I went back to the kitchen and returned a short time later with a rare steak, sausage, bacon, four scrambled eggs, and a little sliver of toast. I slid it in front of him with little fanfare. His eyebrows rose. “What’s this?”
“Breakfast. I thought I should serve you something; otherwise, people in here might think we were having an unpleasant conversation. I would just hate that.”
“Think about what I said, Mo.”
I turned on my heel, then whirled back toward Eli. “You’re right, you know. What you told Cooper the other night? You’re not him. You’re not the man he is.”
Eli had the sense to look chagrined as I stalked away. I told Lynnette that Eli and his tip were all hers. It was the first time she smiled at me. I was pretty sure it would be the last.
17
Scary Stories by the Campfire
BY APRIL, MISSISSIPPI WOULD have been green and unbearably muggy. Daffodils would have sprung up in random splashes of yellow in the tiny patch of grass I called a yard. I would be wearing shorts and sandals and getting ready for the Reynoldses’ annual Easter weekend barbecue.
Here, late winter bled into what passed for spring. One morning, I noticed an icicle dripping on my front porch. It was as if the earth had woken up and flexed, releasing all of this energy in the form of rushing water. Tree limbs, no longer burdened by a season’s worth of ice, snapped up and sprang into power lines. There were a few short outages but none lasting so long that people bothered to turn on their generators.
The people of Grundy became exuberant in the “heat wave.” My neighbors flooded back into town. The grocery shelves at the Glacier were swept clean of everything. It was as if people had survived for weeks on gruel all winter and suddenly couldn’t wait to glut themselves on Cap’n Crunch and Cheez-Its.
Everything seemed to burst into bloom at once, which was familiar. Back home, it seemed the foggy, chilled days of February had barely set in before dogwoods and redbuds exploded to life among barely greened trees. Here, there were more exotic colors and textures. Delicate yellow poppies and flamboyant purple irises grew wild by the side of the road.
Nate’s worries about a flagging tourism base were for naught. Somehow the story about the missing hikers being dragged into the woods, never to be found, had granted Grundy a touch of mystery and danger for morbid curiosity seekers. Alan spent more time protecting people from themselves than searching for the wolf. Outsiders went into the woods with illegal, powerful weapons, hoping to bring back the trophy of a lifetime. Hikers came into the saloon, demanding stories about the “monster wolf” and directions to the attack site.
I finally understood the locals’ hostility toward tourists.
With the influx of strange, gun-toting people in the woods, Cooper couldn’t run long distances anymore. He had to limit himself to the area around the house, patrolling the edge of the property for errant rabbits and driving Oscar crazy with his speed. Our poor little wiener dog’s legs couldn’t keep pace, so he resorted to flinging himself at Cooper’s haunches to slow him down. The only person he interacted with at all was me, and lately, that was becoming sort of one-sided. I would talk. He would listen.
And then, one afternoon, Cooper walked into the saloon’s kitchen and put his hand over my eyes. Unfortunately, he did this as I was sliding a meat loaf out of the oven and ended up having to catch the scalding-hot pan when I bobbled it.
Thank goodness for werewolf healing abilities.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said, tugging at my arm and pulling my apron over my head. When I wouldn’t budge, Cooper slung me over his shoulder and hauled me out the employee exit. “Come on.”
“Cooper, what are you doing?”
“I’ve already made the arrangements with Evie. The lunch crowd is thinning out. You’ve got the next few days off. Oscar’s going to be bunking at their place. We are footloose and fancy-free.”
“Oh, God, they’re going to let Buzz cook again.” I winced as he loaded me into the truck, foreseeing pots crusted with Buzz’s “chili surprise.” The surprise was pulverized spaghetti noodles, which was practically a crime against humanity. And chili. “It will take me a week to undo the damage . . .”
“Mo.”
“Letting it go,” I said, snapping my seatbelt and settling into pleasant fantasies of bed-and-breakfasts and spas equipped with double massage tables.
Unfortunately, Cooper’s idea of a surprise was whisking me away to . . . a nature preserve.
“Camping?” I said, incredulous as we pulled into the parking lot of the Bardwell Camping Area. “Your surprise is camping?”
He gave me a halfhearted smile and reached behind the seat of the truck to hold up a heavy green canvas trail pack. I made a noise embarrassingly close to a whine. I wasn’t much of a camper. For one thing, I’d had enough of roughing it as a kid the summer my parents decided to follow the Dead and live out of the family’s aforementioned VW van. For another, I enjoyed creature comforts, such as not being eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of pigeons.
He jostled my arm as he dragged gear out of the back of the truck. “Come on, you’re always talking about how much you love living so close to nature.”
“Yes, close to nature. Not actually out in it. I mean, is this really a good idea considering everything that’s going on? The attacks, the crazy gun-toting ‘birdwatchers,’ the camera crews? You haven’t strayed so much as a mile away from the house in weeks, and all of a sudden, it’s time for a Super-Fun Death March through the woods?”
His face relaxed under the tension of all that forced energy. It sagged, seeming craggy and drawn. “There’s some stuff I need to tell you. And I can’t do it at home. I want to do this in a place where we can just pick up and leave it behind.”
My eyes narrowed. Was he finally going to talk about his past? His family? Why the stories about the hikers bothered him so much? Or was he just going to give me some sort of talk about how we shouldn’t see each other anymore and Samson was currently moving his stuff out of the house? Either way, we couldn’t keep going the way we were. I held out my hand. “Give me the damn backpack.”
He kissed the top of my head and strapped it onto my back. I couldn’t see a tent or a cooler on Cooper’s back and prayed that meant we were staying in some secret hunting cabin he had hidden out in the woods. I was proven wrong when Cooper led me on a hike along a barely beaten trail, away from a sign marking the entrance to Bardwell.
“Aren’t the campgrounds this way?” I asked, pointing toward the nice, clean, civilized-looking RV park. “With, you know, the electrical hookups and nice, clean picnic area . . . and the grills . . . the showers . . . and the . . . showers.”
“Well, I’m more of a roughing-it guy. You’ll love it. You know, sleeping under the stars. And I did bring a sleeping bag. Just for you . . . because I’m so considerate.” He took in my scowl. “I’m a dead man.’
“Yep.” I said, pronouncing the last letter with a distinct pop as we pushed through the brush.
I had to admit, it was a scenic death march. Everything was so clear, as if even the limited filters of life in town had been lifted. The light passed down through the trees, green and gold. Cooper, who seemed nervous that he’d overstepped the “Mo patience line,” kept up a steady stream of chatter. Funny stories about camping with his grandfather when he was just a pup. Stories about running with Samson in their early days of werewolfdom, most of which ended with Samson waking up naked on the front porch of a ranger station. Old local legends. The weather. When he started giving me the scientific names of the trees, I let him off the hook and chattered back.
We hiked longer than I’d ever chosen to walk in my entire life. We finally reached a small clearing, flanked by even more trees. The ground was hard-packed and smooth. There was a small stone circle in the middle filled with the black remains of burnt branches.
“This campsite seems pretty well used for being so ‘out of the way.’ Do you bring all of your girlfriends here?” I narrowed my eyes in mock suspicion as I shrugged out of the backpack.
“Only the ones who know about the werewolf thing,” he said as he stacked firewood into the stone circle. “Which would be you and you only.”
I dropped the bag. “You’ve never told any of your girlfriends about the wolf thing?”
He blinked a few times, as if I’d just posed an incredibly stupid question. “I haven’t really had that many girlfriends, and none I’ve stayed with long enough to tell about the wolf thing.”
“That’s sort of huge. How has this not come up before?”
“You never asked.”
I thought back to all of the conversations we’d had. “Oh, my . . . you’re right. As a girlfriend, I suck.”
“Well, you get bonus points for prying a bear trap off my leg. That can’t be discounted.”
“Ah, thank God, a retroactive points system. It’s really the only way I’ll win.”
It took surprisingly little time to set up camp. Apparently, experiences with my parents, which included hours spent searching outdoor concert venues for campsites that had good feng shui, had colored my perception of camping. With the thick double sleeping bag, a tent wasn’t necessary. As I unfurled it a safe distance from the fire, Cooper set out the rapidly disintegrating toilet paper and a little spade without comment. I chose not to think about that until it was absolutely necessary.
“What now?” I asked, with the fire blazing comfortably near my bare feet.
“Now I’m going to hunt,” he said.
My jaw dropped, but I felt immediately stupid for not realizing that Cooper would have to run down our dinner. What else were we going to eat? He grinned and rooted around in his backpack, producing packages of hot dogs and buns.
“Funny,” I grunted, slapping at his shoulder. Even though I knew something was brewing, it was sort of nice to have glimpses of the old Cooper back. It was as if he struggled with the decision to have this big “talk” more than the dread of my reaction. Now that he’d made his decision, he could relax.
“Keep up that attitude, and there will be no s’mores for you,” he said as I wandered to the edge of the clearing to find some long, thin sticks fit for roasting. I wiped them down as best I could and held my hand out imperiously for a hot dog. “I can do the cooking,” Cooper said, somewhat indignant now.
“Men always think they should be in charge of outdoor cooking.” I took the hot-dog package from him and skewered a few. “But the Y chromosome has been programmed with the ‘the blacker my food is, the more manly I am’ gene. I like my processed meats to be somewhere in the unnatural-nitrate-red range. Ergo I will handle the cooking, thank you.”
Cooper was quiet for a long moment.
“You’re trying to come up with some sort of ‘processed meats’ double entendre, aren’t you?” I accused him as I held the sticks over the fire.
“Yeah, you didn’t leave me a lot to work with,” he grumbled.
We ate an indecent number of hot dogs and s’mores, careful to hang our leftovers and trash in a tree several yards away from our sleeping bag. As the temperatures dropped into the cool range, I changed into thermals and thick wool socks, something Cooper didn’t have to bother with.
“So, what do you think?” Cooper asked, pulling me against his knees and kissing my neck.
“Camping is just like being at home, only much, much more work.”
He grumped, “Well, it’s not easy for me, either, you know. I’m used to sitting around a campfire with a bunch of overdressed, out-of-shape outsiders, swilling imported beer and pretending to laugh at their jokes.”