Page 7 of Coveted By the Bear

She wore a thin gray tank top over her jean shorts. I couldn’t take my eyes off a line of oddly puckered scars that ran in a circle around her throat. They stood out against her alabaster skin.

“What happened to your neck?” I asked.

She raised a hand to her chest in an attempt to cover them. Her face said she’d forgotten all about them. Her panicked gaze lifted back to the direction of the room she had come from. Her room.

“Do you have anything else to wear?” I asked, giving her an out.

She shook her head again. “Nothing that would cover them.”

She looked longingly at the tattered rag against my neck.

“I owe you some new clothes then,” I offered.

“I don’t need your charity.”

“It’s not charity. One shirt for the shirt I ruined. Deal?”

She bit her lip. “Fine.”

I tried again to sit up. “Where’s your uncle? We need to send for a doctor while you start stitching up my neck.”

“He’s dead.”

I stared at her dumbly. “Dead? Since when?”

The uncertain look on her face said she didn’t know if she could trust me, but after a moment all I saw was resolve and wild hair. “Since last November.”

I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she scooted farther away from me and waited. I slid a suspicious gaze to the back room. What did I really know about Mira Fletcher? Only that every single person in town thought she was bat shit crazy. The kind of unbalanced that scares people. Who was I to argue with every single person who had come into contact with her in the last five years?

“Is he still in his room?” I asked in a low voice. My eyes held hers. I wanted the truth.

Her lip curled up in apparent disgust. “Yeah, I left his rotting corpse in his bed, Caleb. That is the creepiest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

I cleared my throat, feeling bad for my earlier suspicions. “Where is he then?”

Her sigh tapered into a growl, and she stood to leave. I thought she was running from the confrontation, but she returned a minute later with a thick stack of papers in a manila envelope clenched in her shaking hand. She threw it on the floor in front of me and disappeared into her room.

The front of the baby-puke-colored folder had the words Brady Fletcher’s Will written in angry, scribbled, dark letters. I unclasped the metal clips and pulled the stack of legal papers out. The first page was handwritten and signed by Mira’s uncle at the bottom. An undignified piece of me found it surprising he’d been literate. I skimmed the document and grew bored enough on page two to toss them back onto the envelope. Mira returned with a stack of sheets in her arms.

“I buried him under the big oak tree out back like he wanted. He had the tombstone made years ago. I guess he lasted a lot longer than he thought he would. Or than he wanted. I don’t know.”

He had stated in his will he didn’t want fuss. He had given Mira specific directions, and she had followed them. The law would question her about the timing, but I couldn’t really find anything wrong with the way she put him to rest. “How did he go?”

“Drinking,” was all she said.

Mira put her hands under my arms and dragged me as best she could with what little help I could offer. Other than my brain, my body didn’t seem to want to work right. Mira said it was because I lost a lot of blood.

“You need a doctor,” she said when I lay crumpled and broken on her bed.

“Why didn’t you put me in your uncle’s room? He won’t need it.”

“That room is haunted,” she said matter of factly.

I chuckled, thinking she had made a joke, but she regarded me with serious eyes. Mira couldn’t seem to take her gaze off of my curled lips. I wondered what she was thinking so I asked her.

“I haven’t seen someone smile in a long time is all. You need a doctor,” she repeated.

I sighed. I knew I did. The pain was excruciating, and I could feel the little blood I had left seeping out of my open neck. Open arms. Open chest. My skin felt cold except for the tiny puddle of fresh blood in the hollow of my neck. I tried not to swallow too hard for fear that my adam’s apple would dislodge the only warmth I had left and loose the pool of fiery liquid to flow down my throat and into Mira’s clean sheets. I needed it more than they did.