Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan
One
Before the incidents started, Alex’s father used to take him out into the woods on adventures. That’s what he called them, but Alex soon discovered that his father’s idea of adventure was sitting on a log or laying in the brush all day, staring through a pair of binoculars at birds. Still, his father, Frances, wasn’t nice to Alex very often, so whenever he took him out into the woods, Alex made sure to pay attention. He made sure to act interested and to do everything that his father said as soon as he said it and exactly the way he said to do it. After one adventure during which Alex had worked very hard to be very good, he was rewarded with his own pair of binoculars. They weren’t as big or as nice as the ones his father carried, but Alex enjoyed mimicking his movements, staring through them at hawks and falcons and owls. Those were the birds his father was most interested in. Raptors, he called them.
“They’re birds of prey,” his father told him. “Hunters. They have amazing eyesight. They can spot their target from way up high in the sky. They wait for just the right moment, and then they strike! They’re very intelligent birds.”
Alex wasn’t sure what made them intelligent, but he knew that intelligence was important to his father. It was a word he used a lot. He didn’t like people who weren’t intelligent, and Alex lived in fear of being deemed not intelligent by his father. That was why he carried around a notebook and pencil just like his father did. At six, he had just learned to read and write, so he couldn’t write lots of words in his notebook like his father did, but he drew pictures of the birds they watched.
One day they were out in the woods, standing beside a clearing, and his father spotted a large raptor in the sky. It was so high up, Alex couldn’t tell what kind of bird it was, but his dad assured him it was a hawk. “Watch this, son,” he told him.
He reached into a satchel he’d brought with him from their house and brought out a snake. Alex recoiled, falling backward over a branch on the ground. His head knocked against a nearby tree. “Ow,” he cried.
His father stood several feet away, frozen, with the wriggling snake in his hand, and glared at his son. “Get. Up!” he snarled.
Alex scrambled to his feet. He reached behind his head and felt something damp. His fingers came away bloodied. He dared not point this out to his father, who was waiting for him to get back into position, his face getting more and more red with fury with each second that passed.
“Sorry Dad,” Alex muttered, stepping up beside his father again. He looked out into the clearing, then up at the sky even though the movement sent a white-hot streak of pain down his neck. The hawk flew closer to the treetops.
“Watch,” his father said. He tossed the snake into the middle of the clearing. Immediately, it began writhing and wriggling away in the opposite direction. Suddenly the hawk was there, only a few feet away, its thick talons pointed downward like spears, its gloriously large wings spread wide. It snatched the squirming snake from the grass and flew effortlessly back into the sky.
Alex’s father watched with wonder as the bird receded from view.
Alex felt a warm stickiness slide down the back of his neck. “Dad,” he said quietly. “I think I need a bandage.”
He touched the back of his head again and this time, when he brought it forward to show his father, his entire palm was covered in blood. His father looked down at him, his look of awe transforming into one of disgust. For a long moment, he stared down at Alex, his lip curled in a sneer. Then he shook his head, huffed, and walked away. Momentarily dumbfounded, Alex watched him go. He had already covered quite a bit of ground when he turned and spat the words back at his son, but Alex heard them as clearly as if he’d shouted them into his ear.
“Stupid boy.”
Two
A cold, wet nose nudged Josie’s arm. Then came the mournful whine. When she didn’t respond to her Boston Terrier’s efforts to get her out of bed, he jumped up onto the covers and began to sniff her ears and the nape of her neck. “Trout,” she groaned, rolling over to face him.