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He changed his tone.
“I’m Doug, by the way. Doug Muir.”
“I’m Saber Warren.”
“Saber, pretty name. Do you walk here often?”
“No,” she said. “I can only walk when its light out and school is closed.”
“Walking-in-the-woods season is indeed coming to an end.”
“So I hear. I’m enjoying it now, though, while I can. It’s beautiful out here.”
“That it is. Nice to meet you, Miss Warren.”
Saber smiled at him and waved, and watched as he went along his way, pressing his walking stick into the loamy, springy earth. She stood looking at the coyote for a minute longer, admiring it. Its fur really was thick and lustrous, and other than the fact that it was dead, it was a beautiful animal.
When she walked on, she looked up into the gray sky and saw one raven circling overhead, then another. She shivered and pulled her jacket tight around her. It wasn’t even three in the afternoon, and it already felt like dusk.
“Do you think about, like, Elise and Laurel and those girls?” Saber asked Lozen as they sat at Saber’s kitchen table with books open, working on their homework.
“What about them?”
“Like, if they’re in danger?”
Lozen looked up at her, then tapped her pen.
“Yeah,” Lozen said. “I do think about that.”
“I know you don’t like them.”
“I can notlikepeople and still hope they don’t get murdered. It’s called emotional maturity.”
Saber snorted.
“But you don’t feel like you should try to do anything about it?”
Lozen sighed.
“I want to know what’s going on, but I’m not going to risk my life over it. I can’t. I worry about my mom too much to do that to her. I lovemyselftoo much, honestly.”
“Mysteries drive me crazy,” Saber said. “Like, I can’tstandnot knowing.”
“That’s because nobody killed someone you know personally. It feels a lot more real for me.”
“Ok, sorry. It just seems like somebody—”
“Come on, Saber, we’re not the Hardy Boys. It’s not our job to figure out what’s going on.”
Saber nodded, but the truth was that she’d been thinking about it for days. There was a small part of her that was insanely, irrationally curious if somehow Ansel was one of the rich men entertaining high schoolers at these parties, even though he really, really didn’t seem like the type. She’d had bizarre dreams about it, him offering her exotic jewelry, kissing her, speaking to her in that haunting voice that made her shiver.
“Well, I kind of want to find out. We could go together if they ever invite me out again, see if anything weird is going on.”
“I don’t know. I do have some morbid curiosity about it. I want to know how my cousin died, and I wish she could have justice, but not enough to risk my own life.”
“My dad told me that Ben died from blood loss, but there was no blood at the scene and no wound.”
“How doesheknow?”
