Page 57 of Coveted By the Bear

Chronic Anxiety

The list went on to name the medications they had tried on her. Which ones worked and which ones didn’t. Sedatives seemed to be the only thing that helped consistently.

I did some quick math on the date. Mira had been ten years old at the time. A part of me wanted to mourn for what she’d been through, and another part was pissed that she never told me anything about such a huge childhood experience. I flipped through a small rap sheet, mostly made up of Sheriff Clancy’s disturbing-the-peace arrests, then leaned back into the seat.

I really didn’t know Mira at all.

Chapter Twenty

Mira

“I’m taking a break,” I informed Opal, who sat comfortably on the stepstool in the storage room, taking inventory. “Keep an eye on the front?”

“Yeah, yeah. You got it. See you in fifteen,” she said in a distracted voice.

Her pen tapped loudly against her clipboard, and I knew she was doing math. “It helps me focus,” she had told me one day when I couldn’t stop staring at her pen, blurred with motion.

I had big plans to run down to the gas station and buy a two pack of Twinkies as a reward for surviving the past week. Never before had I tasted one, but I’d heard good things, and I needed a distraction. The corner of a piece of paper taped to the door lifted and fluttered in the breeze. Opal didn’t normally allow flyers on her windows so, out of curiosity, I stopped to read it.

The sound of my heart was deafening as I read the dreaded summary of my past. I gasped as I ripped it off the window and glanced around to see if anyone else had read it. Clusters of people talked in hushed whispers as they watched me, and my gaze crashed into a telephone pole that held another report. Proof of my mental instability.

Copies were attached to every visible wooden or glass surface on Main Street, like a snowstorm of my indiscretions. Horror sat on my chest and made it hard to breathe. “No, no, no,” I chanted as I ripped page after page down and wadded them up.

“What’s going on here?” Opal asked as she came out of the pie shop. She cast a confused look to the people in her store who stared out of the clear glass, like window pups at a pet store.

“Opal,” I sobbed. Tears burned my eyes and trailed down my cheeks.

My fists were full of the crumpled, damning papers. Opal pulled one off a blue metal mailbox in front of her shop. She scanned it, and her face fell. “You people should be ashamed of yourselves,” she yelled. Quietly, to me, she said, “Mira, go home.”

I panicked. Everyone would see them. He would see them. “But—”

“I’ll clean all of this up. You go on home now, you hear?” She turned to the gathering crowd. “Pie shop’s closed for the rest of the day.”

Opal turned to pull another report off the window of the shop next door. A few of the onlookers began to help her, and I bolted for my truck.

Caleb was on the rig all day. Opal would have them all cleaned up by the time he got off work. He would probably never see them. Oh, who was I kidding? Nobody took a shit in this town without every last person knowing about it.

I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, over and over until it throbbed. Who would do such a thing? Clancy and his deputy were the only ones in town who had access. What could I have possibly done to piss them off so badly that they would ruin my life like this?

I never checked my mail. It was pointless when you had lived off the grid for so long and didn’t get bills. And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t like I was in danger of receiving a Christmas card. But a copy of my report fluttered in the wind, held onto the rusty old mailbox by a thin piece of tape. I threw my truck into park and jumped out to rip it off, like the faster I did, the less it would be true. The lid clunked open and a very official looking packet lay folded inside. After I wrestled it out, I read the return address logo.

Avery and Woods Law Group. The name pulled on the edges of my frayed mind. I wiped my damp lashes with the back of my hand and tossed it into the passenger seat before I got in my truck. As I drove through the woods that led home, my gaze was attracted time and time again to the oversized envelope. The only lawyer I knew was Sam Burns.

And the lawyers from the trial.

I slammed on the brakes and stared in fear at the package. My fingers couldn’t work fast enough as I tore through the top and pulled the papers out. Scanning the document, my heart fell to somewhere between the soles of my feet and the rusted out floorboard.

…Angus French……released early……parole……good behavior…

The rest of the letter didn’t matter to me. I was supposed to have three more years of safety, but my stepfather somehow convinced a panel he wasn’t evil anymore and got himself released.

He’d be coming for me.

I scanned the date at the top and cursed myself for not checking my mail more often. He could be to my house as early as tomorrow if he got lucky with a ride. Maybe even today. My fingers clenched the paper as I searched the woods. My forest suddenly became darker, more sinister. A chill ran up my spine and gooseflesh raised over my arms as I imagined Angus watching me from some unknown hiding place in the shadows. I couldn’t stay here. The Fletcher house was where he would come first.

The mouse in me said I was going to die just like Angus had told me all those years ago, but the survivor in me was already searching for a hidey hole. I needed to find asylum.

I pulled the truck around and headed for town again, my earlier dilemma forgotten in the wake of unmitigated fear. I could go to Sheriff Clancy. He was a cop. He was supposed to, by profession, help people who were in danger, right? I growled. Clancy hated me. He’d probably assist my stepdad and then dance on my grave.