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"What the hell is going on, Alex?" There was impatience in the clipped tone of Zach's voice. "I need to know what you saw out there. All of it."
"I saw a footprint," she stated as clearly as she could manage. "Not from a boot. It was from a bare foot. A very large foot, and very humanlike, only ... not quite--"
"Oh, for God's sake," Big Dave said around a snort of laughter. "It wasn't wolves that killed them, it was Bigfoot! Now I've heard it all."
"What are you doing, Alex? Is this some kind of joke?"
"No," she insisted, pivoting away from Zach's disbelieving look to the rest of the townsfolk. They were all staring at her as if waiting for her to burst into laughter.
Everyone except the black-haired stranger in the back.
His silver eyes bored into her like spears of ice, only the feeling she got the longer she held his gaze was not one of cold but of bone-melting heat. And there was no mockery in his expression. He listened with an intensity that shook her to her core.
He believed her, when every other person in the place was dismissing her with polite--and some not so polite--looks of confusion.
"It's not a joke at all," Alex told the residents of Harmony. "I've never been more serious, I swear to you--"
"I've heard enough," Big Dave announced. He started lumbering toward the door, several other men laughing among themselves as they followed him outside.
"I know it sounds crazy, but you have to listen to me," Alex said, desperate that she be believed, now that she'd laid the truth out for them.
Part of the truth, at least. If they wouldn't take her word about the track she saw in the snow, they would never accept the even more incredible--more terrifying--truth of what she feared was to blame for the murders of Pop Toms and his family.
Even Jenna was gaping at her as if she'd just gone off her rocker. "No one could survive in that cold without proper clothing, Alex. You couldn't have seen a bare footprint out there. You know that, right?"
"I know what I saw."
All around them, the meeting began to disband. Alex craned her neck to try to find the stranger, but she couldn't see him anymore. He was gone. She didn't know why that thought should disappoint her. Nor did she understand why she felt so compelled to search him out. She was impatient with the need, and desperate to get out of there.>"I simply don't understand," said Millie Dunbar from her seat in the pew behind Alex. The old woman's voice trembled, not so much from her eighty-seven years of age but from sorrow and concern.
"Who would want to harm Wilbur Toms and his family? They were such good, kind folks. Why, when my father first settled here, he traded with Wilbur's grandfather upriver for many years. He never had a bad word for any of the Tomses. I just can't figure who could be so evil to have done something like this." One of the townsmen near the back of the church piped in. "If you ask me, makes me wonder about the boy, Teddy. Too damn quiet, that one. Seen him hanging around town a bit of late, but he wouldn't even say hello when spoken to, just acted like he was too good to answer. Made me wonder what the kid was up to, and if maybe he had something to hide."
"Oh, please," Alex said, feeling obligated to defend Teddy since he wasn't there to do it for himself. She pivoted on the pew and shot a disapproving glance to the area behind her, where dozens of faces had hardened with suspicion because of Big Dave Grant's baseless accusation. "Teddy was shy around people he didn't know well, that's all. He never talked much because of the teasing he always took for his stutter. And to suggest that he could somehow have anything to do with the murder of his family when he's lying right next to them on a cold slab is disgustingly callous. If any of you had seen the condition they were left in--" Jenna's hand came down softly on Alex's wrist, but the warning was unnecessary. Alex had no intention of taking that train of thought any further. Bad enough she'd been reliving the gruesome discovery over and over in her mind since she'd stumbled upon Pop Toms, Teddy, and the rest of their kin. She wasn't going to sit there and rehash for everyone how brutal their murders had been. How savage the wounds that had rent flesh to the bone and torn open throats as if some kind of hellish beast had come out of the cold night to feed on the living.
No, not a beast.
A being out of a nightmare.
A monster.
Alex closed her eyes against the vision of blood and death that began to rise from the darkest reaches of her memory. She didn't want to go there, never again. It had taken years and thousands of miles, but she had outrun that dark reality. She had outlived it, even though it had robbed her of so very much along the way.
"Is it true there wasn't no murder weapon found?" someone shouted from the middle of the gathering. "If they wasn't shot or stabbed, then how exactly were they killed? I heard there was a hell of a lot of blood spilled out there in the bush."
From his position behind the pulpit, Zach held up a hand to quell the ensuing barrage of similarly curious questions from the crowd. "Until the AST detachment arrives from Fairbanks, all I can tell you is that we are treating this as a multiple homicide. Being that I am one of the investigating officers, I am not at liberty to discuss the details of the case with anyone at this time, nor do I think it would be wise for me to speculate."
"But what about the wounds, Zach?" This time it was Lanny Ham who spoke up, his reed-thin voice edged with slightly more than its normal level of nervous energy. "I heard the bodies look like they were attacked by animals. Big animals. Is that true?"
"What does Alex think, since she was the one who found the bodies?" someone else asked. "Do either of you believe it could have been animals that killed them?"
"Roger Bemis said he saw a pair of wolves prowling around near his property on the west side of town the other day," interjected Fran Littlejohn, who ran the town's small health clinic. Ordinarily she was a reasonable woman, but now there was a strong note of worry in her voice. "Been a hard winter already and it's just started. What's to say it wasn't a hungry pack that decided to attack the Toms place?"
"That's a damn good point. And if it was wolves, what's to say they won't come looking around here, now that they've gotten a taste for human prey?" came another paranoid suggestion.
"Now hold on, everyone," Zach said, his attempt to inject calm getting lost as the voices in the building escalated along with the level of hysteria.
"You know, I saw a wolf right before nightfall just last week. Big black male, sniffing around the Dumpster out back of Pete's. Didn't think nothing of it then, but now--"
"And don't forget that it wasn't more than a few months ago that wolves killed some sled dogs down in Ruby. The papers said they didn't leave anything more than entrails and a couple of leather collars--"
