Page 2 of Silver Linings

For now, anyway.

“While I’m here, though,” Beverly added. “I might as well get another bag of those salmon treats. Groucho and Chico and Harpo go through them like you wouldn’t believe.”

Actually, I did believe, since the cats’ mistress came into the shop at least once a week to pick up some more of the fishy treats. Groucho was a handsome tuxedo cat with a wide black mustache — hence his name — while the other two were both orange tabbies. They weren’t related, but had been adopted by Beverly back when I was in high school, and they’d been together long enough now that they might as well be brothers.

I put the bag of treats on Beverly’s tab — she always settled up on the fifth of the month after her Social Security check came in — and then went to open the door for her so she wouldn’t have to struggle while holding the rabbit and the bag of treats she’d just purchased.

After she was gone, I couldn’t help shaking my head. More than once, I’d tried to suggest that she should really talk to Hope Hayakawa, Silver Hollow’s only real veterinarian, but Beverly insisted on asking for my advice instead.

“I’m sure you know just as much as she does, Sidney,” she always said, and by that point, I’d mostly given up the fight.

As far as I’d been able to tell, Hope was more than competent. But she’d also settled in town a mere three years earlier, which of course would make her a source of suspicion among the old guard. I was Silver Hollow born and bred, and that meant to someone like Beverly, I was the natural person to turn to when she needed help.

Luckily, Hope seemed more amused by the situation than anything else. Also, because I couldn’t dispense drugs or give shots or do any of the other day-to-day tasks a veterinarian might be expected to perform, it wasn’t as if I was horning in on her business too much.

All the same, I knew I’d be glad if I wasn’t called on to offer any more professional advice that day.

To my relief, the rest of my customers that afternoon were far more interested in buying bags of food and treats, or maybe replacing a worn-out dog bed, than picking my brain to see if I thought Fido should get a kennel cough booster shot before they dropped him off at a pet sitter’s for the weekend. Not that I didn’t mind being helpful when I could, but more that I couldn’t help but feel I was overstepping my bounds, and at some point, I’d get busted by the veterinarian police.

Deep down, I knew it didn’t work that way, but still.

At that time of year, daylight lingered far past the hour when I closed up shop at five-thirty. Ever since I’d returned to Silver Hollow — when I’d had to deal with what felt like endless questions from the local sheriff and the FBI regarding my mother’s and grandmother’s disappearance, not to mention the sympathetic glances and words of the people in town — I’d steadfastly avoided going out into the forest. Logic suggested there was no reason in the world to believe the woods would swallow me up, not when I’d wandered there all the time before I’d gone off to college, but the fear still lingered that somehow I’d stumble across the same portal or wormhole or whatever it had been that had taken my mother and grandmother and would disappear forever.

True, if that happened, maybe I’d discover where they’d gone, but there was no real way to know whether there was a single alternate world out there, or many. The creatures that appeared in the forest couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell the women of my family where they’d come from, so the only real thing we could do was guess as to their origins.

Fear had kept me away, but now the shock and worry had finally begun to subside, and in their place was anger.

Why in the world had that first unicorn appeared here, now almost 170 years ago? What was its purpose?

And why had it approached Mary Welling, of all people? She certainly wasn’t the only one from her settlement to wander in the woods, so if the unicorn simply wanted company, there were other people it could have gone to.

But it had laid its head in her lap, and for whatever reason, all the women of our line seemed to have the same power to attract the strange creatures, although most of them weren’t quite as friendly as the unicorn.

Still, even though some inner force I couldn’t quite explain had driven me to come back to the forest at last, that didn’t mean I planned to be reckless. I drove my mother’s trusty old Subaru Outback to a popular trailhead, thinking it was smarter to stick to a path where I had a decent chance of seeing other people. If nothing else, there might be someone around to report seeing me in that general vicinity just in case I ended up missing.

The fog had lifted a little that day, and although the sun still didn’t feel exactly warm, the air was just a bit milder, slightly less damp, than it generally was around these parts. Because I wore pretty much the same uniform every day — a T-shirt, either long- or short-sleeve depending on the weather, jeans, and boots — it wasn’t as if I’d had to worry about going home to change before I headed into the woods.

A woman who looked as if she was around my own age of twenty-seven or possibly a little older came out of the woods just as I was locking up the Outback. A faint sheen of perspiration covered her forehead, and I got the feeling she’d done some serious hiking before she decided it was time to head back to her car.

I didn’t recognize her, so I only inclined my head in her direction as I began to move toward the trail. She did the same thing, telling me she was just fine with us acknowledging each other’s presence but didn’t see the need to actually say anything.

Fine by me. I talked to customers all day, so I was perfectly happy to get some peace and quiet once I was done at the pet store.

Besides, this fit my plans very well. Now someone had seen me out here, which meant if I did go missing, she’d be able to tell the authorities that she’d encountered me not too long before I vanished.

Even though I knew the odds of that happening were pretty low. My mother and grandmother had purposely come out here to try to find the portal that allowed all those legendary creatures to gain access to our world, and, I supposed, had been following a trail of some sort when they disappeared.

I wasn’t doing anything like that, however. No, I’d come to the woods to reacquaint myself with the forest, and to do my best to get over my fear of being alone there. Nothing would happen, and then I could go home, content in the knowledge that at least I’d given it a try.

Once I was among the trees, the pale sun that had been drifting in and out of the clouds all day effectively vanished. A shiver moved down my spine, even as I told myself there was nothing to worry about, that I was only chilled because I didn’t have even the spurious warmth of that listless sun to warm my bones.

Sure, Sidney.

Birds chirped from the trees — I recognized the songs of chickadees and Steller’s jays, of gold-crowned sparrows and kinglets — and I had to admit their cheerful little songs reassured me somewhat. After all, if something dark and menacing lurked out here, or if there was imminent danger of falling into a wormhole, I kind of doubted all those birds would sound quite so happy.

But then I glimpsed a flash of white among the dark pines and the slender birch trees — something white that I doubted was the T-shirt of someone wandering in the woods, doing their best to get in a hike at the end of the day before it got too dark to be out here.

No, that pale glimmer was a unicorn approaching through the woods.

---