Page 7 of Lion's Share
Right, small town. Although Ben was slowly becoming used to the way everyone in Silver Hollow seemed to know everyone else — and knew their business, which made it all the more remarkable that the women of Sidney’s family had been able to keep so many secrets for so many years — he hadn’t gotten anywhere close to mastering all the various nuances involved.
After she had ten boxes stacked on top of the counter, she came back around to the front and handed half of them to him.
“They’re not all the same kind,” she said. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter so much, as long as they’ll all talk to my computer. Or yours,” she added, now looking a little worried, as if she feared he might take offense at the way she’d just assumed she would be the one monitoring the cameras.
“No, better that you keep watch,” he replied easily. “You know these woods — and the people in town — a lot better than I do. I don’t want to go off half-cocked thinking someone’s our graffiti artist and then find out it was just an out-of-uniform park ranger.”
Sidney chuckled. “Good point. But I’ll probably need some help getting all this hooked up so I can get the feeds stored on my computer. The last thing I want to do is have to stay up all night watching this stuff.”
Neither did he. Luckily, he had plenty of experience working with trail cams, since he’d used them to keep an eye out for chupacabras whenever he was wandering in the desert, where he might spy one. So far, he hadn’t caught anything on film, but hope sprang eternal.
All the same, he had to admit he wasn’t quite as gung-ho about chasing down those supernatural desert dwellers now that he’d seen an actual unicorn.
“It’s not that hard,” he assured her. “Shouldn’t take much more than a half hour — once we have all the trail cams in place, that is.”
“We’ll have to do that after I get off work, though,” Sidney replied. “I don’t think we have enough time to get back out there and set up all the cameras before I need to be at the store.”
Ben wasn’t sure whether they’d be able to do all that before the sun went down, either, although they should have close to three hours of daylight.
An idea occurred to him. “How about I go back to the clearing this morning and set up two of the cameras there? That’ll take care of part of the job, and that means we’ll have less to do this afternoon.”
She replied right away, telling him she didn’t have any qualms about him handling part of the work without her. “Sure, that’s a good idea. And then you can meet me at the store a little after five.”
It seemed clear that she didn’t plan to go home and change before she headed for work, even though she was wearing cargo pants and hiking boots and a T-shirt. Well, a pet shop wasn’t the kind of place where you needed to dress business casual, even if you owned the store.
And it would save a lot of time if she was ready to go as soon as she closed the shop for the day.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s a plan.”
Chapter Three
Work was fairly busy…but not busy enough that I couldn’t help wondering if there was something better Ben and I could have been doing with our time. True, he texted me about an hour after I opened the store at noon and let me know that the first set of trail cameras was in place, and yet I still knew I was way too on edge.
But absolutely nothing untoward happened that afternoon, and Ben was prompt as usual, showing up outside the shop at a little after five, which gave me enough time to close down everything and lock the front and back doors.
“I think we should go to the oak grove first,” I told him as we headed toward the closest of the numerous trails that wandered away from the eastern outskirts of town and into the forest. “It’s the farthest away of the places where we want to set up the trail cams, and then we can work our way backward from there.”
“And reward ourselves with pizza when we’re done,” he replied, an amused glint in his mossy hazel eyes.
“Of course,” I said, and knew I smiled a little as I spoke. “Unless you’d rather get takeout from Hog Wild.”
No point in suggesting that we dine in, not when I knew we’d have plenty to talk about that we wouldn’t want overheard.
“Pizza is fine,” Ben said, which was pretty much the way I thought he’d respond. Barbecue was great, but it would probably be easier to munch on pizza while working on my laptop rather than trying to deal with messy ribs or drippy pulled pork sandwiches.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, both of us seeming to understand that we should wait until we were safely in the woods before we started to discuss any sensitive subjects. At that time of day, I doubted too many hikers would be roaming around in the forest, since this was usually the hour when people would start to head back into town if they’d made a day out of their hiking expeditions. All the same, I figured we couldn’t be too careful.
Then Ben said, “I heard from someone at UC Davis — Marjorie Tran. She’s a grad student in the physics department and sounds very interested in taking some readings around town. Luckily, she’s only teaching one summer school class, and that was yesterday, so she should be up here tomorrow afternoon sometime.”
“Well, that’s good news,” I replied. Or…was it? What if this Marjorie Tran discovered something dreadful, like all these electromagnetic instabilities were just a prelude to the Earth basically imploding and swapping poles like in that one disaster movie my friend Ashley loved to watch when we were in junior high? She’d been on a real kick that year, forcing me to watch everything from The Day After Tomorrow to San Andreas…which I found kind of ironic, since she moved to San Francisco after she graduated from college, and you’d think someone that obsessed with earthquakes might want to end up someplace a little more seismically stable.
Although I thought I was fairly good at keeping my emotions to myself, Ben must have noticed some shift in my expression, because he said, “I doubt whatever Marjorie finds is going to be anything catastrophic. If nothing else, it would help to know where the center of the anomaly is. If it’s somewhere in the woods, then we’ll know it must have something to do with the portals.”
“And if it’s in the middle of town?” I asked.
Undaunted, he replied, “Then we’ll just have to figure out a way to deal with it.”
Nothing seemed to bother the guy. Oh, sure, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had his setbacks here and there, but in general, he seemed to be the optimistic type. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t suffered any real hardships or tragedies in his life, had come from what sounded like a solidly upper-middle-class family in Southern California. Even the chupacabra sighting that had changed the trajectory of his career seemed more like a necessary push to get him in the direction he was truly supposed to go than an event that had totally derailed his ambitions.
