“But I’ll need to tell them—”
“Call it an anonymous tip. Someone found their bodies and left voice mail.”
After a moment, she nodded. “I may need to call in a favor or two, but I’ll leave you out of it.”
“Thanks.”
She went to a kitchen drawer, opened it, drew out a fat envelope, which she set on the table in front of him. It was full of cash, just like he asked. “I think I totaled up your expenses all right. Let me know if it’s short.”
“And the cabin?” Trina said. “Don’t worry about it. Free of charge. Just for, you know.”
He almost pushed the envelope back. He liked Domingo. What had happened here? That needed to be taken down. This wasn’t a job, this was a crusade for the public good.
Is that a little pride I sense, hm?
The altruistic thing would be to refuse payment and drive off into the sunset. But he took the money because the gas he’d burned to get here was more than he could afford. Besides, he deserved a little compensation for that nightmare. For facing Famine itself and living to tell about it. But he at least counted out what he would have spent on the cabin and gave it back to her.
“Thanks,” he said. Annie and Trina shared a wry smile.
“Anything else?” she asked.
He could ask her out to dinner. He could maybe stick around a couple more days. He could do a lot of things, he supposed. But he wanted to get back home.
“I’m happy I could help, Ms. Domingo,” he said, and offered his hand for shaking.
“I’ll call you if we get any other weird trouble around here, yeah?”
“You’ve got my number,” he said.
Amelia had one last task she wanted to perform before they took to the interstate to head out of the valley, so Cormac went to the supermarket up the road and bought a bouquet of flowers. Plenty of daisies this time of year, and Amelia liked daisies. Next, they drove out to the Alder Creek site, where the Donner family had camped. Camped, starved, and mostly died. Half the kids had survived. None of the adults did.
At Amelia’s direction, he stepped a few feet off the trail and found a likely spot, near a living pine and hidden in the grasses where a conscientious ranger wouldn’t be likely to see it right away. There, he laid the thin bouquet on the ground, and thought about Tamsen Donner.
Not just her, Amelia thought. All the mothers, really. If I was in the habit of praying, I would pray for them, trying to keep all those children alive through the nightmare. It’s the women of the camp I mourn.
They couldn’t change anything. The prayers, the flowers—they were never for those who’d died. They were for the living, who wanted to help but couldn’t, not a hundred and fifty years later. So you lay down flowers and try not to think of what you’d have done if it had been you in that camp.
He stood for a moment enjoying the clean air, the pure morning sun blazing down. Soaking in some of that elusive peace. If he felt a hand in his, giving a comforting touch of pressure, surely it was his imagination.
I think it’s far past time we leave this place and go home.
Cormac knew she was right.
Kitty and Ben stared at Cormac across the table, and the longer they did the weirder this got. Obviously he hadn’t explained things very well, but he wasn’t sure what else he could say to make his trip out to Truckee sound more reasonable. They’d wanted to know what happened. Maybe he shouldn’t have told them.
Finally, baby Jon fidgeted in Kitty’s arms, and that distracted them from their astonishment. He still wasn’t used to seeing the couple with a baby, but that was another issue. Babies were something that happened to other people, not anyone he knew.
“Famine? The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse Famine?” Ben said.
Cormac shrugged. “Don’t know that I’d swear to it in court. But it was pretty convincing.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Kitty said. “Why am I even surprised? The shit we’ve seen? Sorry, pardon my language, don’t learn that word.” She kissed the baby’s fuzzy head, and he yawned.
Ben was Cormac’s cousin and sometime lawyer. Kitty, he’d planned on killing the first time they met. Now, in one of the stranger mysteries in Cormac’s life, they were friends. The couple were both werewolves. Cormac had introduced them to each other, and. . .well. That had turned out all right, in the end.
Today, they occupied a corner booth at Wild Things, Kitty and Ben’s new café slash coffee shop venture. More upscale than these places usually were, the café gave the impression of being part of the atrium of a modest country house, refined yet homey. Well lit and furnished, it had a good selection of art on the walls, books in scuffed bookshelves, and inviting sofas, chairs, and tables distributed throughout, with enough space in between that people weren’t likely to jostle each other moving around. Werewolves were territorial and sensitive to that sort of thing.
Cormac still kept a silver-laced penknife in his pocket, just in case.