Unbound
Authors: Meredith Noone
© 2016 by Meredith R Noone
All Rights Reserved
The following is a work of fiction.
The characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and a product of the author’s imagination.
October
The wind carried with it the scent of fresh blood and old death. The big gray wolf tipped back his head and tested the chilly morning air, nostrils flaring.
Human
, his nose told him.
The wolf turned to follow the smell. It led him down from the high mountain meadows, through the coniferous woods of the Adirondacks, around the edge of the oxbow lake where teenagers from the town often came during the warmer months to swim, to a farmhouse near the edge of town.
The cattle in the field had not yet been milked today. Their udders were full. They were bunched up together in the far corner of their paddock, and they were lowing uneasily.
Something had spooked them. The wolf slipped out of the edge of the trees, casting only a cursory glance at them as he followed the smell of the blood. He didn’t hunt livestock. He knew this land. This was the old O’Reilly farm.
The O’Reilly patriarch was lying in a ditch, not even two hundred yards from his cattle. His throat had been torn out, his chest cavity opened up, his internal organs partly eaten, his eyes open and staring. Whatever had killed him had pulled off his jawbone. It was lying on the grass, a dozen feet away, all the teeth plucked out. The wolf stepped softly as he approached the body, his nose to the ground.
The kill site was fresh. The body was warm. Jacob O’Reilly hadn’t been dead longer than three hours.
There was a smell. It was bad. Wolves didn’t normally associate smells with good or bad. Those were human ideas. Smells were information, and while a pungent perfume might be a bit powerful, it was no worse than the burning scent of bleach, the smell of leaf litter, or a deer that had been lying in the sun for a week.
This smell was bad, though.
It reminded the wolf of a slow-creeping rot, the sort that sometimes sickened people and animals and ate them up from the inside, a smell which tasted sick-sweet on the back of his tongue. Whatever had killed O’Reilly had left it behind. He trailed the scent, following it as far as the creek before he lost it amongst the myriad of other smells at the water’s edge.
He returned to O’Reilly’s body.
Jacob O’Reilly had been a good man. The wolf had known Jacob O’Reilly when he was just a cub, and O’Reilly had been decent and hardworking, and had sent both his son and his daughter off to college. Now he was dead, staring up at the sky. Sooner or later, the crows would come and peck out his eyes and the foxes would come and eat his intestines and the flies would come and lay their eggs and the maggots would eat his remaining flesh.
The wolf turned and made his way towards the highway, which ran past O’Reilly’s farm, a little less than a mile to the east.
He stepped onto the shoulder and sat down there and waited.
Three cars past him by without slowing down or stopping. The fourth was a black SUV. It indicated, then slowed down and pulled over a hundred yards further along. A man got out. He was tall and broad-shouldered. He had fair hair and pale skin and a serious expression. He smelled like gunpowder and grass and gasoline.
“What are you doing all the way down here, Ranger?” the man said to the wolf.
The wolf recognized the man as Charlie LaVergne. Charlie LaVergne worked at the butcher’s in town. He had a young daughter called Alyssa but she was not in the car. She would be at school. The wolf decided that Charlie was a good candidate to lead to the body.
The wolf flicked an ear.
The people of the town didn’t often see the wolf anymore. He came out of the woods infrequently these days, preferring solitude.
The wolf turned on his heel and started trotting up Jacob O’Reilly’s long, winding driveway. He stopped, twice, to look back and make sure Charlie LaVergne understood. LaVergne got into his SUV, did a U-turn onto O’Reilly’s turnoff, and followed the wolf up to the farm yard, where he pulled up and got out again.
“Okay, Ranger,” LaVergne said. “I’m here. What did you want to show me?”
The wolf led him to the ditch where Jacob O’Reilly’s body lay. LaVergne blanched, held a hand to his nose to block the smell, and turned to look at the wolf with hard eyes.
“Did you do this?” he asked the wolf.
The wolf pinned his ears back and growled.
“All right, all right, you didn’t,” LaVergne said, holding his hands up in surrender. He spotted the mutilated jawbone and stepped closer to take a look. “You wouldn’t take the teeth, anyway, would you Ranger? What would
you
need teeth for?”
The wolf chuffed.
“I better call Sheriff Hostler,” LaVergne muttered.
The wolf slunk off into the trees as LaVergne pulled out his phone and called the police station. Sometime later, the Sheriff’s car pulled up O’Reilly’s long, winding driveway. A couple of police cars stopped behind it, and Sheriff Hostler, his Deputy, Hunter, and a couple of other officers got out.
LaVergne showed them the body.
Sheriff Hostler swallowed heavily. “What happened?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” LaVergne replied. “I saw Ranger on the shoulder and followed him up here. Old O’Reilly was like that when I got here. What do you think did it?”
The Sheriff shook his head. “I don’t know. Third body like this we’ve had this month, though. Ranger would know better than anyone what would cause these sorts of injuries.” He looked up, his eyes scanning the tree line. He was looking in the wrong place. The wolf was sitting under the old red pine near the barn. “Is he still here?”
“I think so,” LaVergne said. “Don’t think you’ll get much out of him, though.”
The Sheriff sighed. “No one ever does. We consulted Madam Watkins on the previous two bodies, but she didn’t know what to make of them. I’m starting to think we’ll need to speak to Michelle about it, soon.” He turned to his Deputy. “Hunter – it’s probably time we got state police involved. We can’t keep it in the town anymore. Can you give Detective Bower a call? Better get the ME up here, too.”
Hunter nodded. “I’ll get on it now.”
The Sheriff turned back to the body. “Christ. This is a mess,” he said, mostly to himself.
The wolf moved to stand at his side.
“Ranger,” Sheriff Hostler acknowledged him. “What are we going to do?”
The wolf whined, softly. He didn’t know. There wasn’t a lot he could do, not anymore. It was up to the Sheriff and the town to sort this out.
Ranger headed back to the forest to consult with Nicole who was two valleys over.
The day Detective Bower came to Tamarack, the wolf went to visit Michelle Devereaux. The two events were actually unrelated. The wolf had simply been wary of returning to the deep mountains too long when there was someone – or something – lurking in his town, killing his people, so he’d been hanging around the edges of Tamarack, eating roadkill when he could or else scavenging through people’s garbage cans.
The night before, though, he’d been rummaging through a plastic bag left on the curb for some leftover pizza when a man came out of a house that the wolf was
sure
had been empty the last time he was in town and started shouting at him, spooking him away and leaving him with an aching belly. Most of the people in Tamarack knew the wolf, recognized the chewed up left ear and the scarred up muzzle that lent him a raffish air, and they knew he belonged to the town and never bothered anyone.
But the man who scared him had been unfamiliar.
The wolf knew that there were certain people he could always get a free meal from. Claire and Alexander, the old married couple he’d known since he was very small, who lived on Melrose Road, would offer him berries or fruit or chicken. Miss Ackers who lived by the school and had to be nearly ninety and was starting to go a bit senile, would give him a lump of cheese if he scratched on her door. Victoria Meadowbrook kept cats, and if he looked pitiful enough she might give him a delicious sliver of turkey.
The wolf liked Michelle the best because she would let him into her house and offer him a bowl of water and let him sleep in front of her fireplace for the afternoon. Michelle would probably have liked it if he stayed with her forever, rather than returning to the mountains every time, but she seemed to understand why he needed to leave and never tried to stop him.
He wandered onto her porch and sat in front of her door, whining. He wasn’t allowed to scratch at her house – she was sick and tired of constantly having to repaint the door, she’d told him, and he could respect that.
She didn’t hear him whining at the door, so he yipped a couple of times, and that worked.
He liked Michelle. She came to the door in her pajamas with her short blonde hair awry. She had a picture of a smiling cat on her pajama shirt, her right sleeve hanging empty. Her breath steamed in the brisk morning air, and she yawned.
“It’s really early, buddy,” she said to him, stepping aside to let him in. He supposed he must’ve woken her up.
The wolf wiped his cheek against her knee as he went past, leaving his scent against her, then brushed his side along the arms of her armchairs, and then the back of her couch.
“All right,” she said, watching him tolerantly. “But don’t you
dare
pee on anything.”
The wolf gave an offended huff, and flicked an ear.
“Don’t you
sass
me, Ranger, I
know
you.”
He followed her into the kitchen, where she started opening cupboards to peer inside, humming thoughtfully to herself.
“What do you want for breakfast?” she asked him without turning around to look at him. “Oatmeal or scrambled eggs?”
Ranger chuffed at her.
“Both, of course,” Michelle said, more to herself than him. “How long’s it been since you ate something decent, anyway? Yeah, that’s what I thought, mister. But if I’m cooking both, it’s gonna be microwave oatmeal. I can’t do everything all at once. Not without someone to
give me a hand.
” She side-eyed him, grinning. “What, nothing? I thought that one was great.”
For someone with only one arm, she was extremely deft in her own kitchen. She’d mastered the art of cracking eggs against the edge of the frying pan a long time ago and performed this task with practiced ease while she told the wolf about her cousin Eli’s most recent adventures at high school.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, stirring the eggs carefully with a spatula after she’d finished telling Ranger about the fight Eli had with another student at school where they both ended up suspended for three days. “I
like
Eli. He’s a good kid. But he doesn’t always make the best decisions. And his friend Lori? She definitely likes to stir the pot.”
Ranger put his paws on the counter and leant over to stare at the pan, feeling his belly rumble painfully. The eggs smelt delicious. She’d mixed them with cream and a little salt and pepper, and what appeared to be little chopped up bits of bacon.
He whined, glancing up at Michelle’s face and then down at the cooking eggs again.
“Yeah, another thirty seconds, maybe,” she agreed. “They’re a little runny still. Speaking of Eli, Aunt Abby’s renting out Granny’s house over on Elmwood Street.”
Ranger dropped down to the floor, snapping his jaw shut, and stared at her, bewildered.
Michelle went on, apparently oblivious to the wolf’s bemusement, though there was a hard edge in her voice. “Yeah. The new tenants are moving in this afternoon, apparently, coming over from Boston.”
Boston
.
“Detective Bower, and his kid, the one with the weird name. Sacheverell. They’ll be staying until someone can work out who’s killing people, I guess. Don’t know how long that will be.”
The wolf used to live with Granny Florence in that little house on Elmwood Street, until Granny died two winters ago. She’d been eighty-five years old, and she’d had to lean heavily on her old oak walking stick towards the end as her right hip was so bad. She went in her sleep, in the armchair in front of the fire, while the wolf was napping on the hearth rug.
Michelle flicked the element on the stove off, removing the pan from the heat and abruptly changing the subject. “I got you a collar. And a tag.”
Ranger snorted.
She laughed. “I know, but with the murders there are a lot of new people in town and I don’t want anyone taking pot shots at you. All the wolves are wearing them, now. And I
know
you can take care of yourself and you’ve been doing it for years, and everyone else knows who you are and wouldn’t dare do anything to you. But do it for me? I love you, you know, and I couldn’t bear it if you got hurt over something stupid.”