Page 21 of Silver Linings

A single blink. Then he replied, “I thought I did.”

“Not really,” I said. “Or at least, while what you said earlier kind of danced around the truth, I don’t think it was the whole truth. Not by a mile.”

His chin lifted. “You’re a very perceptive woman, Sidney Lowell.”

“Not always,” I returned. “But sometimes I just get a feeling.”

Once again, he was quiet, his face in profile to me as he stared out at the rain pounding down on the pine trees and hemlock and the small stand of birch about ten yards or so from where we sheltered under the overhang. It was heavier now, with not much sign of letting up. That was the way it worked around here, though; you often didn’t get much warning at all, just a few drops here and there, and then more and more until you had an honest-to-God downpour.

“I used to be an archaeologist,” he said. “But now I’m more interested in unexplained phenomena.”

“Like Bigfoot?” I asked, only half joking.

“I’m not much of a Sasquatch guy,” he replied, and now a hint of a smile had begun to play around his mouth. “But sure, things like that. Chupacabras are my specialty, though.”

“Any particular reason why?”

“I saw one once,” he said, his tone dead serious. “On a dig down in the Sonoran Desert. No one believed me, of course. But I know what I saw, and I suppose that spurred me to start investigating the strange and unusual.”

That revelation didn’t make me feel any less anxious. The last thing I needed was someone with scientific training poking around, trying to discover just what was a little — or a lot — different about Silver Hollow.

Had he somehow found out about the unicorn or the other creatures that appeared in this forest?

I couldn’t say for sure. We’d both been keeping our cards pretty close to our vests, and I doubted he was going to give away his hand unless he had something a little more concrete to go on from me.

And I wasn’t about to say anything.

Except….

Maybe I could act like I was trying to help him, but instead would do my best to steer him away from any of the parts of the forest that I knew were more likely to have some of those mythical beasts roaming around. True, there wasn’t any real rhyme or reason to their movements, and yet I’d still noticed that they’d been spotted in certain locations more than others.

The idea felt horribly dishonest, but my first loyalty was to protecting the forest and the creatures who magically appeared there. While Ben seemed like a decent enough guy, I couldn’t allow anyone to know the real truth about these woods, not when the women of my family had been guarding that secret for generations.

“And that led you here?” I asked. “Why?”

For a second or two, he didn’t reply. No, it seemed as if he was having an inner battle with himself, trying to decide how much he should say.

Then, “This is going to sound crazy.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “I’m pretty good with crazy,” I replied. “Try me.”

“Let’s just say I found a reference online to a shining horse that had been spotted in these woods,” he said. “The person who wrote the entry admitted it was all hearsay, but it still sounded as if something strange was going on here. Since I was in San Francisco for a conference anyway, I decided to visit Silver Hollow and see what I could find out.”

A pretty big leap of faith, to come to the far end of the state to investigate an internet rumor. Still, I wondered where he’d found the entry, and if there was any way I could possibly get it removed. I did my best to keep on top of stuff like that, but I wasn’t anything close to a hacker. Besides, I didn’t have unlimited free time to drop everything every time a snippet that might or might not have been about Silver Hollow popped up online.

“But you haven’t found anything yet.”

For just a moment, his eyes met mine. The admiration in them was clear, and warm blood rushed to my cheeks.

“Oh, I think I’ve found something,” he said softly.

I looked away first. No matter how attractive he was, I knew I couldn’t allow a connection to develop between us, not when he was trying to expose the one thing I knew needed to stay hidden.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t exploit that attraction if necessary…as much as I hated to do so.

“Maybe I can help,” I suggested, and at once, his eyes narrowed.

“You’ve seen this horse?”

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