Page 6 of Lion's Share
“Do people go off-roading out here?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. Or at least, I know that Sam Tucker and the other forest rangers land on anyone pretty hard if they try to ignore the signs about coming in here on anything except your own two feet. Even mountain bikes aren’t allowed on most of the trails.” As she finished speaking, she straightened and gazed around them. “The tracks look as if they go off to the north.”
“Should we follow them?”
He found himself slightly relieved when she shook her head again.
“No. You get into some really rough country if you go that way. But maybe….”
The words trailed off there. Her mouth had set, and she was quiet for a moment, which told him she was probably thinking a mile a minute. Then she said, “I think we should set up trail cameras here and in any other likely clearings so we can try to catch the person doing this. At first, it was just sort of interesting, but they’ve marked so many of the trees here that it’s becoming destructive.”
He was inclined to agree. No, it wasn’t as if all the tree trunks were covered in graffiti, and some people might have argued that the Ogham letters weren’t even terribly visible unless you were right on top of them, but still, marking pretty much every tree in this clearing seemed like overkill. Whoever was doing this, they needed to be tracked down…and stopped.
“That’s a good idea,” he replied. “Does the outdoor store here carry trail cams?”
It was well-supplied for such a small town, as he’d found out when he first arrived in Silver Hollow and realized he needed a whole bunch of things he couldn’t have brought with him, considering he’d come straight here from a cryptozoology conference in San Francisco. At the time, he hadn’t seen any trail cameras, but then again, he hadn’t been looking for them, either.
“They do,” Sidney said. “They’d probably be cheaper on Amazon, but I don’t want to wait for even two-day shipping.”
Back in Southern California, Ben had gotten most of his Amazon items within a day, but he could see why it might take some extra time to get them to a far-flung place like Silver Hollow. “Okay,” he said, even as he performed a quick mental calculation to see whether his budget could accommodate a few hundred dollars’ worth of trail cameras. True, he’d gotten a nice chunk of change from that cryptozoology symposium in Fountain Hills, Arizona, last month, and his YouTube channel was still chugging along nicely, even though his relocation had upset his schedule a bit and he’d only been posting videos every other week rather than every Thursday like he normally did.
Had Sidney noticed his hesitation? Possibly, because she said, “I’ll cover it. The cameras were my idea, and besides, Ray gives me a fifteen-percent locals discount.”
Ray was the owner of the outdoor shop, a chatty guy who was always ready to share his knowledge about the various wilderness trails that surrounded the small town. Ben couldn’t help wondering how long it would take to be considered “local,” and guessed it would require a lot more time than his current month-long tenure in Silver Hollow.
“Sure,” he said easily. “How many do you think we’ll need?”
Sidney reached up to pull off her scrunchie, which had already begun to slip, then gathered up her hair so she could confine it once again. For just a moment, it fell loose and gleaming over her shoulders, and his breath caught.
God, she was gorgeous.
However, she spoke again right after that, and he gathered himself as best he could. It was idiotic to stand there and gawk at her like some pimply freshman mooning over the homecoming queen.
“Probably ten,” she said, looking thoughtful. “We’ll need two for each clearing, and there are four or five likely spots.” A pause, and then she added, her expression clouding a bit, “I wish things were a little more stable. It would be a lot easier if we knew the portal was going to appear in the same place every time.”
That was for sure. “But it seems to have destabilized, for whatever reason, so we’ll just have to work with what we have.”
Sidney didn’t look too cheered by that prospect. “I just can’t figure it out. I mean, it’s not as if my mother or my grandmother ever talked about the portal, but still, based on everything else they said over the years and from what I found in my grandmother’s journals, it sure seems as if the situation was fairly stable until recently.” A pause before she added with a lopsided grin, “Well, as stable as anything dealing with legendary beasts and magical forests can be.”
He couldn’t help smiling in return. “We’ll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, getting those trail cameras in place is a great idea.”
Since she was still holding her phone, she glanced down at the screen. “Perfect timing, too. By the time we get back to town, Ray’s Outdoor should be open.”
Sure enough, the hour was just rolling past ten when they got back to Silver Hollow, and the door to the hiking shop already stood open. Ben had noticed that some of the other stores on the town’s main drag weren’t exactly sticklers about keeping to the business hours posted on their doors or in their windows, but he supposed Ray would want to open right on time, considering how most hikers liked to get an early start on things.
Not that it seemed to matter too much in this part of the world. No one hiking around here had to worry about temperatures climbing into the nineties before it was even ten in the morning. Maybe every once in a while, they got a rare heat wave in this locale, but as far as Ben was able to tell, a “hot” day in Silver Hollow was when they were able to climb out of the low sixties.
Ray was helping some other customers — a wiry, outdoorsy-looking man and woman in their late thirties — when Ben and Sidney entered. He nodded his balding head toward Sidney as she came inside but otherwise didn’t seem inclined to pay them too much attention.
Which didn’t seem to be a problem for her, since she only tilted her head in reply to Ray’s nod and then continued to the back of the store, where there was a display case with trail cameras and GPS devices and night-vision goggles.
Nonchalantly, she moved behind the case and opened it up. Ben lifted an eyebrow.
“Is Ray okay with you doing that?”
She responded with a smile, even as she began pulling out boxes and stacking them on top of the counter.
“Ray Mackinnon has known me since I was born,” she replied. “And I know where he keeps the key to this case. There’s no reason to have him waiting on us hand and foot when we know exactly what we want. With any luck, he’ll be done with those customers by the time we get up to the cash register.”
