CHAPTER EIGHT
Honey
Iglance at the man in the furry costume tromping through the woods next to me. “Are you able to leave the house without that costume on?”
After overhearing his phone call, one more puzzle piece has slid into place. I still don’t know what he does for a living, but I know he’s hiding out here because of a bad break-up.
No wonder he wants to be alone and his house is such a wreck all the time.
He’s suffering a broken heart.
I still have a feeling, one I’m doing my best to ignore, that he’s lying about being a professor. I suspect, because history has taught me well, that he’s involved in something less than legal.
Pretty sure it’s nothing violent, since he stopped me from killing a spider before we left his house, but I’m not counting out any possibilities for sure.
His head tilts to the side, but I can’t see his human eyes, so I have no idea if he’s actually looking at me. It’s not like I was the best at reading this guy before he put the suit on, but he’s like a brick wall now.
“You’ve seen me outside without Bert.”
“Who’s Bert?” It only takes a moment for it to sink in. “Oh, my Goddess, you’re talking about the costume. You have a Bigfoot alter-ego?” Laughing feels good. Look at me, I’m in the woods, talking and laughing just like I’m somewhere safe. I’m not thinking about the creepy-crawlies or the furry biting things. I can conquer my fear.
Mac huffs. “It’s not an alter ego. I just named the suit. Bert the Bigfoot.”
“Uh-huh. And when you go out in the woods to scare the tourists, it’s not Mac Skillworth scaring tourists. It’s Bert?”
“Sure. It helps me stay in character.”
“That’s the actual definition of an alter ego, Mac. Do you sometimes dream you’re really Bigfoot, free and wild and running through a meadow?”
“You seemed a lot nicer when you were on the other side of a pasture from me.”
“Yeah, well, you seemed a lot stalkier.”
Underbrush crackles and I move closer to my giant protector. “I’m just curious. Are you hiding from something? Is the costume protecting you in some way from your fear of the real world? Are you actually on sabbatical or—” I shut my mouth because asking the man if he’s hiding from the law seems rude.
“It’s nothing like that. My aunt is Lorraine Gibson.”
“No.” I’m so surprised, I stop walking for a moment. “Lorraine, who owns the general store in town?”
“That’s her. I spent every summer with her growing up.”
“Oh.” A few things click into place. “I guess that makes sense.”
The trail narrows, and he falls back, letting me take the lead. I can handle the lead. I just have to follow a narrow dirt trail. Probably nothing’s going to jump out and grab me and, if it does, being in the back would be equally dangerous.
“What makes sense?” Mac’s giving me space I don’t want. I mean, it’s nice he’s not stepping on my heels since I’m sure I’m slower than he’d like to be, but I’d like it better if he could literally have my back.
I glance over my shoulder to see he’s, like, two people-sized spaces behind me. I gesture at him. “Walk closer. They can pick us off if we’re too far apart.”
He chuckles, but closes the distant between us. “Who’s they?”
“Bears, wildcats, really gigantic spiders. Whatever monsters live out here.”
“I’ll protect you, don’t worry. No one messes with Bert.”
“Your alter ego.”
“Whatever.” He huffs. “What did you mean about my aunt when you said, ‘it makes sense?’”
I shrug. “Just that I can see how she’d have a nephew who created an alter ego named Bert the Bigfoot to scare tourists and small children.”
“Are you saying my aunt is a weirdo?”
I smile, thinking of Lorraine. She’s got unnaturally red hair, obviously dyed, and an easy laugh. She’s the bright spot of my day any time she comes into the diner, but most people would say she’s eccentric only if they were in a kind-hearted mood. “My favorite people are weirdos. It’s not a bad thing.”
“So there’s hope a guy who dresses up as Bigfoot could be your friend some day?”
“Kind of depends on the reasons for this weirdness. If you’re afraid of going outside as Mac Skillworth, I can probably work with that. If you believe deep down in your marrow you actually are Bigfoot…” I glance back at him. “I’m not sure I can trust you not to tie me up in your basement as a sacrifice to your Bigfoot god.”
“If I was going to sacrifice you to the big furry bringer of light, don’t you think I’d have done it already?”
I’d mostly been joking, but his words throw me so completely I trip over my own feet and something soft brushes against my cheek.
I shriek and throw my hands up, warding off whatever large, flying creature is attacking. It flings itself at my arms and I rush up the trail to escape.
Furry arms grab me around my middle and lift me off my feet. I scream and struggle.
“Honey, calm down.”
I relax a bit when I realize it’s Mac holding me and not a giant version of a bumblebee. “Don’t let it get us. We have to run.”
“Honey,” Mac says slowly. “You’re running from a tree branch.”
He must not have seen the bug. “I felt it. It was soft and fluttery. Branches don’t feel like that.”
He spins with me in his arms and carries me over to several low-hanging branches with some sort of feathery leaves on them. He sets me on my feet and runs his fingers over the leaves. “This is what you felt.”
“I think I know the difference…” I reach up and brush my fingers over the leaves. “Oh. Yeah. This is what I felt.”
“It’s my fault. I scared you with that stupid thing about the big furry god.”
I’m honestly just terrified of all things forest, but I want to hear this, so I nod. “I really don’t want to be sacrificed.”
He tilts his head down, and I swear I can feel him smirking behind the mask. “Uh-huh. Well, I shouldn’t have teased you. The truth is, my aunt’s store isn’t doing so great. When the first Bigfoot sightings started last fall, she bought all this Bigfoot stuff to sell in her shop - t-shirts, mugs, signs, hats, pretty much everything she could find. I was already living out here on, um, sabbatical and I knew there was no way a real Bigfoot was in these woods, which would mean her already financially strapped store would be in even worse trouble when Bigfoot disappeared.”
“So you made sure more people spotted Bigfoot.”
He nods. “And it worked. Her store’s doing better than ever.”
My heart swells. I wasn’t expecting to be impressed by this guy and I’m not sure I like it. “Your aunt must be really grateful.”
He looks away, out into the woods, hopefully watching for attack deer or whatever. “She would hate it if she knew. It’s why you can’t tell anyone about me or what I’m doing out here.”
“Don’t you think you can stop now that her store’s doing so well? It’ll be a long time before the tourists give up on finding Bigfoot or stop wanting t-shirts with Bert’s face on them. Years maybe. Catalpa Creek is already getting a reputation as the home of Bigfoot.”
“I’ll stop soon. What about you? How did a woman who grew up around here develop such a deeply entrenched fear of the great outdoors?”
“The normal ways. Come on, we should keep going. Don’t want to lose daylight.”
“It’s ten in the morning. Pretty sure we’re safe.”
I turn and start up the path. “Never can be too careful.”
“That’s okay. I’ll get the answer out of you, eventually.”
We crest a hill that looks down on what’s more of a widening of creek, rather than a true pond. Ferns grow thick and green around it and a boulder rises from the edge. “Does this look like the spot?”
“Little more than a puddle sits at the elbow of a giant,” Mac recites from my grandfather’s riddle. “It could be, but I’d guarantee the waterways have changed in the past sixty years.”
“We should check it out so we can rule it out.” I try not to get my hopes up. There’s no way we’re going to find the treasure our first day out when my father spent nearly a decade looking for it. “In the devil’s eye socket, beneath an X of blood and sweat rests the legacy of my years.” I repeat the end of the riddle aloud. “That sounds like a cave to me.”
“I agree. But it seems too obvious for a riddle.”
“I doubt my grandfather was a professional riddle writer.” I start off the trail, but my feet sink into dead leaves and loamy earth. “What do you think lives under these leaves?”
“Nothing stupid enough to wait around to find out who we are with all the noise we’ve been making.”
“That can’t be true. Anything could be hiding under all these leaves. What if there’s a snake under there?” Logically, I know there can just as easily be snakes in the fields at the farm, but there’s something about the deep leaves that makes them seem scarier. A snake would stand out against green grass in a way it wouldn’t against leaves.
Plus, forest snakes are probably bigger. They have more room to grow.
He sighs and steps around me. “I’ll go first and take the bite if there’s one hiding in here.”
He takes a few steps down the steep embankment, but I’m frozen in place. “What if you just wake them up and it’s me who gets bitten?”
Without a word, he walks back to me, crouches, and scoops me up in his arms. “Um, what are you doing?”
“I’m protecting you from snakes and giant insects.”
Wrapping an arm around his furry shoulders, I hold on tight because I don’t want to be dropped on my butt in the leaves. “Thank you.”
“Hey,” someone yells. “Put her down, you monster.”
“Oh, shit,” Mac mutters. “Hide your face.”
With me tight in his arms, Mac runs the rest of the way down the hill, slipping and sliding at the bottom. Once there, he looks over his shoulder.
“I’m calling the park rangers,” the voice, clearly female, shouts.
“I’m fine,” I yell.
“Hush,” Mac says.
“Bert and I are good friends.”
“Seriously?” Mac splashes through the creek toward the enormous boulder.
“How do I know you aren’t just saying that?” the woman shouts.
“Believe me,” I yell back. “You haven’t really had cock until you’ve had Bigfoot cock.”
“Really?” The woman sounds like she’s genuinely interested and no longer terrified I’m about to be sacrificed to Bigfoot’s furry god.
“Oh, yeah,” I yell back. “He’s—”
“Please, for the love of all that’s holy—” Mac says.
“-also amazing with his tongue.”
“Kill me now.” Mac picks up his pace to head uphill, presumably to the other side of the boulder and out of sight of the woman.
“Think he’s into threesomes?” the woman asks.
I smother my laughter against Mac’s furry chest.
“Does all that fur get in the way?”
Finally behind the boulder, Mac drops me to my feet and slaps a furry paw over my mouth. “Not another word. Or I’m feeding you to the forest monsters.”
I freeze, all the laughter dying in my throat.
“Shit, you’re seriously terrified.” He takes his paw from my mouth. “I would never do that to you, Honey. Just please don’t encourage them. I don’t want to be captured as some woman’s love pet.”
That’s a funny picture, but I’ve looked down and realized I’m ankle deep in dead leaves. I start to shake. I need to calm down or I’m going to have to ask Mac to carry me on his back like a human backpack everywhere we go.
“Lost. I was so outside myself I couldn’t find my way back in,” I sing softly. It’s a song I wrote for me and my sisters. From a time I was even more scared than I am at this moment.
“What was that?” Mac bends down, putting one furry ear closer to my mouth.
Admitting I’m terrified of dead leaves is worse than Mac hearing my horrible singing, so I keep going. “I thought I’d found the answer in your eyes, but you told only lies. You told me you knew the way, but you twisted me up, and left me lost. So lost I believed you when you said the answer was in the bottom of a cup.”
“What is that song?”
I breathe in deep and steady myself. I’ve fought through worse. I can get through this. “Nothing. Just a stupid song I wrote.”
“You wrote that?” The awe in Mac’s voice finally drags my eyes away from my feet buried in leaves and dead things.
People who have no artistic ability are often easily impressed by even the worst examples of creativity. “It’s nothing. Just a hobby.”
“That might be a hobby,” Mac says. “But it’s not nothing.”
It occurs to me, for the first time, that I don’t actually know if he’s creative. ”What did you say you teach?” He told me he teaches music and, if he was telling the truth, he’ll get more specific. If he’s not, I’ll catch him out. Win, win.
He’s peeping around the side of the boulder, probably looking for the woman who now believes Bigfoot kidnaps women and has amazing sex with them. “Teach?”
“Isn’t that what professors do? Or are you one of those research professors who just writes books?”
He comes back over to stand in front of me. “She’s gone. We should start looking for the treasure.”
“Sure. But what do you teach?”
“I, um.” He glances back over his shoulder like he’s expecting the woman to sneak up on us and beg him for sex. “I teach about, um, plants and trees and stuff.”
“You’re a botanist?” Caught him. That was way easier than it should have been. If he’s a criminal, it must be something that doesn’t require lying to anyone’s face.
I could push him for the truth now, but I’m more interested in finding out what he’s hiding and there’s no way he’s going to admit to it.
More fun to watch him twist himself up in his own lies. And it might give me something I can use when he inevitably lets me down or betrays me.
Because as much as I’m starting to like the guy, I’ve learned the hard way that no one is self-less or completely trustworthy. No one.
He whips around so fast I’m worried his fake head might pop off. “Huh?”
“A botanist. A person who studies plants?”
“Right.” He clears his throat. “I’m a botanist. Most people don’t know that term, so I just tell them I study plants.”
“Well, I know it, because my mom’s a botanist.”
“No fucking way,” he mutters.
I stifle a laugh at his obvious dismay. He’s got no poker face at all, not even when he’s wearing an actual mask. “I know. Small world, right?”
I could absolutely have some fun with this, but he’ll catch on that I know he’s lying if I ask too many questions, and I’m not ready for him to know that yet.
I’ll wait and see what Levi can dig up on him first.
“Where should we start?” He asks.
“Let’s look for small caves or divots in the boulder. Then, we’ll look for anything X-shaped.”
My hope of finding this treasure is already diminishing. We can’t dig up the entire forest and it’s been sixty years. What are the odds the clues are still aboveground? Or that the treasure hasn’t already been found by someone else?
“It seems overwhelming.” Mac looks at me through Bert’s eyes. “But this is just the first stop. We’ll narrow down the possibilities and figure this out.”
I don’t know where he’s found so much confidence, but I like the sound of it. “Okay, let’s get started.”