The Return. Dinah McCall

seen their faces and heard the accusations and whispers.

      Witch.

      The notion was so absurd that it was all she could do not to scream. How could ignorance such as this still exist? They were in the twenty-first century, and these people chose to accept an eye for an eye as justice, and believed in curses and spells?

      In the midst of her musing, something thudded out on the porch, then rattled across the old wooden planks.

      Catherine jumped to her feet, pivoting sharply to face the door, too late remembering Luke’s final warning. With racing heart, she grabbed a chair from beside the kitchen table and shoved it up under the doorknob, jamming it so tightly that she inadvertently pinched her finger.

      At the moment of pain, sanity returned.

      “Lord,” she muttered, then she took a deep breath, silently berating her panic.

      She listened again. The sound was gone. All she could hear was the wind. She made herself calm. More than likely it had been something blowing across the porch. There wasn’t anything—or anyone—out there.

      To prove to herself she was right, she kicked the chair away from the doorknob and yanked the door open wide, striding out onto the porch to face the night. Immediately, strands of hair whipped across her face and into her eyes, clouding her vision with stinging tears.

      “There’s no one out here but me,” she muttered, then took a deep breath and walked to the edge of the porch. “There’s no one out here but me,” she said louder, letting the wind rip the words out of her throat.

      She looked up at the sky. Straggly clouds scudded across the face of a quarter moon, leaving wispy bits of themselves behind as they flew. Something took flight from a nearby tree, cutting briefly across the periphery of her vision. For the first time in her life she was, quite literally, alone. No neighbors down the block. No cars. No lights. No telephones. No sounds of civilization except the sound of her own voice. Her fingers curled into fists as she gazed into the blackness of the tree line. Again she spoke, and this time, it came out in a defiant shout.

      “There’s no one out here but me!”

      She waited, challenging the darkness for an answer that never came. Shaken in both body and spirit, she spun around and strode into the cabin, slamming the door shut behind her.

      A short while later, she climbed the stairs to the loft. When she reached the top, she took a last look down at the big room below, then at the meager lock and the chair beneath the doorknob. Hating herself for being afraid, she crawled into bed, certain she would never be able to close her eyes. Within minutes, she was asleep.

      

      Less than a hundred yards from the house, the hunter crouched among the trees, his expression wary. Someone was in the cabin. It couldn’t be the ghosts that he’d seen there before, because ghosts didn’t need lights. And whoever was in there had not only turned on the power, but had also built a fire. Even though the wind was blowing in the opposite direction, there were brief moments when he could smell the smoke.

      Curiosity was a powerful emotion, and the urge to move closer was upon him. But years of solitude and caution kept him hidden from sight. As he continued to watch, the door to the cabin was suddenly flung open. Instinctively, he shrank back into the trees, although he knew it was impossible for her to see him from where he was standing. Her slender form was nothing but a silhouette as the light from within spilled out around her.

      When she started to speak, he stared into the darkness, believing that she was talking to someone out in the yard. But the longer he stood, the more certain he became that she was talking to herself, which made him relax. He’d been talking to himself for years.

      At first he caught only a word or two of what she was saying, but when she shouted, “There is no one out here but me,” he froze. Even though he didn’t want to know her, at that moment, he knew how she felt.

      The wind began to rise, wailing through the trees in a high, mournful sound. His stance became motionless. He tilted his head to listen, as he had done so many times before. Would this be the time? Would his search finally come to an end? His breathing became shallow, his pulse all but nonexistent, as he willed himself to an unnatural quiet.

      There! He heard it again—the high-pitched cry of a newborn child. His eyes narrowed, his jaw setting as he disappeared into the night.

      

      Luke tossed aside the latest file on the thefts and then stood up from his desk, stretching wearily as he strode to the window to look outside. Moths and other night bugs made kamikaze runs at the streetlight outside his office as he stared into the dark. But his mind wasn’t on what lay before him. Instead, he kept thinking of the thief, who, like a pack rat, stole one thing, only to leave another in its place. Added to that were the oddities of what he stole—anything from foodstuffs to a pair of overalls drying on a clothesline, as well as odds and ends of small tools. If memory served, the thief had once taken a handsaw rather than the more expensive chainsaw hanging beside it, and left a hand-carved bowl in its place. Another time he’d obviously watched a farmer cutting firewood, waited until the man went inside to eat a meal, then took the ax he’d left in the stump, leaving behind a small, wooden stool. Dogs never barked a warning of his arrival, and to date, no one had even gathered a glimpse of his face. Rumors were starting to spread that it was a ghost. Only Luke knew better. Ghosts had no need of earthly things, and ghosts didn’t wear shoes, especially shoes with a notch in one heel.