Harvest Moon Read online

  With a press of a button, she turned on her thrift store coffee maker and let it percolate while she went for the shower. It was five minutes before the hot water reached the faucet, but once it did, it was heaven. The water in the mountains was fresh and clean and there was nothing like a long, hot shower to let Dawn relax and prepare herself for another day serving beer and burgers to hunters, miners, loggers, and hikers.

  When she finally felt that her muscles were as relaxed as they were going to get, Dawn pulled herself out of the hot water and wrapped a towel around her body. Slinging drinks and food was more of a workout than she had ever imagined, and she let her fingers trail over the muscle of her bicep. It was growing just a little more every day, and for a girl who had always been petite, she couldn’t deny her pride in that.

  Over the sink, Dawn began to brush out her shoulder-length blonde hair. As she brushed, she examined her roots and frowned. I’ll need to pick up some dye soon, she thought as she looked over the dark hair growing in. She could never let it grow out more than a little bit before she bought more dye, just in case some realized she was a natural brunette.

  The coming winter meant she could no longer just let her hair air dry, not without risking catching a cold, and she flipped her head over to dry it with the weak blow dryer she’d picked up in an outlet store in Nashville last fall. She knew she’d need to upgrade it soon, but she kept putting it off in exchange for more urgent purchases.

  The last thing she did to get ready was pull out the small contact case from the top drawer of the tiny counter that sat beside the door to the bathroom. With a steady hand, she pulled out one contact and placed it over her eye, then the other. Blinking, she watched her brown eyes turn to a lively green before she moved back to the kitchen to get her coffee.

  Dawn sipped at the strong brew while she grabbed a bagel out of the fridge and popped it in her toaster. While she waited for it, she noticed the faint red and blue of the police lights as they danced through her kitchen window and across her living room.

  It’s not for you, she reminded herself as her heart began to beat faster. If it was, they would have knocked by now.

  Her own insistence that she was fine, that no one had found out who Dawn Garrett really was, wasn’t quite enough to calm her down, but it did keep her from panicking. No, the cops were in town for something else, and Dawn wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that something else was.

  Though she was nervous, she moved to the window that looked out toward the gravel road right by her house. The lights were stronger as she pushed the curtains aside, and she leaned against the glass to see if she could see what was going on.

  All she saw were a few people walking by, but none of them noticed the young woman watching them. Dawn watched them as they walked, whispering to each other. She had been watching people for years, and she could read their body language well enough to see that they were curious and maybe even a little bit scared. Something was going on, but despite her own curiosity, Dawn didn’t think it was in her best interest to go poking around to find out what it was.

  She forced herself away from the window and went back to getting ready. Though she hoped that the ruckus had nothing to do with the bar, she knew she would be walking toward whatever was going on to get to work. She had no desire to come so close to a group of cops, but she had no other choice unless she wanted to be very late.

  With her coffee finished and her bagel eaten, Dawn moved back to her bedroom and traded the towel for a faded pair of jeans and a simple black t-shirt. She pulled her blonde hair into a ponytail and double-checked herself in the mirror one more time before she left. There was no room for her to be anything but Dawn, and that meant never leaving the house unprepared.

  From the back of the couch, she grabbed a red and blue flannel jacket that a hunter had left at the bar a month ago and pulled it over her shoulders. It was heavy and warm and helped her blend in better with the rest of the crowd in Goosemont. On her feet, she put on an old pair of cowboy boots, and then finally stepped outside into the cold November air.

  Most of the crowd had made their way to where the commotion was before Dawn had forced herself out of the house. They were a few houses down yet, but she saw Jim’s bar was still standing in the distance, and she began walking toward the crowd that spilled onto the rough gravel street that cut through the center of town.

  “Can you see anything?” she heard a woman say to someone as she got closer.

  “Nah,” a man answered her as he fought to try to stand taller and see over everyone. “The cops have it blocked off.”

  “You don’t want to see it,” someone told them as they pushed their way back from the crowd. “It’s a mess, a goddamn mess.”

  That made Dawn stop in her tracks. She was expecting a burglary or maybe a car wreck, but the man who was fighting his way away from the scene made her question that. His voice was low, hollow even, and his face was ashen. Something had shaken him up badly, and now people were fighting to see what it was.

  “Well, what is it?” the woman asked him, her morbid excitement growing as she bounced on her heels, still trying to get a look of the crime scene.

  “Another hiker,” the man who had witnessed the scene told her. “Or one of the ones they haven’t found yet, I don’t know. Totally ripped apart. Like, shredded.”

  “Wait,” the other man said, “shredded?”

  “Yeah,” the witness said, nodding while Dawn kept her eyes forward and made sure no one noticed her eavesdropping. “It’s got to be an animal, and a big one at that.”

  “So close to town?” the woman said, her excitement now touched with fear. “But that’s not possible.”

  “Why not?” the other man argued. “The town is surrounded by woods, and I see ‘coons all the time. What’s to stop something bigger getting to town?”

  Dawn shuddered at that. Goosemont, so far, had been pretty safe. There wasn’t much in the way of cell phone service, only a couple people had computers on ancient dial-up access, and the worst crimes were a few petty thefts. It was all part of why she had stuck around so long, but now she had to worry about a bear or another wild animal or something? The thought made her shiver.

  “You think that’s what got those missing hikers?” someone else asked. Other people were joining the conversation now.

  “Maybe,” someone agreed. “It would be the fourth one in only a few weeks.”

  Four? Dawn thought to herself. A hiker going missing on the Appalachian Trail was nothing new, but four in the same area over a short timespan? Even Dawn knew that there was something out of the ordinary about that.

  Part of her wanted to stay and see what else she could glean from the conversation, but she knew it was time to get moving. The crowd was still thick, and she could probably pass through unnoticed on her way to Jim’s bar if she left right then.

  With most of the crowd facing the blocked-off alley, she wove around the back of them and exited only a block from the bar. Half the town seemed to be fighting to see what was going on, yet no one even looked at Dawn.

  As she moved out of the crowd, she noticed the town’s few cops leaning on the one of the cruisers while they talked to three men dressed in dark suits.

  FBI, she realized as she kept walking. She wanted to run then, to get out of sight as quickly as possible, but she knew that would only draw their attention. The very last thing she needed was an FBI agent looking into who Dawn Garrett was. Even an agent who played by the books would turn her in. She’d seen her own missing persons picture before, and didn’t need someone realizing that the blonde waitress was really a New York City girl who’d run away from home at eighteen.

  The only problem was that she needed to walk right by them to get to work. The cruiser was parked to the side of the road, but what must have been the FBI agents’ vehicles were blocking off the street, and Dawn would need to sneak through the gap between them to get the rest of the way to the bar.

  As she walked by t
hem, she watched and listened as the three agents talked with the cops. They kept their voices low, but she watched them out of her peripheral as she went by. Taking note of them was more than just simple curiosity. She wanted to remember them, to see if any of them followed her or stuck around town long after they figured out what was going on. Then she would know to run.

  While most of the small band of law enforcement officials were locked in conversation, one agent caught her eye more than the others. He was just a little bit taller than they were, with dirty blond hair and a five o’clock shadow. Sure, he was attractive, but that wasn’t all that Dawn noticed.

  The other two agents, while not wearing Prada or Gucci, were at least wearing suits that were tailored to fit them. The third agent, the younger one, was wearing a suit that was obviously cut for someone else, someone just a little taller than him; the cuffs of his pants fell just a little too low and were scuffed and ripped at the heels. His shoes didn’t shine like the others’, and Dawn noticed that his had thicker treads.

  He was out of place from the others, and the fact that the older two agents had their backs turned to him and didn’t acknowledge him made Dawn realize that they obviously hadn’t come to Goosemont together.

  He’s probably just a rookie, her mind told her. He might not be able to afford anything better.

  Still, that didn’t seem like the right answer. He was too confident to be a rookie, too seasoned. He couldn’t yet be thirty, but even in profile she could see his dominance, and she realized he was watching her in the same way as she was watching him.

  The younger agent turned his head just enough for them to lock eyes. Light green eyes met hers from a car’s distance away, but it was enough to send a current of electricity down her spine. There was recognition there, of what she didn’t know, but for a moment, she held his gaze before she forced herself to move again.

  She was done with walking slow. She’d already been noticed, and there was no point in taking her time. Her feet picked up speed, and it was all she could do not the jog the last stretch of road to the bar.

  Chapter Two

  The bar was deserted when Dawn arrived for her shift. She had a habit of arriving early, and this day was no exception. All her life, she had been early for everything, though it was different at the bar. There was no sense of duty or urgency there, but rather a respect for the owner, Jim Brewer, and her few coworkers that brought her in early every day.

  “Hey, Jim,” Dawn said as she hung up her coat just inside the double doors that led into the old, shabby bar. The place could definitely use a few repairs and a fresh coat of paint, but it was homey. There was something about the smell of beer, greasy food, and stale tobacco that just seemed right to her. It was the exact opposite of the life she’d led so long ago, and it suited Dawn just perfectly.

  “God, girl,” Jim said as he lumbered out from behind the bar and gave his number one waitress a bear hug. Jim might have looked more beast than man, with a short, unkempt beard and a healthy beer belly, but at heart, he was a big old softy. “I’m so glad to see you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. “I take it you saw the commotion up the street?”

  “Did I ever,” he said, worry touching the crow’s feet around his eyes. “Rumor is that it’s some hiker who got tangled up with a momma bear, but I don’t know about that. This close to town and all.”

  “It’s happened before,” Gabe, the cook for Jim’s bar, said as he poked his head out of the kitchen. Gabe was in his thirties, married with a couple of kids. He was a little on the gruff side, but once Dawn got to know him, she saw he was an all right guy, just rough around the edges.

  “It has?” Dawn asked as she grabbed the small apron she wore around her waist during her shifts.

  “Well, not the mangled corpse part,” Gabe said.

  “Watch your tongue,” Jim warned him. The two often acted at odds with one another, but really, they were pretty cool. Get a few drinks in Gabe and he’d go on about how much he respected the old bear that ran the bar, and Jim was no different.

  “Sorry,” Gabe said. “But I’ve lived here my whole life, Jim too, and it’s not the first time a bear has wandered up Main Street.”

  “Has anyone been attacked before?” Dawn asked as she started to wipe down the bar.

  “Well,” Gabe said as he ran a hand through his shaggy dark hair, “there was this one time…”

  “A long time ago,” Jim cut in. At nearly fifty, he wasn’t the oldest man in town, but he was the oldest in the bar. “When I was a pup, maybe fifteen or sixteen, we had a momma bear come through here a couple times. Now, most folks around here know that when you see a bear and her babies, you turn the other way, and that’s what we did. Too bad some kids from Charleston who were up here looking for work didn’t quite get that idea. You city kids need to have a healthier respect for nature.”

  Dawn knew he was talking about her. She hadn’t said she was from New York City, she’d never even mentioned the state, but she did tell people she was from Cleveland. It was half true. She’d spent three months there before she’d hopped a train for something new.

  “Did the bear kill them?” Dawn asked. She was so wrapped up in Jim’s story that she was barely paying attention to the cleaning, though it didn’t matter much. There was a layer of old beer on everything that would never come out, no matter how much she scrubbed.

  “Nah,” Jim said. “But those idiot kids tried to run that bear out of town one night after drinking in this very bar. Of course, that was long before my pappy passed it down to me.”

  “So, what did happen?” Dawn asked.

  “One kid got mangled pretty bad,” Gabe said, cutting into Jim’s tale.

  “Hey,” Jim barked at him. “It’s my story, let me tell it.”

  “But you’ve told this story half a hundred times,” Gabe laughed. “I could tell it myself.”

  “Don’t you have prep to do?” Dawn asked him. Despite the mutual respect the two men had for each other, Dawn wasn’t in the mood for one of their pissing contests and she put her foot down right away.

  “Fine,” Gabe relented. “But I’m telling you, that’s what happened.”

  Once they were alone again, Dawn asked Jim to finish his story.

  “Well,” Jim said as he pulled up the waist of his faded jeans, “Gabe was half right. After the boys got drunk, word is they were stumbling home and the bear was digging through some trash with her cubs. They decided to try to chase her off, idiots. Of course, she stood her ground and charged. One boy lost an arm, another an eye. Only one of them walked away without any serious damage, and I heard that was only because he collapsed from fright and the bear let him be.”

  “Damn.” Dawn shook her head. “What happened to the bear?”

  “What I expect is going to happen this time,” Jim said. “Now that there’s been an attack in town, hunters will come in and shoot whatever’s doing the killin’. The last time, they shot the bear after three days. Word is they gave the cubs to a zoo down south. Chances are, that’s how it’ll go again. Can’t complain, though. The more hunters who show up, the more thirsty people looking for some cheap beers at Jim’s.”

  “Hey, speaking of that,” Dawn said as she eyed the old grandfather clock in the corner of the bar, “it’s about time we opened.”

  “Right you are,” Jim said as he moved toward the door and clicked the open sign on.

  The bar never did have much of a lunch rush, but a few of the people who had been gawking at the carnage did meander into the musty old bar for some greasy food and a drink. The place may have looked a little shoddy, but Gabe had a way with the bar standards, and Dawn had never had a better cheeseburger anywhere, ever.

  Even though Jim’s was busier than usual on a weekday afternoon, the place was oddly quiet. The few people who had claimed seats were talking amongst themselves in hushed whispers, like what they were discussing was some secret, despite the fact that everyone was talking abo
ut the same thing.

  They’re scared, she reminded herself. And you should be, too.

  That much was true. With the feds in town, the media might not be far behind. Not much that was considered news worthy happened around Goosemont, and Dawn was glad of that. The last thing she needed was to have her face on national TV. Even if she was just in the background, it was too risky to allow.

  The hushed anxiety and curiosity permeating the bar broke as the front door swung open. With the cold breeze from the early November day came Courtney, the second waitress at Jim’s and Dawn’s de facto best friend in Goosemont.

  “Courtney, hey,” Dawn greeted her flame-haired friend as she set down a tray of nachos for a small group of diners.

  It hadn’t crossed Dawn’s mind to worry about Courtney in the same way that Jim had worried about her. Courtney had grown up in Goosemont, and her father and brothers were all working in the lumber yards that provided jobs for most of the town. Though she was energetic, Courtney wasn’t an idiot, and Dawn knew she wouldn’t do something like tangle with a bear, or wolf, or whatever animal it was that had killed that poor hiker.

  “Oh my God,” Courtney gushed as she tossed her fleece vest over Dawn’s flannel jacket that hung by the door. The girl had grown up with the mountain cold, and this weather was nothing for her. “Did you hear the news?”

  “Um,” Dawn mumbled as she watched the patrons eying Courtney. She was a bundle of excitement and could barely stand still as she grabbed her apron and tied it on.

  Though everyone was just as curious about the dead hiker, Courtney’s shocking lack of tact was obviously agitating them, and the last thing Dawn wanted was to piss off Jim’s customers. That, and she had no desire to lose her tips because Courtney was acting like a fool.