Hustling between the trees, I was sure, sure enough to bet my bossy oldest sister Celadon’s life on it, was a large donkey in a black-and-white-striped costume. I squinted and blinked some more. Sure enough, it was still there. No one I knew of in town had a donkey. The Spencer family had one in the past to keep predators away from their flock of chickens but it had unfortunately eaten some siding off its enclosure and died of internal bloating. Unless I was looking at the striped ghost of a gluttonous donkey, something else was up. Or I really was hallucinating. If I thought for sure I was seeing this apparition, was I still certain I had seen the mountain lion the night before? Could that obnoxious man from the state have actually been right about me seeing things? Then, I remembered what Graham had said about the escaped animals. Alanza’s death had driven that bit of exciting news right out of my mind.
“Did you see that?” I asked Grandma, reaching toward her with my closest hand, not taking my eyes off the creature in the woods. But before she answered, the animal disappeared. I leaned back in my seat but continued to scan the trees for another glimpse of it. The road bends away from the woods, and before I knew it, we were out of sight.
“I’m sorry, Dani,” Grandma said. “See what?”
“Never mind. I must have been imagining things. Besides, whatever it was is gone now.” I didn’t tell anyone about my mountain lion sighting, but they could find out down at the Stack or the general store or even the post office if the gossip about Alanza didn’t manage to sink it deep enough under the feet of old news. I found myself hoping gossip would run amok and Myra wouldn’t have any tidbits to share concerning me. Or that even if she did, no one would be interested. But since she was at the police department, it seemed like she would be the most favored conduit of information concerning the possible murder and that my secret was safe as long as the guy from the state didn’t say anything.
Even if he did, it wasn’t likely he’d say anything to anyone I knew. He could blab all he wanted to the other guys back at the Fish and Game station house, wherever that was, and tell them about the crazy woman who’d been drinking and thought a mountain lion was padding across her porch like a house cat. It probably gave him something fun to share with his coworkers, a good laugh, a deep rumbling chuckle, but nothing that affected my reputation as long as he didn’t attach the name of the sugarhouse to the story.
Could he do that? Was there some sort of oath of office, some kind of professional code that would not permit him to disclose the names of people involved with a distress call? I didn’t know whom I could ask, except maybe Knowlton Pringle, the local taxidermist. He spent a lot of time roaming the woods and encountered at least his fair share of game wardens. Maybe more than his fair share.
He looked a little disreputable and he’d been spoken to about keeping any flashlights pointed toward the ground on a few occasions when he tried explaining he was not out flashing deer, just trying to find roadkill in need of stuffing. At least that’s what constitutes bragging in Knowlton’s world, tall tales of deep woods encounters of the game warden kind. I’d rather stew in my own worry juice than approach Knowlton for information.
If I asked Myra about it, that would only serve to remind her about the incident in the first place and she would be sure to spread it round. If I asked anyone in the family, they’d want to know what I was doing in the sugarhouse when I had a migraine. No solution came to me and my spirits flagged. By the time we reached the house, I was ready to climb into bed and pull the covers over my head. Unfortunately, that wasn’t on the schedule. We were already two hours later getting home than the worst-case scenario I had envisioned, and tonight was the monthly Griddle and Fiddle gathering at the Stack Shack.
I also knew I’d be dragooned into silver-polishing duty and all sorts of kitchen tasks in preparation for Thanksgiving creeping toward us on Thursday. Grandma was already drying a mountain of bread cubes for stuffing and had mentioned me whipping up a maple cranberry sauce. I was trialing a few new recipes at each holiday for possible inclusion at the shop and had even started tinkering with the idea of a Greener Pastures cookbook to sell there.
And I was still starving, having never gotten around to breakfast. I tucked my sneakers into one of the shoe cubbies lining a whole wall in the mudroom. For years the shoes from such a big family piled up helter-skelter and made us all crazy. One morning Loden woke us all with the sounds of a circular saw. By the end of the weekend we had a totally transformed mudroom thanks to his quiet way of taking on a project and solving a problem. I grabbed my pair of sheepskin-lined slippers from the wicker slipper basket and tugged them on as I headed for the savory smells floating out of the kitchen.