Page 8 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

The heavier one steps back. "Mr. Blackwood. Couple days back, maybe three. Why?"

"What did they drive?"

"Dark car. Didn't think much of it." He frowns. "Should we have?"

"No," I say, because a true answer would do them no good. "Goodnight."

It is the first courtesy I have shown anyone in this town, and the wrongness of it moves them off faster than a threat.

I walk past a lamp and the road turns to gravel. The public notice board stands where it has always stood, at the trailhead, layered with church suppers and lost dogs. I nearly miss it. The mark is small, scored low into the post and half-covered by a flyer — a circle crossed by three short lines. The hunters' sign. I haven't seen one carved in earnest in forty years. My hand does not rise to touch it. The last one was outside a mill town that no longer appears on maps.

In the dead grass below the post there is ash. Not from any chimney — finer than that, paler, the kind left when a thing is burned to send a message rather than to keep warm. I kneel over it. The wind has not yet scattered it, so it is fresh. Whoever scattered it knew precisely what it said, and trusted that no one in Briar Glen would.

These are not tourists. Tourists do not cut old warnings into trailhead posts. Vandals break what they can see; thieves take what they can sell. This hunter has done it before and will do it again.

I think of the lit windows behind me, and of telling Hannah. Of her face changing, and the questions that would open after it. Who burns a circle into a post, and why. What her grandmother truly did with her evenings. Who I am, that I can read every line of it at a glance. Every honest answer is a door I cannot hold open. A warning stripped of its reasons is only fear with no shape, and fear like that has never kept a single person alive. So I will say nothing. The choice is the right one and sits in me like a swallowed stone.

I drive back and call it caution. It is a cleaner word than the truth, which is that I cannot point the car home until I have seen the two walk out of that hall unharmed.

I am in the lot, close enough to count the heartbeats still inside, when a voice cuts across the dark.

"Normal people go home when they leave a party."

Lily. She has come out alone, hands buried in her sleeves, and she crosses the gravel toward me like I'm a fixed part of the night, not a man she has met only once.

"I left," I say.

"You left and then stood in a dark parking lot. That's weird. That's two steps from a true-crime documentary."

I say nothing. Most people read silence as a door closing. She reads it as one held ajar.

"Mom thinks you're rude," she says. "I told her you're just bad at people. Different problem."

"Is it?"

"Rude's a choice. You look more like somebody who forgot how it's done." She tilts her head. "So why are you really out here?"

The question is harder than her voice carries it. She is sixteen and she has already learned to notice the gap between what a person says and does. A useful habit. An inconvenient one to stand in front of.

"It's late," I say. "I like the quiet."

"Sure." She doesn't believe me and doesn't bother to hide it. "You had a face on, when you came in. Like somebody handed you bad news."

"Not at all."

"Huh." She nods slowly, as if I've finally said something worth keeping. "Go figure." She turns, then stops. "For the record — you're not nearly as scary as you think you are."

Then she's gone, back inside. I wait until the door shuts. Until the heartbeats inside come whole again before heading home.

The road home is familiar, ten thousand times driven without a thought. Tonight I cannot stop hearing Lily. Somewhere in this last week they stopped being a complication on the next property and became something I lack any clean word for. Not strangers. More like family. It's not comforting.

I learned that last time, in the cruelest lesson there is. It means heartbreak. Problems. Difficulties. None of which I want to deal with. I came here to outlive everyone I might lose, to want nothing the world could take from me. The first true threat to find me has chosen the one town where that plan has already, quietly, failed. The hunters aren't the only danger I carry home tonight. They came for whatever Elspeth hid. They do not yet know I'm here — that next door to Elspeth, I'm there.

7

HANNAH

The pencil snaps against the page, and the line I meant to trace goes ragged. I've spread the journals across the quilt, and not one of them will make sense. My grandmother's hand is small, looping through dates and the symbols. A triangle and a circle together, and a circle with horizontal lines. A mark like a key. A column of initials that match no one I know. Under one she's written, moved it to the second safe place. The first is no longer ours. As if she handed me a map and kept the explanations. Evie. What was your secret?