Wild Things Read online

  When the sheriff mentioned the cabin and the white deer, my heart started beating fast, but when he said Hargrove’s name, it pounded like it might leap out of my chest. I hadn’t told Henry what had happened at school on Monday. After I’d given my Henry presentation and the class had gone to lunch, I came back to the room for a book and caught Hargrove gaping at the art books I’d left on my desk. When I asked what he thought he was doing, he froze and turned three shades of red. I went straight to his desk, reached inside, grabbed his dog-eared notebook, and started flipping through his pencil drawings of animals, dogs and birds and squirrels. Hargrove crossed that room like a shot, snatched it out of my hand, and shoved me against the door just as Ms. Avery walked up. She took us right to the principal’s office, and Hargrove had to apologize to me in front of his daddy, the mayor. The next day my journal was gone.

  Now I put on my best poker face and looked from Henry to the sheriff to Fred. Thank heaven for card nights with Manny and his gambling buddies.

  “How is the Peters boy?” Henry asked.

  “Doc Wilson says he won’t be throwing sliders for a while, but otherwise he’ll be fine.”

  Henry nodded. “And you say the other boy is older? A cousin?”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff said. “I’d bet money those two were drinking and Hargrove cut himself on that old still. They got scared and concocted a story on their way home so they wouldn’t get in trouble. But Mayor Peters wants me to investigate.” The sheriff didn’t look happy about his mission or in a hurry to accomplish it.

  “Sounds like two knuckleheads on a bender,” Henry said.

  “I came by here to see if you’d seen anybody prowling around on your back land, especially the northern piece bordering Maud Booker’s place.”

  Henry frowned when the sheriff spoke Maud’s name, while I felt like I jumped about four feet in the air.

  “Maud know about this?” Fred asked. “If even a rumor of a white deer gets out, hunters won’t leave it alone, posted land or not.”

  The sheriff turned to Henry. “You ever go up there?”

  “Not in forty years,” Henry said. “I’d forgotten about that cabin, but it was a ruin even then. Augustus and Maud did keep a hawk’s eye out for hunters and ran a few off at gunpoint.”

  “And she’s kept it up,” the sheriff said. “Nobody with any sense hunts up that way. I warned Maud not to take the law into her own hands. What I can’t figure out is how those boys knew there was a cabin to see.”

  “My journal!” I cried.

  Henry turned to me. “What do you know about this?”

  “Why, you go in that direction every day,” Fred said, the fact just dawning on him.

  “That’s what Henry was saying before you got home,” the sheriff said to me.

  “I wasn’t aware you went that far,” Henry said. “What journal are you talking about?”

  “My private journal that Ms. Avery gave me. Somebody stole it, and Hargrove’s in my class,” I said, keeping my differences with Hargrove and his daddy to myself.

  Hargrove’s father, the mayor, had turned out to be a grown-up version of Hargrove in a suit and tie. Hargrove shrank in his chair the second his daddy came in the principal’s office. He shrank even more when his daddy caught sight of the dog-eared notebook lying wide open on the desk. His daddy frowned at the drawing—a fair pencil sketch of a Henry sculpture I’d shown in my presentation—and then slapped the cover closed and said, “I thought I told you to quit this mess and pay attention in class.” Hargrove looked like a whipped dog. I even felt a little sorry for him till my journal went missing.

  “Is there truth to what those boys were saying?” the sheriff asked me. “Because if you were there and had to defend yourself, they were trespassing and full of beer besides, and there won’t be charges.”

  The sheriff looked like he was half hoping I had winged Hargrove. They were all three looking at me.

  “I’ve never seen any still or boys up that way,” I said honestly. “And I don’t own a bow and arrow. Sounds like somebody’s been reading too much Robin Hood.”

  “What about yesterday?” the sheriff asked. “Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?”

  “I didn’t see or hear boo yesterday. Not between having my journal stolen and my cat. He sat down at the foot of that trail and wouldn’t budge.”

  “What cat?” asked the sheriff, looking around.

  “He’s under the house,” Fred told him. “Only comes to her. Follows her around like a little dog. Mutual-admiration society of two.”

  “Well, he wasn’t admiring me yesterday,” I said. “Wouldn’t budge for love or Fred’s corned beef.”

  “You fed him my slaved-over corned beef!” Fred hollered.

  “I’m trying to train him, Fred! Jeezy peezy!”

  “I wouldn’t mind laying eyes on this animal,” said the sheriff, looking impressed. “Not every day you meet an honest-to-god guard cat.”

  “You might never lay eyes on him,” Fred said. “He’s a one-girl cat.”

  “Well, he’s got good sense, I’ll say that,” the sheriff said to me. “And you’re one hundred percent sure you didn’t see anything even a little bit strange?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good enough for me. You stay close to home for now with your cat, and I’ll have my deputy do some extra patrolling on North Road. Call me if you have one whiff of trouble, okay?”

  “Will do,” I said.

  “Thanks, Sheriff,” Henry said, though he still looked worried. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Same to you,” said the sheriff.

  Fred walked the sheriff to his cruiser while Henry stayed back with me. He was working a nut up and down the threads of a bolt and studying me. “Is there anything we need to talk about?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “That lady the sheriff mentioned, Maud Booker, she came here. The last time you went down to check on Bessie. She claimed to be my grandmother and said she just wanted to see if I was okay. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  Henry nodded a little. “Do you want to talk about her now? Not that I could tell you much beyond the rumors. My father had women friends; she was one. Maud’s always kept to herself, been fierce about her land and privacy.”

  “Later, okay?” I said. I wanted to get to my cabin, make sure everything was all right.

  “At dinner, then,” he said. “Anything else?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t want you going up in the woods for a while,” he said sternly.

  “I know,” I answered, nodding like I agreed as I backed out the door.

  “I mean it, Zoë,” he called after me. “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear,” I hollered back. “Loud and clear.”

  “If you like, I’ll walk up there with you later, but I can’t go now. I need to keep working on these pieces for Lillian. All right?”

  “All right, Uncle Henry,” I called, backing down the drive. “Do what you need to do.”

  Mr. C’mere came out from under the crawlspace as the sheriff’s cruiser sped down the drive. We sat on the porch together until Fred drove off and Henry’s grinder started up again. I thanked him for protecting me the day before and gave him the last piece of Fred’s corned beef. Then I sneaked out of the yard and over the bridge, quiet and quick as I could.

  She called to him, but she didn’t wait for his short legs to catch up. She rushed headlong into the woods toward the cabin, her mind on other things.

  Today, at least she was kind.

  The day before, she’d snapped at him, trying to push him where he would not go. She’d lacked all sense of danger, while he’d caught its stink at once on the air. Couldn’t she smell it? The stench reminded him of the savage, brought back the old fears.

  After the boy’s mother died, the savage had seemed changed. The day after his son was born, he’d buried the woman’s body under the dogwood in the cabin’s yard, whispe
ring soft words. He tidied the silver house and grounds as the woman had, and tended to his son.

  The cat had been a kitten then. From time to time, as he hunted in the woods, he glimpsed the boy and his father. By autumn the boy had learned to walk, and by spring he was agile and quick. The cat would come upon him in the woods, naked and laughing, chasing squirrels and birds and sometimes the cat himself, calling kitty, kitty, kitty, delighting in everything, the savage not far behind. The boy learned to pee and squat away from the house, marking his territory. The cat marked it back. The boy learned to feed himself, stuffing his mouth with his chubby open hand and dropping half his meat on the ground for the cat.

  While the boy explored, the savage rebuilt the log house not far from the silver one. Quickly a porch appeared, then two simple chairs, windows, a door. The boy watched his father work in a kind of rapture, and in the evenings, when the man pointed to the stars and to the moon rising over the tree line, he gaped at his father in amazement, as though the savage had put them there.

  By the sixth winter, the savage began to leave the boy by himself more often, first locking him in the cabin alone for a few hours, then overnight. The boy cried bitterly when the man left him, and once he grabbed hold of his father’s leg. The savage shook him off and ran, and the boy’s short legs could not keep up.

  As the boy grew older, the savage stayed gone for a day or two at a time. When he returned he was loud and rough and unsteady on his feet. He came and went on the guttering two-wheeled machine that sent the cat flying but mesmerized the boy. The boy pestered his father, who taught him to drive it and let him circle the clearing on its back, until one day it spun out from under him and stopped.

  The savage spent most days in the woods with his other contraption, tinkering. He swilled from a jar as he worked, and by afternoon’s end he staggered back to the cabin and to the boy. Evenings, the savage sat in a porch chair with a knife and a piece of wood, paring off little shavings onto the ground, carving small objects. The boy watched him as if under a spell. In time, his father gave him the knife, showed him how to carve the objects himself.

  One full moon, when the cat had a rabbit cornered nearby, the savage filled jars from his contraption, screwed on the lids, and packed the jars in a box. As always, the boy’s eyes grew big when he saw his father leaving, though he’d learned not to beg. He stood and watched mutely as his father started out. The savage caught sight of the cat crouching in a blackberry bramble. He picked up a stone and hurled it at the cat’s head. The cat bolted before it fell.

  A few days later, the savage still gone, the boy started to wail. He wailed all night, and by morning the cat moved farther off to rest his ears. When the wailing stopped for a few hours at sunset, the cat crept up the trail. The boy lay sleeping in the dirt, curled into a tight ball. His face was swollen, streaked with dirt and misery.

  The cat killed a rabbit and dragged it back, dropping it silently at the boy’s side. He waited nearby. He thought the boy might be hungry. This time, though, the boy woke staring into the dead eyes and started up again. He clutched the stiff bunny and raged all the next day and the next.

  Stupid boy, the cat thought. Didn’t he know luck when he had it?

  The cat kept clear of the boy after that. Sometimes he caught glimpses of him running through the woods, but until the girl came, the cat wanted no part of savage fathers or the idiot sons who worshipped them, no part of humans at all.

  He watched the girl race up the path, thinking how much, today, she reminded him of the boy. By the time he arrived at the cabin, she was furious. Broken objects spilled out the door onto the porch and littered the yard. Others were stomped into the ground or crushed with large, muddy footprints.

  She took in the mess, ranting, angry tears spilling down her cheeks, then squatted to pick up the bent feathers, broken eggshells, the shards of colored glass.

  12

  Beyond the cabin, in woods I hadn’t explored, I found a rusty heap of dented metal, the remains of the old still. Pieces of it lay scattered in every direction with beer cans and cigarette butts all round.

  I picked up what I could find of my treasures, but the few feathers and eggshells I found were bent or smashed to bits and the little carved animals were gone. You didn’t have to be a detective to see that Hargrove and his cousin had lied up and down about what happened. They’d used the porch chairs to break the cabin windows, then tramped inside, pushed over the table and stools, stomped on the bedcovers, and left their muddy footprints everywhere. I couldn’t fix the windows, but I stuffed the tattered quilts in the holes to keep out the rain and swept up most of the mud and glass. I set the broken treasures in the sink and remade the bed, trying to restore some order, though it didn’t do much good. I kept pushing tears back. I wished whoever had shot at Hargrove had put that arrow straight through his heart.

  Every light was on in Henry’s house by the time Mr. C’mere and I got back. A big, fancy car I’d never seen gleamed in the drive. Mr. C sniffed the tires and stayed back while I scouted ahead. Before I got to the porch I heard voices coming from the unused room at the front of the house.

  Through the windows I saw that somebody had pulled the bedsheets off the furniture. It looked like a regular living room now, with all the lamps lighted and a fire burning in the fireplace. Bessie sat talking in the fireside armchair. Henry stood leaning against the mantel scowling at some faraway thing, and a man and a woman I didn’t know sat on the couch, the man lying on his back with his head in the woman’s lap. She was about Henry’s age, I guessed, blond and pretty, with an interested expression on her face. The man held a cigarette holder with no cigarette in it, and he kept looking up at the woman.

  In no mood for company, I slipped in the kitchen door to get the skinny from Fred. “I was just wondering when the ransom call would come,” he said, glancing up from glazing a ham. “Henry and I have been worried sick. We were giving you ten more minutes before we called the sheriff.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, taking a handful of carrot sticks from the colander.

  “Henry didn’t tell you?”

  “I haven’t talked to him yet. Tell me what?”

  “Mayor Peters is offering a five-thousand-dollar reward to know who hurt his son. He says he has a good idea who it was.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said, wishing it had been me.

  “It is,” Fred said, lifting an eyebrow. “The mayor says you and Hargrove had words earlier this week—”

  “I caught Hargrove going through my desk!”

  “And you went through his.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Hargrove’s been weird to me since the first day! He didn’t like me even before I got here! He stole my journal! He—”

  “All the more reason to be careful,” Fred interrupted.

  I crunched my carrot sticks, glad the steam pouring out of my ears was invisible. I’d been stupid to spend even half a second feeling sorry for Hargrove. He’d insulted me, stolen my property, and invaded my sacred place. I was beyond happy that somebody’d shot at him. That was just the start of what he should suffer for all he’d done.

  “Are you listening to me?” Fred asked.

  “Who’re those people in there?” I said, changing the subject.

  “Helen Cavanaugh and her husband, Franklin. Old, old friends of Henry’s from New York who came to surprise him. She’s a painter. And he’s some hotshot writer, and a lawyer besides.”

  I made a face, remembering Lillian and Sid, but Fred saw what I was thinking.

  “Not like that,” he said. “They’re good people, so you be nice. They’re here for Thanksgiving. They’ll stay in Henry’s room, and he’ll sleep out in the studio.”

  “He practically sleeps out there anyway,” I said.

  Fred gave me a dark look and slid the ham back in the oven. “Try to behave, will you? Go introduce yourself. They’ve been waiting on you.”

  I was in no mood to meet new pe
ople, but I couldn’t get upstairs without going by the front room.

  “Odysseus returns,” said the man, standing as I came into view. I’d seen people do this in the movies, but nobody had ever stood up for me. He held out his hand, and I went over and shook it. “Franklin Cavanaugh III. Pleased to make your wily and intrepid acquaintance.”

  “I’m Helen,” said the woman. “Just Helen. You should be flattered. Franklin doesn’t stand up for any reason if he can avoid it.”

  “‘Never stand when you can sit; never sit when you can lie down,’” Franklin said, stretching out beside her on the other two-thirds of the couch.

  “I like that,” Bessie said. “I’m going to write that down.”

  Franklin sucked on the end of his empty cigarette holder.

  “There’s no cigarette,” I said.

  “Dr. Royster forbids it,” Franklin whined, giving Henry a long-suffering look.

  “I say it too, but do you listen to me?” Helen said. She turned toward Henry. “Could we just move in, so Franklin will behave?”

  “I can’t seem to get anyone else around here to do as I ask,” Henry said sharply. “Why should Franklin be the exception?” He’d looked relieved when I came in the room, but suddenly he turned to me, all annoyance. “Nice of you to join us.”

  “We heard about those two boys,” Bessie said. “Fred and Henry were worried into next Tuesday, but I told them you were scrappy and quick and smarter than all of us put together. I’d have gone up there with you, except for the old women around here holding me back. What’d you find out?”

  “Not much,” I said, pleased she thought I was smart. “They made a big mess. Beer cans, cigarette butts—”

  “Torture me,” Franklin moaned.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “If you play bridge, I’ll forgive you.”