Harvest Moon by Helena Shaw

moved into the kitchen. “Mind if
we Irish up those drinks?”
    “Huh?” she asked, but then she saw the bottle of
whiskey sitting on her counter. “Oh, yeah, I can get behind that.”
    The coffee was instant and bland, but the Johnnie
Walker was enough to make it palatable. With two mismatched mugs in hand, Dawn
walked over to the couch where the agent now sat, his eyes trailing over her
home in a way that Dawn wasn’t sure she liked.
    “Just move in?” he asked as she handed him his coffee.
    “I guess.” She shrugged as she looked at her sparsely
furnished home. She moved around so much she’d never bothered to decorate, but
she decided against telling him that.
    “Sorry,” he said as he sipped his drink, the wisps
steam raising over his face. “I just imagined you having pictures of friends
and family, maybe even a cat, or something.”
    “You were picturing my place?” Dawn said with a laugh
as she took a big gulp of the hot coffee. If not for the whiskey, she would
have spit it right back in the cup.
    “No,” Agent Nash protested, but his smile was growing
bigger.
    “Well, what about you?” Dawn asked, working to take
his focus off her life. “The other two agents, Hart and...?”
    “Connors,” Nash filled in for her.
    “Yeah, Hart and Connors. They’re partners, right?” she
continued.
    “That’s right,” he nodded, but there was a suspicion
growing in his eyes. He didn’t stop her from continuing her own line of
questioning, but she knew she’d need to tread carefully.
    “What about you?” Dawn asked, pushing the focus of
their conversation more toward him. “Where’s your partner? I thought all FBI
agent worked with a partner.”
    “Well, it’s not all like the movies,” Nash said as he
shifted his weight and then took a big drink of his own terrible coffee. His
face twisted with disgust as he drank it, but he never complained.
    “That’s it?” Dawn asked. “Did you ever have a partner?
Or are you like a lone wolf, or something?”
    He shrugged. “Something like that. To be honest, my
last partner died a few months ago. We were working a case in New Orleans and
someone got the drop on us. She didn’t make it.”
    “Oh,” Dawn sighed, suddenly regretting pushing so
hard. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
    “You didn’t have any reason to think that was the
case,” Nash said. “Like I said, it’s not like the movies. Sometimes there isn’t
a happy ending. I’ve been working on my own ever since, and I like it that
way.”
    “What about the other two?” Dawn asked. “Hart and
Connors?”
    “They’re okay,” Agent Nash said as he gulped back the
rest of his decaf. “But they’re out of their element, city boys with no
understanding of what’s really lurking just beyond the trees. Fish and Wildlife
has been in touch, but they’re stretched thin as it is out here.”
    “And are they saying it’s a bear?” Dawn asked. “I
mean, out here it could be anything, right?”
    She expected the agent’s answer to be certain it was
an animal of some kind. All the other officers had said the same thing. But he
only shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Four—no, five young women all about the
same age and similar body type going missing in a twenty-five mile radius over
a month? Bears don’t have a victim profile.”
    Dawn nodded as she stared at her empty cup. There was
a question burning inside her that she was so scared of even admitting she
wanted to ask that she almost ignored it. If that question could just fade away
and never return, that would’ve been fine, but she knew she couldn’t go forward
without knowing.
    “Do you think…” Dawn began, her voice so quiet that
even she could barely hear it. “Do you think Courtney is still alive?”
    “Oh, Dawn,” Nash said with an apologetic look in his
eyes. “I want to say yes, but... no. It’s been over twenty-four hours since
anyone’s seen her. The chances of her still being