Carefully, Joe tugged back the sheet from the head. Recognition seized his heart. He caught a gasp at the back of his throat.
“Oh, Max.” Joe swore softly and gripped the steel bed rail. The man had been so kind to him over the years. He was literally the reason Joe currently worked for the DNR.
Poison? But how? It made no sense.
The sudden arrival of the nurse at his side startled him. She moved like a mouse, fast and stealthily.
“Sorry.” She handed him a clipboard and then turned on a low light over the bed. “Just need your signature. Do you recognize the deceased?”
“I do.” Joe scribbled his name and badge number on the standard form and handed it back to her. “His name is Maximilien Owen and he’s Chippewa. The Fond du Lac band. Doesn’t live on the Fond du Lac reservation, though. Hasn’t associated closely with his tribe for decades. Eighty-two years old. Has never seen a doctor a day in his life. I thought he was healthy, though he’d had a dry cough of late. Are you sure it was poison?”
“That was the initial assessment. You know these Native Americans have herbs and plants they use for rituals and whatnot. Probably ate the wrong plant or something. It’s very sad,” she added.
Joe lifted a brow. She had no idea.
“Max would never eat the wrong plant,” Joe insisted. “He lived off the land his entire life. He knew the Boundary Waters like no one else. His dad used to be a tracker in the Vietnam War, and he taught Max everything he knew.”
“Oh, that’s touching.”
She wasn’t in the mood to hear the old man’s life story, and Joe wasn’t going to gift her with Max’s wonderful tale. He pegged her cheery attitude as a false front.
“I’m going to stick around for the coroner,” he said. “I want an autopsy.”
The nurse’s jaw dropped. “Do you…know his family? We don’t usually…”
“He didn’t have family. I’ll pay for the autopsy. This is important.”
Joe wasn’t about to let the old man be filed away as an accidental poisoning. That was not Max. At all. Something wasn’t right. And Joe would not rest until it was confirmed that Max’s death had been natural—or not.
Two weeks later…
BURNING CEDARWOOD SWEETENED the air better than any fancy department store perfume Skylar Davis had ever smelled. Pine and elm kindling crackled in the bonfire before her. A refreshingly cool August breeze swept in from the lake not thirty yards away and caressed her shoulders. She breathed in, closing her eyes, and hugged the heavy white satin wedding dress against her chest.
It was time to do this.
Beside her on the grass, alert and curious, sat Stella, the three-year-old timber wolf she’d rescued as a pup. Skylar could sense the wolf’s positive, gentle presence. The wolf was there for her. No matter what.
She opened her eyes and then dropped the wedding dress onto the fire. Smoke coiled. Sparks snapped. Stella sounded an are-you-sure-about-this yip.
“Has to be done, Stella. I can’t move forward any other way.”
Using a long, charred oak stick peeled clean of bark—her father’s fire-poking stick—she nudged the lacy neckline of the dress deeper into the flames. The tiny pearls glowed, then blackened, and the lace quickly melted. The frothy concoction, woven with hopes and dreams—and a whole lot of reckless abandon—meant little to her now.
Stepping back to stand beside Stella, Skylar planted the tip of the fire-poking stick in the ground near her boot and nodded. She should have done this two months earlier—that Saturday afternoon when she’d found herself marching into the county courthouse with hell in her eyes and fury in her heart. An unexpected conversation with her uncle an hour earlier had poked through her heart and left it ragged.
Her world had tilted off balance that day. The man she’d thought she was ready to share the rest of her life with had a secret life that he’d attempted to keep from her. She’d had her suspicions about Cole Pruitt, which was why she had been the one to approach Uncle Malcolm in the flower shop parking lot that morning she had intended to say I do. Normally she’d find a way to walk a wide circle around the family member who had done nothing but serve her and her father heartache over the years. But she’d had to know. And Malcolm had been just evasive enough for her to press—until he’d spilled the truth about Cole.
Since then, life had been strangely precarious. Not only had she ditched a fiancé, but her uncle had been keeping a close eye on her, as well. Hounding her about the parcel of land he wanted her to sell to him. And so close to making threats, but not quite. Still, she was constantly looking over her shoulder for something—danger, or…a rescuer?
Hell, she was a strong, capable woman who could take care of herself. She didn’t need rescuing.
Maybe.
“Stella, I—”
Something stung Skylar’s ear. It felt like a mosquito, but immediately following that sudden burn, she saw wood split out, and a small hole appeared through the old hitching post three feet to her right.
“What the—?”
Clamping a hand over her ear and instinctively ducking, Skylar let out a gasp as another hole suddenly drilled into the post.
Stella jumped to all fours, alert and whining in a low and warning tone. The wolf scanned the woods that surrounded their circle of a backyard. Cutting the circle off on the bottom was the rocky lakeshore. A cleared swath in the thick birch and maple woods opened to the lake, where Skylar saw no boat cruising by. Was someone in the woods?
She opened her hand before her. Blood smeared one of her fingers. What had just happened?
The holes in the post answered that question. And set Skylar’s heartbeats to a faster pace.
“Stella, stay here.” Still in a squat, Skylar patted her thigh. The wolf crept to her side and Skylar ran her fingers through her soft summer coat. “Someone just shot at me,” she whispered.
And, unfortunately, that was no surprise.
Finishing off a ham-and-pickle sandwich he’d packed for a late lunch, Joe Cash sat in his county-issue four-by-four pickup truck outside the public access turnoff to Lake Vaillant. He’d just come off the water after a long day patrolling, which involved checking that fishermen had current licenses, guiding a few lost tourists in the right direction and issuing a warning to a group of teens who had been trying to dive for “buried treasure.” The depths of the lake were littered with fishing line, lost hooks and decades of rusting boat parts. Only the beach on the east shore had been marked for safe swimming.
All in a day’s work. A man couldn’t ask for a better job. Conservation officer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources was a title that fit Joe to a tee. Ninety percent of the time, his office featured open air, lakes, trees, snow and/or sun. Joe’s job was to keep the public safe, but also to protect and guard the wildlife that flourished in this county set in the Superior Forest. Not a day passed that he didn’t get to wander through tall grasses, spot a blue heron or, if he was lucky, spy on a timber wolf from a local pack.
He smiled widely and tilted back the steel canteen of lukewarm water for a few swallows. This job was what made him wake with a smile and dash out to work every morning. Nothing could give him more satisfaction. Except, that is, when he finally nailed the parties responsible for the rampant poaching in the area. Someone, or many someones, had been poaching deer, beaver, cougar, turkey and the animal most precious to Joe’s soul,