Chapter Thirty-One
Thirty-One
MAZYWOOD
EIGHT YEARS LATER
AN OTHERWORLDLY CLOUD HOVERED OVER Mount Shasta’s peak like a disk-shaped spacecraft in Forbidden Planet, hugging the mountain in orange ringed with majestic purple.
These spectacular cloud formations didn’t usually appear in winter, so today the sight felt as magical as Scout’s presence beside her.
For every step Mazelle took, she heard him matching her pace beneath snow glowing in crystalline twilight hues.
Scout usually knew better than to bother her when she had guests, or her children were awake, but she’d heard an urgent ringing of the wind chimes she’d posted beneath her bedroom window.
She’d only happened to hear it as she emerged from her bathroom while her chef, Marguerite, prepared dinner.
Those chimes were placed out of most drafts, so the only time they rang was when Scout leaped against them.
As soon as she stepped down the rear porch steps, she saw his erratic tracks in the snow, as if he’d been racing in a frenzied circle. To the unschooled eye, it might look like someone had been operating a snowblower without rhyme or reason.
“What is it, boy?” She whispered so her special guest in the nearest cabin wouldn’t hear.
Scout, still hidden beneath the small drifts, led her away from the house and cabins. In seven years, Scout had grown from the size of a possum to a fox, but no single animal could explain Scout. Mazelle figured there had never been another like him.
Mazelle had told Scout that he must stay out of sight—but he had adopted a new extreme by the time she returned from Los Angeles for her Christmas stay, preferring to burrow beneath the snow, propelling himself like a snake.
His motion was wild, almost playful, as he’d been in his dog form.
But he had been robbed of his more functional doggy legs in his transformation, reduced to overly long front legs with bat-like, furred webbing and claws.
He mostly used his mismatched stubby rear legs, also with claws, for steering.
(But he moves too fast, so that isn’t all of it, not by a long shot.) Scout swam beneath snow as if he had been conjured in Alaska instead of Florida, easily adapting to his new life on the mountain.
He did not move like bone and skin. He moved like a creature of the mud.
Mazelle and Scout traveled together alongside the wooden railing above the ski trail, past the empty rose-colored metal car for the ski lift, which was chained shut because neither of her guests this week wanted to ski.
She had spent a fortune to build a ski lift only for it to go untouched so often—probably too much, as Grady had tried to warn her—but she still loved the sight of the padded car and sturdy wires strung down the path like miniature flying streetcars.
Mazywood looked like any boutique resort where Negroes were still not welcome.
As far as she knew, she was the only Negro woman, or Negro period, who had ever built a ski lift at her own resort, even a small one, an enduring source of pride.
And she barely had the chance to enjoy any of it.
If not for her radio gig in Los Angeles playing a quipping elevator operator in a fancy hotel, Mazelle would have let Ricky and Sadie live with Mother and Dottie for a long while and moved here to spend all her time with Scout.
She hated to be away from him. Her sleep was restless in the trap of her Baldwin Hills house, where she yearned for inky-black night skies, fresh air, and the perfume of fir trees instead of a city smell that was so much more pronounced now that she remembered what clean air smelled like.
And Scout was so much easier to care for than the children.
All Scout needed her to do was toss him a few raw steaks from the back porch at night. Not even that.
Mostly, Scout hunted for his own food. (And what else?)
“Scout, wait.”
Someone had carved three crude letters into her gate’s wood, spaced an inch apart: N-I-G. What in the world? Mazelle ran her fingers across the damaged pine and spruce slat, feeling the groove of the exposed paler wood underneath, verifying that the damage wasn’t an illusion.
Then Mazelle saw an abandoned pocketknife with a pearl handle on the ground near her furred boot.
The knife lay in a spray of dribbled blood.
The carving had been interrupted, and Mazelle knew perfectly well what the finished word would have spelled.
A vandal had been on her property! And Scout had… ?
Mazelle’s heart quickened as she realized she probably knew who it was. A face with ruddy cheeks and a goatee flashed in her head like a klieg light.
“Scout, what is this?” she said. “What happened?”
A hole puffed in the snow beside the blood spray, and Scout’s long snout poked out. An almost insectile whine floated from Scout’s nose, nothing like a dog. And yet exactly like a dog.
Scout killed again. Mazelle’s memory punished her with the image of Aunt Ruby’s twisted neck after she fell down the stairs, her head bent in such an unnatural way.
Yes, she’d seen those sharp teeth and claws and, yes, sometimes his paws were stained from the blood of his prey.
But he had seemed to be such a good listener when she told him, Stay away from people.
Didn’t he know her thoughts, as before? Didn’t he understand that he couldn’t kill people?
Mazelle had only thrown on a knitted shawl before she rushed outside to answer Scout’s bell. Now her bones felt chilled.
“Where is he? Show me.”
Even if Scout hadn’t launched himself back under the snow to streak ahead, raising a trail sharply right, then left, Mazelle only had to follow the blood.
It was thinner near the ski lift, mere drops, but blood streaked the snow where the light relinquished to shadows in the tree line.
Scout had dragged the intruder into the trees before the worst of the mauling.
Dear Lord, was Scout as strong as a mountain lion despite his small frame? And would he continue to grow? Scout’s growth was so incremental that she only noticed after longer absences, but it was still steady after almost eight years. What was his mature size?
And why had he left so much blood?
Mazelle assumed that Scout was feeding on rabbits, raccoons, and perhaps larger animals like deer, but he never left bloody signs.
She always searched the grounds for gore before her guests arrived, but the closest she’d found was a pink spot signifying a bloodier pool underneath the snow, and even that had been partially covered by brush.
Scout knew how to hide, just like when he had mimicked an ordinary dog day in and day out under everybody’s nose—even hers.
She had thought of Scout as a “magical” dog, but the truth was that Scout wasn’t a dog.
Had never been a dog. For Scout, his previous form had been his chrysalis and now he was reborn.
And just like that, Mazelle understood why he had left such a mess: He wanted to show her. He wanted her to see what he had done. That was why he was so eager to lead her.
There. Beneath a mound of fir branches wrapped in snow, she saw a bright red shoelace and half of a two-toned gray hiking boot. Beyond it, a pea-green hunting jacket with a bloody, shredded sleeve was ensnared in branches. The blood was fresh, not yet frozen. Dammit.
Had it just happened while they were all inside? Why hadn’t they heard any yelling? Had Scout muffled him somehow before he tore out his throat?
“I told you to keep the hell off my land,” Mazelle said to what was left of Jeff Meek.
That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. That wasn’t even the thought she wanted to entertain in her head, but there it was. The sonofabitch had it coming.
Mazelle had seen Meek’s hulking figure every time she stopped for gas in McCloud, since he manned the gas pumps with a stern jaw when Grady pulled up in the Caddy. Meek would fill up her tank, but never wipe her windshield clean, even when she asked him to.
Then, last summer, he’d scared the hell out of her when she saw him standing under her Mazywood ranch logo in the driveway with a hunting rifle that felt like a threat, although he’d pretended it wasn’t.
Grady had grabbed her rifle out of her closet and told him he was on private property, and for a tense moment Mazelle had believed her old friend and driver might be shot to death while she watched—or else shoot first.
Meek had just lowered his gun and said, “They never shoulda sold you this land, I don’t care if you’re famous or not.” And he turned around to go back to his blue Chevy truck, which he had parked outside of her gate. The nerve!
Grady had complained to Meek’s employer at the gas station, and apparently he had been fired, since he hadn’t been working at the station when she and Grady came back with the kids for Christmas.
Although most townspeople were welcoming, even solicitous—forever trying to invite her over for dinner—Mazelle knew that some mountain residents weren’t happy that she had purchased the property for Mazywood.
She’d intentionally built the tall, ostentatious ranch gate as a middle finger to any neighbors who didn’t want her there—and anyone else who had opinions about how she had earned her money.
Meek hadn’t had the nerve to call her the terrible word to her face, but he’d been trying to carve it into her fence rail when Scout had another idea. She wanted to praise Scout, but she couldn’t deny the knots wringing her stomach.
“Bad boy, Scout,” she said. “The kids might have seen. Or my guests.”
This was a problem. A major problem.