“Eric?” I say.
He snaps out of it. “No. Right. Yeah. Good surprise. Okay.” He hunkers beside me, and the puppy launches itself at him, going crazy now. It jumps on him and licks and whines like it’d been abandoned for weeks and the only familiar face it’s ever known has finally returned. Then it piddles. Right on his boots. And he sighs. Just gives a deep sigh.
I smile up at him. “Not the first time it’s done that, I’m guessing.”
“Nope.” He rises, and the puppy goes even crazier, as if about to be abandoned again. Another sigh, and he scoops it up under one arm and takes it to the kitchen, returning with a rag.
“It’s a she,” he says. “I did some research. With this breed, females are a better choice. They’re mastiffs, which means they’re stubborn, and a male would get bigger than you someday. I figured that a war of wills wouldn’t go well—for you or the dog.”
He cleans the mess as the puppy returns to me, satisfied Dalton isn’t leaving.
He continues, “The ideal breed would have been a hound for tracking. But hounds aren’t northern dogs. She is. They’re supposed to have a good nose, and they are used for search and rescue. She’ll be big, too, which is good for protection. So a Newfoundland isn’t a perfect fit, but hell, no dog’s going to be perfect for what we want, and you like them.… You do like them, right?”
I grin my answer. Then I tug him down to the floor, and we play with the puppy until it’s time to return to real life.
THIRTEEN
When Dalton got me a puppy, he obviously didn’t expect us to be launching a major case. There’s no way I can have a puppy at my heels as I investigate Nicole’s kidnapping. Petra promptly volunteers for dog-sitting duty, day or night. She only works part-time at the general store. Otherwise, she’s parlayed her skills as a comic book artist into one of those local “cottage industries.” I don’t know how much time she’ll get for drawing with a puppy around, but she insists.
By the time we leave the dog with Petra, I need to interview Nicole. We walk over, and Dalton stands guard out front. Nicole is upstairs, so I wait in the living room and try not to see Beth in her former home. She’s still here. She’s in the faint smell of the hospital-strength antiseptic. In a lopsided dream catcher on the front window. In the laugh I hear as she tells me about making the dream catcher, her one and only attempt to be artsy.
She’s there too in a still-open novel on the coffee table, where she must have been reading on the futon that used to be Abbygail’s bed. Reading and maybe thinking of Abbygail.
I look at this room, and I think of our first lunch here, after Anders set us up on a “date,” convincing the shy local doctor to ask the new girl to lunch. I think of the friendship that came of that lunch, quiet and warm and easy, so welcome after the roller coaster with Diana. I think of where it began … and how it ended.
When Dalton dropped me at the door, he asked if I was okay coming in here. I shrugged it off. And I was honest in that—standing outside, I felt nothing, my mind consumed with the task of interviewing Nicole.
Then I came into this room, and the very smell of it brought those memories crashing back, the reminder that we haven’t been able to clear her house, haven’t quite dealt with what she did. Like I haven’t dealt with what she did to me. Pick that up, put it in the closet, shut the door, and face the situation at hand.
* * *
Last year Nicole Chavez snuck out of Rockton on a warm fall evening, just before dusk. There was a nearby berry patch not quite tapped out, and she wanted berries. That’s it. The patch wasn’t more than a hundred paces from the town limit, and it was still light, and she was close enough to shout if she happened upon a bear or a hostile. As rebellions go, it was no worse than me as a child, petting the neighbor’s dog through the fence.
Nicole snuck from town to gather berries. She found the bush, crouched to pick, and …
And that’s all she remembers. She woke in that cave, the back of her head throbbing, her brain groggy from the drugs that kept her sedated when the blow wore off.
She woke in that hole. And that’s where she stayed.
For over a year.
Fifteen months.
Sixty-three weeks.
Four hundred and forty days.
I knew she must have been taken straight to that cave, yet I kept telling myself that isn’t necessarily true. She could have been held captive elsewhere and moved to the cave. Maybe she tried to escape and was relocated. Maybe she was only in the hole for a month, two tops.
It’s not as if I imagine her happily shacked up in a cabin with a settler. Her body tells another story. So why does this hit so hard, the confirmation that she’s been in that hole the entire time? Because I cannot wrap my head around it. Some primal part of my brain runs gibbering from the thought. If it happened to me, I would go mad. I would literally go mad. I’d claw the flesh from my body, like a wild beast in a trap. Rend my flesh. Rip out my hair. Batter myself bloody on those rocks. My brain could not handle it. This is a test I would fail, and that terrifies me.
But this isn’t about me. It is about the woman who did survive.
Nicole and I sit in the living room. The blinds are drawn. They’re blackout blinds to help in summer when the sun shines past midnight. She’s curled up in a chair. A pair of sunglasses rests by her side—the darkest anyone could find—and as we talk, she periodically puts them on, against the light seeping around the blinds. But then she’ll take them off again as she tries to adjust.