Page 9 of Murder

Working out is more fun, too, I notice Wednesday evening when I finish, because no longer am I practicing my Taekwondo with the intent of getting a last-ditch job as an instructor. I may still get re-licensed for the fun of it. Because, until I got “discovered” as a model, Taekwondo was one of the biggest parts of my life, and it would be nice to be able to instruct again. Maybe even pro bono. But I don’t have to if I don’t want to.

I spend Wednesday night packaging the plush black bears I sell on the sanctuary’s web site at an $8-per-bear profit, then watching Doctor Who (David Tennant) while lounging on the couch, yammering with my mom and Jamie. My brother Rett calls too, letting me know how glad he is that everything worked out with the sanctuary.

When I think I’m finished with my talk-a-thon, my mom calls back to ask me a mundane question, and I can hear the tears in her voice. She doesn’t like me to ask outright, nor does she actually want to talk about how she misses Dad, so I just chat with her like normal, tidying up my office as we chat, then, when her lengthy debate—mostly with herself—about what piece to sculpt next starts to melt my brains, I sit at my desk and start reviewing footage from the cams.

Tomorrow is an enclosure day for me, so I need to spend some time figuring out where my bears are tonight, and how they seem to be doing. I track them via their anklets and then, because my mom is still going strong—she’s leaning toward a woman mostly covered by a large shawl; “perhaps really a mourning veil,” she says excitedly—I check the footage from Cams 1 and 2 around the time I was out practicing.

To my horror, I see something. Something blurry. Something moving. Something man-sized. And then, just when I start to second-guess myself, I see a hand. A real, flesh-colored hand—I’m sure it is!

I stop the footage and hit rewind, and I can finally see. It is a person. Holy shit! It’s someone wearing camouflage. I would never have realized had I not seen that left hand. He must have taken off his camo gloves.

Oh holy shit, who is this person?

The trajectory in which he’s moving in the footage points him toward me. He’s moving toward me at the time I would have been headed back to the house.

Shiiiiitttt.

“Hey Mom, can I call you back?”

“Of course. Don’t worry with it tonight. I feel much better. Thanks for listening, love.”

“No prob. It sounds amazing, Mom. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up with her and dial Jamie. “It is a man! It’s a man, it’s a man!”

“Whoa there, Squirrel. Your new neighbor?”

“No, the camo ripple ghost thing on the cams. It’s totally a man. He took his—I guess camo glove off, I could clearly see a hand. Who the hell is it?! He’s a murderer! Talk to Niccolo, Jamie! Tell his Mafioso ass to come save me!” I flop back in my desk chair, out of breath and laughing at my own dramatics.

“How much Absinthe did you have this morning?” Jamie asks.

“STFU, whoreface. I mean it, there’s a man on the cams and he was out there when I was out there. Tell me that’s not creepy as hell.”

I keep Jamie on the phone for thirty minutes, running my wild theories by her, forcing her to promise she will call me first thing in the morning, telling her if I’m kidnapped, I’ll grab the bag of pistachios from my night stand and drop them in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. In other words, trying to make her laugh.

Say what you will about my dislike of Niccolo—she fell for him in the days after my accident; at one point the police tried to link the accident to his younger brother; BFF-related jealousy; yada yada whatever—but I do have one legimate complaint: he’s a boring mofo. She spends too much time with his dreary ass, if you ask me. Right now he’s producing a movie in L.A. Since Jamie lives in Nashville, they’re only seeing each other two or three times a month, leaving more time for me and actual fun.

I review the camera footage one more time, watching up until the moment the hand, and the blur of the man’s body, disappear, sometime after he has turned around, away from me and back toward the hill behind my house.

I take the safety off the .38 I keep in my nightstand drawer, say my prayers, and fall asleep mostly untroubled, having managed to partition off my ax-murderer anxiety and any residual upset about the zoning situation—me talking and snarile-ing at the commission meeting in my pathetic attempt to arouse pity.

In dreamland, I find myself on that road, holding a gardenia petal in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I keep hearing the squeak of boots against the fresh powder. Snowflakes fall on my nose and forehead, melting on my skin. When I move, my long hair sways around my hips. When I wake up Thursday morning, I remember that: my hair was long. Down to my ass. Not in real life, but in the dream.

I Google it and read that long hair in dreamland is a sign of strength.

Even so, I grab the .38 and tuck it into the pocket of my sheepskin coat before I slip into the woods.

When I tell people I run a bear sanctuary, I almost always get one of two responses.

“You? Like—just you? Aren’t you scared of being EATEN?” Or, “OMG, what’s it like playing with those precious bears?”

The boring truth is, there is almost zero chance of being “eaten,” not just because black bears are almost never aggressive unless provoked, but also because there are lots of common sense precautions.

I don’t take food into or around the enclosure. I don’t even eat in the moments before I go in, nor do I leave my garbage cans outside. I pull up the tracking app on my phone before I unlock the enclosure’s gate, so I know exactly where each of my five bear babies is. Also, I carry bear spray. Not because I think I’ll need it, but because it’s smart. Just like carrying a small gun is smart, because of poachers and criminals of the human-hunting variety.

As for playing with the bears? No way. Caring for captive bears is all about limiting contact. While occasionally I’ll get bears like Aimee and Papa, “lifers,” I call them, a lot of my charges are only being rehabbed. They’ll be released back into the wild, and if they’re going to be successful when they are, I have to try to minimize their reliance on human intervention.

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