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“It’s not always empty,” I reminded them.
“Yeah, you rented my dream house to strangers last year.” Maddie wasn’t done being bitter, it seemed.
“You built your dream house and never moved into it. Some dream.” I could play this game, too. Maddie had been the one who was supposed to live in the big house, but she met Connor mid-build, and ended up moving straight into his house. I ended up in the guest house back then, and just hadn’t seen a reason to leave it. “I’ve got plans to rent it again, remember? That girl Mike hired from New York to work at the Inn.”
“Why don’t you rent this girl the guest house and live in the big house yourself?” she asked. Her curls danced around her head, and I felt a fierce love for my sister when I glanced at her.
“I don’t need the space,” I said. That was the truth. I had no idea what I’d do with myself in the big house on the property my sister had given me when I’d moved up here. The two bedroom guest house that sat off to one side of it was plenty of space for me. I was alone, and had no plans to change that. And one man didn’t need four bedrooms and a chef’s kitchen. It wasn’t like I was entertaining on a weekly basis. “Plus I get more money renting the big house than I would this little house.”
“What do you know about this girl?” Connor asked. The fire danced off his red beard and I thought—not for the first time—that he looked fierce and pretty badass. Besides the fact that he seemed to know a lot about various ways to kidnap, torture, and kill people—thanks to the thrillers he was famous for writing—I wouldn’t want to meet him in a fight. I could hold my own, but there was something about Connor that told me he could too. It made me glad he was with my sister. He could take care of her. Not that she needed it. She was pretty fierce on her own.
“Some woman from New York,” I answered. “Didn’t get a whole lot beyond the deposit and the credit check. Set it up by email.” Pretty much the way I liked it. I didn’t have to talk to her, and if I was lucky, I’d never even see her after handing off the key. I wasn’t anti-social exactly, but people were not my thing. I loved my sister, and I didn’t mind her friends and fiancé. But other people? Kind of unnecessary in my mind. I had bad luck with people.
“Huh, okay.” Maddie shrugged. “Maybe when she gets here I’ll come over and say hi.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “She’s supposed to get in tomorrow.”
“Good.” Maddie leaned forward and stared into the dying coals in the pit, then surprised me by chucking her fist into my shoulder. “So. Walking me down the aisle, right? To some song besides ‘The Final Countdown.’ And there will be no mist or eerie lighting, thankyouverymuch.” She glared at Connor with this last part and he shrugged and grinned.
“It was just an idea.” He said and then finished his beer.
As Connor put the empty bottle on the table, an eerie shrill squealing sound tore through the fabric of the cooling night, a high-pitched squall that sounded like a cross between grinding machinery gears and a maniacal whistle. Everyone around the dying fire lifted their heads, listening.
“What was that?” Maddie asked, looking around, her voice wary.
Connor glanced at me, and his gaze told me he had a pretty good idea. I shook my head. The squall was something I hadn’t heard in the years I’d been here. “Not sure,” Connor said slowly. “Ranger George did say something about a mountain lion last week. A couple deer killed locally that fit the profile.”
Maddie’s mouth dropped open a bit and she glanced nervously out into the darkness. “Mountain lion?”
There were few real predators in our mountains—part of the reason we’d been allowed to roam freely up here as kids, and certainly a big part of the reason village kids still wandered the hillsides together, blissfully exploring the semi-wild without much to fear. There were black bears and the occasional bobcat, and plenty of deer. But mountain lions were different. The Sierra Nevada was part of their range, definitely, but Connor explained that Ranger George said he suspected the cat that had been around lately might have been driven to a new area by the fires that had reduced their usual range in recent years.
I spent a fair amount of time on my own hiking, and had never seen any evidence of a mountain lion. But the cry we’d just heard had me wondering.
“Nothing to worry about,” Connor assured my sister. “You don’t hike alone, and if you did run into it, you know enough not to run away, right?”
“I do now,” Maddie said, sounding very doubtful. “But I think I’ve got a long night of Googling ahead of me. It’s getting late. Better head home.” Maddie stepped near and hugged me, and I held my breath. Maybe I was superstitious—maybe I was just insane. There was a little part of me that believed people I loved tended to die. But my goal with Maddie was to keep her so close I could stop anything from happening to her. I hadn’t been able to do that with Jess. But maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough. Or maybe I hadn’t loved her enough.
Once they’d gone, I stared into the dying coals in the fire pit for a long time. At first I just sat and listened, wondering if there really was a big cat prowling the hills just on the other side of the little creek below, but soon I just watched the way the coals glowed and dimmed. If I worked hard enough, I could see Jess’s face in the smoldering fire, the outline of her jaw, the gleam of fun that was always in her eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut. If I worked just a little bit harder, I could almost feel her beside me. We’d had issues, that was certain. And maybe, had Jess lived, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. But I missed the possibility...the feeling that life wasn’t always predictable, wasn’t always dark and sad.
But I knew it was pointless. The work I should be doing was to forget. I needed to forget her completely, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t seem to let go of her or of the guilt that plagued me whenever I thought of my dead wife.
Chapter 2
HARPER
The pine trees got bigger the higher up the side of the mountain I drove, and memories came rushing back like embarrassing one-night stands showing up at your favorite bar. I hadn’t planned to come back here. Like, ever. But a lot of things in my life turned out to be completely different from what I’d planned.
At the top of the winding, hours-long road, my head had started to pound to match my heart, and when the first sign for Kings Grove appeared at the side of the two-lane highway, I pulled over just past it into a dusty half-moon turnout. My hands gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled and desperate, and I forced them to relax, forced my body to unclench. Deep breaths. Yoga breaths.
I used to pay a lot of money to learn to relax—now was the time to figure out if it had all been a waste. In truth, the only yoga pose I ever really mastered was corpse pose at the end of class. The rest of it just felt like awkward scrabbling and uncoordinated half-balancing in hopes I looked a little bit like the lithe strong teacher at the front of my class. “Accept,” she always said. “Acknowledge and accept. Be curious, but don’t judge.”
If only.
My life wasn’t about acceptance. Maybe some of us just weren’t built that way.
My parents hadn’t accepted each other, neither had really ever accepted me. It probably wasn’t a surprise that acceptance wasn’t really my thing.
Now I was having trouble accepting that I was back in Kings Grove, aka the middle of literally nowhere. The only reason I’d come back to the place I was born was absolute, pure desperation. And my dad essentially blackmailing me into it. Maybe “blackmail” was a strong word. But Dad was not a guy I was used to turning to for help, and the only reason I found myself driving toward the little town he’d never left was because he’d made it so easy.
