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watch. “It’s four. Don’t you have some homework to finish?”

  “Yeah…It can wait until after supper – Want them pork chops you thawed out yesterday before you decided to have fish instead?”

  He didn’t answer, obviously lost in thought again.

  She cleared her throat. “Earth to Paul!”

  He swung around.

  “Nah…She’s not on your mind…Not even a little.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what did I just ask you?”

  “I don’t know…Was busy with the order here.” He held up the clipboard.

  “I asked you if you wanted me to cook those pork chops you thawed out yesterday.”

  “Pork chops…Yeah…Sure…guess we should have them tonight. But do your homework. Sally should be here soon to relieve me…Thought I’d cook them.”

  “Fine with me. I do have a test to study for tomorrow.” She walked off.

  Just then a matronly woman in jeans, loose-fitting sweater and shoulder-length, light brown hair entered the store.

  “Hi! Sally,” Paul greeted their only employee. “Glad you’re here. Gonna finish up the order and then I’m through for the day.”

  “I don’t see any customers, Paul,” Sally said, tossing her purse behind the counter. I can finish up for you.”

  “That would be great…Thanks!”

  “No problem.” She went up to him and took the clipboard as he handed it over.

  “Well, you know where to find me if anything comes up.” He hurried off and ducked through the door behind the counter into the back, directly entering into his and Judy’s living quarters. Judy was already at the kitchen table doing her homework.

  Amber finished her chicken TV dinner and tossed the empty plastic plate into the garbage under the sink. She washed her hands and poured herself coffee. She looked out through the kitchen window over the sink. Still daylight. But it was dwindling fast behind the thick forest. She decided to step outside to drink her coffee. She exited out her backdoor onto the porch. There were three steps leading off the porch, same as the front. She noticed the large round concrete slab on the ground to the left of the steps, approximately four feet across. There was a rustic hand pump on top – Her well.

  At the top of her steps, she took a seat, resting her feet on the bottom stoop, and peered off into the woods. There was a barely visible trail that veered off to the right. She realized that that was probably the trail that led to Dorian Lodovico’s cabin.

  A slight wind rustled through the tops of the trees, and off in the distance a crow cawed, followed by another crow answering from somewhere else. When she looked straight up, she could see the sky. It was clear blue but with thick patches of graying clouds, building up for rain.

  She shivered, realizing that it was growing cooler. Still, she wanted to look around out back for a little, maybe even walk up that trail for a ways and see if she could see Lodovico’s place.

  She jumped up and went inside, left her cup in the sink and grabbed a sweater from her closet and went back outside and headed off to the trail. She realized that the only reason it was a trail was because it had been walked through often, probably by the previous owner. The grass was knee-high on both sides, with some shorted blades extending from the sides across the gray dirt of the trail.

  The wind whipped her hair and the strong scent of damp pine filled her nostrils. She loved it! She had forgotten how refreshing it was the one time she had visited Washington, a far cry from the stifling heat of the Texas coastal area. This she could stand for a very long time. Off in the distance, she heard a strange chattering. She decided it might be a coon, although she really didn’t know what coons sounded like. It had to be an animal. She glanced back; her cabin had disappeared behind the trees. She had left the little clearing around her property. Had she gone a quarter of a mile? It seemed so.

  She continued a little further, beginning to feel uneasy, but not really being able to pinpoint the reason.

  She still didn’t see anything other than lots and lots of giant conifers, birds perched up high in the branches, and squirrels scampering about. So where was Lodovico’s cabin? She sucked in air and exhaled loudly.

  “And why am I so curious?”

  She jumped then, as what she believed to be a very large crow, called loudly over her head. Its raucous caw was a little different than what she remembered, almost a croak.

  She looked up. It was staring down at her from a branch only a few feet from where she stood, head cocked sideways, watching her intently. There was also something different about its eyes.

  She shivered again, but this time not from the cool air. Never had a bird stared at her like that before. “Shit! I’m going back.” She turned and starting running, not walking, to her cabin.

  She knew she was probably being silly, but there was something about that crow that bothered her, not that she’d had many close encounters with crows. Still, she had seen them a few times in her life, while on vacations with her folks, or on trips to the Houston Zoo, and even on a one time camping trip when she was around twelve.

  She was winded when she reached her back porch, and she noticed it was quickly growing dark, and a mist was tickling her face. She couldn’t wait to get inside and lock her door. Soon as it was secured, she ran to the front door and locked it too. Then she stopped in the middle of her small living room. “Crap! I am losing it! Letting myself be spooked by a friggin’ crow! Even though it was really large. Derek would never let me live this one down!” She went to the sink and grabbed her cup and filled it with coffee again and sat down to her little table. Her magazine was lying just where she’d tossed it after coming home from the store. She picked it up and began leafing through it, hoping to get her mind off her obviously ridiculous fear.

  What she didn’t see was the same bird that had frightened her alight on the railing of her back porch. It sat there watching her through the window of her door as she read her magazine.

  Clifford was up early in spite of the cool front that had blown in the evening before. He had to get down to the nitty-gritty today on chopping up that wood for winter.

  He ate a big breakfast, as was his usual habit, and drank a pot of coffee before pulling on his boots and flannel jacket and going out back to start on the wood. He never had a shortage of logs to split. Old trees fell fairly frequently, enough to keep his hearth supplied through the cold winters.

  Only drawback to using the available trees, he had to chain up his gray mare Betsy and have her drag them back to his lot and then chop and cord the damn things. But it beat the hell out of trying to heat with electricity – which tended to go out a lot during the winter storms – or with propane. Just using propane for cooking made it last a whole lot longer. Sometimes it just wasn’t possible during heavy snow or ice storms to get to Paul’s.

  He took up his axe and stared up at the sky. The sun was still peeking through the thickening gray clouds in areas, but it wasn’t going to clear off today. He was sure of that. The mist that had fallen during the night hadn’t soaked the ground, but it had left heavy dew on the wood. Didn’t matter, as the tree was pretty dry under the bark. It had been dead for some time. He glanced back to his porch. Some wood was still stacked there, left over from the previous winter, but it would only last him a week or two when the weather got seriously cold. This wood he intended to stack up beside it.

  The familiar honk of Jerri’s horn took his attention, and he glanced down his driveway at the mailbox where she was on the road side in her postal Jeep. Jerri waved in her big fashion. “How’s it going, Clifford?”

  “Good…Just chopping wood for winter.”

  She laughed in her usual cheerful manner. “It’s what keeps you strong, handsome. You take care, now. Ya hear?”

  “You too!” He smiled as she drove on. She had a crush on him, and he’d been aware of it for some time. He liked her. She was a pleasant looking woman with soft brown hair and yellow eyes, bu
t ever since his wife, Caroline, had been killed by some kind of animal three years back, he just couldn’t let himself get involved with anyone.

  For one thing, it hurt like hell to lose the only woman he’d ever really loved. They’d been sweet on one another ever since kindergarten. For another, her death was still somewhat of a mystery. Though the coroner had said he believed it was an animal attack, she had been drained of every drop of blood in her body. That he knew just wasn’t right.

  His gut told him that no ordinary animal was capable of that. He had made a vow to her dead body when he found her in the woods that fateful day, that he wouldn’t rest until he had found who or what had killed her.

  He was a freelance writer and photographer for magazines and newspapers, having sold some articles to such noted magazines as “National Geographic” and “The Smithsonian”. But mostly his income was from hunting and fishing pieces he sold to the Seattle papers. The day Caroline had been killed or murdered, he’d gone into Seattle to pick up a rather large check, one that would hold them over for a year, but when he got home just after dark, expecting her to be waiting with open arms, she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The only clues he had at all were her half drank cup of coffee on the back porch railing and her mobile phone lying off in the grass by a large tree that was to their cabin side of the trail that went off into the woods.

  Instantly alarmed,