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The welcoming squeal was loud enough to wake all the neighbors in three counties. A large, pale shape trotted toward him with excited snuffles and grunts. Ashton stood completely still in the shadows of the house, his heart hammering as he waited for every living thing in the street to come rushing out to see what the noise was, but nothing happened. The neighborhood slumbered on.
“Henry,” Ashton said softly, as his heart rate slowed. “This is where you got to.”
The big boar came up and stood in front of him, looking up expectantly. Ashton fished around in his pocket. He’d come prepared with a carrot just in case he found Henry. He held out the carrot and Henry took it, crunching noisily.
“It’s a good thing Gloria is away,” Ashton whispered, bending to scratch Henry behind the ears. “Winifred is hard of hearing, but Gloria would surely have heard that. You’re a noisy boy.”
Henry looked up in the hope of another carrot, but when he didn’t get one, he turned around and ambled off to the other side of the yard.
Ashton watched him go. He appeared to be in good health, and Ashton had no fears for his welfare. But what should he do now that he’d discovered Henry’s hiding place? He was sure that Bec and her vegan friends were probably behind the great pig heist, but Lily would have to at least be complicit. This was her house, and there was no way she could claim ignorance of a large pig living in her backyard. He shook his head. He couldn’t take Henry back to the farm tonight; he had no trailer, and Henry might be reluctant to leave his new abode.
Then a thought struck him. Why not just … play a little joke on the girls? They had taken his pig, after all. Regardless of their reasons, it had caused him to worry and was an inconvenience. He guessed he could go to the police with an accusation of theft, but he didn’t want to do that. He knew it was a risk to leave Henry there; they could move him on to somewhere else, but he thought it would be worth it to have some fun at the girls’ expense. A little payback was in order after what he’d had to go through.
He left the yard and made his way back to his truck, which was parked around the corner. He got into the cab and fished around for a pen and some paper. Then he tried a scrawl with his left hand so it wouldn’t be recognizable as his handwriting.
Dear Lily & Bec
I have a confession to make. I think I’ve been scaring people away. They hear me in your yard and think they’re going crazy. After all, no one keeps a big pig like me in a yard like yours. There’s nothing wrong with your yard, of course. But it’s a bit small for me and now it smells like pig. I’m working on making myself more at home, of course. In the future, I plan to have multiple mud baths all over the yard and I love digging holes, so expect plenty of them to appear. It helps to keep me from getting bored because I miss my ladies and my farmer. Ashton was always good to me and he never said the S word around me. But I got to know what it was because I overheard Ashton talking about sausages to a friend. It was alarming at the time, but Ashton is a good guy and wouldn’t turn me into sausages.
Anyway, if you want your friends to come back, maybe it’s time to take me to a farm. I appreciate your attempts to save me from a terrible fate, but I miss the open spaces to roam around. I had a good life with Ashton and my ladies.
Your ever-loving friend,
Henry
Ashton grinned and folded the note, then crept back into Lily’s yard and propped it up on the back window sill where they would see it when they went outside to feed Henry in the morning. He chuckled to himself, then tiptoed back to his truck and went home to bed.
Lily stared in horror at the piece of paper in Bec’s hands.
“Well, Henry can’t write notes,” she said. “Someone obviously knows he’s here.”
“Ashton is the most obvious culprit,” Bec said. “Are you sure he didn’t see Henry when he brought you home the other day?”
“As sure as I can be,” Lily replied. “This is bad, Bec.”
“It sure is,” she agreed.
“Can’t you take him back to the farm?”
Bec shook her head. “The trailer is off on another job, and my friends aren’t back yet. He’s stuck here, at least for now.”
“You could always just tell Ashton he’s here.”
Bec looked at her as if she were crazy. “Well, why don’t you tell him if it’s such a good idea?”
“Because this madness wasn’t my idea in the first place.”
“But the consequences are yours to share,” Bec reminded her.
Lily groaned. “Can you imagine what Ashton might do? We could end up in jail or worse!”
“What might the ‘worse’ be?”
“Ashton might … might be really angry, and who knows what would happen then?”
“We knew that was a risk.”
“You mean, you knew it was a risk, but you insisted on doing it anyway.” Lily glared at her friend, hands on her hips.
