Coveted By the Bear

Chapter One

Caleb

The bell dinged above the front door of Jake’s Quickstop. My brothers and I turned our heads from our conversation just enough to see who had come in. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone.

Old man Tucker sauntered in and called out a greeting to Bernard behind the counter. I nodded my hello when he waved in our direction.

“Here you go, boys,” the waitress said, setting three full plates down in front of Evan, Brian, and me.

She wore a red and white, tight-fitting dress with white sneakers. The dress looked young for her, but she had been working at Jake’s for as long as I could remember. The uniform had never changed. She’d probably filled it out nicely in her twenties.

“Thanks, Leona,” I said through a smile before I dug in.

I was starving. Working on an oil rig meant physical effort and exertion from the moment I stepped onto that platform until the moment I climbed back down the clanking metal stairs to my truck.

I was always hungry enough to eat a horse when my shift ended.

Jake’s was quite the hotspot in town. It had multiple functions for a rancher or an oilman on the go.

It tripled as a grocery store, gas station, and fine dining.

By fine dining, I meant the best burgers and fried burritos in town.

It was also Bryson’s social apex where all the old ladies picked up on the latest gossip.

A boisterous group of them chattered away at the booth nearest the casino machine and rack of Twizzlers.

The bell above the door dinged again, but I didn’t look up.

The burger was good enough to hold my attention.

Jake’s grew eerily quiet. The kind of quiet you feel more than you hear.

Even the old ladies had stopped their chattering.

Evan elbowed me, but I was already turning my head to see who had caused friction in a room full of old friends.

“It’s Crazy Mira,” Evan whispered.

I could hear the smile in his words. When Crazy Mira came to town, everyone had enough entertainment to last them a week.

Each member of the crowd had frozen in whatever position they had been in when she came through the door. The audience held more interest for me than Crazy Mira did. Nelda Jenkins had a string of pasta hanging out of her mouth like she had been mid-slurp when the girl had arrived. It dangled there.

Nelda reminded me of a fishing trip I had taken with my dad.

The water had been so uncharacteristically clear, we could see the green and brown backs of the fish we were after.

I had plunked my worm in the water in front of a big one and waited, excitement humming through me as the fish moved closer.

I had never seen anything like it, but the fish clamped on and stayed there.

I didn’t even feel the pull of the pole.

We just stayed tethered to each other by this thin, almost invisible line while he started to digest my worm.

I had often wondered if I would ever feel so tethered to another living creature again.

Nelda’s worm didn’t know it was being eaten yet.

I could hear the sharp intake of air from Mira when she looked up enough to notice Jake’s was abnormally busy for this time of day. The girl was swimming in a cloud of mystery, but that she tried to avoid people wasn’t one of them. She’d failed.

Mira dropped her chin to her chest and skittered for the grocery aisles. She picked up a small blue plastic basket from an end cap and began to fill it with items from a list she held clenched tightly in her white-knuckled grip.

I tried to ignore her, if for nothing else than to give her peace from one pair of prying eyes. My gaze kept drifting just far enough in her direction to catch her movement in my peripheral, though. Something about the strange woman demanded attention.

I saw Nelda make the sign for the devil with her hands. If ever anyone mentioned a witch, people knew who they were talking about. Crazy Mira and witch were one in the same.

Nelda’s gesture at Mira pissed me off, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

“Did you hear about Dina Manchester?” I asked Evan, loud enough for the others to hear.

Evan still looked dumbly in Mira’s direction.

It was my other brother, Brian, who took the bait. “No. Why, did you hear something?”

“Nope. Just wondering why she put off the wedding. Again.”

The ladies in the booth looked at each other with wide eyes and started to whisper amongst themselves.

Crazy Mira’s movements became less jerky and robotic with some of the attention directed elsewhere.

She rushed. She didn’t get many groceries, but it felt like she’d been in here for hours.

Acutely aware of her effect on everything to function normally, I wished she would finish shopping already and leave.

She dropped a can of soup, and the sound of metal on tile cracked through the room. Everyone became quiet and attentive again. She apologized. To the soup? I shook my head. Crazy Mira.

I wasn’t hungry anymore so I pushed off and laid a crumpled ten dollar bill on the counter. Leona smiled at me. She probably loved serving the McCreedy boys. We always tipped her what our meal cost. Our dad always taught us that kindness and a good tip kept the spittle out of our food.

“Good burger, as always,” I told Leona.

She beamed.

“Why are you leaving so soon?” Evan asked incredulously. What he was really asking was, why in the hell are you leaving before Crazy Mira finishes her show?

I shrugged noncommittally. Really, I didn’t have an answer. Staring at Crazy Mira had never bothered me before. Now, it left a sick feeling in my stomach.

By the time I turned for the door, Mira had pushed her meager groceries onto the checkout counter. She was staring longingly at a miniature refrigerator filled with small cartons of milk as if they were stacks of Spanish gold.

“Fifteen seventy-six,” Bernard told her as he began to bag up the food.

“Oh,” she said softly. She counted the change that sat in the bowl of her palm. “I don’t have enough.” She looked at the goods like she was trying to decide which to put back.

She didn’t even ask for Bernard to cut her a break, and something about that struck me.

Evan snickered from the counter in the back.

Mira apparently heard him, too, because she threw a terrified glance in his direction.

The problem was, I was in the midst of leaving and right in her line of sight.

She froze when she saw me approaching. I didn’t mean to scare her.

I was only headed for the door to hear the dinging of the bell that meant salvation from this uncomfortable situation.

I’d never actually looked at her face before.

She did an impressive job hiding it with all of that thick, wavy, devil-black hair that cascaded down her back and brushed her hips.

She always leaned forward a little, though whether it was to help gravity to pull her hair in front of her face or to look at the ground where she was walking, I couldn’t guess.

Maybe both. And here she was, terrified.

I was the cobra and she was the mouse. Not one of the black and white, hand-reared mice they sold at the feed store, but a gray, matted, feral mouse with teeth.

She was the assumed victim none-the-less.

I hated her for making me feel this way.

Why couldn’t she just act normal? Say hi to people? Join a conversation? Smile? It was a small town. Everybody knew everything about everybody, but you couldn’t get more people willing to help you than in a place like this.

Despite my anger, I pulled a five dollar bill out of my pocket. “Here,” I said as I laid it on the counter with her one dollar bills and coin change.

“No, thank you.” Her voice cracked on the last word like she hadn’t used it in a while.

Mira cleared her throat and looked down.

She pushed the five dollar bill back in my direction and took a package of frozen broccoli and a loaf of wheat bread out of the bags.

“Now do I have enough?” she asked Bernard.

He shook his head. “Still a dollar ten short,” he said in a regretful tone.

“Just take the money,” I said a little too loudly. I was baffled. Why was I still standing here trying to help her? And why couldn’t she just take the stupid money and give us both an escape?

Mira flinched at the quiet snickering from behind me as if the sound were the crack of thunder in her ear. Her shoulders hunched inward when Evan asked me, “Caleb, what are you doing?”

She threw a determined look at me. “I can’t.”

I was already angry and should have just left. Instead, I gritted out, “You know, you really are as crazy as everyone says you are.”

I regretted the words before they finished leaving my lips.

The look on her face was something I would never forget.

I watched her drown in sadness, in fear, and humiliation.

She wasn’t angry with me. She was disappointed in me, and somehow that made it worse.

I wasn’t usually cruel, and her confusion at my reaction held me in place, unable to take my eyes from her sorrow.

The laughter around us had her dark eyes darting from one grinning face to another.

She leaned her head forward and stared at the ground for a moment before she scooped up her change and bolted out the front door.

“What about your groceries?” Bernard yelled after her.

The dinging of the bell was the ugliest sound I’d ever heard.