owl. They were watching him. Taking pictures. Why?
If they didn’t have guns, he could fight them all. He was bigger, stronger than both men, the one who had driven him there in the truck, and the other one who asked him questions and then put him in the cage.
That man was in the room next door, he could smell him, his scent both strange and familiar. Like pine trees only . . . too much. Too . . . everything. The smell made Lucas picture pine trees as tall as the sky and as wide as a mountain. Bright blinding green with pine cones huge like boulders. Lucas wasn’t sure what to think about that. His smell was just very.
But suddenly, underneath that, there was something else . . . he leaned his head back, closing his eyes and trying to pick up the scent beneath all the other ones. It was faint, very faint but he caught it and held on. A faraway wildflower field after a rainstorm. Clean. Earthy.
A woman.
Her smell . . . soothed him.
Confused him.
Her scent made the whispers stir up inside. They weren’t whispers, that was the wrong word, but the only one he knew to use. The feelings he got when everything else disappeared, except for his instincts. They were always quiet, but sometimes he understood them, and sometimes he did not.
He pulled in another breath. The scent of her was new and old, something that was not known and already a part of him. Deep down. Deep, deep down. Something came alive like a spark, rising up to greet its match, a singing in his blood that was like the wind that showed up on a cold winter morning telling the forest that springtime was in the close faraway.
Startled, he opened his eyes, letting the feeling settle, until his breath evened again.
Now there was another man in the room next to the cage Lucas was in. Lucas could smell him through the thing high on the wall that blew air out of it. Hot. Cold, he thought. Both. What was the name of that thing? He couldn’t remember. But the scents of the men were stronger than the lighter scent of the woman and he lost his grasp on it. She faded away.
After a time, he smelled the man getting closer and was unsurprised when he showed up, using a key in the door with bars and sliding it open, coming into the cage with a smile.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” the man said. He had hair the color of the big rocks that sat on the river’s edge—light gray and dark silver all speckled together. “If you’ll follow me this way, we can talk.”
Lucas followed the man, turning his head to see the woman. But the door of the room she was in was closed. The man brought Lucas to another room with a table and two chairs. “Please sit,” the man said, and when Lucas did, the man sat too. “My name is Mark Gallagher. I’m an agent with the Montana Department of Justice.” He smiled again. His eyes are nice, Lucas thought. But he didn’t trust himself to see niceness. Or meanness. Lucas knew well that people lied and pretended. “I know you’ve been mirandized and that the sheriff already asked you some questions, but I have a few more if you don’t mind.”
Lucas nodded slowly, not wanting to answer questions, but understanding that they weren’t asking, they were telling.
“Good. Will you tell me again how you knew the victim, Isaac Driscoll?”
“He traded things with me. Things I needed but couldn’t get.”
“Okay. And why couldn’t you get the things you needed?”
He didn’t tell the man why. He wasn’t sure he should. Didn’t know who to trust, and who not to trust. Not yet. “I didn’t want to leave the forest. I wanted to stay there. And I . . . didn’t have a car.”
“I see. Okay.” But he could tell by the man’s face that he didn’t see. Did he know Lucas was lying?
“Is there anything else you can tell me about your relationship? Anything you knew about him that we should know?”
“No.” He tried not to picture the blood when he answered, the puddle that had grown and grown moving across the floor.
“Okay. And you live in a house on Isaac Driscoll’s property?”
“Yes.”
“And you traded things with him in exchange for rent?”
Rent? Lucas wasn’t sure what that meant, but he knew the man—the agent—expected it was true so he