CHAPTER 5 #3
She turned pages. Vaccine records. Treatment notes for a dog bite Terrell’s granddaughter had sustained two years back.
The child had recovered fine; the dog had been quarantined and cleared.
The bureaucracy of small-town medicine, even the off-books kind, accumulated the same way all bureaucracy did: one form at a time, until the folder bulged at the seams and nobody could remember why half of it was there.
What stopped her was the intake sheet.
It was clipped to the back of Terrell’s folder, behind the treatment notes, on paper that wasn’t the clinic’s standard letterhead.
This was a handwritten form. The kind that got filled out in bulk at community events, when someone organized a health fair or a vaccination drive and needed a quick way to track who showed up and what they needed.
The heading read ASHTON GROVE SPRING WELLNESS, DATE: 05/14, in block letters that June didn’t recognize.
Not her handwriting. Not Emma’s. Someone else’s.
Three names at the top, listed in the same hand, same ink, same date.
Deacon Pruitt. Thyroid check, refill needed.
Terrell Oakes. Blood pressure screening, follow-up recommended.
Callum Reese. Minor laceration, treatment provided.
The date was months ago. Spring. Some kind of organized intake event.
The kind that happened in towns where the nearest real hospital was forty miles down the county road and preventative medicine meant somebody with a clipboard standing in a community center once a season asking if your arm hurt when you raised it above your head.
June didn’t know Callum Reese. She ran the name through the clinic’s database.
Mental, not digital, because the clinic’s database lived in a filing cabinet and in June’s head, and her head came up empty.
No Callum Reese in the active files. No Callum Reese in the billing system.
No Callum Reese who had ever walked through the front door of Ashton Grove Animal Clinic and left a record behind.
She went still. Her finger rested on the name.
Callum Reese. The handwriting was neat. Capital letters, even spacing, the precision of someone who had been taught to write clearly and had never seen a reason to stop.
The same hand had written all three names.
The same hand had organized whatever spring wellness thing had brought Deacon, Terrell and a man June had never met into the same room on the same day months before two of them turned up dead with identical throat wounds and blood that didn’t match the scene.
She picked up her phone. Opened the camera.
Photographed the whole form, held steady under the desk lamp, close enough that the handwriting was legible on the screen.
The flash was too bright. It washed out the paper, turned the ink gray.
So she turned it off and used the lamp’s yellow light instead.
The second shot was cleaner. The names sat in the frame just as they sat on the page: Deacon Pruitt.
Terrell Oakes. Callum Reese. Date: 05/14.
Spring wellness. Someone’s handwriting. Someone’s event.
She locked the clinic. Front door first, deadbolt engaged, the solid thunk echoing in the empty waiting room.
Back door second, the key turning in the lock as it always did.
The boarders shifted in their runs. The shepherd mix stood up when the lights went out, whined once, then settled back onto its bedding when nobody answered.
Routine. The building shrank around her at closing, same as it always did, darkness falling in increments until only the exit sign’s red glow touched the linoleum.
She got in her truck. Didn’t start the engine.
Sat in the driver’s seat with both hands on the wheel and the fob in the cup holder and the ridge a black hump against the sky beyond the parking lot.
The gravel held the day’s heat. The pine smell carried on a breeze that hadn’t been there when she drove home from Emma’s.
Somewhere in the trees, an owl called, once, twice, then nothing.
She didn’t know yet what had generated the form.
Didn’t know who had organized the spring wellness event that put Deacon Pruitt, Terrell Oakes and a man named Callum Reese on the same page in the same handwriting months before two of them were killed.
Didn’t know if the third name was a target or a witness or something else entirely.
Didn’t know if the nest in the Hollis place had anything to do with it, or if Sebastian Croix’s four-century-old score involved men who got their blood pressure checked at community health fairs in towns so small they didn’t rate a second glance on most maps.
She would. The method was the same whether she was looking at a blood panel or a set of radiographs or a handwritten intake form with three names on it and two of them dead. Start at the beginning. Go through until something stops you. Don’t skip pages. Don’t assume.
Observed to be surprised. Never the other way around.
The fob sat in the cup holder. The ridge kept its silence. June sat in the dark with her hands on the wheel and waited for the pieces to assemble themselves into a shape she could read.