Page 17 of Call Off the Dark

“They would have loved it. That’s like happy hour for them.”

“Yeah, well, Wade would have eaten it on bruschetta himself.”

Agnes looked at Helen sharply. “What? You can’t eat raven. They carry disease and shit.”

“All animals can carry disease and shit. If the meat is still fresh, and you clean and cook it properly, ravens are as safe to eat as some pig or chicken that’s been crammed into a commercial breeding barn. I mean, probably.”

“Probably? You don’t even know how long it’d been dead.”

“I do. I saw it die.”

Agnes cringed. “What do you mean? You just came out here and it was lying on the ground, like twitching?”

“Yeah. It was almost dead. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Very creepy.”

Helen smiled softly at her young friend. A dead bird was nothing compared to a masked man with a knife, and Helen wondered, not for the first time, how Agnes would respond if she knew about Tyler’s murder. Agnes didn’t even know that before Wade there had been Tyler. She just knew that Helen’s heart had been broken by another man in Seattle. The first time Agnes had shown up at the farmhouse, Helen had wanted to make a friend who wouldn’t view her as a tragic widow, so she’d told a fuzzy variation of the truth, and then she’d never corrected the record. There was something nice about just talking about everything and anything other than the one thing she couldn’t stop thinking about.

Agnes wrinkled her nose. “Helen, seriously, you can’t just go around eating twitchy birds.”

“I have no desire to eat a raven.” Helen gestured at the grave. “Hence the burial. I’m just saying Wade feels we’re living the life of survivalists and should eat from the land.”

“Got it,” Agnes said slowly as she studied Helen. “So what was the jerky you gave me to eat last time I was here?”

Helen waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. That was just crow.” She kept a straight face and watched Agnes process her words.

“Crow? Seriously?” Agnes looked a little sick.

Helen waited a moment before she grinned. “No, not seriously. It was deer.”

Agnes burst out laughing. It was such a nice, boundless sound, and Helen wanted to laugh along with her. Laughing with someone was like sharing your heart with them. Helen felt her body loosen, and she thought she would begin to laugh too except it didn’t happen, not in the way it should have. Instead it stalled in her throat, and the sound she forced out was like a bad actor laughing in a bad movie. She went quiet, afraid Agnes would think she was being disingenuous.

It seemed Helen’s body no longer remembered how to laugh.

Chapter Eight

After Agnes left, Helen went back inside to work on the stew, the shadows of earlier pushed back a bit by the warmth of her friend’s visit.

As she sliced vegetables, first the carrots, then potatoes and winter squash, she tried to fill her head with happy thoughts of living in the forest with Wade. Two months ago, after dark, they had moved the rocking chairs from the front porch down to the yard so they could gaze at the Perseids meteor shower. It was her second year seeing it from the clear skies of this remote land, and it didn’t amaze her any less than the first time. Growing up in Seattle under the city lights, she’d barely been able to even see stars, let alone the trails of gold shooting across the galaxy.

Everything wasn’t bad out here.

She could do this.

After a while, she heard the rumble of Wade’s old Ford pickup truck. The sun was still above the trees, so Helen was surprised he was back already.

She went to the front door and opened it, leaned against the doorframe, and watched him climb out of the truck in his dirty work clothes. Even when Wade looked tired, as he did now, he still looked so solid. Not long after they met, Helen had taken him to Gas Works Park in Seattle. She’d been there several times before, but Wade had moved from his farm in central Oregon only a month earlier, and there were so many things he didn’t know about the city. While he’d marveled at the rust red remains and the gray towers of the former coal gasification plant, she had marveled at the size of his shoulders, and it was the first time since Tyler’s murder she’d felt anything close to safety. Every now and then, she still felt like that woman in Gas Works Park when she looked at him.

At the farmhouse’s front door, Wade greeted her with a little kiss, careful not to get her dirty.

Helen asked, “How was everything today?”

“I finished marking the trees.”

“Good. I’ll run you a bath.”

“Actually, no,” he said. “I need to head into town. I missed out on a good deer today. There’s some kind of issue with my firing pin.”