Day 7

Chapter 14

Hugo had been in love with Mandy since they had attended McLoughlin Valley High together. She was a year older, and had had flowing brown hair. She looked much older now, and tired. She had her arm linked with the Duck as they slowly walked toward Dr. Bonanza and Hugo. She walked with delicate steps and an unhurried air. She had attended Hedlund at the same time as Hugo, and then had even taken some classes together. They had grown close, but not as close as Hugo would have wanted. She met The Duck in an upper level Physics lab, while Hugo had only taken the lecture, a regret that haunted him still, though he really understood that it hadn’t been about the lab.
“Hello, Hue,” Mandy said, touching him on the shoulder. She always called him Hue. He always let her speak first; she always took the initiative. She also always called him Hue. He wondered how she spelled it. He liked to think, somewhat uncharacteristically romantically, that she spelled it the same way he did.
“Hello, Mandy,” he said. He nodded to the Duck, “Duck.”
“Hello, Mandy, hello, Duck,” said Dr. Bonanza. “Sit down, let us buy you some beers. Are you drinking piss, because Hugo is.” Dr. Bonanza cackled as Shirley walked up.
“Hi, you two,” she said. “What can I get you?”
They ordered their drinks and Shirley went off to make them.
“What’s new, Hue?” Shirley said. She sat next to Hugo, and the Duck sat on her left.
The Duck leaned forward, looking at Dr. Bonanza’s empty plate. “Do they have snacks,” he said. “ I love snacks. I’m hungry. Do you want some snacks?” he asked Mandy. He went off to the hors d’oeuvre without waiting for her response. Mandy waited for Hugo to respond to her question and Dr. Bonanza smiled to himself. He knew that Hugo had been infatuated with Mandy for many, many years.
“Not a whole lot,” he said, a little harsher than he had meant.
“I read your book,” she said.
“Really,” he said, incredulous. Allowed himself a small smile, then said, “I didn’t even know that there were three copies in McLoughlin.”
Dr. Bonanza pounced, “There ain’t. She borrowed my copy.” Bonanza cackled again.
Shirley brought the round of drinks and asked Mandy how work had been.
“Oh fine,” replied Mandy. She made a dismissive gesture with her right hand, then placed it on the bar. “Drunks and wife beaters, all of them.” Mandy had become a trial lawyer, a Public Defendant for Cascade County. Shirley left to wait on a couple around the other side of the bar.
“Most of those guys with lunch pails riding their son’s bicycles to work were my doing,” Mandy said, conspiratorially to Hugo and Dr. Bonanza.
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” Bonanza said.
“I liked your book, Hue,” she said, placing a hand on Hugo’s arm.
The Duck returned with two plates of food. Mandy turned when he arrived, taking her hand away. Hugo didn’t know what to say, so he waited for someone else to speak.
“I just love meatballs,” the Duck said, taking his stool. The didn’t have actual forks or spoons for the hors d’oeuvre so Mandy and the Duck had to eat with toothpicks. On the side, they had potato skins with cheese and bacon.
All four drank and ate in silence for a minute, then Dr. Bonanza said, “Have you two heard anything about these deer killings?” It seemed that he and Hugo had made an unspoken pact that they wouldn’t reveal the livestock killings to anyone just yet.
Mandy looked at them both with wide eyes. “Heard of them,” she said. “Why, we found one of them.”
Hugo looked at her, incredulous again. “Oh my yes,” said the Duck between bites. “We were up, going for a hike, you know. Well…Mandy, you tell it. You are such a better story teller than I.”
Mandy smiled and continued for the Duck, “As the Duck said, we went for a hike. I had the day off and it hadn’t started raining yet, so I said, Why don’t we go down to the refuge and see what we can see? So, we packed up the car and drove down there. We drove around, looking in the ponds to see what birds hadn’t yet migrated when we came to that trail. You know the one, Hue. It goes right up to the National Forest boundary, then loops back.” Hugo knew the trail. He had showed it to Mandy the first semester that he attended Hedlund. Hugo nodded and grunted assent, but resented that Mandy had taken the Duck up there.
The trail wandered among the ponds, then climbed a little ridge before dropping down and returning to the ponds. You wouldn’t find it in Best Hikes in the West, but the ridge overlooked the ponds and you could see all the way to the visitor’s center. The whole trail was about seven miles total.
“Anyway, we took a lunch, and some wine,” she continued. “I like to sit up on the ridge and look down at all the goings on in the refuge, you know,” said the Duck. “It’s just nice.”
“Well, we had had our lunch, and were getting ready to go down when the wind must have changed or something, because there came a rather disgusting smell. The Duck said that something must have died nearby.”
Here, the Duck took over the telling, “I said to Mandy, ‘Mandy, you stay here and I’ll go have a look. So, I carefully dropped off the ridge, to the south, you know, and looked to see what was down there. I hadn’t gone thirty yards when there it was. A dead deer. It looked pretty old, but not too old, if you know what I mean. The hind leg had been removed, and the stomach and guts had all fallen out.” The Duck made a wry face, crinkling his nose. He leaned into the group and said quietly, “It didn’t have any brain.”
Hugo leaned back and thought about what the Duck had said. The Duck looked a little put out that he hadn’t gotten a bigger reaction from either Dr. Bonanza or Hugo. He shrugged and went on, “I called Mandy down to have a look. I poked it a bit while I waited. She thought that it was pretty disgusting, so we left and told the rangers on the way out.” He popped another meatball into his mouth and drank his drink. Hugo hadn’t caught the name of it.
“I asked the ranger what did it, and he shrugged, saying that he wouldn’t be able to tell until he had had a look. I said that it must have been a mountain lion. Buy why would it have taken out the brain?”
Hugo remembered something about migrating raptors that would kill birds as they traveled, only eating the brains, then moving on. But these weren’t passerines, sparrows and juncos, these were good sized mammals. Hugo tried to picture where the kills had been, thinking that maybe something had been migrating. He shook his head thinking how silly that sounded, even to him, and he could come up with farfetched theories when the need arose.
“Do you think that it’s still up there?” Hugo asked. He turned to Bonanza. “If it is, I think that we should go take a look.”
Mandy looked at him. “Why do you want to take a look at a dead deer?” she asked.
Hugo fidgeted a bit, looking at Dr. Bonanza. He decided that he would let them in on what he and Bonanza had been thinking about since the morning. “Well,” he began. “It’s just that Dr. Bonanza here had a sheep killed on his place, out by the refuge.” He didn’t mention the goat on Olaf’s place, nor did he say anything about the cougar up by Two Rabbit Lake.
“Really?” Mandy said.
Bonanza nodded his head, finishing his beer and motioning for another. “It sounds like maybe it were just the same with you deer as it was with my sheep.”
They all fell silent as Shirley delivered more drinks.
“Was the brain missing from your sheep?” She asked quietly.
Bonanza nodded.
“We can take my car,” she said. “We can leave first thing in the morning.”
“Let’s make it more around 9:30,” Dr. Bonanza said. “We got chores to do.”


Chapter 15

Hugo woke up in the middle of the night again. He looked out the windows, half expecting to see Mrs. McGregor out on the front porch with anther cat (or possibly the same one).
When he was satisfied that no one had been creeping around outside, he opened a beer and sat down in his reading chair by the fire that had almost gone out. He threw another log on the fire, but didn’t really believe that it would catch.
He enjoyed the beer and about three chapters of Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn before he nodded off and slept until the sun came up.
***
When he awoke, cold and stiff from sleeping in the chair, he glanced out the front window. As he tipped the empty beer bottle up to catch the last drop, he saw Mrs. McGregor working in her yard. She looked down the street, to the west, then turned her gaze on Hugo’s house. He didn’t think that she would be able to see him, but he waved and pulled up the afghan as he stepped toward the kitchen. She made a movement, but he couldn’t tell if it had been in response to him or not.
He looked in the cupboard and found food. Same for the refrigerator. Then he had a shower, the first in three days. It felt good to get cleaned up. He shaved after his shower, then went to the front room to wait for Dr. Bonanza. Mrs. McGregor still worked in her yard. Hugo read a bit in the Hillerman book, but then put it down.
A knock at the door startled him. He looked out the window, but didn’t see Dr. Bonanza’s truck. He got up and walked to the door. Out of the glass, he saw just the top of Mrs. McGregor’s curly, gray hair.
He opened the door, expecting to see another cat. Her arms hung at her sides. Hugo raised his eyebrows and said, “Hello, Mrs.…” She pushed her way into his house past him. He moved aside, quite taken aback. He had had her over for tea once or twice, but they were not as familiar as this.
“Mrs. McGregor?” Hugo asked.
She glanced in the front room, then the kitchen and finally his bedroom. She shook her head, stopping in the hall, close to the center of the house.
“You don’t know what you are getting into,” She said.
Hugo looked at her.
“I know what’s going on. It happened about forty years ago, just like this.” She looked around, as thought someone else might be listening. “Let the dead bury the dead.” She said. She strode to the door, still standing partially open. “You get to work on your next book,” she admonished, shaking her finger at him. She walked out the door, shutting it behind herself.
Hugo stood open-mouthed, not knowing what to say.
A knock came from the door again. He grabbed for the handle and roughly pulled open. “What was that all about…” he began.
“What was what all about de Naranhas,” Dr. Bonanza said as he came in. “You got any beer in here, I am powerful thirsty this morning.”
Hugo motioned down the hall toward the kitchen, but Bonanza had already opened the refrigerator. Hugo stuck his head out the door looking for Mrs. McGregor. She had disappeared.
When he made it to the kitchen, Dr. Bonanza stood near the sink drinking down one of the lagers that Hugo had purchased the night before. Hugo opened the refrigerator and pulled out one for himself, feeling that he had earned it.
“Did you see Mrs. McGregor?” Hugo asked.
“When? Just now?” Bonanza replied. “I didn’t see no one on your whole street. What? Does everyone sleep late on Saturdays around here?”
Hugo felt the panic start to rise in him again, but he held it in check. He and Bonanza swallowed the last of their beers and went out the front to Bonanza’s pick-up.
“I gotta’ stop by the store on the way out to Olaf’s place,” Dr. Bonanza said as they climbed in the truck. Hugo looked for Mrs. McGregor, but she must have gone inside, or around the back. He scrutinized the front window of her house to see if she were watching them, but couldn’t see anyone.