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Of course, I couldn’t tell Ben any of that.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m not an expert on this sort of thing. Pre-Columbian Mexico was more my area of specialty.”

That made some sense, considering he was from Southern California. He wouldn’t have had to travel very far to visit many of those digs.

One of which had led to that encounter with the chupacabra…and sent him down a very different path from the one he’d originally envisioned for himself.

“There’s a professor at U.C. Davis who could probably analyze the carvings for us,” Ben went on. “Dr. Ogilvy. If you want, I can reach out to him and send him several of the photos we took, see if he can offer some insights.”

I’d never heard of Dr. Ogilvy during my tenure at that university, but I didn’t think that was too strange, not when I’d been focused on my DVM degree and didn’t have any further undergrad requirements I needed to fulfill by taking the odd archaeology or linguistics course.

And I figured it couldn’t hurt to have an expert take a look at what we’d found.

There was always the possibility that those symbols didn’t mean much of anything, that someone was playing at being pagan and had scratched a bunch of runes into the tree in a sort of faux ritual without having any real idea of what they were doing.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

“Then I’ll send an email tomorrow morning.” Ben paused there, and a wry smile touched his mouth. “I’ll just have to hope he hasn’t heard of me.”

Well, I could see why he’d made that remark. No doubt most people in academia would think Ben Sanders was a raging crackpot.

He wasn’t, though. He’d been touched by the strangeness that lurked in the corners of our world, had encountered something very few people ever did, and the experience had changed him, had made him want to learn more.

If a bunch of scholars were too narrow-minded to realize that, it was their loss.

About all I could do was smile in return, then return to my plate of spaghetti.

“How’s your hand doing?” he asked.

“It’s okay. A little sore, but I cleaned it out really well and put Neosporin on it before I applied the bandage, so I don’t think it’s going to give me any trouble.”

He seemed satisfied by that response — although, once we were done eating, he insisted on taking the dirty plates into the kitchen and rinsing them off and putting them in the dishwasher.

I could tell he wanted to keep me from getting the bandage wet, and since it had been a long time since I was able to sit and relax while someone else did the cleanup, I didn’t protest too loudly.

Afterward, we headed into the living room, where he’d set down the satchel he’d brought with him. He opened it and pulled out his laptop, then put it on the coffee table.

“These are just mockups,” he said, as he popped open a couple of files in Photoshop. “But I wanted to play with some of the pictures we took this morning.”

For mockups, they looked pretty damn good. My favorite was one that featured the spotted owl he’d captured on camera as it looked at him, wide-eyed. Underneath, in a large, easily readable font it said, Don’t take away my home!

The others were in a similar vein, all of them spotlighting different woodland animals and making pleas to protect their habitats.

“I think they’ll all work,” I told him. “It’ll be good to have different designs with the same message. That way, you’re getting the point across without being too repetitive.”

“Is there someplace in town where I can print these up?” he asked as he minimized the Photoshop window we’d just been looking at.

“The stationery store,” I said promptly. “They have private mailboxes there and a color printer and copier. Just take in the files on a thumb drive, and you’ll be set.”

“How modern,” he remarked, and I chuckled.

“Even Silver Hollow has entered the twenty-first century,” I replied before adding, “Well, mostly.”

“I think it’s good that it’s not all the way there,” he told me. “It wouldn’t be so charming if it didn’t feel as if some part of it is still stuck in the past.”

Maybe it looked that way to an outsider. I only knew that the internet could be slow and poky here and that it was annoying to have to drive to Eureka to get the particular brand of cheese I preferred.

Then again, Silver Hollow wouldn’t be the same if someone parked a Costco on the edge of town…not that we even had the population to support one.

“I suppose I can see that,” I said lightly.

He seemed to realize he shouldn’t pursue that line of conversation, because he said, “It looks like we’ve got that part of our plan of attack pretty well sorted out. Putting together a brochure is going to take more time, but I should be able to work on that tomorrow.”

“If it even turns out that we need it at all,” I replied. “The flyers are eye-catching, and something people don’t have to stop and take a lot of time to read. So maybe we should see how those work before we move on to something else.”

“You have a point.” He reached over and closed the laptop, as if he understood that there wasn’t any point in looking at the flyers again, not when I’d already said they all looked great. “Then I’ll take these over to the stationery store tomorrow. How many of each flyer should I get printed up?”

He’d made five different versions, and our downtown area wasn’t exactly what you could call large. “Maybe four of each? You can bring them by the shop when they’re ready, and I’ll make sure they get posted in prominent spots.”

For a moment, it looked as if he intended to say something else — possibly to offer to be the person to put up the flyers — and then he seemed to realize that it was better if I was the one to handle the task since I knew Silver Hollow’s downtown so much better than he did.

“All right,” he said. “Then I suppose that’s about it for now.”

Something in his tone was almost reluctant. I guessed he was thinking that he’d believed our little project would take longer…and would provide more reasons for us to be together.

Or maybe I was flattering myself.

Then again, I hadn’t missed the look in his eyes back on the forest trail…or the warm strength of his touch as he bandaged my hand.

Unless I was completely misreading the signals, it seemed he would very much like for our casual partnership to turn into something a little more.

If circumstances had been different, I probably would have wanted that as well.

“It’s been kind of a long day,” I said, knowing I was taking the coward’s way out. “I think I need to get some rest.”

By then, it was only a little before eight, an hour when I would never have lowered myself to go to sleep unless I was sick, but I needed some excuse to end our evening together. It had been all business, and I needed to make sure things stayed that way.

“Yes, rest and heal,” he responded as he got up from the couch. “And probably no hike tomorrow morning.”

“Absolutely not,” I said at once. “I’m glad we found those runes…but I’m also glad we’re not planning to go back to the oak grove any time soon.”

Ben’s expression was sympathetic. However, he sounded no-nonsense enough as he replied, “I don’t think there’s any need for that until I hear back from Professor Ogilvy.”

Well, that was true. If the professor supplied some information that would be better supplemented by additional study, then sure, I could probably be persuaded to return to the oak grove and see what other secrets it might have to reveal.

Hopefully by then, my knee wouldn’t feel so stiff.

I’d tried not to hobble around Ben because I knew he’d be worried and maybe a little upset that I’d been hiding the true extent of my injuries from him, but I thought what I mostly needed right then was a chance to take my weight off it and get a good night’s sleep.

“Then we’ll wait to see what he was to say,” I replied.

Ben nodded and returned his laptop to its satchel so he could swing it over his shoulder before heading to the door. We exchanged goodbyes, and he headed down the porch steps. I didn’t see a car parked anywhere near the house, so I assumed he’d walked.

For some reason, that small gesture pleased me. It showed he wasn’t going to drive when his destination was only ten minutes away on foot.

It was a very Silver Hollow thing for him to do.

That night, I dreamed about my mother and the unicorn.

It wasn’t much of a dream, just a glimpse of her walking among the trees with the unicorn at her side, but I still awoke feeling uneasy, as though there was something more I should be doing to help than merely putting together flyers to alert people to what we’d be losing if we allowed Northwest Pacific to start cutting down trees.

But really, what else could I do? I wasn’t an environmental lawyer. I didn’t have the ear of the local news stations. My small acts of protest were about all I could manage.

On the other hand, it couldn’t hurt to know more about the enemy.

My mother had made a comment once about the lumber company cutting in the forest when she was a little girl, but what if there had been other instances over the years?

One thing I had done was look up Northwest Pacific just to get an idea of what we were dealing with here, and I learned that the company had been in operation for well over a hundred years.

It sure seemed to me that such a long span of time would have provided plenty of opportunities for the outfit to encroach on our beloved woods.

Some online research while I was eating breakfast didn’t turn up very much, unfortunately. No, it seemed as if I’d need to find that information in person.

But Silver Hollow had a very good records department at City Hall, as well as a local archives maintained by Sandra Oakley, who’d been the town librarian before she retired and my friend Jasmine took over. I had to hope Sandra would be able to point me in the right direction.

Luckily, City Hall opened at nine, giving me an hour to work on my research before I had to head over to the pet shop. I got ready as quickly as I could, glad that my knee wasn’t giving me too much trouble this morning and that the wound on my hand seemed to be healing at a similarly rapid pace.

Sandra seemed a little surprised by my request, but she led me over to a shelf with bound copies of the town’s old newspapers and said, “I know Northwest Pacific had operations here in the 1950s and the 1930s, possibly even before then. Maybe you can find some reference to them in these newspapers.”

Narrowing it down to a decade didn’t seem like a lot of help, but I supposed it was too much to expect that all of this would have been digitized and indexed and made easily searchable.

The town archivist was a volunteer position, and that would have been a huge project for anyone to take on, let alone a retiree in her mid-seventies who didn’t seem very comfortable with technology.

I thanked her, and she went back to her desk. A pause as I looked at the shelf of bound newspapers, and then I allowed myself a sigh and got to work.

At least the Silver Hollow Herald had always been a weekly paper, so I didn’t have to dig through as much extraneous crap as I’d worried I might.

I flipped pages, going past the marriage announcements and obituaries, the recipes — I hadn’t been expecting that, but I supposed there hadn’t been enough going on around town to merit inches of news stories — and then thought I might have found what I was looking for.

Northwest Pacific Announces It Is Ceasing Operations, the headline stated, and I narrowed my eyes as I read the rest of the article.

Dated May 27, 1952, it explained that the company had decided that cutting in the forest outside Silver Hollow wasn’t cost-effective enough and was shutting down.

Nothing so strange there — although I had to admit their motivation didn’t make much sense to me, not when the town was surrounded by trees and only fifteen miles or so away from Eureka, the nearest big population center.

Then again, businesses often did things that seemed inexplicable to the eyes of outsiders, especially when lots of money was involved.

There wasn’t much else to the article, though, so I flipped my way through to the end of the binder and then set it aside.

The papers from the 1940s carried echoes of World War Two through much of their pages, but I didn’t find a single mention of Northwest Pacific. I paused so I could pull out my phone and check the hour.

Nine thirty-eight. Getting closer to the time when I’d need to leave and open the store, but not quite there yet.

In the binder from 1937, I thought I might have hit pay dirt.

The basic story was mainly the same — namely, that Northwest Pacific was packing up and leaving — but this article included some tantalizing tidbits.

Workers complaining of hearing strange sounds in the woods, and having their chainsaws and other equipment vandalized.

There also seemed to have been inexplicable failures of the other machinery kept nearby to process the lumber and get it ready for transport.

I also found mentions of people outright quitting and leaving, claiming the woods were haunted and that they weren’t going to stay there for a moment longer.

Those claims were dismissed as the ravings of men who’d dipped into too much gin after their shifts, but I knew that wasn’t what had really happened.

No, it sure sounded to me as if the forest had fought back somehow, making conditions so uncomfortable that Northwest Pacific couldn’t sustain its operations with so many of its workers walking off the job.

And even though my knowledge of twentieth-century history was a little shaky, I thought I remembered that the 1930s had been the time of the Great Depression, an era when people certainly wouldn’t have passed up a steady paycheck without a damn good reason to do so.

Was that what had happened in the 1950s…in the 1970s, when my mother was a little girl?

Quite possibly.

It seemed as if Northwest Pacific returned to Silver Hollow every twenty years or so — or at least, they had up until 1975, when they supposedly had given up for good. What had changed then?

I had no idea. And although I went and looked through the Silver Hollow Herald papers from the mid-70s, I couldn’t find any mention as to why the lumber company had left. Maybe by then the cycle was so predictable that no one saw the need to comment on it.

Anyway, I couldn’t spend any more time here. As it was, I’d probably be a couple of minutes late getting to the shop and opening for business.

There seemed to be some kind of mystery at work here, but I’d have to figure it out later.