Page 76 of That's Not My Name

What if I’m not Mary?

The question burrows in my mind. I clutch my temples. Who am I if I’m not Mary Boone?

I look up at the house for Wayne, but he’s nowhere in sight. The van is parked by the basement door, but I don’t seehim.

A branch snaps to my right, between the woodpile and the tree line. I whirl toward it, half expecting to see him standing there, staring at me. But there’s nothing but the tarp-covered woodpile and the forest.

The breeze shifts, twisting upstream. It brings cool wet air from the woods, and with it, the most disgusting smell. Like bad meat, or old eggs, only way worse. It smells like the forest is rotting, and I instinctively recoil from it, stepping into the water. The splash disrupts the silence, and something moves straight ahead. My gaze slides over the swing, toward the trees beyond it, and I lock eyes with an animal.

A coyote.

It stands about twelve feet away, absolutely still. So still it blended right in with the branches behind it. The hairs around its mouth are pink with blood and there’s something in its mouth.

My heart stops beating. I stare at it, and it stares at me, and I wonder if my Wayne panic was pointless, because I’m about to be mauled to death on a mountain that smells like rotten meat.

Without taking my eyes off the thing, I crouch until the tips of my fingers dip into the frigid water around my feet, and I dance them across the bottom until they catch on a rock about the size of a mason jar, but with a long sharp point on one end.

I stand slowly, water dripping off my fingers, rock ready at my side.I don’t know what the hell I’d do with it if the coyote actually ran at me, but the second I’m upright again, it takes off through the trees.

Dropping whatever it had been chewing on in the process.

My poor heart restarts as soon as it disappears, but my gaze zeroes in on what it dropped. The other side of the woodpile is all muck, but it looks like the coyote dug a big hole in the ground. I pull my feet from the water and take a step toward the swing, knowing I don’t want to find out what’s back there even as I move closer.

I stare at the thing on the ground, stepping around the outside of the swing. It’s probably a dead squirrel or something gross like that.

My legs itch to run. To take my rock and get the hell out of here, but I can’t stop moving toward the hole. The smell, and the blood…all the fear in my body is trying to figure out what’s back there so I can react to it.

I stop a few feet away. The hole tugs at me, begging me to look inside, and…

I see him all at once, in graphic detail. One solid second of images, forever seared into my brain like a gruesome tattoo. Bite marks from animal teeth on the side of a partially dirt-covered face. Blood. Ripped skin. Open milky eyes. Giant gaping wounds on a mutilated neck. A half-exposed buffalo-print hat. One arm sticking out of the hole. Hand missing.

Discarded six feet away by the coyote.

Acid burns up my throat, catches behind my teeth, and goes back down, as I stare at his familiar face.

The coyote dug up Ben Hooper’s corpse.

TWENTY-TWO

DREW

I don’t know what I’m expecting from a place called Nana’s Favorites, but this is not it. We pull up in front of a smallish building with that beachy wood siding and dirty white shutters that look a mess even in the fading light. A bird flies out from behind one of them and takes off toward the ocean, scaring the shit out of Max as he unfolds his gangly self from the driver’s seat.

“Shit,” he says, ducking long after it’s gone.

Max doesn’t like birds.

Autumn laughs and tries to turn it into a cough, as the lights inside the store turn off and an older woman with completely white hair and hot-pink glasses steps outside with keys in her hand. She freezes in the doorway when she sees us all standing there and breaks out into a smile. “Well, hello there! I’m afraid you kids are going to have to come back tomorrow. The store’s closed until the morning.”

She turns to lock the door.

I grab my phone and my missing flier from the seat, then walktoward her. “Actually, we’re not here to shop. We’re hoping you could help us find someone?”

She looks at me over her shoulder, key still in the door. “Excuse me?”

I tell her our names, and hand her the paper. She lets her keys dangle in the lock while she adjusts her giant purse on her other shoulder and reaches out for the piece of paper. Her purse is the same color as her glasses. And her yoga pants. Pink on pink on pink with this one.

The woman squints at the photo, and her fingers come up to cover her mouth. “She’s missing?”

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