Say That Again (30 page)

“It’s a wonder you make any money doing this. Last time you said that, it was two months before you even mailed the darn bill.”

“Not my doing. Jo Middleton was the receptionist when Doc Samuels was there. She does things at her own pace.” Which meant glacial, but Hunter didn’t say it out loud. Jo may have been a slow worker, but she had a rapport with the clientele that stretched back to the mid ‘70s. “Besides, we have a deal. I don’t tell her how to file the papers; she doesn’t tell me how to do a C-section on a Bulldog.”

They stopped at the back of Hunter’s truck. He hooked his fingers in the latch of the tailgate, only to find it wasn’t completely closed. He must’ve forgotten to slam it hard enough last time he shut it. He set his case in the back, but kept the vials with him. The feed sacks had shifted to the side and a coil of rope was strewn atop boxes and bins. Eventually, he ought to straighten this mess out, but there always seemed to be something more pressing to do.

A smile creased Tommy’s leathered face into deep folds. “Thanks a bunch, Doc.”

They clasped hands, then Hunter looked around the barnyard for his trusty companion. He thrust his tongue between his lips and let out a shrill whistle. “Echo! Come on, boy. Time to go home.”

A dozen goats raced from inside the barn out into an adjacent pen and started bleating. Hunter waited a few more seconds before whistling again. He took a quick look in the cab of the truck as he set the vials down, just to make sure the dog wasn’t in there, although he remembered Echo loping along behind him when they went into the main barn and sniffing at the mineral blocks stacked next to a round bale of hay.

“Maybe he’s around to the side?” Tommy posed. “Big ol’ manure pile over there. You know dogs.”

There was no sign of Echo hanging around the manure pile, or the feeding troughs, or the chicken coop. Where could that dog have gone? He was barely ever more than thirty feet from Hunter. He’d never wandered off before.

Tommy began calling out Echo’s name, too. Pretty soon, Tommy’s wife, Beth, had joined them in scouring the property.

Hunter was standing by the dock that reached out into the old swimming hole when his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Jenn calling. She rarely phoned him during work hours, restricting herself to texts that he could answer at his convenience. Must be important. He pushed the button.

“Hunter?” The pause that followed was enough to make him sink to his haunches and brace his elbows on his knees. He could hear her breathing, rapid and frantic. “Oh my God. I don’t know where to start.”

“Honey, what is it?”

“This
can’t
be happening. It can’t. It just can’t.”

“What are you talking about? Is Maura okay? I know her basketball game doesn’t start for another hour, but —”

“It’s not Maura!”

“Hannah?” Cold sweat broke out on his forehead and the center of his chest. Unable to move, he stared at the frozen pond, fixing his gaze on a bubble of air trapped beneath the thin layer of ice. The question, when it finally came out, sounded airy and hopeless, even to his own ears. “What happened?”

A grievous sob sounded on the other end. And then, “She’s gone.”

Shock compressed Hunter’s ribs. “Gone?”

“Missing, Hunter. She’s missing. We can’t find her anywhere.”

That morning, while he was waiting for his coffee to finish brewing, he’d cracked open her door and seen her sleeping form bunched under the covers. Then he went downstairs, where he’d found Echo waiting by the back door. Usually, the dog would follow him around the house in the mornings from the time he stepped out of the shower. Then, when he let him out and went to his truck, Echo had come running with what appeared to be one of Hannah’s school papers in his mouth. The dog had never chewed on or stolen anything from any of them. He’d slid the paper under the front seat to keep it safely out of Echo’s reach, so he could return it to Hannah later, but the whole sequence of events was quite out of character for Echo. There was a lot about this day that was anything but normal. How could both Hannah and Echo go missing in one day?

Hunter stood and started back toward his truck. “You checked with my parents, right?”

“They were the first people I called. They just got back in town yesterday and they haven’t seen her.”

“Did you check in all the barns? The garage? My parents’ outbuildings?”

“Yes, of course we did.”

“The Crooked Tree? I wouldn’t put it past her to climb up too high and get stuck.”

“Yes! I told you. We looked
everywhere
. Faustine is still sitting on top of her nightstand. If Hannah had wandered off, she would’ve taken Faustine with her. Hunter, what if ... what if someone
took
Hannah?”

“Honey, please don’t think the worst. Remember, Hannah has a history of just drifting away.” He didn’t want to ask the next question, but he knew he had to. The last time he’d put it off had very nearly cost Hannah her life. “Did you call the sheriff?”

“I did,” she bit the words off. Hunter sensed she was going to lash out at him again, but he expected that. Jenn was very emotional. Her girls meant the world to her. But stupid questions had to be asked if he was going to get up to speed on this.

“So they’re already looking for her? They’ve notified surrounding law enforcement?”

“Sure, I guess. But right now Brad’s across the road, talking to Nate Bowden, the new sheriff.”

“At Heck’s, you mean? Why? Did you tell them Hannah might have gone over there to paint?”

“No, Hunter. They’re taking Heck in for questioning.”

Hunter stopped at the back of the Appletons’ house, where Beth was standing on the back porch, putting a knit cap and gloves on. Beside her was her oldest grandson and one of her daughters. He held up a finger to let her know he’d talk to her in a minute, then turned away, lowering his voice. “What? Why?”

“Why do you think, Hunter? Maybe those rumors Maura was talking about ... maybe there’s a grain of truth to them?”

No, she was wrong. It couldn’t be. Not Heck. “I’m on my way home, Jenn.”

After putting his phone away, Hunter turned to Beth. “If you could keep looking for Echo for me ...?”

Nodding, Beth stepped closer. “Is everything all right at home?”

“Family emergency. Sorry, I have to go.”

“We’ll call you. I’m sure your dog just —”

Hunter didn’t hear the rest of it. His mind was miles ahead of him already.

Maybe by the time he got home, they’d have found Hannah asleep behind the straw bales in the horse barn. He had to hope.

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H
er arms around my neck. Her nose buried in my fur. The sweetest things I’ve ever known.

A dog without his person is only half a dog. If that.

When I fled from the Grunwalds and was on my own, those endless days and weeks when I sat at the shelter, all that time at Carol and Ed’s when I was small, after my siblings left — I had felt nothing then but alone and empty, even as I tried to convince myself of how independent I was. It embittered me to people. Made me reluctant to trust them.

The day Mario hit me with the skillet and left me for dead on a country road,
that
was the worst day of my life. And the luckiest. Because it brought Hannah into my life and opened my world to love. I belonged to the McHugh family. I was a piece of their whole. Without me, they were incomplete.

How could I make Hannah understand that it was also true for her? I knew she was trying to run away because she saw herself as the cause of recent problems, but she had to have faith that things would work out. Hannah’s parents loved her. Not more or less than Maura, but differently. Like you can love cookies just as much as you love bacon.

Hannah’s challenges were also her gifts. Her parents were smart enough to know that. Heck had also recognized that gift and taught her how to capture it, shape it, and share it with others. Which was probably why Hannah didn’t want to go home. Because they had taken away her friend. A friend she could see just down the road. A friend who had shown her more purpose and opened her eyes to more wonders than anyone else in her whole life.

I could relate.

Yet there was a lot that I still didn’t understand, like why they had forbidden her from going to Heck’s in the first place. We dogs may not always comprehend the complexities of human relationships, but we see what is so plain to us, like the way someone hangs their head in shame; a quiver of fear in their hands; the bitter drawl of loathing in their voices; the way their eyes light up when a loved one walks in the room; the sad longing when they leave. When it came to how the McHughs perceived Heck, I saw a spectrum, a disparity so grave that it left me bewildered.

Hannah, of course, loved him. It was a love stemming from admiration, from a connection of like souls, and from gratitude. Hunter desperately wanted to trust him, but his wife and oldest daughter’s contrasting sentiments left him confused in loyalty and doubting his own intuition.

If there’s one thing we dogs know, it’s always trust your gut. Always. Objective analysis is highly overrated. Reasoning is better left to lawyers and scientists. And sometimes Border Collies, but don’t get me started on that.

Anyway, I digress. Jenn was acting out of fear. Guilt, too, although she didn’t realize it. She wanted to be there for Hannah, but she also wanted to have a life of her own. Maura, on the other hand, was boiling with jealousy. Ever since Hannah had been born, much of her parents’ attention had revolved around her little sister. Lately, it was even worse. And most recently, Hannah was developing a talent far beyond anyone’s expectations. Heck showered her with attention through his patient instruction. Her parents praised every creation. At first they pinned the crayon drawings to the refrigerator with magnets, then they taped them to the kitchen wall, and now they were framing her watercolors and hanging them in the hallway. Meanwhile, Maura — hardworking, athletic, almost-never-been-in-trouble Maura — was brushed aside unwittingly.

What was she to do but turn the tables on Heck and rob her attention-mongering little sister of all that was important and special to her? Everything but me, that is. Then again, Maura
had
tried to cast blame on me for Franklin’s disappearance.

Right now, I was all that Hannah had. I couldn’t convince her to go home, but I could stand by her, make sure she was safe and loved, if only by me, a dog.

A shiver rippled through Hannah’s tiny frame. Her shoes and socks were wet from jumping in the creek. Her pants all the way up to her knees were soaked, too. In the time since she had climbed down from the tree and huddled next to me, the sun had vanished, its shining face replaced by low, brooding clouds. A damp wind gained force, plying frigid fingers beneath my thick fur. I curled up in Hannah’s lap as she sat cross-legged, doing my best to keep her warm. But it wasn’t enough. Her shivers grew more violent. We needed to get moving. Find shelter.

I escaped the comforting circle of her arms and whirled around. Her cheeks were ruddy and her eyes red from cold. Pulling her knees in tight, she rested her chin on them, lip quivering.

She looked so ... lost. Probably because she was.

Hopping backward a few steps, I bowed low and barked. Anything to entice her to move about, get the blood flowing through her body. She turned her head sideways to lay her cheek on her arm. Head low, butt high, I growled playfully, my nub wagging.

She laughed. Not a belly-deep, unfettered laugh, but a small one. Her cheeks bunched in a weak smile as she slowly got to her feet. I bounced farther away, leading her on. She moved stiffly the first few strides, but soon she was loping alongside me.

For miles we walked in silence, our only objective to keep going. Often, I looked around me and inhaled deeply, trying to memorize the landscape by sight and smell. But one tree looks much like another, even to a male dog. Which gave me the idea eventually — hey, better late than never — to mark as many as I could. A habit which annoyed Hannah greatly.

“Stop it,” she said. “How can you pee
that
much?”

She didn’t understand. It was better than leaving a trail of bread crumbs that birds could swoop down and eat. So I lagged behind on occasion, peeing at more random intervals, spraying only a few drops on the trunks so I could make my urine last as long as possible. My tank was emptying. All this walking and peeing was making me thirsty.

As for smells, the wind was making that hard. I couldn’t pick up any scents, save for those close to the ground. Other animals had passed here, but what kind I had no way of knowing. On the many calls I had gone with Hunter, I had seen plenty of cattle, goats, and sheep, as well as a few horses and llamas. But these smells were none of those.

The lane dumped out into an overgrown pasture, crowded with scrub brush. We followed the tire tracks some more, until suddenly they weren’t tracks anymore. We stood on what was probably a deer path, the way ahead marked by barely bent stems of growth and an ever-thickening forest. When had we left the path?

We circled right, crossed our own path, veered left, backtracked when we were confronted with a fallen tree too big for either of us to get over, then climbed a hill to go around it and rejoined the deer path.

Chin raised, Hannah gazed at the hills ahead. Then she looked at the hills behind us. I was sure they had grown bigger. The trees were also more densely packed, and thicker, and taller.

As sure as if she had been here before, Hannah tromped on.

We had no idea where we were going, but it didn’t matter. We were together.

––––––––

—o00o—

––––––––

W
e were lost.

As in, no sign of civilization, whatsoever. Just us two dummies, bumbling along through the wilderness. Pretending we knew what we were doing when we were just hoping to get lucky.

Talk about stupid.

But I wasn’t about to tell Hannah that. No matter what, from a dog’s perspective, the human is always right — even when they aren’t. It’s some sort of pact that we’re sworn from birth to uphold. I don’t remember putting my paw print on the dotted line, but who am I to question the Code of Canine Loyalty?