The flashlight beam quivered along with her hand, splashing shadows across the clumpy grass, steadying enough to find the tree at the other end of the run and from there the run cable itself. She took a step out on to the porch. "Sunny?"
There was no sign of her.
Nothing, until the light created unfamiliar shadows in the middle of the yard, and she stopped scanning the grass to settle on it, her heart beating wildly in her chest. A disc, gleaming dully. It didn't belong.
A few more steps—down the porch stairs, onto the stepping-stone sidewalk—and light and shadow resolved into something recognizable. Sunny's collar. A turquoise nylon collar, looking darker than it should. Another few steps from there and she could reach for it, slowly dropping to a crouch to first touch it, then pick it up. Her swollen hand was stiff and fumbly, the fingers not sure of what they felt.
"Sunny?" she said, a tentative call into the darkness as she stood. "Sunny?"
She couldn't not look. She couldn't stop herself from going to the barn, from walking the old rail fences of the barn paddocks, calling Sunny's name in a voice that refused to shout, her fingers clenched around the collar, feeling more and more dazed as the moments went by and she slowly realized how little sense it made. Any of it.
She was crazy. Overworked. Imagining things.
Had
imagine things.
Like th clenching dark cold that stole the breath from her lungs, the air pressure slamming the door closed on a clear still night. Sunny's cable to the run broken at the collar, the collar abandoned nearby.
If she'd slipped it...
If she'd slipped it, she'd have left it dangling on the cable. No way for a dog to slip a collar without some force being applied to the collar itself.
The flashlight lowered to point at the ground, seemingly of its own accord, and this time the call came out in a whisper. "Sunny..."
She probably should think about what to do next, about checking on Druid or cleaning her hand or calling animal control to leave a message about her dog, somehow on the loose. But she just stood there. And then those decisions were taken away from her as an unfamiliar vehicle made the sharp turn into her driveway at some speed and charged the hill up to the house, painting her in a bright halogen light and driving her shadow up the side of the barn. The man who got out of it was nothing but a harshly limned shadow in the night.
"Brenna? Brenna, are you all right? What's going on?"
"What's going on?" she repeated slowly, realizing that Gil Masera was here, that the phone was somewhere shattered on the kitchen floor. "I don't even know how you found my house, never mind what's going on—" and she gestured half-heartedly with the collar, bringing it up into the headlights he'd left on.
Blood.
Blood soaked the collar, and dripped from her fingers; it smeared across her hand.
She stared stupidly at it.
This isn't happening.
But her mouth seemed to know better, for it said, "Oh my God," though the words came out faintly.
"Is that blood yours?" he said, his words as edged as usual. No, not as usual. Edged, but different somehow.
But not to be ignored, as her hand started shaking again. With one hand grasping at the fencepost, she sank to the ground, to her knees in the dry grass. "No, I—"
If not hers, whose? Sunny's?
In a few long strides he reached her, tucked an arm around her waist and drew her back up. "Inside," he said. "You can sit down inside."
Inside, where the blood would be bright and unmistakable. "Oh God," she said again.
But that would leave— "No! I've got to find her. She's here somewhere. She's hurt—"
"Brenna," he said sharply, getting her attention. "You've got another dog inside who needs you. Let me look for Sunny." When she just stared stupidly at him, he said patiently, "I've got my headlights and I'll take your flashlight. Druid needs you."
Druid.
He took her up the porch and in through the dog room, past Druid on his side in the crate, and flipped a kitchen chair around. She sat, only then truly seeing Druid and the flecks of blood around the crate. Blood from his lips, his teeth, his paws—self-inflicted injuries in his frenzy. He lifted his head to look at her, his eyes as glazed as hers felt.
She wanted to dive into the crate with him and cuddle him up. But that's what
she
wanted, and not what he needed; she'd wait until he had some intelligence gleaming from those eyes again. Wordlessly, Masera returned to the back yard; she heard him bellowing Sunny's name, his voice growing more distant as he expanded his search. Waiting, strangely dazed, she sat beside Druid, her hand pulsing with pain and her mind still too befuddled to hold a coherent thought—still unable to understand what had kept the storm door closed against her considerable efforts, or what could possibly have separated Sunny from both the run cable and her collar.
She glanced down at the collar, the turquoise that had been so pretty against Sunny's burnished red coat— and wished she hadn't.
It wasn't turquoise any more.
Suddenly she couldn't stand it anymore; she couldn't just sit here and wait for Masera to return; she hadn't heard his voice in many moments, though she could swear she'd heard him rummage briefly in the barn. There was another flashlight in the cupboard over the stove, and she got up to reach for it—
Masera returned.
A glance outside showed the headlights turned off; he'd darkened the flashlight as well. But he was alone.
"I'm not giving up that easily," she said, and took the flashlight from his unresisting grip. "She's out there somewhere—"
"I didn't give up," he said.
She took a step back from him, suddenly noticing the starkly pale nature of his normally Mediterranean complexion, the hollow look of his eyes. And then took another step back, and another, until she was back in the kitchen chair. "No," she said. And then, immediately standing once more, determined all over again. "Take me to her."
He didn't try to soften his words. "I already buried her."
Stunned all over again, Brenna said, "You
what
? What do you mean, you buried her? Without letting me say good-bye? Without asking me
where
I wanted her buried?" She didn't know whether to scream in grief or smite Masera on the spot.
"I'm sorry," he said, and it was the undertone of comprehension in his voice and on his face that stopped her from doing either. He understood what he'd done...and he'd done it anyway. She looked up at him, puzzled, utterly unable to figure it out, and still only a breath away from bolting out to find where he'd left her dog. He said, "I know it probably wasn't right. I don't... I don't know what got her. But there was no way in hell I was going to let you see it. Brenna," he added quietly, "I couldn't have done it so quickly if there was much left to bury."
"I—" she said, and stopped, shaking her head. She would have wanted to see her dog. To say good-bye. "It wouldn't have mattered—"
"It was my weakness, then," he said. "You think of her the way you last saw her, not—" He stopped, closed his eyes—looking away from her as though she might somehow pluck the reflection of what he'd seen out of his eyes, and he couldn't chance even that. And as she struggled to deal with that, he looked back at her and said,"Please."
Please don't ask me
.
Coward that she was, she didn't. She sat with tears running down her face and her entire body clenched so tightly that it ached, the collar cutting into the fingers of her throbbing hand. Beside her, Druid stirred in the crate, looking up at her to whine, barely audible.
"We'll look at him in a moment," Masera said, his hand on her shoulder; only then did she realize that unthinking, she'd been about to rise, to go to the crate. "Let's see about you, first." He pried the collar from her grasp, and she gave a hiss of pain as her fingers finally came to life, another noise of protest as he took Sunny's collar away and put it in her sink. He brought back her dishcloth, pulled out another chair for himself, and put her hand over his knee so he could wipe off the blood and inspect it—with some relief, she thought in hazy realization, to have something else besides Sunny on which to concentrate.
She let him tend to her, using the time to come back to herself, to sharpen up her thoughts. She found the phone—on the floor by the crate, and in several pieces, all right—and saw that Druid was indeed recovering, no longer flat on his side but lying upright. What had terrified him beyond sanity? What had taken her Sunny-hound so horribly, so violently?
Masera made a satisfied noise and returned her hand to her. "No doubt you've had a recent tetanus," he said, "So I won't bother to ask. What I
want
to know—hell, what happened here tonight?"
She probably shouldn't have laughed, but she did. Short and bitter and then a little thick, as she looked down at her hand and thought about the answer—the many answers—to that question. Gingerly, she flexed her hand, and finally met his gaze. Seeing the scruffy version again, definite stubble lining his jaw, his hair forgetting where he'd had it parted earlier in the day. Dark blue eyes reflecting her kitchen light back at her. Concerned and frankly puzzled eyes, still hiding what he'd seen.
She looked down at her hand and frowned. "How'd you find my house?"
He sat back in the chair. "I don't live far from here. I've heard about the groomer who lives in the old farm up on the hill."
She gave him a skeptical look.
He shrugged. "Okay, I'm looking for a place of my own and I was curious about the property. I asked around."
"It's not for sale."
And he just looked at her, because he hadn't asked and neither the words nor the tone she'd used to say them were fair.
She should have been contrite, she supposed, but she was too miserable for that; she just looked away and answered his question from moments before. "I don't really know what happened. I mean, I can tell you what I saw, but—"
"It's a good place to start," he told her, leaning back in the kitchen chair. He quickly perceived that he had chosen the wobbly one and shifted to a position that didn't depend so much on the integrity of the chair seat connection to the back.
She looked at the phone, still on the floor. "I was talking to you, and Druid started up." She hesitated then, uncertain whether to mention the strange feeling she always got when the Cardigan lost it, equally uncertain whether that feeling came from the Cardigan or whether something else existed that they perceived as individuals. No, she decided. If
she
couldn't even figure it out, she wasn't going to muddle up this already confusing evening trying to explain it, especially when it hardly seemed relevant. "I don't know how much you heard—I mean, I don't know when I—"
"Threw the phone?" he said for her, a dark kind of amusement showing on his face.
"Threw the phone," she affirmed. "But Sunny started barking. And then she screamed, and it was the most awful—"