Once in a while it draws in a big guy.” His face was tight and clear-eyed as he scanned the surrounding country.
“I saw Becky on the snowmobile trail,” said Harry.
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s been following me. Peeking in windows at the lodge.”
234 / CHUCK LOGAN
Emery nodded. “She can be like that. Sneaky.”
Harry refilled the Thermos cup and offered it to Emery. “’Fraid it’s just coffee,” he said.
Emery didn’t comment. He sipped the cup. “Good,” he said. They smoked in silence for a moment.
Harry gestured toward the gigantic open pit that broke the back of the ridge. “Sure wrecks the nature walk.”
“Yeah,” said Emery, “My dad said he took a coupla battleships out of that hole in the ground.” He flicked the coal from his cigarette and field stripped the paper. Then he kneaded the remains between his fingers, raised his hand, sniffed it, and let the wind carry the brown strings off his fingers. He was different up here, his energy straighter.
“You were a cop in Duluth, weren’t you?” said Harry.
Emery’s tobacco eyes passed slowly over Harry’s face. “Let me ask the questions.” He handed the cup back. “Fact is, not a good idea to ask too many questions of people you meet up here in these woods. You might not like the answers you get.” said Emery.
He left like smoke, without a sound.
Harry sat back down with his rifle firmly across his knees and drank another cup of coffee and smoked another cigarette. The only sound was the click click click of the antlers swaying over his head.
“He gone?” Becky called out.
“Got me,” said Harry. All he saw was trees and sky.
“He has this way of just showing up that can give you the creeps.”
Her voice came from over the lip of the drop. By holding on to the tree roots, he could lean out and see her six feet below, sitting on a concave shelf of rock. She stood up and dusted off the seat of her jeans. “Got any food?” she asked.
“Sandwich.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Ham and cheese.”
She climbed up, took his hand, and swung up beside him. She stood with her hands thrust deep into the baggy pockets HUNTER’S MOON / 235
of the field jacket. Her running shoes were tied together and thrown around her neck. When she pulled off her sweaty wool cap, he smelled an outdoors broth of body odor and unwashed clothing.
She squatted on the thick tree root and devoured the sandwich and washed it down with coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked.
“I’ve learned all I’m going to learn in that school. I’d rather watch all the grown-ups. That’s real school.”
“So, you learn anything lately?”
“Uh-huh. You were out with Mom,” she accused with food in her mouth.
“There’s food on your upper lip,” said Harry.
She wiped at her face with her sleeve. “You fuck her again?” she asked.
“Watch your mouth.”
She grinned at him. “Bet you did, fuck her. If I was home I could tell cause she gets this dreamy full-like glaze on her eyes. Sorta like a python I saw on National Geographic after it slowly squeezed a baby pig to death and swallowed it. Women are supposed to glow, aren’t they? Not Mom. She just swells up a little. Men are Mom’s food of choice.”
Harry ignored her. After an interval, he asked, “Emery follow you up here?”
“Yeah. He’s never far away.”
“He watching us now?”
“Probably.” She hugged herself. “Maybe he wants to see if you’ll throw me off this cliff.”
Her nimble eyes tingled with secrets and budding beauty under a layer of dirt and Harry cautioned himself, mindful her IQ was way ahead of her teenage emotions.
“Somebody left something pinned to my door last night,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I read it.”
“See who left it?”
“Dumbass Don Karson. Who else.”
“So, tell me about Tip Kidwell.”
236 / CHUCK LOGAN
She yawned with cosmic teenage boredom. “Kidwell was a jerk.
Mom always marries jerks.”
Again, the sensation of eyes plucking at him. Somebody was watching them. Harry could feel the crosshairs of a high-powered scope crawl on his neck.
“Why’s Emery trying to catch you?”
“Figures I know something.”
“Do you know something?”
“Yup,” she grinned nervously. “He could figure it out if he wasn’t drinking.” She hugged herself and shivered. “It’s all so obvious.”
“So just go tell him, or tell me.”
“Can’t. Not yet. I’ll let him catch me when the time’s right, like I let you catch me by the lodge,” she announced. Boldness flared in her eyes. Too much. She didn’t know how to adjust the flame. For the first time, she resembled her mother.
“Let me catch you,” said Harry.
“Uh-huh. It was a test, to see what you’d do. You could have murdered me and stuck my body in the bottom of the lake.”
“Like I ‘murdered’ your brother?”
She looked away. “You didn’t kill Chris on purpose.”
“Then why’d you do this to my face?”
“At the time I didn’t know. But I’ve thought it all through and now I know.”
“You saw us that morning. You swept the tracks so your dad wouldn’t…”
“Uh-huh. Mom’s got enough trouble without that.”
Harry seized her jacket and pulled her forward. “For Chrissake, Becky, quit screwing around—”
“Watch it. Dad could be out there, but Mitch is there for sure watching you through a rifle scope,” she cautioned as her eyes roved confidently toward the treeline. Harry sat back and opened his hands to show they were empty. She smiled. “Sorry, I have to do this my way and I have to trust you more.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
HUNTER’S MOON / 237
She shrugged. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Like what?”
“What was your mom like?”
“She taught me to read and to draw. She died when I was young.”
“What about your dad?”
Harry took a breath and it just came out; because he was sitting on a mountaintop talking to a kid, he figured it was all right. “He was an officer in the army—he was in Europe and Korea and Vietnam. Now he’s a writer.”
“Poor Harry,” said Becky as she stood up and dusted damp bark from the seat of
