“Bowling squirrels?” Chase had guessed.

  “Thirty pounders, with masked faces and bushy, striped tails,” she’d told him, laughing. A city boy, he’d been raised in the Boise suburbs, while she’d grown up in rural Kansas.

  “Oh, Chase,” she murmured now. “You’ve got to be okay. Please be okay.”

  A clatter from outside the window caught her attention. She sat up to investigate, pulling aside the curtain. A young woman riding a bay horse was making her way up the gravel driveway, leading another saddled horse, this one a paint.

  Weird. As far as she knew, Chase had never had any interest in horses. When the young woman dismounted, Sam slid out of bed and dashed down the stairs just in time to answer her knock on the door.

  The surprise on the face of the other woman probably mirrored her own. She was attractive, with long chestnut hair gathered into a ponytail. The lack of lines anywhere on her face indicated youth.

  “Hi,” the stranger said. “I’m Bethany, from down the road. Is Chase home?”

  “I’m Sam. Are you a neighbor?” Sam wasn’t sure how she felt about Chase having such a pretty young woman living so close.

  The girl’s face relaxed into a smile. “I guess, although I live about a mile away. Is he here?”

  “Not right now,” Sam said. Was it dangerous to let her know that Chase might not be home for some time? Would that be an invitation for robbery or vandalism? “Was he expecting you?”

  The paint horse rubbed his head against the deck post, jingling the rings attached to his bit, and Bethany glanced back at him before returning her gaze to Sam.

  “We had a schedule set up,” she said. “I called him to confirm, but I didn’t get an answer.”

  “I think his cell phone’s not working.” As far as Sam knew, Chase’s cell was either still missing or in the hands of the FBI. “What was on the schedule?”

  Bethany twisted sideways to flick a hand at the horses. “Riding lessons.”

  “Really?” Although Chase knew she’d owned a horse in her Kansas youth, Sam had never heard him express a desire to ride.

  “Yeah.” Bethany chuckled. “He didn’t want to make a fool out of himself when he took this woman named Summer to a guest ranch in Canada in a few months. I guess it wouldn’t be too romantic for your hero to fall off his horse, would it?”

  Chase was planning to take her to a ranch in Canada? That would be a dream trip for her, a sweet reminder of her happiest times growing up.

  The pain from the lump that formed in Sam’s throat must have shown on her face, because Bethany’s smile abruptly faded. “Oh shit.” She took a step back from the doorway. “I mean, shoot. You didn’t know about Summer.”

  She raised a hand to flick a strand of hair from her forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. Shit.” She backed up toward the horses.

  “I’m Summer,” Sam told her. “Sam is a nickname I use sometimes.”

  Bethany stopped, her cheeks flaming now. “Then I guess I should be doubly sorry. I let the cat out of the bag, right? This was supposed to be a big surprise. Please don’t tell Chase.”

  It was Sam’s turn to chuckle. “You thought I was ‘the other woman’, didn’t you? And I was afraid you might be her.”

  “Me?” the girl squeaked. “Chase is a handsome dude, but I think he’s probably as old as”—Bethany’s words faded for a second as she considered who she was talking to, then she finally concluded with—“my dad.”

  After an uncomfortable silence, the girl said, “I guess we’ll have to reschedule. Tell Chase to call me, would you?”

  “Come in for a minute, Bethany.” Sam opened the door.

  Then, when they were both seated at Chase’s kitchen table, Sam told the girl about the avalanche.

  “Omigod, everyone heard about that. Chase was in that? Is he gonna be okay?”

  Sam sniffed and wiped a tear away from her eye before it could escape down her cheek. “We hope so. But he might not be back for a while.”

  “I’ll tell the other neighbors. We’ll keep an eye on this place.”

  “Thanks.” Sam accompanied her back to the porch, and while Bethany untied the bay, Sam untied the paint, but before handing the reins back to Bethany, she buried her face in the horse’s neck. He was a gelding, like her old horse, Comanche. His winter fur, still long and thick, smelled slightly sweet in the cold air, like fresh grass.

  “I had a pinto like this when I was about your age, in Kansas,” she told the girl. “I had some of the best times of my life riding Comanche.”

  “I think Chase must know that.” Bethany swung into the saddle on her bay mare. “Tell him I said to get well soon. Bye for now, Summer-Sam.”

  Tears rolled freely down Sam’s face as she watched Bethany ride away with the two horses. Why did it hurt so much to learn about Chase’s wonderful plans?

  Because it was a promise of the future. And now that future was uncertain.

  No, she couldn’t think like that. If Chase needed her help to recuperate, she’d move in with him for as long as it took. Or maybe Chase could move into her house. She could cook, if she had to. She could take care of him, although it was hard to imagine what that might entail. Maybe, like her dad said, it could work that way.

  “Chase, you and I will go to that ranch in Canada,” she said aloud.

  Going back into the cabin, she went upstairs and packed a change of clothes for Chase. Layers. The spring weather could bring anything. Wool socks. His spare boots; he and Nicole had still been wearing their ski boots when she’d found them, and his shoes were probably lost wherever he’d changed. Jeans. A dark blue long-sleeved placket shirt that showed off his muscular frame. An ivory cable fisherman’s sweater she loved. His spare jacket. She stuffed it all into the backpack she found in his closet.

  After checking the garage to be sure Chase’s car was still there, she didn’t have another mission to accomplish at Chase’s home. Unlike her, he had no pets waiting to be fed, no plants to water. Across the clearing, the deer had vanished. Sam scanned the edge of the bordering trees for a moment, but spotted only a rabbit nibbling the grass, close to the safety of nearby shrubs.

  Everything was so unresolved. Chase’s future. Gina’s recovery. The identity of the buried young man and woman, their motivation for capturing a wolverine. And oh God, the baby wolverines. She couldn’t bear to think about them. She wished that Gina hadn’t planted that possibility in her head.

  She had to do something to provide an element of certainty somewhere. Anywhere. Provide some forward momentum. All the loose threads were driving her crazy.

  Gina had mentioned Anton Priest as a local trapper. Checking the online information service, Sam determined that Priest lived a few miles north of Maple Falls, a drive of approximately forty-five minutes from her house in Bellingham, but from Chase’s, probably no more than twenty.

  She slid into her RAV4 and instructed her cell phone to take her there. “Navigating,” the female voice announced.

  Priest lived on a small farm off the Silver Lake Road. A hand-crafted wooden address sign hung from a metal bar at the driveway entrance, along with a sign that read Taxidermy.

  The house was a nondescript manufactured home with an added deck. A large barn, painted in the traditional red with white trim, was the most attractive feature of the place, set against lush green pastures occupied by a handful of cows. Herefords, if her memories from rural Kansas were accurate.

  Nobody answered her knock on the front door of the house, but she heard hammering from the barn, so she walked in that direction. Nothing appeared immediately ominous, and she chided herself for expecting puddles of blood or piles of hacked-off animal parts. It had been Gina’s label, poacher, that put those pictures in her head.

  Pushing open a side door to the barn, she shouted, “Hello?”

  “Come on back!” The response came from a far corner.

  Although the floor was a mix of dirt and sawdust and there were a dozen bales of hay stacked in one corner, the barn was outfitted to be more of a workshop than a traditional shelter for animals.

  She walked past cardboard boxes and glass jars on tall wooden shelves, several containing what appeared, disturbingly, to be eyes of different sizes and colors. Taxidermy, she reminded herself. Any stuffed beast would not be wearing its original eyes.

  Feisty. Frozen eyes. Baby wolverines, waiting for a mother who would never come. She made herself pause and take a breath. Get a grip, Westin. Killing all sorts of wild creatures was legal in many locations.

  Priest, a short thick man with white hair and a close-cut beard, turned from a long wooden counter to greet her. Sam was grateful the counter in front of him did not hold a corpse or any part of one.

  “What can I do you for?” Priest asked in the folksy manner of rural folks.

  She explained that she knew of several hunters who might need taxidermy services in the near future. “I’m thinking of getting a gift for my husband, and maybe my brother, too. Do you have a specialty?”

  Priest shook his head. “Nope, I do it all.”

  “What sort of animals have you . . . er . . . preserved?”

  “Come see.” He led her to a walled-off portion of the barn and opened the door on what might have been a museum to some.

  The room seemed like a graveyard to her. He gestured proudly around the space. “Some just want the antlers or the head,” he explained, pointing to wall mounts of a deer, an elk, a bighorn ram, and saddest of all, a mountain lion. She stared at the magnificent cat’s head. Its mouth was open in an eternal snarl.

  He noticed. “Usually, when someone gets a cat or a bear, they want the whole animal.” He waved a hand toward a group of preserved specimens in different poses: a bobcat walking on a tree branch, another mountain lion with paws in the air, ready to spring from its haunches.

  “That one,” he pointed to a porcupine, “was tricky.”

  She forced a laugh. “I’ll bet.”

  “Sorry I don’t have a bear right now for you to see. I just sold a grizzly; posed him like this.” He held his hands up in a threatening pose and bared his teeth.

  Grizzlies were even more rare in the Cascades than wolverines. She had to think for a moment about the right way to ask if he’d shot that bear, finally came up with, “Your own trophy?”

  “Yep,” he said, grinning. “Got him on a hunt in Canada. Sold him to a museum in Germany, if you can believe that. Museums are some of my best customers. They like to show visitors the wildlife of an area.”

  “I see.” How horribly ironic. They’d rather feature a dead animal instead of protecting the live creature. She was reminded of a stuffed jaguar she’d seen in a museum in Tucson. The display should have been labeled How humans preserve jaguars in Arizona.

  “’Course,” he said, “Sometimes too much gets blown away to restore. You do have to know what a critter originally looked like, after all.”

  She didn’t want to think too much about hunters hauling in horribly mangled bodies to preserve.

  “But if I can’t save the head or some other part, I can just skin ‘em.” He waved his hand at a line of skins hanging from clips on the wall. A thick pelt of course dark fur with a blond fringe running along the sides and forming a vee above the tail was tacked to the wall. She pointed at it. “Is that a wolverine?”

  “Well, it used to be.” Priest laughed, displaying remarkably white, even teeth. “Got him in Canada, too. His head was too ruined to keep. But the pelt is still worth a lot.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Wolverine pelts go for more than five hundred. Even close to a thousand if they’re primo and you have the head and claws.”

  She gulped. “I hear that there are some wolverines in the North Cascades. Does anyone try to hunt them?”

  Priest narrowed his eyes. “Not that I know of. Too hard to find here.”

  Not to mention it’s illegal to kill them in this state. She wondered if Anton Priest knew that, or if he would care. Just this morning, she’d read about three critically endangered Sumatran tigers that had been found dead in traps in Indonesia. The rarer a creature was, the more doomed it was to be slaughtered.

  Sam fingered the wolverine fur for a moment, besieged by memories of all the magical wild animals she’d seen over the years. The living creatures, with their liquid eyes and fluid movements, their strength and ferocious beauty. I am so sorry for what my species does to yours.

  “If you ever hear of a wolverine around here, you tell me first, okay?” he said.

  When Hanoi freezes. She swallowed and then managed to mutter, “Sure thing.”

  She continued to stroke the pelt, surprised by how soft the wolverine fur was. How dense and warm.

  “Nice, huh?” Priest put his hand next to hers. “You interested in this pelt?”

  Sam jerked her hand away. “Oh God, no!”

  He narrowed his eyes at her again, watching her curiously. A frown line creased his forehead. In a minute, he would be asking her to leave.

  “It’s gorgeous,” she stuttered, backpedaling. “But it’s too expensive, and too precious. I can’t afford it.”

  She had forgotten her mission. The dead kids. After pondering the situation for a minute, she told Priest, “I have a nephew who might be interested in taxidermy. Have you ever taken on students?”

  Priest grimaced and leaned back against the rough plank wall. “Now why would I want to create competition for myself?”

  She shrugged. “I think he’s interested in trapping. Maybe you’ve met him? Dark hair, kinda scruffy? Nineteen, I think. Or maybe he’s twenty by now. He wears an earring in his right ear, usually what looks like a diamond. About six feet tall?” She was guessing at the height, since she’d only seen the poacher stretched out horizontally.

  Priest’s expression was blank. “Doesn’t sound like any kid I know.”

  He led her back into the workshop. They stood at his work table as he handed her a business card and a sheet of paper with price ranges. In a series of small cubbies along the wall, she spied various tools that appeared to be a variety of scalpels and scraping devices, tweezers and hole punches, and one large hunting knife with an orange handle. It appeared to be the same model the frozen trapper boy had carried.

  “Interesting knife.” She pointed. “I think I’ve seen that kind before.”

  Priest snorted. “I’m not surprised. Every hunter I know has one of those,” he told her.

  He ushered her to the door and held it open for her. “Come back whenever you’re ready. I’ll make you a good deal. Tell your friends.”

  If she hadn’t known what he did for a living, she might have liked Anton Priest. The tools of his trade were creepy, though, designed for removing flesh. And that knife. Was it the same model as the dead kid’s? Or was it, like Priest said, just a common brand that a multitude of outdoor types carried?

  But the sheriff’s department had the knife now. She didn’t have any way to compare the knives without telling Ortiz she’d been checking out Anton Priest, and she wasn’t sure it was wise to admit that.

  The sun was low in the west as she drove back to Bellingham, comparing in her head the live creatures she’d known with the stuffed ones in Priest’s display room. Stealthy mountain lions in Utah. Sleek sharks and amazing sea turtles in the Galápagos. Bears she’d encountered over the years. Pronghorns in Arizona. And deer everywhere—in Chase’s yard, in hers. Raccoons with their humanlike hands on the windows, begging to get inside.

  Taxidermy definitely required skill, and there was even a sort of artistry to what the man did, but each mount began with the violent death of a living wild animal. Had all the stuffed animals she’d seen in museums been murdered just for display purposes? She shivered, thinking about it.

  Legal, she reminded herself. Most of the time, for most animals.

  Damn.

  Though wolverines were not on the federal list of endangered species, they were legally protected in Washington State from being trapped or killed, except in cases of self-defense. But who would know if a lone wolverine was killed? The “skunk bears” were solitary animals, and the few that researchers had found in the North Cascades were mostly well-kept secrets. If caught, a poacher could claim he’d been attacked first. Self-defense. As if wolverines hunted people.

  How the hell did those kids know where to find a wolverine?

  Chapter 36

  “So.”

  Maya was cutting willow switches in Sam’s back yard to repair her tent poles when she heard the familiar voice behind her. She twirled around.

  “Hannah!” Although Blake’s daughter was five years younger, Maya had always gotten along well with Hannah. She was the closest thing Maya had to a sister.

  “I’m glad to see you!” She threw her arms around Hannah. “Wow! You’re taller than I am now.”

  The girl stiffened in her embrace and twisted away. “Big duh.” Hannah’s expression was as sullen as her tone.

  “What have you been up to?” Maya tried to sound cheerful. “How long are you visiting?”

  Hannah stepped back, her face darkening into a scowl. “I can’t believe you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m helping Dad and Sam fix the wreck you made of the house. And you shot Simon!” The younger girl made a face to show her disapproval.

  “That wasn’t me,” Maya protested. “It was Eaze. And a freak named James. And he’s going to be okay, isn’t he—Simon?”

  “Who’s Eaze?”

  “He was my boyfriend, I guess. But not anymore. In fact, I stabbed him.”

  “What?”

  “I stabbed Eaze with a kitchen knife. He and his buddy James wrecked the place, looking for stuff to steal.”

  “Why’d you let them in?”

  Maya waved the willow switch in the air like a baton. “I didn’t! They broke in while I was on the bus, before I could get back.”