A Temporary Arrangement

Keifer hadn’t seen anything in the bare refrigerator that looked as good as that, but he just shrugged and stared at the faint, muddy paw prints circling the kitchen.

Rufus had brushed up against the white cupboards, too.

He tried to imagine what Dad would say.

He sure didn’t have to imagine Mom’s response—she’d be totally freaked out. Anything involving dirt, animals, blood or sweat freaked her out. Which is why he’d never had any real pets. Only some dumb fish that couldn’t do anything but swim in circles.

After Abby left the room he stretched out in his sleeping bag, propped his chin on his palms and listened to the tiny squeaks and squeals from the puppy box.

He’d counted the days until coming here, but the first morning had been scary. And now Dad wasn’t even here and a stranger had taken his place.

But Abby said he’d probably be back tomorrow, and the puppies… He squirmed caterpillarlike in his sleeping bag until he could see over the top of the box and count them all over again.

The empty feeling in his chest eased as he watched Rufus lick and nudge her pups. Even if Dad wouldn’t be able to do all the fun things he’d promised, there’d still be puppies to play with, and Keifer wasn’t going to be homesick for Mom and all his friends back home.

He backhanded a hot tear before it had a chance to fall. Nope, he wasn’t going to miss them.

Not much at all.

AFTER A SLEEPLESS NIGHT on the sofa, Abby cracked an eye open to look at her wristwatch. She flopped back against the cushions and pulled the afghan up over her shoulders. Five o’clock.

When had she last been awake at five?

The storm had finally passed, but Rufus had barked anxiously at the door at least three times. She’d blearily shuffled out to the kitchen and then had stood on the chilly porch until the dog returned. Amazingly enough, Keifer had barely stirred.

Drifting and dreaming, only half awake, Abby snuggled deeper under the afghan, thankful for the marshmallow-soft sofa.

It was so peaceful here, the silence of the forest broken only by the distant hoot of an owl, a chorus of coyotes…gentle mooing….

She sat bolt upright. Mooing?

Throwing back the afghan, she hurried barefoot across the cold hardwood floor to the window and squinted out at the gray predawn landscape. Heavy fog hung low to the ground, leaving the tops of fence posts and bushes hovering weightless several feet above the ground.

Farther away, large dark shapes drifted past like ungainly rowboats floating on a sea of fog. Very oddly shaped boats. One of them mooed.

Keifer pushed open the kitchen door and stood next to her, his hair tousled. “Weird,” he observed after a loud yawn. “So, are you gonna do chores?”

Chores. Interesting concept, that. What, exactly, did chores entail? She rubbed her upper arms and considered. “I don’t suppose your dad has a list?”

Keifer looked at her with the patience of a person dealing with the mentally incompetent. “He just does them. Why would he need a list?”

Lists were comforting. It was fun, making lists of things to do and crossing off each success. Without a list…on foreign ground…she was at a complete loss.

She crossed her arms and tapped her fingers on the bulky sleeves of the sweatshirt she’d borrowed. “If there’s no list, have you seen him do chores? I assume those cows get food. And what about the horse and those goats you mentioned yesterday?”

“I don’t know. I just got here.” Keifer shrugged. “Their food’s probably in the barn.”

“I’m sure it is, but I don’t know how much or what kind to give them.” She had an unsettling thought. “Um, he doesn’t milk those cows, does he?”

Keifer rolled his eyes. “They’re the beef kind, but he doesn’t eat them. He says, ‘Anything that dies here, dies of old age.’ He gave them all names.”

“Names?”

“Yeah. He was gonna raise cattle for money, but then they all sorta got to be pets. So now he says they’re the lawnmowers for his meadow.”

Feeling more and more like Alice after she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole, Abby sighed. “So, this mowing crew of his, have you ever seen your dad feed them?”

Keifer shrugged.

“Maybe we’d better try contacting him. He probably had his arm fixed last night, and he might even be on his way home. If I can track him down, maybe he’ll tell us what he wants done.”

Far more confident now, she tousled Keifer’s hair and went to the phone in the kitchen. In the far corner, Rufus raised her head over the box, then dropped back down, clearly occupied with her new family.

The line was dead.

Abby reached for her purse and rummaged for her cell phone. Her hope faded at the words No Service.

No way to contact the outside world.

No car—because hers was still mired in the road.

And, she remembered with a heavy heart, she’d promised to contact the animal shelter this morning about that poor dog on death row.

But surely the shelter wasn’t open to the public on Sundays, anyway. And surely the staff scheduled to feed the animals wouldn’t actually euthanize anything today…would they?

Biting her lower lip, she leaned against the kitchen counter and rubbed her face, the image of that sad, wary dog all too fresh in her mind. “I’m going outside, Keifer,” she called. “Can you tell me where the barn is?”

He came to the doorway. “Past the house. Driveway goes back there.”

Here, at least, was a ray of hope. She remembered driving through Wisconsin’s dairy country and seeing herds of black-and-white diary cattle lining up to get into their barn. Did beef cows know that trick, too?

“Maybe the cows will, um, follow me if they think they’ll be fed.”

Keifer wandered into the kitchen with a sullen expression. “The TV doesn’t work. Not the computer, either.”

“The electricity’s out. Maybe you’d like to just crawl into your sleeping bag and go back to sleep while I go outside. It’s too early to be awake, anyway.” When he glanced nervously at the curtainless kitchen windows, she added, “Rufus will be in here with you, so you’ll be fine.”

“Uh…maybe I better come along. Just in case.”

She hid a smile as she went to the back door. “If you prefer. I’m sure you’re more of an expert at all of this than I am.”

She sorted through a pile of boots, found a small pair that had to be Keifer’s, and handed them over. The rest were size elevens. After considering her muddied shoes, still wet from last night, she took a pair of rubber work boots, found some ratty yellow gloves and stuffed one into each toe.

“These are going to look like clown shoes,” she muttered, looking up at Keifer. “Promise you won’t laugh?”

He nodded solemnly, though his mouth twitched.

The fog still hung low and heavy, tinged now with the faintest shade of rose. The cows had moved farther toward the road, where—luckily—she’d closed the gate last night.

“Do you ever see wildlife around here?” she asked casually as she followed Keifer down the lane toward the barn.

“’Possums. ’Coons. Deer. No wolves, though, if that’s what you mean.”

He stepped into a mud puddle with a splash and nearly fell, his arms flailing. “Whoa!” She steadied him.

She glanced around at the forest still shrouded in mist…where something rather large could hide.

“I think I saw a bear once,” the boy continued, “but it was pretty far away. Dad sees wolves, but not this close, so I never saw one. Pictures, though. Dad takes lots of pictures.”

“Pictures,” she echoed, trying to imagine the man she’d met as a photographer. “Really.”

The lane climbed a gentle hill and soon they were out of the ground fog. “For his book.”

“Like a picture album?”

“No, a book about wolves.”

She glanced at Keifer, but the boy kept trudging on with his attention on the ground in front of him. If the kid had said Ethan Matthews raised platypuses and giraffes, she couldn’t have been more surprised. “He writes books?”

“Not kid books, though.”

“Really.” Maybe the boy had things a little confused. The man she’d met at the hospital had hardly seemed the erudite, professorial type.

Ahead, probably another twenty yards, the first slivers of sunlight picked out a wooden barn that must have been constructed recently, and beyond it, a fenced pasture and a much older barn weathered to pewter-gray.

On the south side of the new barn, a ten-or twelve-foot pipe gate hung askew from just one hinge, its top bars bent.

“I think we’ve just discovered how your dad’s livestock got out,” Abby said, relieved. “He must’ve forgotten to chain the gate.”

“Dad doesn’t do stuff like that. He’s real careful.”

“Maybe when he got hurt out here, he couldn’t get it fastened. Let’s bring a bucket of grain from the barn and see if we can lure some of those animals back, okay?”

“I’ll get it.” Keifer ran through the gate and disappeared around the building. He returned a moment later, ducked into the barn, and soon came out with a bucket of corn that was obviously a heavy load for a kid his size. Puffing, he set it down at her feet. “I think this is weird, though.”

She caught the handle of the bucket in one hand and tested the weight of it, then started back down the lane. “What’s weird?”

Keifer chewed at his lower lip. “The pens for the sheep and goats were open, too!”

Abby switched the heavy bucket to her other hand and flexed her tender fingers. She smiled down at him. “He was hurt, so he was probably in a hurry.”

“No. I mean, he was—but I was out here with him when it happened. He never opened those other gates.”

Abby paused. “You said goats were smart and hard to keep penned, so maybe they just played Houdini.”

“Who?”

“Houdini was a guy who could escape from just about anything.”

“No.” Keifer’s voice held an edge of fear. “It wasn’t the goats. The locks were sawed off, Abby. Why would anyone do something like that?”

Abby eyed the muddy barnyard. “I’ll take a look if we actually get any of the livestock back up here,” she said. “Now, let’s see if we can round up some critters.”

THIRTY MINUTES LATER Abby was hot, muddy and frustrated.

The sheep and cows were nowhere to be seen, but shaking a bucket of grain certainly attracted the goats. They charged toward her as if that grain were their last, desperate hope for survival, then shouldered one another out of the way and nearly knocked her off her feet.

She hurried to the barn, with three irate goats butting at the bucket, and her.

Headline: Foolish Nurse Lures Angry Goat Mob With Grain—Trampled To Death. Or, Woman Chased By Goats—Spends Two Weeks In A Pine Tree.

Both sounded entirely too plausible by the time she’d finally trapped them in their pen.

Keifer, who’d brought up the rear, eyed them warily as she poured part of the grain into a feeder and quickly slammed the gate shut again.

Leaning against the gate to catch her breath, she ran a hand wearily through her hair. “I’ve definitely lost my fondness for goats,” she announced. “How about you?”

But Keifer wasn’t paying attention. He’d squatted by the gate to study something and held up a long heavy chain and padlock. “See, I told you,” he said.

She stared at the ruined padlock. Then turned slowly to scan the nearly impenetrable forest surrounding the little buildings on three sides.

Shadows seemed to coalesce, materialize, then slink away. Every boulder, every clump of under-growth offered a place to hide.

Someone had cut that padlock after Ethan left. Someone who’d wanted to cause trouble. But why?

And the bigger question… Where was that intruder now?

She turned to Keifer and reached for his hand just as a much taller shape loomed out of the mist not twenty feet behind the boy.

She bit back a scream.

CHAPTER SIX

ETHAN SPUN AROUND, expecting to find a ten-foot bear looming over him or an angry moose, ready to charge.

“Dad!” Keifer started to run for him, then faltered to a stop. His face looked worried as he stared at the heavy white bandaging that covered Ethan’s arm from elbow to fingers. “Holy cow.”

Ethan gave his arm a rueful glance, then welcomed Keifer into a one-armed hug. “I’ll be good as new before long.”

He looked over the boy’s head at Abby. “W-we weren’t expecting you,” she said, her voice faint. Splattered with mud from head to toe, she gripped a length of chain until her knuckles turned white.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you two, either, since I didn’t see my truck in the drive. Where’d you park it?”

“About your truck…”

There were dark circles under her eyes and she was clearly exhausted. He felt a pang of guilt. Though much of yesterday was foggy, he dimly remembered handing her his truck keys and mumbling something about chores. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come out here. Especially not in this wea—”

Lightning struck somewhere close with an earsplitting crack followed by a long, ominous roll of thunder. Raindrops rippled the puddles of standing water at their feet, and then it began to fall in earnest.

“The goats are in,” Abby said over the rising wind. “But I didn’t…get…”

The goats? He shook his head, unable to hear her clearly. “Get back to the house!” he shouted. Keifer took off like a jackrabbit. Abby tried to yell something else, but he gestured and started down the hill, shielding his arm with the tail of his shirt. If the damned thing soaked through, he’d probably need to go back to the hospital again. A long drive. A waste of time.

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