Samhain Publishing Ltd, Ebooks and Books in Print

Lucas Keeling was already at the station when they arrived, sitting in his dusty Ford truck and flipping through his logbook.

Five minutes alone with that logbook, Carlie thought, watching Lucas and her dad take the fox, camera and forensic kit inside the station. Brushing the idea aside as next to impossible, she took the horses to the stable and wiped them down before feeding and watering them. By the time she finished and went inside the station, her dad was getting his jacket back on.

“Lucas and I are going to Buffalo Woman Lake.” He picked up the phone and hit a speed dial combination. “Opal should be able to take you home.”

“Is it the second den?” She blurted the question and then felt her cheeks flush. When she was sure she wouldn’t sound too eager, she continued. “They didn’t hit the park twice, did they?”

Lucas looked at his logbook and pretended to ignore her while her dad called Opal, Carlie’s godmother. She was positive Lucas was only pretending to ignore her because he was grinning. She’d known Lucas almost her whole life and he was just as bad as her dad when it came to being overprotective of her. Only Lucas hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Nope, there was no way she was going to directly ferret anything from him. Visiting her in the hospital two years ago after she broke her leg on the mountain, he had vowed that she would never get another chance to play wildlife detective with any of his information again. And he’d managed not to drop a single clue around her since then.

Carlie’s dad hung up the phone and tapped her shoulder. “Jeff will be back in about fifteen minutes and Opal should be here in thirty. Are you okay to stay alone?”

“Yeah, sure.” Her answer held a distracted quality, her mind racing to think of where in the office she could search first. The trashcan? The daily reports?

He put his hand on her shoulder, catching her attention. “Maybe Opal should take you to Riley’s.”

“No!” Doc Riley would put her leg in a brace just to keep her out of any further trouble. Sometimes the whole town seemed ready to lock her up “for her own good.” She answered her dad again, only slower. “No. I don’t think a trip to the doctor is necessary.”

“Well, we’ll see how things look in the morning.” His tone promised nothing and he gave her a quick hug before he followed the still-grinning Lucas out the door. They carried most of the evidence with them, as well as a second forensic kit.

Carlie waited until she could no longer hear the rumble of Lucas’s truck before she peeked out the window. Comfortable that they were really gone, she checked her dad’s trashcan first. Empty. She scanned the top of his desk next but, as always, he had put everything inside of it.

She hesitated at the drawers to his desk, her face and chest warming with the flush of temptation. The drawers would be unlocked but were off-limits. Right or wrong, she had started the day with the expectation that her little act of disobedience in hiking alone to Tully Lake wouldn’t be discovered, if at all, until the contest results were announced and then only if she won the scholarship. But when it came to rifling through his desk, he’d know if so much as one pencil was out of place—particularly since she’d already given him reason to be suspicious—and then the fox wouldn’t be the only creature with its hide skinned today.

The same prohibition applied to the filing cabinets and so Carlie moved on to Jeff’s trashcan. She picked past a half-eaten, open submarine sandwich and some coffee grounds that had spilled from a filter. Below that layer, she found only colored fliers announcing last week’s “Going to the Sun” night hike. Below that, nothing.

She could hear the clock ticking down as she checked the recyclables bins. Nothing but newspaper. Empty-handed, she plopped down in Jeff’s chair, her eyes lazily scanning his desktop. Jeff, having already been reprimanded by her dad, meticulously kept even the most remotely confidential material in his desk or in one of the filing cabinets.

“Not today!” Carlie yelled, her hands leaping out to grab Jeff’s notebook. It wasn’t quite the same as if she had found his logbook, which he probably took with him, but she still gave a little victory “woot!”

She started with the most recent entry and worked her way backwards, finding precious little information she didn’t already have. Someone had reported a white Blazer in restricted areas, including the location of the first den and another near Buffalo Woman Lake. The reports, however, conflicted with one another. One witness said the Blazer had Montana plates, another witness said Idaho plates.

“Some clue,” Carlie groaned. Flathead County alone had a couple dozen white Blazers registered in it. Heck, even her godmother, Opal, owned a white Blazer.

Returning her attention to the notebook, she read that Jeff also had recorded some loose conversation on poaching activity. There were rumors of a quarry farm, where wild animals were kept and then released for hunting, in Dillon and Livingston, Montana, and another outside of Bonners Ferry in Idaho.

Still reading, she heard the door to Jeff’s Jeep slam shut. She replaced the notebook on the desk and scurried across to her dad’s desk just as Jeff finished unlocking the door to the ranger’s station.

“Your dad gone already?”

A little breathless, Carlie nodded. Jeff gave her a suspicious glance before he tossed his logbook and a park map on top of his desk. He sat down, gave a hesitant frown, then leaned toward her. “Did you hear anything?”

Grinning, she shook her head. “Nope.”

“What about the den?” His fingers strummed along the top of his desk. “Did you see anything?”

“Nope.” Knowing that Jeff—technically an adult, although still in college—was equally in the dark sparked a certain gleeful joy that flushed her cheeks.

“What about the pictures?” he asked.

“You mean from the digital camera?” she said.

“Yeah.” His head had a slightly conspiratorial tilt to it. “Won’t Lucas need a copy?”