Chapter 4 Baz
BAZ
Baz had left the soap at the cabin that both sight and scent told him was being lived in: trampled grass around the door, the slight smell of bug spray and deodorant.
He hadn’t mentioned their mystery guest to Lexie.
Whoever was staying here might be from the wild shifter clans, or perhaps it was a camper nervous of being caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.
In either case, he meant them no harm, and hoped to have a friendly chat with them later.
Despite the evidence of occupation, the cabin had felt distinctly empty when he left the soap there, but the mysterious bather had been at the pool not too long before. His bear was as intrigued as Baz, stirring lazily from its usual calm to perk up with ursine curiosity.
He looked forward to having a little mystery to investigate.
By the time he returned from wandering the town’s back streets, he’d long since lost track of Lexie, who he had last seen muttering about water treatment and piping systems at the creek.
He found all three of the others sitting at the pile of gear with an open cooler, several demolished paper plates of sandwiches and pie, and a large, nearly empty jug of lemonade.
“You’re lucky you came back when you did, cuz,” Lexie called. “I saved the last quarter of Aunt Saffron’s pecan pie for you.”
“She means she didn’t have room to eat it all,” Fern put in.
Declan didn’t add anything, but even his cranky attitude seemed to have relaxed a little with the food. Baz dug himself out a large chicken salad sandwich. One thing of the many things their families could always be counted on for was good food.
“Did everyone find places to stay?” he asked, adding some chips to his lunch.
Embarrassingly, he had forgotten that one of his reasons for exploring was looking for somewhere to den up for the night.
He had found himself wandering from one part of the town to another, as if driven by some instinct he couldn’t explain, looking for something he hadn’t been able to find.
“It feels so weird,” Lexie said, forking up leftover fragments of pie from her plate. “Just moving into someone else’s house like this.”
“You’re not, though, any more than buying a house through a real estate agent would be,” Baz pointed out between bites of his sandwich.
“Every property in this place was bought up by a real estate developer back in the sixties or seventies, and it’s all ours now.
So you can pick whatever house you want. ”
“I found mine,” Fern said cheerfully. She pointed across the street. “You can’t see it from here, it’s behind some trees, but it’s an adorable little cottage. I think with some paint, it’ll be so cute I could die. There’s even an overgrown orchard with fruit trees. Baz, did you see any bunnies?”
“What? No. You mean wild rabbits? Did you see one?”
Fern shrugged. “I just thought there might be some.”
Whatever was in the cabin was definitely not a bunny. “No, but I’ll let you know. What about you two?” Baz asked Declan and Lexie.
Declan grunted, and Lexie shook her head. “I did go looking for the wishing well,” she said. “I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s overgrown.”
“Wishing well?” Fern asked, looking curious.
“Doesn’t anyone but me remember it? It was behind these houses, along the creek somewhere. I just can’t figure out exactly where.” Lexie waved a hand. “I swear it’s like we all have different recollections of this place.”
Declan spoke up. He had been so quiet that Baz was slightly startled to hear his voice. “I do remember. We all threw coins into it and made wishes.” Declan smiled lopsidedly. “We had to keep our wishes a secret, or they would never come true.”
“I still remember my wish,” Lexie said quietly. She looked down at her plate rather than at the others.
And suddenly, sharply, Baz did remember.
The vague recollection spurred by Lexie’s earlier mention of the wishing well crystalized into a clear memory from their tween years, maybe even earlier.
No wonder Fern didn’t remember; she must have been quite young.
He was a little surprised that Declan did.
It had been a warm summer day, not too different from this one. Their parents must have brought them here; he had a vague sense of the adults being around somewhere, but the kids had been allowed to run wild between the old houses.
And they had found what they decided was a wishing well.
Looking back on it now, Baz didn’t think it could have been a real well.
It might have been someone’s old garden ornament, all grown over with vines and brambles.
It had looked like something out of a storybook.
They all stood around it, and since they didn’t have any money to put in—they were just kids—they decided to each leave a toy that they had brought with them instead.
And each of them made a silent wish.
Maida was there too, Baz recalled; she used to play all those old imagination games with them, until she felt like she got too grown-up and dignified.
Baz’s wish danced somewhere out of reach, and then he remembered that, too.
I wish I had a true purpose in life.
As an adult, he now recognized this as every child’s search for where they truly belonged. But there was truth in it, too. He still didn’t know for certain what he was meant to be doing. Could this town be that for him?
“Do you all remember your wishes?” Lexie asked.
“I don’t even remember the wishing well,” Fern said, flushing.
“I remember mine,” Declan said softly.
“Me too,” Baz said.
Fern looked more cheerful. “Did any of them come true?”
Declan looked away. So did Lexie.
Baz said, “I think if we’re done with lunch, now it’s time to start getting things settled for evening.”
With four pairs of hands, it was quick work to divide the pile of gear, sort it out, and get it put away where it belonged.
Since the country store was right there, and it was big, the old building seemed like a natural place to put their communal supplies.
While the others fanned out to take their own belongings to the houses they had identified as “theirs,” Baz walked around in the old store, feeling a paler ghost of the compulsion that had led him to wander the entire town in search of whatever it was that he or his bear were looking for.
The store had been mostly cleaned out before it was abandoned, but some clutter remained in the corners and on a few of the shelves.
Technically it was junk: old cans and bottles, a wooden cigar box, a rusty wrench, a pair of gold-framed eyeglasses that no longer had their lenses.
But most of it (barring a few recent beer and soda cans) had reached the antique point where even ordinary things became interesting.
Baz began to line items up on the old wooden store counter.
Perhaps it would be fun to create some kind of display, a museum in tribute to the hardy miners and farmers who used to live here long ago, before the place was bought up as a failed tourist attraction and then passed into the hands of his clan.
He found himself liking the store as a space. Everything was big and heavy in a way that appealed to his shifter side: wide floorboards polished by the passage of many feet, a large store counter, and a solid iron stove in the corner.
Baz pushed his way through an old-fashioned swinging door into the back.
With no lights and the windows covered with dust and cobwebs, it was almost too dim to see, but he made out a small office that still had an old wooden desk, as well as a storeroom.
He walked through the storeroom and another doorway, and found himself in a small house attached to the back of the store, where the storekeeper must have lived.
It still had some furniture, even dishes on the shelves.
Baz opened the back door. Overgrown grass, dotted with wildflowers, stretched to a nearby wall of trees.
Here, he thought with an abrupt sense of rightness. I think I’ll stay here.
The light grew golden as the day passed through afternoon into evening.
After unpacking a few things for the night, Baz wandered through the town one last time before dusk.
He walked by the cabin with the closed door and the trampled grass.
The bar of soap he had placed on the woodpile was gone, and he smiled to himself.
Was the mystery person still here? There was no light in the window. Baz thought about knocking, but decided not to bother them tonight, if they were even still there; perhaps they were long gone. He felt no sense of danger.
Still, he was intrigued by this small house and its mystery in a way he couldn’t quite explain.
Something you want to tell me? he asked his bear, but as usual, he got no answer.
He knew some people’s shift animal talked to them, including most of the older generation in his clan.
But his bear never did. He just got glimmers through their connection, urges and suggestions that seemed to come from something almost outside himself, but not quite.
He had heard that a shifter’s animal was not a separate part of them; it was their deepest, most instinctive part, the intuitive and strongly emotional soul that reacted beyond conscious thought, reaching down to a person’s most primitive and automatic hindbrain.
The shift animal knew things that the human mind did not.
Maybe it had noticed something about this crude cabin that he hadn’t—but if so, Baz couldn’t imagine what that might be.
“Good night,” Baz said quietly. He walked away.
The sun was setting above the mountains, casting the town into shadow. Feeling an alpha’s pull to monitor the wellbeing of his new little clan, Baz took a circuitous route back to the store that let him check in on where everyone had settled down.
Lexie had picked the old blacksmith shop. When Baz came upon her, she had opened the building’s big double doors for air and light, and she was happily poking around the old forge, anvil, and other supplies, completely in her element.
Declan was across the street, in ...
“Is this a schoolhouse?” Baz asked.
The building looked exactly like an old-fashioned schoolhouse from an illustration in an old book. It was a small, square clapboard building, with a cupola on top, still retaining traces of white paint. The windmill, visible from all over town, was behind it.
“I like it,” Declan said, rather defensively. He had the door open and was sweeping the floor with a broom that looked like it had been chewed on by mice. “You’re living in the general store, no reason why I can’t have this.”
“If we meet any kids, Deck, we’ll send ‘em your way!” Lexie called.
Baz contemplated the incongruous thought of Declan as a teacher. Oddly, once he started thinking about it, he found it not at all inconceivable. Declan had always been pretty good with kids; it was with adults that he was hostile and reserved.
“Looking great,” Baz said, and went off to find Fern’s new cottage.
She was across Main Street from the store, on a side road called Prospector Place.
As soon as he saw the house, Baz could see why she had picked it.
The paint was faded, but it looked like it had once been robin’s-egg blue with white trim.
It was as small and cute as a dollhouse, and even resembled one, with gingerbread trim and open shutters.
Unkempt roses spilled around the door, and he supposed the trees growing wild around it, some still showing vestiges of spring blooms, were the orchard she had mentioned.
“Hi!” Fern called, waving from a window. “I can’t believe this is still in such good shape. It isn’t going to need much work at all. Are you sleeping in the store tonight, Baz?”
For some reason his thoughts drifted immediately back to the locked cabin.
“I think I might,” he said, pulling his mind away from its sideways drift.
“I like it there. And every town needs a general store, right?” He could picture it suddenly, as if the image had dropped into his mind from somewhere else entirely: the iron stove glowing with heat in the corner and a few comfortable chairs around it, the shelves fully stocked, busy townspeople going in and out, stopping to chat and gossip and have a cup of coffee.
“Better you than me,” Fern said. “A quiet house in the woods, that’s what I want.”
Baz thought of the cabin again. Was it what someone else wanted? He shook his mind away from that thought, puzzled by the intensity of it.
“Come in and see my house,” Fern suggested.
He was getting a tour in the growing dusk when Lexie showed up, wiping her dusty hands on a shop towel. “Hello!” she called. “Do we want a bonfire? Declan and I collected a pile of dry wood while we were cleaning up.”
Fern clapped her hands. “I think there are marshmallows in one of the boxes.”
“And hot dogs in the cooler,” Baz said. “The good kind.” He looked up at the sky, streaked with sunset colors. “We can make plans for tomorrow, because it’s going to be a busy day.”
And investigating that mysterious cabin just might be one of his priorities.