If a door is locked, that means it’s not for you.
“All right, sorry,” I grumbled to the imaginary man in my head.
The place was perfect, and it was mine for now. All anxiety melted away as I opened a few windows to circulate some fresh air. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Mr. Grumpy Pants made it out to be. Why rent out a place if you didn’t actually want anybody to stay there?
I returned to the car to bring in a few more things when movement in my periphery toward the main cabin caught my attention. A jolt of adrenaline had me widening my stance and tensing my shoulders as a grayish-brown blur bolted at me. I had just been reaching for my pocketknife when I realized the blur would not reach higher than my kneecaps and was thin enough to get lost behind a sapling.
It was adogrunning full speed in my direction. I may have braced for impact in any other situation, but this little thing wouldn’t intimidate a house mouse. Its whip-thin tail and high-arched back reminded me of a Greyhound, but one shrank to afraction of its original size.
This must be the dog I was warned about.
Terrifying.
“Are you the ferocious protector of Château Carmichael?” I knelt to catch her as she approached.
She was not having it. She trotted right past me, barely sparing me a side-eye. She stopped at the front door and scratched, her little frame wracked with shivers. It had to be in the upper fifties, yet she shivered like she’d been left out in the tundra. How did this dog handle these conditions in the coming months? This wasnotan outside dog.
Her whine increased, along with the shivers rattling her bones, and her thin tail tucked under her legs. I couldn’t tell if she was malnourished or just built like the child protagonist of a Dickens novel. I made my way to the door and touched the handle.
“You wanna come hang out?” I asked.
She looked up at me quickly with beady little dark eyes as though I would deny her more porridge at any second.
“Hi, I’m Claire. We’re going to be friends for the next few months.” I spoke calmly and sweetly as I held up a hand and slowly squatted down, studying the tagged black collar. “Can I get your name?” She stared ahead, whining quieter but with no outward signs of aggression. Thankfully, her tag was angled in my direction. “Ripley. Nice to meet you. You’re a good girl, Ripley. You don’t have a secret dark side that leads to sudden acts of violence, right?” I said in a sweet, high voice reserved for dogs, children, and birds that intimidated me at the park. Not cats.They hated that voice.
I slowly extended my hand, but she only gave a cursory sniff. I stood back up and opened the door. “Okay. Why don’t you give me the full tour? Good idea.” She zipped in and out of sight.
“Ripley?” I turned around in the room slowly, looking for the furry blur. The quick whipping motion of a tail caught my attention from where it stuck out under the throw blanket, lying across the heavy down comforter on the bed.
“No. This is good. You make yourself at home. I’ll just do my thing, and you do you, boo.”
Her tail wagged harder under the blanket before she let out a contented sigh and settled.
“I’m sure your owner is wondering where you are.” I looked out the open door up at the house but didn’t see any grumpy old men clambering at me. Maybe she snuck out.
I closed the door and set up my computer next. Then I remembered the idea that came to me on the drive up about a sharp hook in the introduction paragraph and I needed to jot it down before I forgot it. As promised, there was no internet and no reception on my phone. No matter, I had plenty of notes and files saved to my external hard drive.
My note turned into a sentence that turned into a paragraph, and the next thing I knew, I reached for my headphones so I wouldn’t lose the flow. My phone was filled with downloaded playlists because I’d planned ahead, and I let myself sink into my work.
Working eased more of the tension from me. Iwas safe here in this little bubble. This was what I was meant to be doing. If Kevin’s hurt features drifted into my mind like a floater in my vision, I just blinked him away and focused on the importance of this work and getting the article written.
Hours must have passed when I finally came back to my body and its physical needs. And possibly Ripley’s too. She wiggled restlessly in my lap. I blinked down at her.
“When did you find your way here? Sneaky.” She sat in a shivering ball on my thighs with the throw blanket wrapped around both of us. I paused my music and took out my earbuds, stretching my neck.
“Okay, potty break,” I said.
She balanced on pointy paws to stretch, as yet another chill wracked her body.
“We gotta get you a sweater or something.”
She whined and placed a paw on my desk. Her tiny pointy face aimed at the window with intense focus. She growled, the muscles of her upper body tensed. All at once, the hairs on the back of my neck tingled with the awareness of being watched.
I wasn’t alone.
Ripley started to bark a surprisingly deep protective bark for such a wispy thing.
My heart hammered as I reached for the pocketknife in my jeans. Should I pretend I don’t notice the dog looking out the window? Pretend I didn’t know a person stood just a few feet away from me? And then what? I had a little more sympathy for the victims in scary movies. You always assume you’d knowexactly what to do in these situations, but in the span of just a few seconds, a thousand of the dumbest ideas I ever had rotated through my brain.
