Page 42 of Lion's Share
Because the drapes had all been pulled shut, the room was still dim. However, enough pale daylight seeped around the edges of the fabric that he could tell he and Sidney had survived the night.
Before he could process much more than that welcome piece of news, however, someone pounded on the back door.
“Sidney! Sidney!” came a man’s voice, urgent.
At once, Ben sat upright and grabbed his jeans from the place where they’d been draped over one arm of the couch. Since he’d slept in his T-shirt, it didn’t take long before he was decently covered…even though it still had to be patently obvious that he’d spent the night here.
Just as he was buttoning the top button of his 501s, Sidney came hurrying down the stairs. She wore her UC Davis sweatshirt and some leggings covered in a whimsical cow print and had her hair pulled back into a scrunchie, and he would have thought she was pretty damn adorable if she hadn’t looked so worried.
“That sounds like John Henderson,” she said breathlessly as she hurried past Ben and into the kitchen.
“Who’s John Henderson?” he asked, following her. Yes, the person shouting probably wasn’t a shadow-stalker, but right now, Ben thought he couldn’t be too careful. While he’d bumped into many of Silver Hollow’s residents during his tenure here, he wouldn’t pretend that he knew all of them, or anything even close to that.
“He and his wife have a farm on the other side of town,” Sidney replied, then opened the kitchen door.
Standing out on the back stoop was a man who looked like he might have been five or six years older than Ben, so in his mid-thirties. His thinning hair was mussed, and his T-shirt appeared to have been put on inside-out, indicating that he’d been in a hell of a hurry when he left the house.
“What’s the matter, John?” Sidney asked. “Do you want to come in?”
“No,” he said. He would have been pleasant-faced if he had looked so concerned, and right then it seemed as if he didn’t have any time to worry about niceties. “Can you come to the farm? It looks like something’s been at our goats. Two are dead, and two others are just hanging on.”
At once, Sidney glanced over at Ben, her face pale. Although she didn’t say anything, the question still hung in the air between them.
Shadow stalkers?
All he could do was lift his shoulders. He had no idea what they were capable of, so he didn’t feel qualified to comment, even if he had come across an account or two of them attacking livestock.
But….
“It’s daylight,” he said quietly. “It should be safe.”
John Henderson frowned at that remark, but it seemed he was too worried to waste time puzzling it out. “Patty says it was wolves, but we don’t have wolves around here. Or…do we?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard of,” Sidney said. “Give me a minute so I can grab my bag, and then we’ll come to the farm with you.”
The man looked down at Ben’s bare feet and frowned slightly, but again, he didn’t seem inclined to worry about minor details like that. “Sure.”
So they left him waiting at the back door while Sidney hurried off to get her bag, and Ben went into the living room to pull on his shoes and socks. By the time he was done, she’d returned, now carrying what looked like a black doctor’s bag and with her own feet covered in a pair of well-worn gray Uggs.
A big, mud-splattered Dodge truck waited in the gravel lane that led to the home’s detached garage. John Henderson led them over there, waiting with some impatience while Ben squeezed himself into the back seat in the extra-cab and Sidney took shotgun.
Once they’d backed out of the driveway and were heading west, she ventured, “Did you call Hope Hayakawa? She really would’ve been closer.”
“Phones’re still out,” John said briefly, hands clutched around the steering wheel. “And we don’t know her that well. Patty said I should just come to your house.”
Sidney accepted that explanation without comment, although even from the back seat, Ben could see the way her jaw set. She’d mentioned to him how a lot of the residents of Silver Hollow still viewed her as their veterinarian, even though her DVM degree was in limbo and Hope was a perfectly competent alternative.
He knew that was why John Henderson had come to Sidney’s house despite living way on the other side of town. Around here, old habits died hard.
The farm looked big and prosperous, with picturesque split-rail fences and a white two-story house with French blue shutters and a red barn. However, as they got out of the truck, Ben saw it wasn’t quite as picture-perfect as it first appeared.
Not with the sad forms of two dead goats lying near the fence — someone had covered the bodies with a tarp, but it was obvious what the heavy cloth hid — and with a sobbing woman cradling two more as she sat on the porch. Nearby, a little girl who looked like she was around five stood clutching a stuffed dog and was wailing as well, although Ben couldn’t say for sure whether it was because of what had happened to the goats or because she was terrified at seeing her mother so upset.
Sidney had the passenger door open before John had even come to a complete stop and ran across the dew-soaked grass, black doctor’s bag banging against her thigh as she went. While Ben got out of the truck, she sank to her knees next to the crying woman, asked a few urgent questions, and then got to work.
Although he’d seen her attending to a wounded hawk the first time he’d visited her store, this was the first time he’d really seen Sidney Lowell go into action. At once, she had the satchel open and was cleaning the wounds of first one goat and then the other. It seemed the first one had more extensive injuries, because she appeared to focus on that one more closely, although he noticed how she pressed the woman — Patty, Ben guessed, since John had mentioned her name when he came to fetch Sidney — into service by handing several clean cloths and what looked like a bottle of disinfectant over to her.
Neither of the goats seemed too inclined to get away, so they must have understood it was better to suffer this momentary discomfort rather than risk letting their wounds go untreated.
