Silver Moon, I Wait No More novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Pike Ridge

Ross tells her about three dead wolves and twelve illegal traps, Jolene remembers Delaney's gloves, and at three in the morning a black wolf waits in the motel lot.

"No," I said.

It came out too fast.

Ross kept his eyes on the road.

"Most people ask what a silver trap is," he said. "You didn't."

I looked at the tarp again.

"My boyfriend stepped in one. A year ago. On Pike Ridge."

That made him turn his head.

"October ninth?"

"How do you know that?"

"Because a hiker called it in that night. Said she heard a man screaming up on the ridge."

"By the time I got there, there was blood on the rocks and the trap was gone."

He shook his head.

"Nobody ever came forward. No hospital report. Nothing."

"He didn't go to a hospital."

"With a leg trap on his ankle?"

"Somebody pried it off him and brought him home."

"Who?"

I didn't answer that.

The highway curved down out of the pines into open wheat country.

Ross drove with one wrist on top of the wheel.

"Twelve," he said after a while.

"Twelve what?"

"Twelve of those traps. That's what I figure. I've pulled seven off that ridge this year."

"Silver plating over steel jaws. Somebody paid a lot of money for them."

"Why silver?"

"You tell me." He glanced at me. "Silver doesn't make a trap hold better. It just costs more."

I knew why.

I couldn't say it to a man in a state uniform.

"And three wolves," Ross said.

My stomach turned over.

"Wolves?"

"Big ones. Bigger than any gray wolf I've ever weighed."

"One last November, one in March, one in July. All three dead by the time I found them."

He tapped the wheel.

"And here's the part I can't make sense of. Every time, by the next morning, the body was gone."

"Somebody carried off a hundred-and-forty-pound wolf in the night. Left the trap. Took the wolf."

I knew who would do that.

You don't leave your own people on a mountain.

I closed my eyes and tried to see the night Nash came home.

In my last life, I had thought about it a hundred times, but only about how scared I was.

Now I made myself see the rest.

The front door banging open at two in the morning.

Delaney coming in sideways with Nash's arm over her shoulders.

His jeans soaked dark from the knee down.

Delaney saying, "I was walking on the ridge. I heard him."

What was she doing walking on Pike Ridge at two in the morning?

She lived in a rented cabin on the other side of town.

There was nothing on Pike Ridge but rocks and trees.

And her gloves.

She'd been wearing those black leather gloves.

She had told us she pried the jaws open with her bare hands and burned them to the bone.

She kept them wrapped in my dish towels all night, and Nash kept saying how brave she was.

I never saw a single burn.

But she'd had the gloves on when she came through the door.

She'd taken them off in our kitchen.

She'd put them in her coat pocket before I could see them.

Who brings leather gloves on a walk in October, unless she knows she'll need them?

"Jolene?" Ross said. "You went white."

"I'm tired."

"Where am I dropping you?"

"Somewhere cheap."

He took me to the Riverside Motel on the east side of Spokane.

It had a pool with a cover on it and a sign that said WEEKLY RATES.

Ross walked me into the office.

The manager looked at his uniform, then at me, then gave me a room on the ground floor for less than the sign said.

At the door of my room, Ross handed me a card.

His name. A phone number. A little picture of an elk.

"If you think of anything about that ridge," he said, "call me."

"And if I don't?"

"Call me anyway. You don't know anybody here, do you?"

"No."

He nodded.

"Lock the chain," he said, and went back to his truck.

I locked the chain.

The room smelled like old cigarettes and lemon cleaner.

I sat on the bed and counted my money.

Seven hundred dollars, plus eighty-three of my own.

In my last life, by this hour, I'd been sitting on Bodie's bed in the rental, holding his pillow, waiting for the phone to ring.

I took a shower until the hot water ran out.

I didn't cry.

I fell asleep on top of the blanket with my shoes on, and I didn't dream.

Something woke me.

The clock said 3:04.

The room was dark except for the orange parking lot light leaking around the curtain.

I lay still.

Outside, very close, something was breathing.

Long, slow breaths, deep as a bellows.

I got up and went to the window.

I moved the curtain one inch.

The parking lot was empty except for a minivan, an ice machine and the covered pool.

And a wolf.

It stood in the middle of the lot under the light.

It was black from nose to tail, and so big its shoulders came up past the minivan's door handle.

Its breath smoked in the cold.

It was looking straight at my window.

Its eyes were gold.

I knew those eyes.

I had looked into them that same morning, on my own front steps.

The wolf lifted its head and howled, and every car alarm on the street went off at once.

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