Edmund Graves's Arc

Chapter 12 of 12

Edmund reached for the door with his bag in hand. Then a thought stopped him cold. The man in the gray suit had believed his lie. But belief was not proof. If the stranger called the sister and the sister called Sarah, one question would break the whole story. Sarah had not taken her children to town that afternoon. She had left the night before. The lie had a crack in it, and the crack could open tonight. He stepped outside. The taillights were long gone, but the road ran flat and straight. A car could not have reached town yet. Edmund got in his own car and drove after it, headlights off, hands tight on the wheel. He found the sedan pulled over a mile down the road. The dome light glowed inside. The man held a phone to his ear. Edmund parked behind him and walked up slow, palms open, face friendly. He tapped the window. The man rolled it down. "Sorry to chase you," Edmund said. "I got the days mixed up. Sarah left yesterday, not this afternoon. Didn't want your family fretting over the wrong story." The man lowered the phone. His eyes moved over Edmund's face, then past him to the dark car with no lights. Something shifted in him. He had heard the town talk too. "You're Graves," he said. It was not a question. His thumb went to the phone screen. Edmund's hand came up with the tire iron he had carried from his trunk. He swung once through the open window. The man slumped against the wheel. The phone dropped to the floor mat, the call still live. Edmund reached in, ended it, and pocketed the phone. That was when he heard the huff. A small brown shape stumbled from the roadside brush, ears back, eyes wide with fright. A bear cub, lost and alone, caught in his headlights' absence, close enough to touch. Edmund froze. Where the cub went, the mother followed. Behind the cub, low in the grass, two yellow eyes caught the moonlight. The wolf stood between the cub and the road, steady and calm, watching Edmund the way it always watched him. It had counted this one too. Then it turned its head toward the trees, and a girl's voice called out from the dark. "Maddie, wait!" A woman's voice. Sarah's sister, or someone near her. People were closer than he thought. Edmund shoved the dead man's phone deep in his pocket and ran for his car. The stranger would not report anything now. But the call had gone through. Someone on the other end had heard a voice, then silence. And the wolf had seen his fourteenth body slump against a steering wheel a mile from town, with witnesses closing in on foot.