Chapter 2 #2
“It feels like some sort of weird ritual,” Sidney said. She paused there and glanced around again, then gave a lift of her slender shoulders. “We’re really far off the trail here, so maybe they thought this was a good place to work where they wouldn’t get caught.”
Possibly. Ben looked around the spot with narrowed eyes, but he didn’t see any other obvious signs that anyone had been here. Except….
“What’s that?” he asked, and pointed at what looked like muddy tire tracks on the far side of the clearing.
At once, Sidney frowned. “I don’t know. No one’s supposed to bring motorized vehicles out here.”
The two of them hurried over to take a closer look at the tracks. Ben didn’t claim to be an expert or anything, but he thought they must have been made by some kind of ATV, since the wheelbase seemed too narrow to have belonged to a standard-size truck or SUV.
“Do people go off-roading out here?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. Or at least, I know that Sam Tucker and the other forest rangers land on anyone pretty hard if they try to ignore the signs about coming in here on anything except your own two feet. Even mountain bikes aren’t allowed on most of the trails.
” As she finished speaking, she straightened and gazed around them.
“The tracks look as if they go off to the north.”
“Should we follow them?”
He found himself slightly relieved when she shook her head again.
“No. You get into some really rough country if you go that way. But maybe….”
The words trailed off there. Her mouth had set, and she was quiet for a moment, which told him she was probably thinking a mile a minute.
Then she said, “I think we should set up trail cameras here and in any other likely clearings so we can try to catch the person doing this. At first, it was just sort of interesting, but they’ve marked so many of the trees here that it’s becoming destructive. ”
He was inclined to agree. No, it wasn’t as if all the tree trunks were covered in graffiti, and some people might have argued that the Ogham letters weren’t even terribly visible unless you were right on top of them, but still, marking pretty much every tree in this clearing seemed like overkill.
Whoever was doing this, they needed to be tracked down… and stopped.
“That’s a good idea,” he replied. “Does the outdoor store here carry trail cams?”
It was well-supplied for such a small town, as he’d found out when he first arrived in Silver Hollow and realized he needed a whole bunch of things he couldn’t have brought with him, considering he’d come straight here from a cryptozoology conference in San Francisco.
At the time, he hadn’t seen any trail cameras, but then again, he hadn’t been looking for them, either.
“They do,” Sidney said. “They’d probably be cheaper on , but I don’t want to wait for even two-day shipping.”
Back in Southern California, Ben had gotten most of his items within a day, but he could see why it might take some extra time to get them to a far-flung place like Silver Hollow.
“Okay,” he said, even as he performed a quick mental calculation to see whether his budget could accommodate a few hundred dollars’ worth of trail cameras.
True, he’d gotten a nice chunk of change from that cryptozoology symposium in Fountain Hills, Arizona, last month, and his YouTube channel was still chugging along nicely, even though his relocation had upset his schedule a bit and he’d only been posting videos every other week rather than every Thursday like he normally did.
Had Sidney noticed his hesitation? Possibly, because she said, “I’ll cover it. The cameras were my idea, and besides, Ray gives me a fifteen-percent locals discount.”
Ray was the owner of the outdoor shop, a chatty guy who was always ready to share his knowledge about the various wilderness trails that surrounded the small town.
Ben couldn’t help wondering how long it would take to be considered “local,” and guessed it would require a lot more time than his current month-long tenure in Silver Hollow.
“Sure,” he said easily. “How many do you think we’ll need?”
Sidney reached up to pull off her scrunchie, which had already begun to slip, then gathered up her hair so she could confine it once again. For just a moment, it fell loose and gleaming over her shoulders, and his breath caught.
God, she was gorgeous.
However, she spoke again right after that, and he gathered himself as best he could. It was idiotic to stand there and gawk at her like some pimply freshman mooning over the homecoming queen.
“Probably ten,” she said, looking thoughtful.
“We’ll need two for each clearing, and there are four or five likely spots.
” A pause, and then she added, her expression clouding a bit, “I wish things were a little more stable. It would be a lot easier if we knew the portal was going to appear in the same place every time.”
That was for sure. “But it seems to have destabilized, for whatever reason, so we’ll just have to work with what we have.”
Sidney didn’t look too cheered by that prospect.
“I just can’t figure it out. I mean, it’s not as if my mother or my grandmother ever talked about the portal, but still, based on everything else they said over the years and from what I found in my grandmother’s journals, it sure seems as if the situation was fairly stable until recently.
” A pause before she added with a lopsided grin, “Well, as stable as anything dealing with legendary beasts and magical forests can be.”
He couldn’t help smiling in return. “We’ll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, getting those trail cameras in place is a great idea.”
Since she was still holding her phone, she glanced down at the screen. “Perfect timing, too. By the time we get back to town, Ray’s Outdoor should be open.”
Sure enough, the hour was just rolling past ten when they got back to Silver Hollow, and the door to the hiking shop already stood open.
Ben had noticed that some of the other stores on the town’s main drag weren’t exactly sticklers about keeping to the business hours posted on their doors or in their windows, but he supposed Ray would want to open right on time, considering how most hikers liked to get an early start on things.
Not that it seemed to matter too much in this part of the world.
No one hiking around here had to worry about temperatures climbing into the nineties before it was even ten in the morning.
Maybe every once in a while, they got a rare heat wave in this locale, but as far as Ben was able to tell, a “hot” day in Silver Hollow was when they were able to climb out of the low sixties.
Ray was helping some other customers — a wiry, outdoorsy-looking man and woman in their late thirties — when Ben and Sidney entered. He nodded his balding head toward Sidney as she came inside but otherwise didn’t seem inclined to pay them too much attention.
Which didn’t seem to be a problem for her, since she only tilted her head in reply to Ray’s nod and then continued to the back of the store, where there was a display case with trail cameras and GPS devices and night-vision goggles.
Nonchalantly, she moved behind the case and opened it up. Ben lifted an eyebrow.
“Is Ray okay with you doing that?”
She responded with a smile, even as she began pulling out boxes and stacking them on top of the counter.
“Ray Mackinnon has known me since I was born,” she replied. “And I know where he keeps the key to this case. There’s no reason to have him waiting on us hand and foot when we know exactly what we want. With any luck, he’ll be done with those customers by the time we get up to the cash register.”
Right, small town. Although Ben was slowly becoming used to the way everyone in Silver Hollow seemed to know everyone else — and knew their business, which made it all the more remarkable that the women of Sidney’s family had been able to keep so many secrets for so many years — he hadn’t gotten anywhere close to mastering all the various nuances involved.
After she had ten boxes stacked on top of the counter, she came back around to the front and handed half of them to him.
“They’re not all the same kind,” she said. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter so much, as long as they’ll all talk to my computer. Or yours,” she added, now looking a little worried, as if she feared he might take offense at the way she’d just assumed she would be the one monitoring the cameras.
“No, better that you keep watch,” he replied easily. “You know these woods — and the people in town — a lot better than I do. I don’t want to go off half-cocked thinking someone’s our graffiti artist and then find out it was just an out-of-uniform park ranger.”
Sidney chuckled. “Good point. But I’ll probably need some help getting all this hooked up so I can get the feeds stored on my computer. The last thing I want to do is have to stay up all night watching this stuff.”
Neither did he. Luckily, he had plenty of experience working with trail cams, since he’d used them to keep an eye out for chupacabras whenever he was wandering in the desert, where he might spy one. So far, he hadn’t caught anything on film, but hope sprang eternal.
All the same, he had to admit he wasn’t quite as gung-ho about chasing down those supernatural desert dwellers now that he’d seen an actual unicorn.
“It’s not that hard,” he assured her. “Shouldn’t take much more than a half hour — once we have all the trail cams in place, that is.”
“We’ll have to do that after I get off work, though,” Sidney replied. “I don’t think we have enough time to get back out there and set up all the cameras before I need to be at the store.”
Ben wasn’t sure whether they’d be able to do all that before the sun went down, either, although they should have close to three hours of daylight.
An idea occurred to him. “How about I go back to the clearing this morning and set up two of the cameras there? That’ll take care of part of the job, and that means we’ll have less to do this afternoon.”
She replied right away, telling him she didn’t have any qualms about him handling part of the work without her. “Sure, that’s a good idea. And then you can meet me at the store a little after five.”
It seemed clear that she didn’t plan to go home and change before she headed for work, even though she was wearing cargo pants and hiking boots and a T-shirt. Well, a pet shop wasn’t the kind of place where you needed to dress business casual, even if you owned the store.
And it would save a lot of time if she was ready to go as soon as she closed the shop for the day.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s a plan.”