Page 156 of Mazywood

“I don’t think the cops have even been here yet,” he said. “Sharise took the Jeep, but it’s still… a mess out there. Anyway, I have to get a tow truck here for the rental.” Dad was talking to himself. He groaned with frustration. “Can one thing be easy today?”

“What about the Caddy?” Imani mumbled, half asleep. Dad stared at her as if she were speaking gibberish. “In the garage? There’s a red Cadillac under the tarp. Sharise and I saw it.”

Dad’s face lit up. “Hollman billed me for his work on that car,” he said. “Did he really get that thing working?” Dad had an extra Cadillac and didn’t know. They must be rich, all right.

Imani dozed again while Dad rushed into the garage. When she closed her eyes, her body sank into the mattress as if she were floating, but she jerked awake with a gasp from a nightmare she couldn’t remember, except for snow flying in her face. She was sure it would be dark when she woke, but the sun was brighter through the windows than it had been all day. Or had she slept straight through to tomorrow?

A chorus of trumpets sounded from the front of the lodge. Imani sat up, bleary-eyed, and stared out at the bright red vintage Cadillac through the window. It was a convertible, but Dad had the aged white top up. He waved at her from the driver’s seat. Imani wondered again why cars had looked like boats back in the day. How had people fit two cars in their garages?

But finally—they were going home.

Dad locked up the lodge and turned off the generator. He dutifully left a note on the door for the sheriff, in case someone came to investigate what had been hidden under the Jeep. Then Imani joined him in Mazelle Washington’s Cadillac. The pale leather seat felt as hard as tree bark, crackling when she sat down. She could imagine that it might have looked glorious once, but now the car was a relic. Except for the paint job, everything that had been shiny was faded.

But the engine worked, only sputtering from time to time.

Dad’s hands tremored slightly before he rested them on the huge steering wheel. He must be more tired than she was, she remembered. Imani closed her eyes when they drove past the spot where the Jeep had been and where she knew the RAV was still trapped. She didn’t want to see any body parts or frozen blood. She had seen enough carnage to last the rest of her life.

From habit, she turned on the radio and punched all the silver buttons before she tried turning the knobs for fine-tuning, but all that blared from the speakers was static. One station played snippets of an old jazz orchestra, fading in and out. She turned the radio off.

Dad looked left and right and then left again before he turned from the lodge’s private road back toward the pine-lined road that had brought them to Bear Creek Lodge. The tires slid a bit as he turned, but the view was pretty without driving snow. Imani remembered it would be Christmas soon. She had forgotten all about it. She should help Mom with the decorations.

“What are you going to tell the sheriff?” she asked. It was as if they’d had an unspoken rule not to talk about any of it, but she was tired of the silence.

“Good question,” Dad said. “I think we just stick to what we said: We don’t know what it was. It’s buried in the cavern. You said you got footage, right? We’ll show them. After we see your mom, we’ll send them to look at what was under the Jeep. One thing at a time.”

Imani slipped her hand inside her backpack to make sure she’d packed her GoPro, relieved when her fingers touched the camera. Her battery was dead, but once she charged it again, she had footage of Beast (Scout?) that might change their lives. But people might accuse her of faking the footage or using AI. Maybe there was no such thing as proof anymore.

And anyway, she had no proof of how its eyes had stared at her. Or how it had listened to her. Or how it had brought her and Mom water bottles when they were the most scared. She couldn’t prove that it had seemed to understand everything she said. She couldn’t prove that it had never planned to hurt Daddy, or any of them.

Anyone who watched the video only would see a monster. Grief swamped Imani, fueled by her exhaustion. The biggest miracle of her life was something no one else but her might understand, something she could never share even with her family—just like her great-grandmother. Maybe that was a part of what legacy meant too.

But at a cost.

“Do you think Mom’s foot will be okay?” Imani asked.

Dad’s sigh didn’t sound hopeful. “We’ll see, sweetie.”

No false assurances. No sugarcoating. No matter what, their family was changed now.

The buffed Cadillac in bright red was the only vehicle on the two-lane road toward Route 89 between the stately pines and roadside snowdrifts. The only other living thing in sight was the small brown dog sitting in the road in their lane—almost as if it were waiting for them.

“Dad, stop,” Imani said, since Dad wasn’t slowing down. He hadn’t seen the dog.

When Dad braked, the tires skidded a few inches forward before stopping. They were barely ten feet from the dog in the road, but it didn’t move. The dog stared at Imani through the windshield. Not at Dad—at her.

Dad honked. The Caddy’s old-fashioned horn sounded like a goose. Still, the dog stared.

Something about the dog felt familiar, although Imani was sure she had never seen it before. The dog wasn’t big, but it wasn’t small. She noticed that it wasn’t wearing a collar.

“Dad, it’s in the middle of nowhere. It must be lost.”

“Imani…” Dad sighed. “Please. Let’s just get to the hospital.”

But Imani’s car door seemed to open by itself before she jumped out of the car. Impulse control. She ran closer to the dog, her sneakers squishing snow melting from the sun.

“Watch out—it might have rabies!” Dad called.

But the dog’s tail wagged as Imani approached. Its stubby tail looked chopped in half.