ripped off the monster’s arm, and there was rejoicing in Heorot. Somewhere in the swamps his mother wept and bided her time. Something was coming, the coyotes had meant to tell her. You are not safe, not here.
Clara shut her eyes, imagining running free with them across the countryside, across miles and miles. Shedding her human skin. The fur and wildness underneath. She was as sleek as silence, a she-wolf whose hearing took in what was happening from far away. She heard the skeletons of abandoned barns caving in the wind, the brittle creak of empty grain bins, the lisping of the corn leaves in a dry time before the harvest. She heard the voices Logan carried home with him, the talk inside the houses after sundown. The folk were afraid. They were afraid and didn’t know how to live in a world that was changing all around them. There were coyotes out in the dark running free, come from the woods, from a mountain where the giant lived unseen.
A teenager had murdered the town’s hero, then shot himself. There was no mystery to solve, nothing more to fear. Why should it bother her? Something flickered at the edge of her vision, like heat lightning. She had told Sheriff Steve what she had seen, and that was enough, but what had she seen? She had seen his shoes, dirty Converse, the fraying hem of his coat. She heard the gun, saw him cross the graveyard, heading for the waiting corn where his body was later found. Her mind ran over and over the same ground, the images in branded lightning flashes when she shut her eyes. I’m not ready to bury you like the rest of them. I’m not ready to begin the long forgetting.
And why had the sheriff come back here? Despite what she told Nora, Clara knew he had come here for her and not her husband. She shouldn’t have any reason to be frightened of him, even if he really was the kind of man you didn’t want to cross, as Nora had said. Clara had kept the notes, but was that so wrong? Why that presence down in the basement, that overriding sense of fear?
Some of the riddles she had told her students from The Book of Exeter had no answer or the answer had been lost to time.
I give myself far-wandering longing towards my Wolf.
When it is wet weather and I sat weeping,
Then the brisk warrior embraced me with his arms;
That was bliss to me, but it was also pain.
Wolf, my wolf, my longings toward thee
Have brought me sickness, thy seldom coming
The mourning mood, not want of meat
Hearest thou? Eadwaccer, the whelp of us both,
Carries a wolf to the wood.
The author had been someone named Cynewulf, a monk scholars speculated lived in Northumbria in the ninth century. Did he invent some of the riddles or, like the Brothers Grimm, gather them from the Kinder-folk? In another riddle he mused:
I saw a strange sight: a wolf held tight by a lamb—
The lamb lay down and seized the belly of the wolf.
While I stood and stared, I saw a great glory:
Two wolves standing and troubling a third;
They had four feet; they saw with seven eyes!
The two riddles wove together, not answering but asking more questions. A love child that was a wolf carried into the woods? A lamb that destroys a monster?
THE NEXT MORNING, CLARA picked up the phone. She needed a couple of weeks, time enough to collect her thoughts, to get the house ready for the baby. Time enough that she could still back out if necessary. If the man she was about to call wasn’t in his office anymore, then it wasn’t meant to be. Please be there, she thought. She dialed the number he had left her. “Hello, yes. Could I please speak with Mr. Sheuffler? Tell him Clara Warren is calling about his offer.”
LITTLE WOLVES
Seth cried out, “Dad, look! A coyote!”
His son had rapped on the passenger side window and pointed. It was a late afternoon in March when the sun’s rays warmed the frozen earth just enough that a silvery mist spiraled from the marshes. Grizz had followed his hand and there it was. At first he thought it was a small dog, but then he noticed the lean snout and long, foxlike ears.
Grizz slammed on the brakes, jerking Seth forward in his seat so hard he nearly hit the windshield before his belt snapped him back. The truck slid along