“Oh, that. Back in the glory days of our house, before we lived here, I guess the owners had a walkway down to the lake and a little garden thing here. There are benches closer to the water, and a statue.”
“Can we see it?” I asked, fascinated by the idea of a hidden, overgrown world.
“We’re here. There’s one of the benches.” Isabel led me a few feet closer to the pond and kicked a concrete bench with her boot. It was streaked with thin green moss and the occasional flattened bloom of orange lichen, and I might not have noticed it without Isabel’s direction. Once I knew where to look, however, it was easy to see what the shape of the sitting area had been—there was another bench a few feet away, and a small statue of a woman with her hands brought up to her mouth as if with wonder, her face pointed toward the lake. More flower bulbs, their shoots bright green and rubbery-looking, poked up around the statue’s base and the benches, and I saw a few more crocuses in the patchy snow beyond. Beside me, Isabel scuffed her foot through the leaves. “And look, down here. This is stone under here. Like a patio or something, I guess. I found it last year.”
I kicked at the leaves like she did, and sure enough, my toe scuffed stone. Our true purpose momentarily forgotten, I scraped at the leaves, uncovering a wet, dirty patch of ground. “Isabel, this isn’t just stone. Look. It’s a…a…” I couldn’t think of what to call the swirling pattern of stones.
“Mosaic,” Isabel finished, looking down at the complicated circles at her feet.
I knelt and scraped a few of the stones bare with a stick. They were mostly natural colored, but there were a few chips of brilliant blue or red tiles in there as well. I uncovered more of the mosaic, revealing a swirling pattern with a smiling, archaic-looking sun in the middle. It made me feel odd, this shining face hidden under matted rotting leaves. “Sam would love this,” I said.
“Where is he?” Isabel asked.
“Checking out the woods behind Beck’s house.
He should’ve come with us.” I could already picture the curve of his eyebrows, close over his eyes, as he saw the mosaic and the statue for the first time. This was the sort of thing Sam lived for.
An object beneath the bench before me caught my attention, however, pulling me back to the real world. A slender, dull white…bone. I reached out and picked it up, looking at the gnaw marks on it. As I did, I realized there were more scattered around the bench, half buried in the leaves. Pushed partway underneath the bench was a glass bowl, stained and chipped, but obviously no antique. It took me only half a moment to realize what it was.
I stood up and faced Isabel. “You’ve been feeding them, haven’t you?”
Isabel glowered at me, looking petulant, and didn’t answer.
I retrieved the bowl and shook out the two leaves that lay curled in the bottom of it. “What have you been feeding them?”
“Babies,” Isabel said.
I gave her a look.
“Meat. I’m not an idiot. And only when it was really cold. For all I know, the stupid raccoons have been eating it.” She sounded defiant—angry, almost. I had been planning to goad her about her hidden compassion, but the raw edge to her voice made me stop.
Instead I said, “Or carnivorous deer. Looking to add some protein to their diet.”
Isabel smiled a small smile; it always looked a bit more like a smirk. “I thought Bigfoot, perhaps.”
We both jumped as a high-pitched cry, like an eerie laugh, came from the lake, followed by a splash.
“Christ,” Isabel said, her hand on her stomach.
I took a deep breath. “A loon. We scared it.”
“Wildlife is overrated. Anyway, I don’t think Olivia’s near here if we scared the loon. I think a wolf changing into a girl would be a little louder than we’re being.”
I had to admit her theory made sense. And the fact was that I still wasn’t sure how we were going to handle Olivia’s sudden return to Mercy Falls, so a tiny part of me was relieved.
“So we can go get coffee now?”
“Yeah,” I replied, but I moved across the hidden patio toward the lake. Once you knew the mosaic was underneath your feet, it was easy to feel how unforgiving the surface was; how unlike the natural forest floor. I walked over to stand by the statue of the woman and pressed my fingers to my lips when I saw the view. It wasn’t until after I’d taken in the still lake framed by naked trees and the black-headed loon floating on its surface that I realized I was unconsciously mimicking the statue’s look of eternal wonder. “Have you seen this?”
Isabel joined me. “Nature,” she said dismissively.
“Buy the postcard. Let’s go.”
But my gaze had drifted downward to the forest floor. My heart sped. “Isabel,” I whispered, frozen.
On the other side of the statue, a wolf was lying in the leaves, its gray pelt nearly the same color as the dead foliage. I could just see the edge of its black nose and the curve of one of its ears rising out of the leaves.
“It’s dead,” Isabel said, not bothering to whisper.
“Look, there’s a leaf sitting on it. It’s been there awhile.”
My heart was still thumping; I had to remind myself that Olivia had become a white wolf, not gray. And that Sam was a boy, safely trapped in his human body. This wolf couldn’t be either of them.
But it could be Beck. Olivia and Sam were the only ones that mattered to me, but Beck would matter to Sam. He was a gray wolf.
Please don’t be Beck.
Swallowing, I knelt next to it while Isabel stood beside me and shuffled in the leaves. Carefully plucking the leaf that covered part of the wolf’s face, I felt the coarse fur brush the side of my hand, even through my gloves. I watched the banded gray, black, and white hairs keep moving for a second after I lifted my palm. Then I gently opened the half-lidded eye on the side closest to me. A dull gray eye, very unwolflike, stared at some place far beyond me. Not Beck’s eye.
Relieved, I rocked back on my heels and looked at Isabel.
At the same time that I said, “I wonder who it was,” Isabel said, “I wonder what killed it.”
I ran my hands over the length of its body—the wolf lay on its side, front legs crossed, back legs crossed, tail spread out behind it like a flag at halfmast.
I bit my lip, then said, “I don’t see any blood.”
“Turn it over,” Isabel suggested.
Gently, I took the wolf’s legs and flipped it onto its other side; the body was only a little stiff—despite the leaf that had dropped onto its face, the wolf hadn’t been dead long. I winced in anticipation of a gruesome discovery. But there was no visible injury on the other side, either.
“Maybe it was old age,” I said. My friend Rachel had had a dog when we first met: a grizzled old golden retriever with a muzzle painted snowy white by age.
“The wolf doesn’t look old,” Isabel said.
“Sam said that the wolves die after about fifteen years of not shifting back and forth,” I said. “Maybe that’s what happened.”
I lifted the wolf’s muzzle to see if I could spot any telltale gray or white hairs on it. I heard Isabel’s disgusted noise before I saw the reason for it. Dried red blood stained the wolf’s muzzle—I thought it might be from a previous kill, until I realized that the side of the wolf’s jaw that had been resting on the ground was caked with blood, too. It was the wolf’s blood.
I swallowed again, feeling a little sick. I didn’t really want Isabel thinking I was queasy, though, so I said, “Hit by a car and came here?”
Isabel made a noise in the back of her throat, either disgust or contempt. “No. Look at the nose.”
She was right; there were twin trails of blood coming from the wolf’s nostrils, running down to join the old smear across the lips.
I couldn’t seem to stop looking at it. If Isabel hadn’t been there, I don’t know how long I would’ve crouched there, its muzzle in my hands, looking at this wolf—this person—who had died with his own blood crusted on his face.