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Chapter Twenty-Three
Two days after she and Luther had mated for a second time, a number of attacks cropped up all across Angel Fire and the surrounding communities. Authorities put out a special alert to avoid the mountain paths as much as possible and they warned people to be on the lookout for rabid cougars once the medical examiner had finally sent back their findings from the previous attacks on Lewis and Ilya.
“Our supervisors told all the miners that it’s too dangerous to go out into the woods, and they stipulated that workers shouldn’t be going from the caves to the camp by themselves. We’ve been told never to travel between the sites in groups of less than four. And the men who stay at the camp itself were given a curfew to avoid prime cougar prowling hours, not that it’d do much good, since those shifters obviously wouldn’t be following the same clock,” Luther told her over the phone while Espie was waiting for a dryer to finish so she could move a load of linens to the folding table. “Didn’t you say your clan’s got a cop on the inside? What if we talk to him about what we know?”
“Clive? It won’t matter what we tell him, because he’s not going to act unless it’s on Miguel’s say so,” said Espie in a frustrated tone. “It would be so stupid if Miguel still thinks you’re the killer, even though they’ve now got proof positive it was a different kind of animal involved. Maybe he’d be willing to listen, now that the prime suspect can’t be you.”
“You know him better than I do, Espie, but do you really think he’s going to believe us with so little evidence to support our theories where Vesper is concerned? If we come to him insisting there’s a bunch of cougar shifters who are running around smelling like humans, he’s going to tell us we must have both bumped our heads, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, but he is my brother,” Espie said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve got to at least give it a try, you know?”
“Espie, there’s – I wanted to talk to you about something else first,” Luther told her, his voice sounding so unsettled that she felt her stomach clench with uncertainty. “Didn’t you say you would have the day off tomorrow?”
“Uh, yeah,” she said. “But are you really going to make me wait a whole day to find out what’s on your mind, Luther? I mean, the more time we wait, the more likely it is that somebody else is going to get hurt or killed.”
“I just – please,” he insisted. “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. I’ll just come by tomorrow, alright? And don’t worry. It’s nothing bad, it’s just – I don’t know, personal?”
“Sure, I understand,” she agreed, smiling. “But feel free to text me later if you’re not deep inside a mountain. I want to know that you’re all right tonight.”
Espie worked so late that she was too tired to even bother returning to her cabin, choosing instead to pick out one of the empty rooms and crash for a few hours before she went home to look for Luther.
Before she left the main building, she decided to go to the rec room to use one of the computers that were set up for paying guests, and she pulled up the most recent data she could find about the attacks on a local website, trying to see if there might be another way to connect Vesper to the crimes.
According to the newspapers, all the injuries were caused by cougars. One of the attacks had resulted in a fatality, but most of them, while they’d been quite brutal, had not. Those who were hospitalized either had yet to awaken, or they were too traumatized to remember what had happened. Still others who had roused simply didn’t want to talk about it. In any case, the press was having a field day trying to determine why the local wild cats would have staged an attack en masse in such a violent way.
The phone at the resort had been ringing off and on all day with people canceling their reservations, all of them citing that there was no way they were going to go skiing up on a mountain where cougars were attacking. Most of the people who had been scheduled to stay at the resort over the next eight weeks now would not be coming, which meant that, given what was happening, the Ruiz family might even be forced to close the resort at the very height of the season, until the matter was resolved and the mountain area was once again safe.
It was more than obvious to Espie that the cougars were trying to intimidate the two businesses targeted by Vesper to be shut down. Many of the people harmed had been miners, resort workers, or family members from one or the other group. Surely even Clive would see that pattern if she pointed it out to him, but Espie was as good as her word. She wouldn’t attempt to talk to either Clive or Miguel until after Luther had gotten whatever he was worried about off his chest first.
When she finally headed to her cabin, Espie had been hoping to take a few minutes to settle in and have something to eat before Luther showed up, but when she got there she found Paulina and Rufus, along with the three pups, waiting for her on her porch. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see them, but she still felt a bit disappointed that she’d be losing her one shot at putting her feet up for a while.
“What’s up, guys?” she asked, smiling at them as she unlocked her door.
“We actually wanted to talk to you about everything that’s been happening in Angel Fire for the past forty-eight hours,” Paulina told her. “We wondered if your clan might have figured out what’s really going on out there.”
“The…” Rufus then spelled out “murders” in a hushed voice, which made Espie grin. The pups were nowhere near paying attention. Mika, Mickey, and Marie were more interested in her garden than they were in seeing Espie, with all three pups digging up the soil like it was full of mice.
“Well, come on in,” she insisted, quickly ushering everyone inside. Each adult carried in a reluctant pup. “We can discuss that, of course, but we should probably put the pups in my bedroom first. The window is high enough that they won’t be able to jump out.”
“Yet,” Paulina emphasized with a sigh. “They’re getting bigger and bigger every day.”
Espie opened her window to let the breeze in, and then glanced over at Paulina. The coyote shifter’s eyes twinkled with tears of motherly affection, a look that made Espie’s chest tighten.
“Behave, now, kiddos,” she admonished her offspring. “Don’t any of you dare break any of Espie’s stuff.”
By the time the two women reached the door, the trio was jumping on Espie’s bed, little naked kids with muddy feet, squealing and giggling in human form. Espie rolled her eyes good naturedly when she and Paulina’s gazes met, then she closed the door behind them.
“When we talked last, you were worried about the clan thinking Luther was responsible for those two men’s deaths,” Rufus said as Espie crossed to the kitchen and put the kettle on to boil. She then moved on to get three mugs ready for some coffee.
“Well, I certainly don’t believe it,” she insisted. “Luther is a good man, and he shouldn’t have to prove he’s innocent after all those attacks were declared to be committed by cougars.”
“He sure sounds like a good guy from what you’ve told us,” Paulina said, hovering near the bedroom door while Rufus settled on Espie’s couch. “It sounds like he’s really trying. Struggling to get it right, maybe, but definitely trying.”
Espie shrugged. “I think so, too.”
“Whether he’s a good guy or not is irrelevant,” Rufus pointed out, then he seemed to shrink a little when the two women each pinned him with equally narrowed looks. “No, no, of course it matters in terms of your relationship, Espie, that’s not what I was talking about. It just doesn’t matter if he’s a good guy in terms of the clash between the mining community and the Angel Fire residents, and it certainly has no bearing on this whole cougar debacle.”
Leaning back against the counter, Espie crossed her arms and frowned. “All I know is that if those people were being attacked by cougars, then a polar bear shouldn’t be getting blamed. Just because Luther is new in town doesn’t mean they should be singling him out. And I would say the same thing even if I hated the guy myself. It’s completely unfair, and that’s all there is to it.”
