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He gripped the knife, his thumb on the button that would snap it open and ready to use.
“She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes,” the woman sang as she turned the other direction and began to toddle away.
He loosened his grip on the knife but didn’t let go. At the same time, he let out the breath he’d been holding, sending an airy whistle through the darkness.
The old woman stopped in her tracks as he reflexively gripped the knife again.
She might have been in her eighties, old enough that she’d seen quite a few things over the years. She’d probably seen him all those years ago, but she wouldn’t recognize him now. No one would.
Was she smart enough not to turn around, not to look back? Sometimes just a glance can change everything.
A second after seeming to consider her options, she continued in the direction she’d been going. She moved quickly now.
For a moment, he considered whether he should give chase, but she hadn’t seen him. She hadn’t seen a thing, which meant that if he did kill her, it would be someone who hadn’t done anything to deserve their demise.
No, he’d let her go for now.
He still had a goal in mind, and he didn’t want to miss the opportunity to explore Hazel’s back room, that space that had set in motion the person he’d become.
The place that had made him what he was.
CHAPTER
12
SOMEONE HAD BEEN in my place. I couldn’t pinpoint any specific disruption, but I knew something was off.
It was past the middle of the night, close to four AM, that witching hour when further sleep would probably only make me more tired.
Some mystery thing had awakened me and told me to look around. More kids with rocks? My attacker? It had been a while since someone had sprayed graffiti on the front of the building, but anything was possible.
I’d gotten home at ten, fresh from dinner with Sonny. The non-date. It sure felt like a date. I’d probably smiled to myself a little until I fell asleep.
I hadn’t then, but now I flipped the museum light on and looked around.
I was so used to the mounts that their shadows, their realistic eyes that alternately fascinated and repelled so many people, didn’t register with me. I tried to shift my perspective so I might catch any disruption. It wasn’t a stretch for my imagination to take flight with the owl’s feathers and hear the sounds the creatures had made when alive. The hoot and screech, the call of the eagle, the howls of the coyotes, the growls and screams of the mountain lions. The sounds were the backdrop of my life, my childhood, the lifeblood of Black Vulture. I’d know the sights and sounds even if Wilmot hadn’t been a taxidermist.
A small old brass chandelier hung in the middle of the ceiling, and I knew which way the shadows were supposed to aim.
I examined everything.
My eyes ultimately landed on a desert box turtle. It hadn’t been hunted but had been found dead on the side of the road—perhaps like the subjects of the artists who did rogue taxidermy. I was only ten or so, but remembered the day an old woman had brought it in, tears streaming down her face.
“Can you do anything?” she’d cried.
“Do you want me to take care of it for you?” Wilmot had asked. He’d taken her hands in his as she’d cried. “It’s dead, my dear. Perhaps I could give it an appropriate burial.”
“No. Can you,” she’d peered over his shoulder as he stood in the museum’s doorway, “just do what you do?”
“Taxidermy. That’s what I do.”
Wilmot had been proud of his work. He hadn’t shied away from any of the haters, and he’d never apologized.
“Okay. Yes. I don’t care how much it costs. I’ll come pick it up from you.”
“All right.”
Wilmot usually took a fifty percent down payment on his work, but he let this woman go without asking for money. Though until that very moment, when I’d been rifling through the past for something off, I hadn’t thought about the woman and her real tears for a long time, at this moment I remembered it well. Wilmot had closed the door when she left and turned to see me watching.
