Fur

07 | A Familiar Stranger

Except I know her well enough to know how slim the odds of that happening are.

And so I slump against the house and slide down it in reluctance of that fact, and emit a groan a bear might even be disturbed by. At the bottom of the house where I come to sit, I take out my cell phone and ring the phone company, as much as I don't want to. Because reporting a cut line would raise alarms as to suspicious activity, I tell them my little cousin was playing a prank and didn't realize the permanence of his actions until it was too late. They tell me they'll send a repairman right over.

He arrives half an hour later. I show him to the box and we chat as he gets to work on replacing the line. He's absentminded and talks mostly of football, needing only an acknowledging hum or a filler phrase to be encouraged, until eventually the job is done. He asks me for a name to put on the bill. I give him mine, because Nanni will never know about what she doesn't have to pay for.

I watch the repairman's van disappear down the forested road leading out of Heisenbühl. It's only after the bright red van is out of sight that I turn to go back inside and feel something hard and smooth beneath the toe of my shoe.

A smartphone. He must've dropped it amid his enthusiastic rant about the injustices of last year's World Cup.

I groan and reluctantly swipe the thing up. Returning it is but another task I'll have to deal with... which is why I hold my breathe that he'll come back for it. One tap on the sleek screen gives me my answer.

The lockscreen is the red logo of the phone and cable company. A company phone, I realize, and know that I've seen the last of that football-obsessed repairman's face.

With a sigh I pocket the device and go back inside to the kitchen, where my earlier lie to Nanni—that all the noise last night was just me rearranging the kitchen cupboards—has come back to bite me. She hadn't looked in them this morning, but something has to be different the next time she does or else I'll have some more explaining to do.

And thus, I find myself on the kitchen floor, pots and pans and skillets of all kinds thrown about all around me. It takes longer than I'd like to create enough of a difference to excuse the noise. Though Nanni was half asleep anyway, I need to be sure.

As I make my way around every cabinet, metal ringing in my ears as an aftereffect, I don't realize the room darkening. It's only when I close the last cupboard and clamber to my feet that I notice the house has gone shadowy and the sun has dipped beneath the trees.

I glance at the clock. 7:23 PM.

Closing is at 8:00. I have to get going.

I lock the door on my way out and hurriedly hop into the Hummer, not ignoring the imagined image of the serial killer hiding beneath it, ready to grab my ankles.

What I also forgot, until the desolate bridge coming up in my headlights reminds me, is the ominous letter still sitting in my passenger seat.

If it is you, meet me tomorrow night on the village bridge.

Me or not—scared or not—it seems I'm here.

I can't get to the café without crossing this bridge, nor can I get the McNamaras home. Even if I do speed over, I think, it's better to face it now, before Lattie and Nanni are in the car with me later. Besides that, I won't be able to act like an oblivious passerby. The werewolf in my driveway, after leaving his note for me, saw my vehicle. He knows what I drive.

My speed slows as I come upon the bridge, sitting rod-straight and scanning the shadows for any sign of a person. The writer of the letter had not specified a time, only that it be at night.