The Wolf Gift (25 page)

He got some coffee and sandwiches from a nearby café, brought them back to the room, and started work on the computer.

It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Laura was in some way professionally connected to the forest, to the outdoors, to the wilderness surrounding her house. Yesterday, he’d found one tour guide website featuring tours for women—by an L. J. Dennys. He scanned that website now again looking for clues. But the only pictures of L. J. Dennys made it quite impossible to tell who she was beneath her hat and behind her sunglasses. Her hair was scarcely visible.

He found random references to L. J. Dennys, naturalist and environmentalist, all over the place. But no really good pictures.

He keyed in Laura J. Dennys, and let fly. There were several false leads, and then something entirely unexpected: a four-year-old news story from the
Boston Globe
concerning a Laura Dennys Hoffman, widow of a Caulfield Hoffman who’d died, with his two children, in a boating accident off Martha’s Vineyard.

Well, probably another false lead but he punched it, and up came the picture he’d been looking for. This was the wearer of the pearls, the mother of the two boys in the photo on Laura’s night table—staring out from a society picture of Laura with her late husband, a formidably handsome man with secretive eyes and very white teeth.

She was poised, quietly beautiful—the woman he’d held in his arms.

Within seconds, he was scanning any number of hits on the drowning at sea of Caulfield Hoffman and his sons. Laura had been in New York when the “accident” had happened, and the accident, it turned out, was no accident. After a lengthy investigation, the coroner had ruled it a murder-suicide.

Hoffman had been facing serious criminal charges in connection with insider trading and mismanagement of funds. He’d been arguing with his wife about a possible separation and custody of the boys.

That wasn’t all there was to Laura’s story. The Hoffmans had lost
their first child, a baby girl, to a hospital infection when she was less than one year old.

It didn’t take much ingenuity now to close in on the life story of Laura J. Dennys.

She was the daughter of the California naturalist Jacob Dennys, who had written five books about the redwood forests of the northern coast. He’d died two years ago. His wife, Collette, a Sausalito painter, had died of a brain tumor twenty years before. That meant Laura had lost her mother very young. Jacob Dennys’s oldest daughter, Sandra, had been murdered in a liquor store holdup in Los Angeles when she was twenty-two, one of several innocent bystanders “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It was a breathtaking litany of tragedies. It surpassed anything Reuben might have imagined. And part and parcel of it was that Jacob Dennys had suffered from Alzheimer’s in his last years.

Reuben sat back and drank a little of the coffee. The sandwich looked to him like paper and sawdust.

He was stunned by all this. And felt vaguely guilty reading it, even ashamed. Yes, he was spying on Laura, and, yes, to uncover a mystery in her, and maybe he’d hoped that she was something so exceptional that she could accept him for what he was.

But this was too much.

He thought of those two little kids in the house in San Francisco, nestled together in that bed. He felt a secret exultation that he’d saved them, and a deep resentment that he hadn’t been there in time to save the mother. He wondered where those little kids were now.

No wonder Laura had come home to disappear into the California forest. The L. J. Dennys website was three years old. She’d probably taken care of her elderly father. And then he’d left her, inevitably, like all the rest.

A terrible sadness for Laura settled over Reuben.
I’m ashamed, ashamed that I want you and that it sustains me to think, just to think, that because of all you’ve lost, you might love me
.

He could not conceive of being that alone, no matter what he was going through even now. In fact, the new isolation he was experiencing was driving him crazy.

But even in this, he was surrounded by love—intimately connected to Grace and Phil and, of course, his beloved brother, Jim. He had Celeste
still, who would do anything for him, and Mort, his true friend. He had the warm hub of the Russian Hill house and the great gang of friends drawn perpetually into the family circle by all its vibrant members. And Rosy, beloved Rosy. Even Phil’s tiresome professor friends were a staple of Reuben’s life, like so many gracious old uncles and aunts.

He thought of Laura and that small house on the edge of the wood. He tried to assess what it would mean to marry, and then lose your entire family. Unspeakable pain.

Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical—and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger, and determined to live exactly as you pleased.

Reuben knew a dozen other ways to find out information about Laura—credit score, car registration, personal net worth—but that simply wasn’t fair. In fact, it was obscene. However, there was one more tiny item that he did want, and that was her address, and he found that quickly enough. The house in which she lived had been the subject of a couple of articles. It had belonged to her grandfather, Harper Dennys, and was quite literally grandfathered; no one could have built such a house so deep into the protected forest area today.

He wandered outside and walked around the small motel. The rain was a drizzle. It would be easy after dark to slip out of his room and go up the wooded slope and over the summit and into the thickly forested hills of Mill Valley. From there it would be simple to get to Muir Woods.

Very likely no one was looking for him here now. After all, he had only hours ago killed a man in San Francisco.

That is, nobody was looking for him here unless Laura J. Dennys had told the authorities what happened.

Could she have done that?
And would they have believed a word of it?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine her telling anyone.

If there was a television in that small house, if there were newspapers delivered to the door, or brought home from the grocery store in town, then she had to know what had been happening.

Maybe she understood that the Wild Man of the Wood would rather die than bring harm to her—unless harm was his love for her, and his near-mad desire to see her again.

Just before dark, Reuben hit a store for some cheap clothes that actually
fit him, clean underwear and socks and such, and stowed all this in a bag that would stay permanently in the Porsche. He was sick of roaming around in the oversized hoodie and trench coat. But he didn’t bother to change now.

As the sun set, he drove into Mill Valley in a thin noiseless rain, and up Panoramic Highway till he found Laura’s house—a small gray-shingled cottage way back from the road, scarcely visible for the trees that surrounded it.

He drove past it and found a small gulley in which to hide the Porsche, and there inside the car, he fell into a fitful uneasy sleep. The change woke him much sooner than he expected.

T
HE HOUSE WAS EMPTY
when he entered it, the door unlocked and open to the back porch.

He’d come down through the trees. There was no one anywhere near; no stakeout, certainly; no police voices in the vicinity—in fact, there were no voices at all.

The back bedroom was the sweet picture that he remembered. All the same sweet scents were there.

The high-backed oak bed was draped with a soft beautifully crafted patchwork quilt. A small brass lamp burned on the night table, giving a warm light through its parchment shade. And nestled among the pillows in the oak rocking chair was a faded handmade rag doll with a carefully stitched face of almond-shaped button eyes, rose-red lips, and long yellow yarn hair. A small bookshelf held row after row of books by Harper Dennys and Jacob Dennys. And even a book by L. J. Dennys on the wildflowers of Mount Tamalpais and the surrounding area.

The bedroom opened onto the kitchen, divinely rustic with its big black stove and blue-and-white china cups on hooks beneath the open white shelves.

Potato vines grew from glasses on the windowsill above the sink. Bright white and gold daisies filled a blue vase in the center of the small white table. And a bright impressionistic landscape of a walled rose garden hung on the wall. The signature was “Collette D.”

Beyond was a spacious bathroom with its own small iron fireplace, a huge shower, and a claw-foot tub. Opposite, a narrow stairs went up to a second floor.

Then came the large dining room with its vintage round oak table and heavy press-back chairs, a hutch filled with more antique blue-and-white china, and a living room of comfortable old chairs, draped with artful quilts and blankets, gathered as if for a tête-à-tête before the fieldstone
hearth. A small fire was burning deep in the fireplace, well protected by a screen. A corner floor lamp, old-fashioned brass, gave a soft, agreeable light.

There were large bright garden paintings by Collette D. throughout the house, rather tame and predictable, perhaps, but brilliantly colorful and comforting and sweet. And lots of photographs everywhere—many including the cheerful weathered face of Jacob Dennys, white-haired even as a young man.

There was a flat-screen television in the living room, and even a small one in the kitchen, on the counter. There were recent newspapers by the living room hearth. “Man Wolf Frees Kidnapped Children” screamed the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. The Mill Valley paper had opted for: “Children Found Safe in Mill Valley; Two Dead.” Both papers had very similar drawings of the Man Wolf—an anthropoid figure with lupine ears and a ghastly fanged snout.

It was a house full of windows, and everywhere they sparkled with the soft, whispering rain. Walls were carefully painted in deep earth tones, and the woodwork was natural, and gleaming with wax.

He was in the living room by the fire when she came in the back door. He slipped into the hallway. He could see her in the kitchen, setting down a brown paper sack of groceries and what looked like a folded newspaper.

Her hair was tied back by a black ribbon at the nape of her neck. She slipped off her heavy corduroy jacket and threw it aside. She wore a soft gray high-neck sweater and a long dark skirt. There was a weariness, a dissatisfaction, in her gesture. Her sweet scent slowly filled the house. He knew now he’d know this scent anywhere—its unmistakable blend of personal warmth and that subtle citrus perfume.

He was rapt looking at her, at her tapering hands and her smooth forehead, at the soft white hair that framed her face, at her ice-blue eyes sweeping absently over the room.

He drew closer to the kitchen door.

She was anxious, uncertain. She moved dejectedly to the white table and was about to sit down when she saw him standing in the hall.

“Beautiful Laura,” he whispered.
What do you see? The Man Wolf, the monster, the beast that rips his victims limb from limb?

In shock, she clapped her hands to her face, staring at him through
her long fingers. And her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly she began to cry aloud in deep heartrending sobs.

She opened her arms as she ran to him. He stepped forward to embrace her, and he pressed her warmly to his chest.

“Beautiful Laura,” he whispered again, and picked her up as he had before, and carried her into the rear bedroom and set her on the bed.

He tore the ribbon from her hair. It came down in waves around her—white, streaked with yellow in the light of the nearby lamp.

He could scarcely keep from stripping off her clothes. It seemed an eternity that she struggled with buttons and clips as she peeled them away. Finally she was naked and pink against him, her nipples like petals, and the dark hair between her legs the color of smoke. He covered her mouth with kisses, and heard that deep growl come out of his chest, that animalian growl that a man could never make. He couldn’t stop himself from kissing her all over, on her throat and her breasts and her belly and on the insides of her silky thighs.

He cradled her head in his hands as she ran her fingers over his face, digging deep into the undercoat of soft wolf-fur beneath the long coarser hair.

She was still crying, but in his ears it was like the rain on the windows—like a song.

W
HILE SHE SLEPT
, he built up the living room fire. He wasn’t cold, no, not at all, but he wanted the spectacle of it, the flicker against the ceiling and the walls. He wanted the bright blaze itself.

He was standing with one foot on the low hearth when she came into the room.

She’d put on a white flannel nightgown, like the one he’d torn up so greedily the first night. It had thick antique lace at the wrists and around the collar. Little pearl buttons glinted in the dark.

Her hair was brushed and lustrous.

She sat down in the old chair to the left of the fire, and pointed tentatively to the bigger chair, the battered and worn chair to the right, which was large enough for him.

He sat down and gestured for her to come.

She quickly moved to his lap, and he held her shoulders in his right arm and she rested her head on his chest.

“They’re searching for you,” she said. “You know that.”

“Of course.” He still was not used to the depth of this voice or its huskiness. Maybe he was lucky that he had a voice at all.

“You’re not afraid here, alone, in this house?” he asked. “I see that you aren’t. I’m asking why.”

“What is there to fear?” she answered. She was speaking confidentially, naturally, her hand playing with the long hair on his shoulder. Gradually her fingers found the nipple amid the hair of his chest. She pinched it.

“Wicked girl!” he whispered. He winced. He gave that low hungry growl again and heard her muted laughter.