Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Work was fairly busy…but not busy enough that I couldn’t help wondering if there was something better Ben and I could have been doing with our time.
True, he texted me about an hour after I opened the store at noon and let me know that the first set of trail cameras was in place, and yet I still knew I was way too on edge.
But absolutely nothing untoward happened that afternoon, and Ben was prompt as usual, showing up outside the shop at a little after five, which gave me enough time to close down everything and lock the front and back doors.
“I think we should go to the oak grove first,” I told him as we headed toward the closest of the numerous trails that wandered away from the eastern outskirts of town and into the forest. “It’s the farthest away of the places where we want to set up the trail cams, and then we can work our way backward from there. ”
“And reward ourselves with pizza when we’re done,” he replied, an amused glint in his mossy hazel eyes.
“Of course,” I said, and knew I smiled a little as I spoke. “Unless you’d rather get takeout from Hog Wild.”
No point in suggesting that we dine in, not when I knew we’d have plenty to talk about that we wouldn’t want overheard.
“Pizza is fine,” Ben said, which was pretty much the way I thought he’d respond. Barbecue was great, but it would probably be easier to munch on pizza while working on my laptop rather than trying to deal with messy ribs or drippy pulled pork sandwiches.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, both of us seeming to understand that we should wait until we were safely in the woods before we started to discuss any sensitive subjects.
At that time of day, I doubted too many hikers would be roaming around in the forest, since this was usually the hour when people would start to head back into town if they’d made a day out of their hiking expeditions.
All the same, I figured we couldn’t be too careful.
Then Ben said, “I heard from someone at UC Davis — Marjorie Tran. She’s a grad student in the physics department and sounds very interested in taking some readings around town.
Luckily, she’s only teaching one summer school class, and that was yesterday, so she should be up here tomorrow afternoon sometime. ”
“Well, that’s good news,” I replied. Or…
was it? What if this Marjorie Tran discovered something dreadful, like all these electromagnetic instabilities were just a prelude to the Earth basically imploding and swapping poles like in that one disaster movie my friend Ashley loved to watch when we were in junior high?
She’d been on a real kick that year, forcing me to watch everything from The Day After Tomorrow to San Andreas…
which I found kind of ironic, since she moved to San Francisco after she graduated from college, and you’d think someone that obsessed with earthquakes might want to end up someplace a little more seismically stable.
Although I thought I was fairly good at keeping my emotions to myself, Ben must have noticed some shift in my expression, because he said, “I doubt whatever Marjorie finds is going to be anything catastrophic. If nothing else, it would help to know where the center of the anomaly is. If it’s somewhere in the woods, then we’ll know it must have something to do with the portals. ”
“And if it’s in the middle of town?” I asked.
Undaunted, he replied, “Then we’ll just have to figure out a way to deal with it.”
Nothing seemed to bother the guy. Oh, sure, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t had his setbacks here and there, but in general, he seemed to be the optimistic type.
As far as I could tell, he hadn’t suffered any real hardships or tragedies in his life, had come from what sounded like a solidly upper-middle-class family in Southern California.
Even the chupacabra sighting that had changed the trajectory of his career seemed more like a necessary push to get him in the direction he was truly supposed to go than an event that had totally derailed his ambitions.
Whereas I….
But no, I wasn’t about to go there. Yes, my mother and grandmother were still gone, but at least I knew they were safe…
supposedly. And sure, my father had taken off when I was just a kid, but again, I’d been raised by two loving, supportive women who’d done everything to make sure I didn’t suffer too much from his absence.
Even with them currently stuck in another dimension, I still had the people of Silver Hollow to look out for me.
Quite a few of my childhood friends had moved away, looking for more opportunities in Sacramento or San Francisco or up in Oregon and Washington State, but new friends — like Jasmine Perez, the town librarian, and Hope Hayakawa, the local veterinarian — had moved in. It was all good.
Well, mostly.
“Sure,” I said, since I didn’t see much point in arguing possibilities with Ben, not before we hadn’t gotten any definitive information from the grad student who’d be here the next day.
Besides, right then I was more interested in tracking down the person who’d decided to scatter Ogham letters all over the forest like someone had spilled ancient Irish alphabet soup.
The trip to the grove was a hike of about forty-five minutes. Once we arrived, Ben and I wandered around, checking to see if there were any fresh carvings here, but we couldn’t find anything.
No ATV tracks, either, which was a relief. Something about this grove felt sacred to me, and I would have hated to see the grass between the trees torn up by some jerk out joyriding in his Polaris, or whatever he was driving.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”
Daylight was fading when we finally emerged from the forest well after seven o’clock, but we’d mounted all the cameras in what we hoped were the most likely spots, and had also done our best to make sure they were well concealed within the foliage so no one would see them unless they were looking really hard.
Our pizza was well earned, that was for sure.
Although I itched to get everything set up on my laptop, I knew we needed to eat something before the food started to get cold. Ben opened a bottle of wine, and we both practically inhaled our first slices of pepperoni pizza before we got down to business.
I’d purposely splurged for the fancier trail cameras, the kind that had both SD cards you could remove to survey the data they contained and also a web portal where I could access the footage directly.
It just made sense to do that, or otherwise the two of us would have spent hours tromping around the forest to retrieve all those data cards.
Although I wasn’t a complete idiot when it came to computer stuff, I also had to acknowledge that Ben was way better at this kind of thing than I was.
While I munched on a piece of pizza, I watched him set up my accounts with the two different manufacturers, entering the serial numbers for all the cameras so the correct footage would be sent to the correct account.
Once that was done, he got another slice of pizza for himself and took a sip from his glass of chianti.
“You should be up and running,” he said. “Just remember to check every morning and download anything that looks pertinent, because your accounts don’t have unlimited storage.”
I didn’t think that would be a problem, not when I tended to be an early riser and didn’t have to be at the shop until a little before ten in the morning…except on Tuesdays, of course, when I would have even more time to work with.
“Part of me wants to look at it now,” I replied, and he grinned.
“I doubt there’s much to see yet,” he said. “Whoever’s been carving those letters, I have a feeling they must wait until it’s dark before they break out their carving tools.”
He was probably right. Still, I couldn’t help being a little tingly with anticipation. We had so many different mysteries swirling around us that I thought it would be nice to solve at least one.
“True,” I said. A sudden notion popped into my head, and I decided to go with it before the rational side of my brain came up with a bunch of reasons as to why it wouldn’t be very smart. “Want to come over for a viewing party tomorrow morning? I can make pancakes. Maybe eight-thirty?”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I thought of how cringey they sounded, how borderline desperate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take them back.
Ben, however, didn’t seem to find anything too odd about my request. “That’s a great idea,” he said. “Need me to bring anything?”
“No, I’ve got everything here,” I replied. “It’s not like we’ll be having a champagne brunch or anything. But I figured you want to see that footage just as much as I do.”
He nodded. “Definitely. Of course, we both have to remember that we might not see anything at all except some run-of-the-mill wildlife.”
Or a unicorn…or a griffin, I thought, although they’d been pretty thin on the ground lately.
“Well, if nothing else, it’ll let us know whether our setup is working,” I said, taking care to keep my tone light. “So there’ll still be some value in having a look, even if we don’t see anything that tells us about our mysterious woodcarver.”
“True.” Ben swallowed the last half inch or so of wine in his glass, then set it down on a coaster on the coffee table.
I’d brought my laptop into the living room so we could work there, figuring that location would be a lot more convenient than the first-floor bedroom I used as my office. “Then I guess I’ll be heading home.”
I detected the faintest upward inflection at the end of that comment, almost as if he was asking whether he had any reason to stay.
There should have been. There should have been a thousand reasons, all beginning and ending with a kiss.