Living with the Dead

HOPE

When Hope reached the rear of the ice cream stand, she slowed her jog to a more respectable fast walk. Her gaze was already on the horizon, scouring the strip malls for stores selling shirts. If the same store sold moist towelettes for Karl to clean up, all the better. She just needed -

Hope stopped. While her gaze was focused beyond the ice cream stand umbrella tables, something about those tables pulled her attention back. Before she left, six of the eight had been occupied. Now, only two were, and Robyn was at neither.

Their two cups were still at their table. At the ice cream stand a single patron waited – a round-faced teenage girl.

No cause for panic. Robyn might have needed to use the bathroom or decided to grab a magazine.

Hope called Karl. He answered on the first ring.

"Small delay." She walked toward their table. "Rob stepped away. Looks like she'll be back in a sec. She left her drink – " She stopped, staring down at Robyn's cup.

"Hope?"

"Her milkshake melted."

"What?"

"She was drinking a milkshake and it doesn't look as if she touched it since I left. It's melted, with a puddle of condensation under it." Hope shook her head. "Probably because she wasn't that interested in it in the first place. Just buying an excuse to sit down. Sorry, I'll stop worrying."

"Do you see a place to buy a shirt?"

"Not from here, but I'll go across the road and take a better look."

"Just grab anything. I'm going to start heading that way."

"You think something happened?"

"No, but I think you'll feel better buying my shirt rather than sitting around waiting."

Hope bought Karl a shirt and pack of wipes and hurried across the road. An elderly man was clearing their table, shaking his head at the nearly full cups.

"Excuse me," she said. "That's my – My friend was sitting there."

"Not now," he said, wiping the table.

"You work here, right?"

That made him glance up, watery blue eyes meeting hers. "No, I just like clearing tables. A good hobby for an old – "

"Has this one been vacant long?"

"Long enough." He shuffled off.

One last look for Robyn, then Hope strode around the ice cream stand and broke into a jog.

Hope handed Karl a t-shirt advertising Coors Light and a box of baby diaper wipes. He didn't comment, just shucked his shirt, wiped himself down and pulled on the new one as she trashed the old shirt and the bloodied cloths.

By the time they arrived back at the tables, they were almost full again. There was still no sign of Robyn. Hope's racing heart hit full gallop. Robyn shouldn't be gone this long. Something had happened.

"He didn't circle back," Karl said as they wove through the tables.

She glanced at him.

"Gilchrist. He didn't come back."

That was what she'd been worried about, that while they were recuperating in the office complex, the werewolf had returned and lured Robyn away. Whether he'd connected Robyn with Karl, Hope didn't know, but if he did, he might return for her as a way to get at Karl.

"You were sitting here?" he asked, pausing by the table, now occupied by a couple and two young children.

When Hope nodded, he said to the couple, "Excuse me. My wife was here earlier and she dropped her keys. May I take a look under your table?"

The couple backed their chairs out. Karl crouched and checked one side, then the other. A word of thanks, and he put his fingers on Hope's elbow, guiding her toward the stand.

"Two trails for Robyn, both leading this way," he said under his breath. "One coming, one going, I presume."

When people walk, they shed skin cells and hair, which fall to the ground and lay a scent trail. Hope had researched it, looking up how search-and-rescue dogs track so she'd understand what Karl could and could not do. He wasn't comfortable with questions about what he considered one of the more undignified aspects of being a werewolf.

Canines tracked two ways. One was by air scent, which led straight to a person if he was still around. The other was ground scent, which told where someone had been. What ground scent couldn't tell Karl, though, was which of two recent trails was fresher.

As they drew close to the ice cream stand, he paused. From Karl's expression, Hope knew the trails had grown fainter, meaning he'd veered off course. Short of sniffing the ground, though, it was difficult to find exactly where they'd diverged.

She looked up at the menu board and absently reached into her pocket. She pulled out her change, letting it fall, clinking on the pavement and rolling away.

"Oh, of all the stupid – " she began.

"I've got it."

He knelt, sniffing nearer the ground as he gathered her scattered coins. When he rose, he bent to hand them to her and said, "One goes to the left, through the parking lot. The other heads right, around the back of the stand."

"The second is the way Gilchrist went earlier," she said. "And the way I went."

"Then that's where we'll go."

Once past the strip malls, Robyn's trail became easier for Karl to follow, partly because he could stoop and sniff and partly because they'd figured out where she'd been going – following Hope. When Hope had run to see Karl, she'd checked for a tail a few times, but had been too anxious to do a decent job. If Robyn had stayed a reasonable distance away, Hope would never have noticed.

Robyn's trail ended at the corner of a building. Looking around it, Hope saw the spot where she'd waited out her chaos rush with Karl.

"She saw me," Hope said. "Dammit. What did she think? I must have looked – "

"She didn't see your face, not from this angle. You had your back to her. What she saw was me… and a lot of blood."

"Shit! She must have panicked and – " Hope shook her head. "No, not Robyn. She doesn't rattle that easily."

Karl said nothing, but his expression disagreed. The old Robyn would have seen blood and marched over to help. But she hadn't been herself since Damon's death. After witnessing two murders, had seeing Karl covered in blood been too much?

Or had something caught her attention? Lured her away?

Karl followed her trail. This time, it didn't cling to the shadows. She'd made a beeline for the road, crossed to a gas station and headed into a phone booth.

"It ends here," Karl said, crouched in the lot.

"She called a cab."

"That would be my guess."

"So she sees you bleeding, finds the nearest phone booth and calls a cab… Where? Back to the motel?"

Hope checked her cell. No missed calls. Maybe Robyn had run out of change and decided to call from the motel.

She hoped so. Otherwise, she had no idea where her friend had gone.

When they arrived at the motel, Hope leapt from the car while Karl was still parking it. A cleaning woman near their motel room shrank back behind her cart, then relaxed as Hope pulled out her key, as if the cleaner had thought she was racing over to demand extra towels.

Hope opened the door. Their room was empty.

She remembered the cleaning woman. Had she been in here? Hope had told her to come after three, so she could get Robyn out first.

"Excuse me!" she called as she hurried back outside.

The cleaning woman's shoulders tightened, but she didn't turn, as if praying Hope wasn't hailing her.

Hope jogged up beside her. "The room looks great. I just wanted to give you this."

Hope passed her a five. She looked at it, still in Hope's outstretched hand, her sunken eyes wary.

"Really, thanks," Hope said. "I appreciate you coming later for us."

The woman took the money.

"Oh, and before you go. Did you see another woman in my room? My friend was supposed to meet us there."

"Friend…?" She shook her head. "English no good."

Hope switched to Spanish and repeated the question as best she could, though her Spanish was probably worse than the woman's English. Karl came up behind and took over. His international jobs meant he had a working knowledge of about a half-dozen languages.

Karl translated on the fly. There had been someone in their room when the cleaner arrived. A young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, who'd left right after the cleaner arrived. She'd seen her get into a cab a few minutes later.

Hope thanked her. As the woman pushed her cart away, Hope checked her watch. It was 3:15. "Fifteen minutes to clean our room? I think I overtipped." They headed back toward their door. "But I guess that means I can relax. Wherever Rob went, she won't expect the cleaning to be done for a while, so I'll take advantage of the wait and make a few calls."

As Karl opened the door, Hope noticed the light on the bedside phone blinking. "Oh, we have a message. Let's hope it's Robyn."

It was. And she was calling to explain where she'd gone. But it wasn't "to the corner for a coffee."