Supernatural Noir

Bruce wouldn’t find them here, in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.

——

Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall, her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful—lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.

Miranda helped bring in the groceries. She’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused, and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen torturous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.

The Haugstad cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s—on the cozy side, even: thick slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.

There were a few modern renovations. A portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered—her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.

Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half-drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked what was so fu

“Man alive, I found something weird today,” Miranda said. She’d stiffened when Lorna described shooting tequila. Lorna’s drinking was a bone of contention. She’d hit the bottle when Orillia went into first grade, leaving her alone at the house for the majority of too many lonely days. At first it’d been i

“Where’d you go?” Lorna said.

“That trail behind the woodshed. I wanted some photographs. Being cooped up in here is driving me a teensy bit bonkers.”

“So, how weird was it?”

“Maybe weird isn’t quite the word. Gross. Gross is more accurate.”

“You’re killing me.”

“That trail goes a long way. I think deer use it as a path because it’s really narrow but well beaten. We should hike to the end one of these days, see how far it goes. I’m curious where it ends.”

“Trails don’t end; they just peter out. We’ll get lost and spend the winter gnawing bark like the Do

“You’re so morbid!” Miranda laughed and kissed Lorna’s ear. She described crossing a small clearing about a quarter mile along the trail. At the far end was a stand of Douglas fir, and she didn’t notice the tree house until she stopped to snap a few pictures. The tree house was probably as old as the cabin; its wooden planks were bone yellow where they peeked through moss and branches. The platform perched about fifteen feet off the ground, and a ladder was nailed to the backside of a tree . . .

“You didn’t climb the tree,” Lorna said.

Miranda flexed her scraped and bruised knuckles. “Yes, I climbed that tree, all right.” The ladder was very precarious and the platform itself so rotted, sections of it had fallen away. Apparently, for no stronger reason than boredom, she risked life and limb to clamber atop the platform and investigate.

“It’s not a tree house,” Lorna said. “You found a hunter’s blind. The hunter sits on the platform, camouflaged by the branches. Eventually, some poor, hapless critter comes by, and blammo! Sadly, I’ve learned a lot from Bruce’s favorite cable-television shows. What in the heck compelled you to scamper around in a deathtrap in the middle of the woods? You could’ve gotten yourself in a real fix.”

“That occurred to me. My foot went through in one spot and I almost crapped my pants. If I got stuck I could scream all day and nobody would hear me. The danger was worth it, though.”

“Well, what did you find? Some moonshine in mason jars? D. B. Cooper’s skeleton?”

“Time for the reveal!” Miranda extricated herself from Lorna and went and opened the door, letting in a rush of cold night air. She returned with what appeared to be a bundle of filthy rags and proceeded to unroll them.

Lorna realized her girlfriend was presenting an animal hide. The fur had been sewn into a crude cape or cloak, beaten and weathered from great age, and shriveled along the hem. The head was that of some indeterminate predator—possibly a wolf or coyote. Whatever the species, the creature was a prize specimen. Despite the cloak’s deteriorated condition, she could imagine it draped across the broad shoulders of a Viking berserker or an Indian warrior. She said, “You realize that you just introduced several colonies of fleas, ticks, and lice into our habitat with that wretched thing.”

“Way ahead of you, baby. I sprayed it with bleach. Cooties were crawling all over. Isn’t it neat?”

“It’s horrifying,” Lorna said. Yet she couldn’t look away as Miranda held it at arm’s length so the pelt gleamed dully in the firelight. What was it? Who’d worn it, and why? Was it a garment to provide mere warmth, or to blend with the surroundings? The painting of the hunter was obscured by shadows, but she thought of the man in buckskin sneaking along, looking for something to kill, a throat to slice. Her hand went to her throat.

“This was hanging from a peg. I’m kinda surprised it’s not completely ruined, what with the elements. Funky, huh? A Daniel Boone–era accessory.”

“Gives me the creeps.”

“The creeps? It’s just a fur.”

“I don’t dig fur. Fur is dead. Man.”

“You’re a riot. I wonder if it’s worth money.”

“I really doubt that. Who cares? It’s not ours.”

“Finders keepers,” Miranda said. She held the cloak against her bosom as if she were measuring a dress. “Rowr! I’m a wild woman. Better watch yourself tonight!” She’d drunk enough wine to be in the mood for theater. “Scandinavian legends say to wear the skin of a beast is to become the beast. Haugstad fled to America in 1910, cast out from his community. There was a series of unexplained murders back in the homeland, and other unsavory deeds, all of which pointed to his doorstep. People in his village swore he kept a bundle of hides in a storehouse, that he do