Blood Trail

by the YMCA that often came out to the conservation area. Armed with names and phone numbers of people to contact - "Although the members of that other club are really nothing more than a group of dilettantes. You'd do much better to join us." - Vicki bade farewell to the birders and tromped off through the bush, willing to bet big money that not everyone with a pair of binoculars kept then trained exclusively on birds and that someone was shooting more than film.

    "Henry Fitzroy?" Dave Graham peered over his partner's shoulder at the pile of papers on the desk. "Isn't that the guy that Vicki's seeing?"

    "What if it is?" Celluci growled, pointedly turning the entire pile over.

    "Nothing, nothing." Dave went around to his side of the desk and sat down. "Did, uh, Vicki ask you to check into his background?"

    "No. She didn't."

    Dave recognized the tone and knew he should drop it, but some temptations were more than mortal man could resist. "I thought you and Vicki had a relationship based on, what was it,
    'trust and mutual respect'?"

    Celluci's eyes narrowed and he drummed his fingers against the paper. "Yeah. So?"

    "Well ..." Dave took a long, slow drink of his coffee. "It seems to me that checking up on the other men in her life doesn't exactly fit into those parameters."

    Slamming his chair back, Celluci stood. "It's none of your damned business."

    "You're right. Sorry." David smiled blandly up at him.

    "I'm just looking out for a friend. Okay? He's a writer, god knows what he's been into."

    "Right."

    Seemingly of their own volition, Celluci's fingers crumpled the uppermost paper into a tightly wadded ball. "She can see who she wants," he ground out through clenched teeth and stomped out of the office.

    Dave snickered into his coffee. "Of course she can," he said to the air, "as long as she doesn't see them very often and they meet with your approval." He made plans to be as far out of range as possible when Vicki found out and the shit hit the fan.

    By 10:27, Vicki was pretty sure she was lost. She'd already taken twice as long coming out of the woods as she'd spent going in. The trees all looked the same and under the thick summer canopy it was impossible to take any kind of a bearing on the sun. Two paths had petered out into nothing and a blue jay had spent three minutes dive-bombing her, screaming insults.
    Various rustlings in the underbrush seemed to indicate that the locals found the whole thing pretty funny.

    She glared at a pale green moss growing all around a tree.

    "Where the hell are the Boy Scouts when you need one?"

Six
    Vicki saw no apparent thinning of the woods; one moment she was in them, the next she was stepping out into a field. It wasn't a field she recognized either. There were no sheep, no fences, and no indication of where she might be.

    Settling her bag more firmly on her shoulder, she started toward the white frame house and cluster of outbuildings that the other end of the field rolled up against. Maybe she could get directions, or use their phone ...

    "... or get run off for trespassing by a large dog and a farmer with a pitchfork." She was pretty sure they did that sort of thing in the country, that it was effectively legal, and that it didn't matter because she wasn't going back into those woods. She'd take on half a dozen farmers with pitchforks first.

    As she approached, wading knee-deep through grass and goldenrod and thistles, she became convinced that no one had worked this farm for quite some time. The barn had a faded, unused look about it and she could actually smell the roses that climbed all over one wall of the white frame house.

    The field ended in a large vegetable garden. Vicki recognized the cabbages, the tomato plants, and the raspberry bushes - nothing else seemed familiar. Which isn't really surprising. She picked her way around the perimeter. My vegetables usually come with a picture of the jolly green. ...

    "Oh. Hello."

    "Hello." The elderly man, who had appeared so suddenly in her path, continued to stare, obviously waiting for her to elaborate further.

    "I, uh, got lost in the woods."

    His gaze started at her sneakers, ran up her scratched and bitten legs, past her walking shorts, paused for a moment on her Blue Jays' T-shirt, flicked over to her shoulder bag, and finally came to rest on her face. "Oh," he said, a small smile lifting the edges of his precise gray mustache.

    The single word covered a lot of ground, and the conclusion it