“So he has made you a pitch. I might be able to help you decide if you’ll let me know what it is.”
“No, thanks. You’re as bad as he is.”
“It’s your welfare I’m concerned with. Don’t be so quick to spurn an ally.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But if you stop to think about it, I know a lot more about Luke than I do about you. I think I know the things on which I shouldn’t trust him as well as I do the safe ones.”
“I hope you’re not betting your life on it.”
I smiled. “That’s a matter on which I tend to be conservative.”
We entered the kitchen, where she spoke with a woman I hadn’t met yet who seemed in charge there. She left our breakfast orders with her and led me out the side door and onto the patio. From there, she indicated a stand of trees off to the east.
“You ought to be able to find a good sapling in there,” she said, “for Luke’s staff.”
“Probably so,” I replied, and we began walking in that direction. “So you really were Gail Lampron,” I said suddenly.
“Yes. “
“I don’t understand this body-changing bit at all.”
“And I’m not about to tell you.”
“Care to tell me why not?”
“Nope.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t,” she said.
“But if I already know something, would you be willing to add a bit!”
“Maybe. Try me.”
“When you were Dan Martinet you took a shot at one of us. Which one was it?”
“Luke,” she replied.
“Why?”
“I’d become convinced that he was not the one-that is, that he represented a threat to you-“
“-and you just wanted to protect me,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
“What did you mean ‘that he was not the one’?”
“Slip of the tongue. That looks like a good tree over there.”
I chuckled. “Too thick. Okay, be that way.”
I headed on into the grove. There were a number of possibilities off to the right.
As I moved through the morning-lanced interstices, damp leaves and dew adhering to my boots, I became aware of some unusual scuffing along the way, a series of marks leading off farther to the right, where
“What’s that?” I said, kind of rhetorically, since I didn’t think Vinta would know either, as I headed toward a dark mass at the shady foot of an old tree.
I reached it ahead of her. It was one of the Bayle dogs, a big brown fellow. Its throat had been torn open. The blood was dark and congealed. A few insects were crawling on it. Off farther to the right I saw the remains of a smaller dog. It had been disemboweled.
I studied the area about the remains.The marks of very large paws were imprinted in the damp earth. At least they were not the three-toed prints of the deadly doglike creatures I had encountered in the past. They seemed simply to be those of a very large dog.
“This must be what I heard last night,” I remarked. “I thought it sounded like a dogfight.”
“When was that?” she asked.
“Some time after you left. I was drowsing.”
Then she did a strange thing. She knelt, leaned and sniffed the track.
When she recovered there was a slightly puzzled expression on her face.
“What did you find?” I asked.
She shook her head, then stared off to the northeast. “I’m not sure,” she finally said, “but it went that way.”
I studied the ground further, rising and finally moving along the trail it had left. It did run off in that direction, though I lost it after several hundred feet when it departed the grove. Finally, I turned away.
“One of the dogs attacked the others, I guess,” I observed. “We’d better find that stick and head back if we want our breakfasts warm.”
Inside, I learned that Luke’s breakfast had been sent up to him. I was torn. I wanted to take mine upstairs, to join him and continue our conversation. If I did, though, Vinta would accompany me and the conversation would not be continued. Nor could I talk further with her under those circumstances. So I would have to join her down here, which meant leaving Luke alone for longer than I liked.