A week later I was in the barn planning Shadow’s next obstacle for the agility course when he began barking and racing around the house like crazy. Barking at everything in a friendly way is normal sheltie behavior, but it also served as a warning. Following Shadow around the house, I came to an abrupt halt. It was the guy from down the street who had tried to help me with my flat tire. He wasn’t standing at the door waiting for a friendly response. Instead I caught him walking around the house and peeking in our windows. I shrank back behind the bushes, then made my way in through the back door. I locked it behind me, then made sure the other doors were locked too. I went to the closet, got out my 9mm, and checked to make sure it was loaded. Then I found a spot in the hall that was out of sight of all the windows and prayed the guy would go away.
I worried about Shadow out there. I was almost sure Shadow wouldn’t leave the property. He would either follow the man around or look for me. I just hoped he didn’t follow the guy home.
I jumped when the doorbell rang but decided not to answer it. Then I heard a noise at the back of the house. Who would be at the front of the house while this guy was at the back? I went to the front door concerned that a friend might meet up with this guy.
“Who is it?” I called out.
“It’s Mark.”
“Damn it Mark, you’ve got lousy timing,” I said. “Get in here.”
I opened the door quickly and he stepped in, then I stepped out, gun drawn. I looked in both directions and then stepped back into the house. I pulled Mark along into the hallway. I was willing to take this guy on by myself but I wasn’t willing to endanger others. I thought Mark would be safer inside with me than outside. Pulling my cell phone from my pocket I hit Rusty’s number.
“Hey there,” he said brightly, answering on the third ring.
“Can you send an officer up here to drive by the house a few times, maybe walk around the property?”
“Sure. Are you okay?”
“It’s that guy I had trouble with when I had the flat. He’s prowling around out there, looking in windows. I’ve got my gun and I would have confronted him but Mark showed up. I’d feel better if somebody else checked this guy out.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Rusty, no…” but he was gone. “Like I said, Mark, you have lousy timing. Just sit tight. We’re sitting here in the hall because we can’t be seen from any of the windows.”
“You have spots like this planned out ahead of time?”
“Not exactly, I just notice and file odd facts so when things like this come up solutions fall into place more easily. Would you feel better armed?”
“I don’t think so. I’d be more likely to shoot your house than an intruder. Are you a good shot?”
“Yeah, if need be. I won’t shoot unless I’m forced to, though. I’ve been forced before and it’s no fun.”
“You’ve actually shot someone?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like to talk about it. How’s your shoulder?”
“Better, but useless. I’m stuck in this sling for eight weeks.”
“What was your mom’s reaction when she saw you?”
“You don’t want to know. Basically she broke my shoulder again in the biggest hug of my life. Then she cried and dragged Dad into the whole thing. And, of course, she had to hear the whole story from my point of view.”
I glanced towards the kitchen and thought I saw a movement outside. “I’d offer you something to eat, but we’d need the kitchen and I don’t want to be spotted.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. Is your life always this exciting? Searching for missing photographers? Hiding from prowlers?”
“You don’t even know the half of it. Actually, the past few months have been rather peaceful for me.”
The doorbell rang again. This was starting to feel like grand central station. I didn’t know whether to move or not. Then there was a pounding on the door that made me jump.
“Cassidy?” an unfamiliar man’s voice called through the door.
Mark and I exchanged glances, then I went to the front door.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Police.”
That was quick, but I guess an officer could have been in the vicinity. I opened the door and there stood the guy looking as smug as can be.
“Well, well, I see you’re still armed. You don’t trust anybody, do you? Mighty suspicious aren’t you? Why can’t a neighbor make a friendly call on you?”
Shadow rushed in the door looking like he’d done his duty by greeting our visitor and showing him inside. Then Shadow sniffed around a bit and headed down the hall.
“Don’t take another step,” I warned. “Friendly neighbors don’t prowl around houses peeking in windows or lie their way inside. So far you’ve done nothing to make me believe you’re a friendly neighbor.”
“Aw, come on,” he said, taking a step closer. “You can trust me. You want me on your side. You don’t want to get on my bad side.”
“I’m likely to get on your bad side real quick unless you turn around and get out of here. You don’t want to be here when the police arrive. They’ll haul you off and find something to pin you with.”
“No, they won’t. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You take one more step and you’ll have done something wrong. Now go.”
“I don’t think so. I think you should let me in. I think we need to talk on friendlier terms.” He made his way forward and I drew my gun. “You won’t shoot me. I can see it in your face. You don’t want to hurt anybody. All your tough talk is just a big show. I bet you’d take a beating before you’d pull that trigger.” He was right but I’d never admit it.
I was praying Mark had stayed put, better yet, I wanted him to lock himself in the bathroom.
“You really don’t want to be here when the police arrive. They are used to seeing me in tense situations. They’ll shoot first and ask questions later. You may not be able to answer if you give them a hard time.”
“I’m really scared. Maybe if you were a little friendlier you wouldn’t get into tense situations. Did you ever think of that?” he asked, advancing.
“Damn it!” I said. “I really don’t want to shoot you! Why can’t you just go away? What do you want?”
“I just want to be on friendly terms with my neighbors, some friendlier than others. The more you spurn me the more determined I get.”
“You’re crazy. Why would anybody want to get to know you more if you intimidate them and terrorize them? You can’t treat people like that and get anywhere. With your attitude even an offer of help is turned away.”
“Yes, which is why I came. All I wanted to do was help you with your car. Why did you refuse?”
“If you want to help people you need to sound sincere, not like you’re setting a trap for them.”
“I’ll have to remember that. I’ve been watching for the Explorer. I came over a week or so ago but you were gone for several days. Where were you?”
“None of your business.”
He stepped forward and I switched the gun to my left hand. He stepped forward again and I kicked him in the groin and then slugged him in the nose. He staggered back and blood spurted from his face.
A black and white drove up and came to a halt in front of the house. Jayce Thompson stepped out shaking his head.
“Cassidy, can’t you at least manage to stay out of trouble in your own home?”
“I try. Some people are just persistent,” I replied nervously.
Jayce came to the front door and looked at the guy who was now curled up in a ball on my porch. He tried to stand but was still too sore. Jayce gave the man a moment to recover, then handcuffed him and put him in the car. “Are you okay?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I answered, rubbing my sore knuckles. “You will probably end up turning him loose. He didn’t do anything to break the law, yet.”
“Trespassing, there’s always trespassing.”
“Call Rusty and find out where he is. He might want to talk to this guy before you haul him off. Do you want to come in and wait? A friend stopped by but we haven’t had a chance to visit yet.”
“Let me get Rusty’s twenty first. If he’s going to be a while then I’ll come in.”
Jayce returned to his cruiser and radioed Rusty while I went inside to find Mark still sitting in the hall. “You can come out now,” I told him. “Can I get you something? Coke? Tea? Cheesecake?”
He followed me to the kitchen and watched while I added ice to two glasses, filling one with Coke and the other with tea. There was a light knock and Jayce came in quietly.
“Rusty’s at the foothills. He’ll just be a minute. Is one of those for me?”
“Sure.”
He took the Coke and Mark grabbed the tea, so I reached for another glass and filled it with ice and tea for myself.
“Jayce, this is Mark. He’s a photographer and the son of a neighbor.”
“What happened to your arm?” Jayce asked him.
“I took a tumble down a cliff. Five days before Cassidy found me.”
Jayce looked at me. “He’s one of your ten sixty-fives?”
“Yeah, sort of,” I answered. “Not officially.”
“I wondered why I hadn’t heard about it,” Jayce said. “Usually Rocky and Cliff handle cliff rescues.”
“You’re kidding. Rocky and Cliff? That can’t be their real names.”
“Rocky is short for Robert MacKay, and Cliff is short for Edward Heathcliff.”
“Oh, yeah, Bob and Ed. I knew that. Well, this wasn’t in our jurisdiction, and the police there didn’t consider Mark a missing person. I told his mom I’d go look for him, so I rode the tourist boat over, and while I hiked and camped, I also tracked. That reminds me, Mark, I got my pictures back from that trip. I don’t usually carry a camera on searches but I thought your mom would want to know what happened and I brought the camera in case I needed to collect evidence. Then I ended up taking pictures of animals.”
I went to the bedroom and found the packet of pictures, then handed them to Mark. He flipped through them well aware they had been taken by an amateur.
“If I’d really been there as a tourist the pictures would have been better. I’d have taken the time to stalk the animals and get closer, but since you were missing I felt pushed to search.”
“You got a picture of an Island Fox,” he said, impressed. “The skunks weren’t too hard to photograph, were they?”
“I think I got a couple of pictures of them. They sure were persistent critters.”
“What’s this?” he asked, handing me a picture where half of me had been cut off.
“I tried setting the timer on my camera. I wanted to get a picture with a skunk climbing on me but I sat in the wrong place.”
Jayce made a face. “You let a skunk climb on you?”
“It was a very friendly skunk and it didn’t act like it would spray me. I never met an animal quite like that one before.”
“Next time mark a spot on the ground, focus on the spot and make sure the camera can actually see the spot before you set the timer. A few degrees off and you can miss the subject altogether.”
“Easier said than done when you have a skunk following you around like a puppy.”
I heard a car door and then another car door. I went and peeked out the front window, but didn’t like what I saw. Rusty had the guy pinned up against the squad car. He was livid and if there was one thing I avoided it was seeing Rusty angry. It was like watching a violent storm. He rarely lost his temper and I’d only seem him strike a person once, when they had clearly deserved it, but still… I closed the curtain hoping he didn’t notice me.
“Rusty’s home,” I announced. Jayce headed for the front door. “I wouldn’t go out there yet if I were you,” I warned.
Jayce turned around and came back to finish his Coke.
“I wanted you to see my pictures from the island,” Mark said. “So I developed them and brought them along. I have something for you, too, but it’s out in the car. I wanted to give it to you when Rusty was here.”
I opened the envelope and looked at the first few pictures. “Are they in order?”
“Yeah, I kept them in the same order they were taken.”
“I like the skunk ones, weren’t those the cutest animals?” I flipped to the pictures of the scrub jay.
“Not bad for being thirty feet away. I’m surprised they let you get that close. You must have had a zoom lens.”
“How did you know I was thirty feet away?”
“I was tracking and looking for sign. When I found your notebook I read a little to verify that it was yours. If the notebook was yours, the footprints were yours, too.”
“You remember my notes days after the trip?”
“I remember the oddest things. I wondered what you had been stalking when you lost your notes, and what had made you venture over the side of a cliff. That part was missing from the notebook.”
“Keep going,” he advised.
I continued through the pictures. Some were very good, and some looked like I’d taken them. Flipping over the last picture of a scrub jay I saw that Mark had, indeed, gotten his picture of the Island Fox.
“You saw one during the day?” I asked. “No wonder you left the trail. This is a wonderful picture!”
“Look at the next couple. I was able to get closer before it ran away.”
The next two pictures were close-ups. You could see individual hairs on the fox’s face. Jayce looked over my shoulder. “Wow, those are almost professional! You should have copies printed up! Sell them to wildlife magazines or something. You could make money off pictures like that!”
Mark and I exchanged glances but didn’t say anything to Jayce.
“I like the one that shows the whole fox though. I prefer seeing an animal in its natural environment. This shows the texture of the grass and the way the animal is at home there.”
There were several pictures that showed the fox running off through the brush. Then there was a picture of a bird I’d never seen before. As I flipped through the pictures I asked Mark what it was.
“I don’t know either. That’s what made me follow it. That’s what led me over the cliff.”
“It sure is a pretty bird and you got some great pictures of it. I just wonder what it is!”
“I’m going to take the pictures to a friend of mine at the University of California. I bet he can identify it for me.”
“Where are the rest of them? I know you took some after I found you.”
“I’ll show you when Rusty is here. I want him to see them too.”
I peeked out the front window again and Rusty had the guy back in the squad car. He was talking to him through the open driver’s side door.
“I think it’s safe to go out now,” I told Jayce.
Jayce went outside and there was some talk between him and Rusty, then Jayce got in the cruiser and took off while Rusty came inside. He opened the door and stood there for a second. I was worried he was still mad. Seeing his big form filling the doorway didn’t help the image. When he’d gotten his attitude adjusted and decided how to tackle the situation, he entered the room.
“Cass, you can’t take on a man with your fists. Why did you do it when you had a gun in hand?”
“I didn’t want to shoot him. I wouldn’t shoot him unless it was absolutely necessary. I hit him because I didn’t want to harm him.”
“If you were close enough to hit him he was close enough to take your gun,” he said evenly. “He could have killed you!”
“He might be strange, but I don’t think that was his intention.”
“What was his intention?”
“I don’t know, but he sure gives me the creeps. His actions and his words constantly contradict each other. I think he just enjoys scaring people. I hope he doesn’t get bored trying to scare me and get more intimidating.”
“Mark?” Rusty said.
“Well… I thought we’d be meeting again under better circumstances,” Mark began. “I didn’t see the guy but, from what I heard, Cassidy’s right. The guy’s like a rattlesnake. He was pushing her to let him in, and she was right not to trust him.”
Rusty turned, running his fingers through his hair. I’d learned that gesture was a sign of frustration for him and sensed he’d rather not make a big deal of this with Mark in the house. However, he also needed to gain an understanding about how this situation could progress.
Trying to lighten the mood, Mark said, “I brought something for you. It’s in the car.”
He went out to his car and Rusty followed. They returned carrying two long thin packages.
“When I saw the photos from the island, I knew I had to do something with them. Open them up,” Mark said.
Tearing the protective paper off the outside I could tell they were framed prints, but I wasn’t prepared for the impact of the photos. They were all of me, but Mark had edited the photos somehow. They weren’t color pictures like the photos of the animals. One set was framed vertically, the other horizontally. The vertical one showed me climbing the rope up the cliff. It was black and white and a little stylized, the outside edges pixilated to bring out the roughness of the rock, the toughness of the climb. The other panel showed me stalking the pig. These were not rugged, pixilated pictures but smooth, soft-edged pictures. He captured the focus, the concentration, the fluid movement, the patient study of a good stalk. None of them showed the pig. It was just me, in a totally natural manner being myself. Each frame held four, eight by ten, progressive pictures. They were matted, framed and autographed. He turned one over and there was a picture of himself, unshaven, dirty, and hurt sitting in front of his tent with my little backpacker stove in front of him. Below it was a handwritten note:
“To Cassidy, whose willingness to help a neighbor brought her to a lonely outpost. Whose keen eyes brought her to me when I needed help most. Whose firm determination and bravery brought her to a successful rescue. I thank you from the depths of my heart. Mark Mireau”
I didn’t know what to say. Rusty was studying the photos. Of the stalking pictures, he swallowed a big lump in his throat and said softly, “That’s my girl.” When he turned to the climbing pictures he had a different reaction. “Cass, you’re not even anchored to the rope!”
“I was just climbing and it was tied to a tree. It wasn’t going anywhere. I had to go up and down that rope six times without using any fancy climbing equipment. I’d never even done a belay before. I’d only studied your rock climbing books. I had to use what was on hand and that was my brain and a rope.”
“Well,” Rusty admitted, “that’s my girl, too. You did it, Mark. You captured Cass’ spirit in pictures.”
Mark humbly accepted the compliment silently, then turned to me. “You’d never done that before?” he asked.
“No,” I confessed. “But I knew the theory behind it. Mark, thank you for this gift. You didn’t need to do anything for me. Tracking people is what I do. Just seeing you back on the mainland in one piece was enough for me.”
“I know, but it wasn’t enough for me. Neither is this,” he said motioning to the pictures, “but it’s what I do and I hope you enjoy it.”
“I will…thank you.”