Read Online Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips - Free Book Online Page B

blue-eyed grad student? He kept offering to rub her feet?”
    â€œThe really well endowed grad student?”
    â€œYeah.”
    She pretended to think. “The one who turned out to be a lesbian?”
    Ed smiled. “Yeah. Yeah. That was a good dig.”
    And just like that, he was the Ed she had always known, the man who could name every insect in water, land, or sky. The man who could tell a tall tale like he was giving the weather. At times over the years she could almost imagine this was her father. A father she saw occasionally, who treated her with affection and professional courtesy. It was an appealing vision, a scenario in which fathers were without personal lives or expectations and existed only to be charming and kind and fatherly for as long as their presence was appreciated.
    She’d walked past the swimming hole, farther into the canyon. The dirt road stayed close to the creek. Two sets of deer tracks crossed her path: The splayed, rounded toes of a buck smudged the pointed, compact prints of a doe. She turned a corner in the road, and the air changed: It sparkled around her, bits of light blinking past her face and hands and around her knees. She’d reached a huge cottonwood, towering, with thick green branches. The tree was snowing cotton bits, and the fading sunlight caught them, spun them glittering in the air.
    She walked to the trunk and ran her fingers along its alligator bark. The trunk was thick and ropy, immense. She stood still, wind blowing, caught in its snow globe.
    She heard breathing just behind her, low to the ground. Animal panting, like a dog needing water. She looked behind her, expecting to see Zorro wagging his tail. Nothing.
    She stayed still. Again, the sound of panting, this time farther away. There was the sound of feet moving through leaves so loudly that they must have wanted to be heard. She looked and saw no one. The footsteps grew faster.
    She did not know if she wanted to see whoever was moving through the woods. She made herself control her own breathing—deep and slow. She needed to see whatever or whoever was willing to show itself. She walked slowly back to the creek. For a while, the sounds stopped.
    As she stepped through the creek, she watched the rocks—burnt orange, pink, black, deep gold, pale yellow, chocolate. Ferric oxide in the reds, limonite in the yellows, manganese in the blacks. When she reached the other side, she knew she was not alone anymore. She looked up and saw a man hunched in the tall grass with his back to her. He was strong and lean, and his hair was long down his naked shoulder blades.
    It was only a flash, lasting maybe five seconds. She saw his black hair and an expanse of skin and a carcass at his feet. It was skinned and glistening—a deer, probably. She saw a small mass of what she thought were intestines in a clump of weeds. The man had a blade, a sharpened rock, in his hand, and he was cutting strips of meat, sawing along the whole width of carcass. He pulled off a strip maybe two feet wide and three feet long, the right size for jerky.
    The meat was steaming slightly, and Ren thought she could smell blood. It was surprisingly pleasant. The man had blood streaked up to his elbows. He turned in her direction, pausing, looking at the creek but not at her. She thought he was coming to the water to wash. She looked at the dead thing and breathed in the blood.
    Then he was gone and only the smell lingered.
    She waited for several more minutes and saw nothing else. She tried to clear her head of the smell and make sense of what she’d seen. The man was obviously not her artist, and she couldn’t see how he would have anything to do with pottery. But she was glad to have seen him: He’d been part of this place. If he was here, others might be, too. She only needed to keep looking.
    They’d all taken a long lunch break, because Ren felt she couldn’t put off checking in with the office any longer. It