your dad has a list?”
Keifer looked at her with the patience of a person dealing with the mentally incompetent. “He just does them. Why would he need a list?”
Lists were comforting. It was fun, making lists of things to do and crossing off each success. Without a list…on foreign ground…she was at a complete loss.
She crossed her arms and tapped her fingers on the bulky sleeves of the sweatshirt she’d borrowed. “If there’s no list, have you seen him do chores? I assume those cows get food. And what about the horse and those goats you mentioned yesterday?”
“I don’t know. I just got here.” Keifer shrugged. “Their food’s probably in the barn.”
“I’m sure it is, but I don’t know how much or what kind to give them.” She had an unsettling thought. “Um, he doesn’t milk those cows, does he?”
Keifer rolled his eyes. “They’re the beef kind, but he doesn’t eat them. He says, ‘Anything that dies here, dies of old age.’ He gave them all names.”
“Names?”
“Yeah. He was gonna raise cattle for money, but then they all sorta got to be pets. So now he says they’re the lawnmowers for his meadow.”
Feeling more and more like Alice after she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole, Abby sighed. “So, this mowing crew of his, have you ever seen your dad feed them?”
Keifer shrugged.
“Maybe we’d better try contacting him. He probably had his arm fixed last night, and he might even be on his way home. If I can track him down, maybe he’ll tell us what he wants done.”
Far more confident now, she tousled Keifer’s hair and went to the phone in the kitchen. In the far corner, Rufus raised her head over the box, then dropped back down, clearly occupied with her new family.
The line was dead.
Abby reached for her purse and rummaged for her cell phone. Her hope faded at the words No Service.
No way to contact the outside world.
No car—because hers was still mired in the road.
And, she remembered with a heavy heart, she’d promised to contact the animal shelter this morning about that poor dog on death row.
But surely the shelter wasn’t open to the public on Sundays, anyway. And surely the staff scheduled to feed the animals wouldn’t actually euthanize anything today…would they?
Biting her lower lip, she leaned against the kitchen counter and rubbed her face, the image of that sad, wary dog all too fresh in her mind. “I’m going outside, Keifer,” she called. “Can you tell me where the barn is?”
He came to the doorway. “Past the house. Driveway goes back there.”
Here, at least, was a ray of hope. She remembered driving through Wisconsin’s dairy country and seeing herds of black-and-white diary cattle lining up to get into their barn. Did beef cows know that trick, too?
“Maybe the cows will, um, follow me if they think they’ll be fed.”
Keifer wandered into the kitchen with a sullen expression. “The TV doesn’t work. Not the computer, either.”
“The electricity’s out. Maybe you’d like to just crawl into your sleeping bag and go back to sleep while I go outside. It’s too early to be awake, anyway.” When he glanced nervously at the curtainless kitchen windows, she added, “Rufus will be in here with you, so you’ll be fine.”
“Uh…maybe I better come along. Just in case.”
She hid a smile as she went to the back door. “If you prefer. I’m sure you’re more of an expert at all of this than I am.”
She sorted through a pile of boots, found a small pair that had to be Keifer’s, and handed them over. The rest were size elevens. After considering her muddied shoes, still wet from last night, she took a pair of rubber work boots, found some ratty yellow gloves and stuffed one into each toe.
“These are going to look like clown shoes,” she muttered, looking up at Keifer. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
He nodded solemnly, though his mouth twitched.
The fog still hung low and heavy, tinged now with the faintest shade of rose. The cows had moved farther toward the road, where—luckily—she’d closed the gate last night.
“Do you ever see wildlife around here?” she asked casually as she followed Keifer down the lane toward the barn.
“’Possums. ’Coons. Deer. No wolves, though, if that’s what you mean.”
He stepped into a mud puddle with a splash and nearly fell, his arms flailing. “Whoa!” She steadied him.
She glanced around at the forest still shrouded in mist…where something rather large could hide.
“I think I saw a bear once,” the boy continued, “but it was pretty far away. Dad sees wolves, but not this close, so I never saw one. Pictures, though. Dad takes lots of pictures.”
“Pictures,” she echoed, trying to imagine the man she’d met as a photographer. “Really.”
The lane climbed a gentle hill and soon they were out of the ground fog. “For his book.”
“Like a picture album?”
“No, a book about wolves.”
She glanced at Keifer, but the boy kept trudging on with his attention on the ground in front of him. If the kid had said Ethan Matthews raised platypuses and giraffes, she couldn’t have been more surprised. “He writes books?”
“Not kid books, though.”
“Really.” Maybe the boy had things a little confused. The man she’d met at the hospital had hardly seemed the erudite, professorial type.
Ahead, probably another twenty yards, the first slivers of sunlight picked out a wooden barn that must have been constructed recently, and beyond it, a fenced pasture and a much older barn weathered to pewter-gray.
On the south side of the new barn, a ten-or twelve-foot pipe gate hung askew from just one hinge, its top bars bent.
“I think we’ve just discovered how your dad’s livestock got out,” Abby said, relieved. “He must’ve forgotten to chain the gate.”
“Dad doesn’t do stuff like that. He’s real careful.”
“Maybe when he got hurt out here, he couldn’t get it fastened. Let’s bring a bucket of grain from the barn and see if we can lure some of those animals back, okay?”
“I’ll get it.” Keifer ran through the gate and disappeared around the building. He returned a moment later, ducked into the barn, and soon came out with a bucket of corn that was obviously a heavy load for a kid his size. Puffing, he set it down at her feet. “I think this is weird, though.”
She caught the handle of the bucket in one hand and tested the weight of it, then started back down the lane. “What’s weird?”
Keifer chewed at his lower lip. “The pens for the sheep and goats were open, too!”
Abby switched the heavy bucket to her other hand and flexed her tender fingers. She smiled down at him. “He was hurt, so he was probably in a hurry.”
“No. I mean, he was—but I was out here with him when it happened. He never opened those other gates.”
Abby paused. “You said goats were smart and hard to keep penned, so maybe they just played Houdini.”
“Who?”
“Houdini was a guy who could escape from just about anything.”
“No.” Keifer’s voice held an