Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

M aggs was limping, so when we were out of sight of the Weed Brothers and had reached a fork in the path, I shrugged off my rucksack. I broke down the AK-47, which took all of five seconds, which is why it's very popular among the untrained, and slid the parts inside my ruck. I did notice, though, that the parts were clean.

I took a closer look at Maggs' paw. It was bleeding worse. I pulled out the first aid kit and cleaned the wound as best I could, put some triple antibiotic in it, then bandaged it.

I stood up, shouldering my ruck. I checked to see how Maggs did with the bandage and of course, she promptly started to chew it off.

"No," I said.

She looked at me for a moment, ran that command through her brain, decided nope, not in her skill set, then finished ripping the bandage off. She seemed very proud of that. Another game we could play.

Great.

I re-bandaged the paw, using all of the medical tape in my kit, plus a bit of duct tape that I kept for extreme emergencies, such as sucking chest wounds. Maggs took that as a challenge and lowered her head to chew.

"No!" I said in my best command voice, but I knew it was a losing battle. Maggs was a great dog but stubborn. She was going to tear that off and I had nothing left to put on it and it would get infected and . . .

Damn.

I looked left and could see that way curved downhill and back east, toward Rocky Start. The road I'd crossed the river on. To the right, the trail went uphill, in the direction of the A.T.

I tried to recall what Robert Frost had said about two roads diverging.

As if that were going to help me now.

"Come on," I said and turned left to Rocky Start and Poppy the amateur vet. And my wallet. And Rose.

We hadn't even made it to the main road before Maggs' limp got worse. We only managed to make it to the bridge. "Stay," I ordered Maggs.

She didn't need the order but lay down, looking at me plaintively.

I pushed through the undergrowth along the south side of the river and hid my ruck. Then I made my way back to Maggs, picked her up, and staggered across the bridge on my way into town.

I put Maggs down in front of the glass door to the shop. Rose looked up from behind the counter where she'd been looking at an old bottle and smiled at me, flashing those dimples again, and came to open the door. "Oh, welcome back!"

"About my wallet," I said as I went in.

She opened her mouth to say something just as Poppy came in from the kitchen, opened a door to the side of the kitchen door to throw in some towels—I could hear a dryer thumping—and said, "The lasagna's almost done." Then she saw my dog. "Maggs!" The dog limped toward her, and Poppy turned furious eyes on me, all those dark curls practically turning to snakes as she glared. "She's hurt! "

I sighed. "That's why I brought her to you."

"Well, you got that part right." Poppy dismissed me without another look and opened the kitchen door. "C'mon, Maggs, let's see what he's done to you."

"I didn't—" I started, but Maggs was already through the door, so I turned back to Rose. "My wallet?"

"Oh?" She patted her apron and pulled it out. "Must have fallen out of your pocket."

"Must have."

I put it back in my pocket without checking it and then folded my arms and waited for a better explanation.

"What?" she said, all big-eyed innocence, but I could see the tension in her now. The bruise was darkening on her cheek, too, and I wanted to do something for her. Like shoot Junior.

"What's going on here?" I could see her too-bright smile that meant she was starting to cook up a story and shook my head. "The truth, Rose."

She stopped and started again and stopped, blinking at me, and then in a rush, she said, "Oh. Okay. Okay. So Ozzie, my boss and my landlord, died two days ago, and we have no idea what his wishes were, but Barry, Ozzie's lawyer, has a sealed envelope but he doesn't know what's in the envelope but he's coming back day after tomorrow to open it, assuming whoever he's with doesn't kill him, so I have to wait two days to find out if we're homeless, evicted by Junior—the guy you threw into the street who says he now owns this place because he's Ozzie's secret baby—or by Norman—Ozzie's brother, the most selfish person I have ever known, which believe me is saying something—and I know Coral or Pike or somebody will offer us a place to stay but this is our home, and I don't know who Junior is, I don't know who the person in the black car was, and I don't know who you are, although I'm really hoping you're not in cahoots with Junior, and I don't know how to fix this ."

Her voice rose at the end, and she was holding onto the counter, breathing harder by the time she finished, truly upset.

I got the feeling that this wasn't like Rose, that she was as surprised as I was by the outburst. Mostly I was startled by the "cahoots" thing. Actually, the whole thing was pretty overwhelming for a guy who'd been communing with trees for months. And before that, I hadn't exactly been a social butterfly.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to verbally throw up on you. I think I'm more upset than I thought I was." She took another deep breath and met my eyes. "Really, I'm usually very calm and . . . and . . . cheery. "

She kind of snarled the last word so I moved on.

"Cahoots?" I said, but upon reflection realized it was a smart deduction. "We are not in cahoots. I have no clue who that guy was."

Rose shrugged. "Two strangers, showing up at the same time? I had to wonder. But you didn't seem like you'd be pals." She took a final deep breath and steadied herself, still obviously upset but in control again. "So, your dog is now in our kitchen with Poppy. This way."

There was a shotgun on the counter, and she picked it up and led me back to the kitchen. Because of course a shotgun.

I could handle that better than words.

Poppy was at the back of the room by the window with Maggs, so I walked over to them. A huge dark cat lounged on the shelf over the window, surveying the place like he owned it, and the late afternoon sunlight filtered in, and it was shabby and warm and smelled like tomatoes and spices, and I could see why Maggs and the cat were comfortable here. If I wasn't careful, I could be comfortable here.

Comfortable was bad. We had to get on the way again, not lounge around soaking up rays. Especially around a woman with sticky fingers.

I heard something squeak behind me and turned to see Rose bending over an ancient stove as she opened its creaking door. She pulled out the rack and took foil off a huge pan of lasagna bubbling away. Then she put a pan of buttered bread on the rack below and closed everything back up again.

It smelled wonderful and looked really good.

Rose bending over looked even better.

See, this is why comfortable is bad. The woman had stolen my wallet, for God's sake. Of course, she'd also given it back. Then she'd stolen it again. And given it back. Give and take. Edging dangerously close to a relationship there. Plus the verbal explosion. I'd gotten the feeling that Rose didn't usually lose control and tell people things. I certainly wasn't a person people confided in, although I had heard a few last words. They usually weren't memorable.

I turned away from dangerous Rose to angry Poppy, who was fitting a cone over Maggs' head. "A cone. Really?"

"She'll chew the bandage off otherwise," Poppy said, her "duh" left unexpressed. "She needs the wound covered until the antiseptic can do its job. She shouldn't be walking on it at all ."

I looked down at her. "Thank you for taking care of Maggs, but we really need to be going?—"

" No, sir," Poppy said and went back to bandaging now that Maggs couldn't chew off her work.

I looked at Rose, who'd straightened after closing the oven and was watching us, back in control of herself, flushed from the heat. Definitely not from the guilt of lifting my wallet.

"Yeah," she said. "Poppy's a Capricorn. They're like that. But she's right, that paw needs a rest." She looked back at the oven like she was making a major decision and then she said, "How about you stay and have lasagna with us and let Maggs rest for a couple of hours?" She hit me with that smile and those dimples again. "I make really good lasagna."

The smart thing to do would be to get the hell away from the dimples and get back to the woods.

But the lasagna looked really good. And so did she. And Maggs really did need to rest.

I gave up and said, "Thank you, that's very kind of you. "

She smiled again, like she was glad I was staying, probably so she could steal something else from me, and then turned back to the stove.

After dinner, we were really getting out of here.