Red Fox (34 page)

Eventually she called, “How
does it look?”

I turned and saw her
standing by the bathroom. Her hair was back in a smooth bun. She
was smiling broadly. Was she really proud of herself,
or….?

“
It looks great,” I
said.

“
No bumps?” she asked,
patting it.

“
No bumps.”

Suddenly the door handle
jangled. I flinched but Sarah didn’t budge.

“
Perry!” Dex called from
outside. “Why is the door locked?”

I got up just as Sarah
moved in front of the door, still facing me, still
smiling.

“
She’s in here with me. You
can see her in a minute,” she said through pearly
whites.

“
Sarah? Perry?” He tried the
door again.

I inched my way over to
her, feeling something in this situation was terribly
amiss.

“
It’s OK, Dex,” I projected,
sounding less confident than I would have liked. I was approaching
her like she was some wild animal that I didn’t want to
scare.

“
I need to talk to my wife,”
I heard him say.

Sarah laughed
sarcastically.

“
She’s not your wife,” she
glowered.

I guess there was no point
now in pretending anything.

She turned around, unlocked
the door and opened it.

Dex was on the other side,
looking rattled. Sarah stared up at him, still smiling.

“
She’s all yours,” she
remarked and shuffled past him into the hall. Dex stepped out of
her way.

He jumped in the room and
shut the door quickly behind him, making sure to lock it as well.
He marched over to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“
Are you OK? What was she
doing?” he asked, sounding panicked.

I shrugged. “Nothing much.
She was actually being…nice, or something. At first anyway. She
just brought me tea and wanted to talk about Bird.”

His eyes started flying
around the room. “What tea?”

I pointed to the mug on the
table.

“
It was fine, I only had a
bit,” I reassured him.

He went over to the tea and
sniffed it, frowning.

“
What?” I asked
nervously.

He slowly shook his head
and put it back down. “Nothing. What did she say about
Bird?”

“
She was worried about him,
actually. And thought it was strange. We didn’t really get into it.
What did Maximus say?”

Dex flopped backwards on
the bed. He rubbed his face vigorously with his hands and
sighed.

“
He’s in Gallup already. He
heard about what happened with the cattle from some people there.
Apparently it’s a skinwalker…thing.”

“
Oh, fabulous. Well, at
least we can film it and it is what it is.”

He shook his
head.

“
Why not?” I said, coming
over and sitting down next to him.

“
Will talked to the sheriff
afterward. We’ve put the alert out for Bird and Rudy but he says
the cattle are gone. The farmer came and hauled their remains
off.”

“
So, we go to the
farmer…”

“
Oh, what’s the fucking
point?” he yelled abruptly and covered his face with his
arm.

He sounded hopeless. It was
unlike him.

“
What if,” I tested gently,
“we went back to Rudy’s place? We go with Will. And a gun. And the
sheriff. And we film it as the aftermath, explaining what happened?
If we are lucky, Boy Boy is still there.”

“
If
we are lucky?” he
mumbled.

“
It’s part of the story,
Dex. It’s part of our story. This happened to us. Actual people are
missing or even worse. Not everything has to be some big dramatic
thing. Did you really think we’d capture some actual skinwalker on
camera? I mean, come on…”

He groaned as an
answer.

“
It makes sense,” I
continued. “It’s on the way out of town, more or less. We go, now.
Then at least we’ve got something. I trust you, I know you can make
something really…compelling out of all of this.”

I reached over and poked
his stomach. He winced but at least the arm came off of his face.
His eyes looked fried, a combination of exhaustion, frustration and
fear.

I got up, ready to pull on
his legs but the room spun with a swoosh and suddenly I was down,
down, down.

On the floor with a
thump
.

Ow.

Dex leaped up and peered
over at me. “What the hell?”

“
I’m fine,” I said, slowly
easing myself back onto my elbows which hurt against the hard
floor. “Guess I’m not entirely better yet.”

He didn’t say anything. I
looked up at him. He was eyeing the tea.

“
What?” I asked.

“
Did she really come here
to give you tea?” he questioned.

“
I don’t know if that was
her plan. But when I said I didn’t want any, she said that was
fine.”

“
Then why did you have
some?”

I shrugged. I didn’t know,
actually. My actions acted separate from my mind.

“
Felt like something to do
while she was brushing her hair.”

“
She was brushing her hair?”
he repeated slowly.

“
Yeah…in there. With my
hairbrush…”

“
Why would she brush her
hair in there?” he asked.

I shrugged again. “The
mirror is in there?”

Dex’s eyes widened. He
scampered off the bed and went into the bathroom. The mirror…she
was blind. What good what that do?

“
Where’s the hairbrush?” he
yelled.

I sighed and got to my
feet. Still a bit unsteady, I moved as quickly as I could over to
the bathroom and looked in. The brush wasn’t there.

I rifled through the bag
and the cupboards. Nothing.

“
Did you see her leave with
it?” he asked.

“
No,” I said. I tried to
think. No, I only saw her smiling. Would I have noticed the
brush?

“
She could have hidden it in
her dress or something,” he said leaning against the sink. “You
weren’t watching her the whole time?”

I shook my head feebly.
“Why would I? And why would she take my brush?”

He took me by the shoulders
and moved me to the bathroom window. Clouds had appeared around the
mountains, covering up the sun and casting a dark, grayish gloom
over the land. There was just enough light to see by. He tilted my
head back and peered into my eyes. The light hurt.

“
What?” I asked,
worried.

“
Your pupils,” he said.
“They aren’t retracting.”

“
Drugs?” I
stammered.

He nodded. “I think
so.”

“
Why would
she drug me? I mean…I was
just
drugged, I…”

“
She didn’t get what she
wanted the first time,” he said under his breath. He reached over
and shut the bathroom door.

I felt sick to my stomach.
Not only was I getting light-headed by the second, similar to what
I felt last night, but my head was reeling with what Dex was
proposing. It sounded so crazy that I couldn’t even begin to
comprehend it.

“
What do you mean?” I
whimpered.

I felt for my forehead. Dex
did too. It was hot.

He closed his eyes as if he
were conjuring up inner strength. Or the patience to deal with my
questions. He knew I was only going to get stupider with
time.

“
I think,” he whispered
cautiously, “that we’ve been played this whole time. I think Sarah
is a skinwalker.”

“
She’s a
Christian!”

“
How do we know? Don’t you
think this whole Christian thing is a bit, well, much? I mean, the
religion has its fair share of hypocrites but she’s different. You
can almost see her fighting herself when it comes to the Navajo way
versus Christianity. You can see it when she talks to
Shan.”

“
Shan…” I said slowly,
remembering how I had passed it off earlier as an affair. “The
medicine man.”

“
Yes. And that could
explain a lot of things. Bird and Rudy didn’t jump to that
conclusion but look where they are now. We don’t know. Sarah may be
an accomplice to Shan, she may be an actual skinwalker
herself.”

“
But why…why would she do
all this…I mean even before we came. She would be sabotaging her
own ranch, torturing her own husband.”

“
I’ve seen a lot of women
do worse,” he said, his eyes growing darker, an edge creeping on
his voice.

“
But Will…”

“
I think Will is the only
person here we can trust. But he trusts his wife and that’s going
to be a problem.”

“
Problem?”

“
If we go to Rudy’s with
him and the sheriff…it’s going to be really hard to convince them
about what we think. We’re just two ignorant white city fucks
hunting for ghosts. They won’t take us seriously.”

“
So we pretend we don’t know
anything,” I said.

He chewed on his lip for a
second before a smile twitched on them. “I picked a hell of a
weekend to quit drugs, huh?”

“
And I picked a hell of a
weekend to try drugs again. Accidently, of course” I
added.

He gave me the once over.
“How are you feeling now?”

I told him I was still a
bit dizzy but I wasn’t anything like I was the night
before.

“
That’s good,” he said.
“Maybe you didn’t have enough of whatever it was.”

“
I don’t think so. I only
had a few sips.”

I looked outside, at the
storm clouds as they swarmed closer. It was ominous and filled my
heart with a shadowy, sinking feeling.

“
But I think we should
probably go now, in case I do get worse.”

“
I don’t think it’s going to
be that easy…,” he said. “If she’s drugged you, it’s for a purpose.
If she has your hair…it’s for a purpose. A sick fucking
purpose.”

I remembered what Rudy had
said about hair and body parts (shudder) making skinwalkers more
powerful. What was she planning on doing to me? The same thing they
tried to do last night? Something worse?

“
Do you think that was her
last night? Her and Shan?”

“
I don’t know,” he said. He
carefully brushed my bangs off my forehead. His fingers felt soft,
his voice was soft, too. “I’m not sure if skinwalkers can appear to
be other people or not. But I’m gonna bet that whether it was her,
or just some local trash she had some kind of fucking spell on,
that they had a part of it.”

Maybe it was the drugs
slowly working their way through my system, or maybe it was the
fear, but an icy numbness made its way from my heart and down to my
limbs like a slow-drip IV.

“
You OK?” he said, searching
my face with his eyes. His fingers paused on my forehead. The
physical contact was all too much.

I felt the hot, prickly
sensation of tears poking around behind my eyes.

“
No,” I said. “I’m not OK. I
don’t want to die.”

I looked away,
ashamed.

“
Hey,” he whispered. He put
his arms around me and pulled me into him, embracing me. I didn’t
want to cry. And I definitely didn’t want to die. I felt
stupid.

He stroked the back of my
head with his hand. The comfort was heartbreaking. “You’re not
going to die. I will do everything I can to make sure of
that.”

He kept his arms around me
for a few minutes, pressing me up to him, while I gained my
composure. Normally, a little thrill would have gone through me at
how close we were, but I felt both like a blubbering fool and also
like someone who could be having their last day on
earth.

At long last he pulled back
and said, “I am not going to let anything happen to
you.”

He looked me square in the
eye and I knew he meant that. I felt it in the air around us, in
the warmth of his touch. I also knew that no matter what happened
in the future, whether I truly was in love with him or not, or
whether he’d be with Jenn forever, that it didn’t really hold a
candle to what was really important: I had someone in my life that
had my back. I had never had that before.

I almost got teary all over
again.

Thankfully Dex took this
opportunity to shake some sense into me.

“
Listen, we have one
choice,” he said. “We have to leave, out that front
door.”

I eyed the window. It
didn’t seem that awkward to go out of the room that way. We could
throw our bags down, jump onto the low roof below and –

“
No,” he said, knowing what
I was thinking. “We go out the front door and we act like nothing
is wrong. As long as Will is there, Sarah can’t do anything. If you
can, don’t act like you’re drugged.”