs, according to Sachie, who’d been doing a lot of research on canines lately.

“Dad,” Sachie said to the detective, as they were lingering over ice cream in the living room after dinner.

Detective Bower put his plate down on the coffee table to examine his son. Ranger wondered if either of them would notice if he licked up the last of the detective’s desert. He decided that they probably
would
notice, and he would get shouted at, and he sighed mournfully from his place on the rug in front of the fireplace.

“Yes?” the detective said.

“D’you think I’ll ever go to college?” Sachie asked.

“Your grades are good enough,” the detective replied. “But you should probably take up some sort of extracurricular activity. It’ll look better on your application.”

Sachie looked pained. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

“Oh. Right. Of course you do. You were just being nice,” Sachie said. “But, do you think I’ll
make it
to college?”

Detective Bower thought about that for a long moment, a deep line between his brows, his eyes going unfocused as he gazed into the middle distance. “I don’t know,” he said, eventually. “I hope so. Doctor Abernethy thought you might make forty.”

“
Might
,” Sachie said. “And I haven’t seen Doctor Abernethy since I was twelve. Doctor Monroe didn’t think I would reach fifteen.”

“Well, you’re seventeen, so I’d say you’ve proved Monroe wrong,” Detective Bower said, firmly.

Sachie looked like he didn’t necessarily agree, but he didn’t want to argue. Perhaps this was an old conversation, one they had repeated time and again over the years. How often had the boy wondered if he would reach his next birthday? How often had he wondered if he would see graduation, or Christmas, or even just his friends again for the first time at the end of summer break?