Nothing—no footprints, not even a squirrel or a glass slipper.
Back inside, Nic closed the refrigerator, turned on a brighter light, and opened the box. Like every hard drive meant to be installed in a personal computer, Nic's dead drive was a factory-sealed slab of metal and plastic, plastered with warranty warnings. Inside the slab were magnetic disks so sensitive that microscopic specks of dust would ruin them. Nic considered breaking the seal, but she couldn't afford to void the warranty. By 100-watt light, her curiosity soured. She turned out all the lights and made her way to the bedroom where sleep came in fitful naps and broken dreams about a luminous woman who opened a hard drive.
Nic was still in bed when Bobby Walker knocked on her door. Wrapping herself quickly in a bathrobe, she faced him at the top of the steps. He'd already loaded his two traps, each seething with frightened squirrels, into his pickup truck.
"Didn't get 'em all," he admitted, "but we got enough. Look around—" He opened his arms to the yard where not a single squirrel chattered or twitched.
"Thanks."
"Ma'am?" Clearly he expected greater enthusiasm. "Ma'am, are you okay?"
Nic nodded. "I haven't had my coffee yet ... didn't sleep too well either."
"Traps must've been snapping all night."
She could have said yes and ended the conversation, but Nic needed coffee before she could lie effectively. "No, I never heard them. It was something else—"
Nic watched the squirrels tumbling over one another. Echoing memories of computer crashes, pallbearer squirrels, a strange man warning her to take the box home, and a stranger woman crouched by the door blurred her vision. She blinked and focused on Bobby Walker's face.
"Did your mother say what a brownie looked like?"
"Ma'am?"
"Yesterday you said your mother told you that squirrels chased brownies. Did she ever say what one looked like?"
He shrugged. "Can't say as I remember. Little fellows, I guess. Couldn't be very big, could they, if the squirrels chased them."
"Not tall, then? Not tall and thin and silvery—or maybe dusty?"
Bobby Walker gave Nic a slow, sidelong stare. "You see something like that?"
"Not exactly." Nic couldn't lie, but she could evade.
A squirrel ran along the utility wires. It jumped from the wires into a pine tree's dense branches and a heartbeat later dropped to the roof of Nic's car where it gave her another version of Bobby Walker's sidelong stare.
Nic said, "They're back."
"They were never here, ma'am."
"The squirrels." She pointed at her car.
"Damn. Thought we'd scared them off."
"They're the pallbearers."
Bobby Walker didn't know what to make of Nic's remark. He stood silent on the porch while a second and third squirrel took position on Nic's car.
"I better get rid of these and reset the traps—" Bobby's voice rose, as though he were asking permission.
"Did your mother ever say anything about brownies, except that squirrels chased them? Like were there special ways to catch them or—or set them free?"
Bobby shrugged. "Only that they were lucky and they'd clean house for you if you set out a bowl of milk and soaking bread for them. I think she was hoping for miracles. She had me and my brothers and my father to clean up after. It was a lot of work, if you know what I mean, and we maybe didn't make it easy for her. She went home to Scotland when I was twelve ... said it was a vacation, but she never came back."
"I'm sorry," Nic said without hesitation.
"She didn't like the weather here either. Missed the rocks and hills and all those cold, dreary days."
"And the tall, thin ghosts?"
Another shrug. "Not ghosts. Fairies—not cute, cartoon fairies, but the nasty kind, one step removed from devils." He glanced at his pickup. "I gotta get to work—"
He paused, as if expecting a similar revelation from Nic. When she said nothing, he promised to reset the traps when he got home. There were four squirrels chasing one another around Nic's car by then and dozens more when he returned in the late afternoon. Nic caught Bobby peeking at her door and windows as he reset the traps.
While Nic watched and fretted, Bobby Walker tucked his second trap under the stairs to her front door and, after a vigorous shake of his head, walk back to his own home without knocking on her door. Try as she might, Nic couldn't blame him. He had a job ... a life. Nic's hands trembled as she typed an e-mail to Sara—
... It's worse than weird, Sara. Ever since I replaced the hard drive, I've been surrounded by obsessed squirrels. No kidding. They're all over this place. I've got a neighbor who's trapping them and carting them away by the dozens. He thinks I'm feeding them. I'm not, of course; I'm too busy sending out resumes to be feeding squirrels. He's got to think I'm a slug, not that I've seen a slug around here, but every time he knocks on the door, I'm just waking up. I didn't sleep well last night. I dreamed there was someone in the trailer with me—a woman all dressed in glowing, silvery gray. In my dream—I'm telling myself it had to be a dream—the fairy woman was trying to steal the dead hard drive because there was a brownie trapped on it because squirrels had chased it into a transformer.
My dream made sense, but nothing makes sense now, except that I'm losing it...
fast.
Nic checked her e-mail throughout the evening. She picked up the phone more than once, but her per-minute long-distance rate was too high for commiseration, even on a night when she found herself more depressed than she'd been when she'd first lost her job. When midnight came and went without communication from the civilized world, Nic shuffled into the kitchen, ready to wolf down some unhealthy snack on her way to bed. Her hand was inches away from a box of generic cookies when she spotted a can of evaporated milk she didn't remember purchasing.
A bowl of milk, Bobby Walker had said: bread soaking in a bowl of milk for brownies, luck, and a clean kitchen. The formula hadn't worked for Mrs.
Walker, but Nic was willing to give it a try. She shredded slices of bread into a milk-filled cereal bowl. Then, because she couldn't feel any more foolish, Nic set the bowl beside the dead hard drive.
It was still there, lumpy, scummy, and utterly unappetizing, when she awoke hours later. So were the squirrels, both in the woven-wire traps and racing free around the trailer. They'd grown destructive overnight. Several of the rodents squatted on the car's hood, stripping away her windshield wipers as though the black rubber were licorice candy. Nic slapped the picture window in a futile attempt to scatter them.
The sound snared the attention of a squirrel perched on the narrow banister beside the door. It launched itself at the window and hung there a moment before sliding down. Another squirrel hit the window hard enough to make Nic jump away with surprise. This second squirrel, more determined than the first, fought the pull of gravity. Its dark claws squealed frantically against the glass before it, too, fell from sight.
When a third squirrel leaped from an overhead branch, Nic had had enough. Grabbing a dish towel, she burst out the door, flailing cloth and shouting. The squirrels scattered, but not far. When Nic turned around, one of them was at the top of the steps, scratching at the door which was closed, but not completely shut. She whirled the towel above her head and charged.
"Whoa!"
The voice came out of nowhere, along with an opposite pull on the towel.
Nic let go of the cloth. She spun around and found herself perilously close to Bobby Walker.
"One more step, and you'd have landed on the ones we already caught."
Nic looked down at the writhing trap inches from her foot. She didn't know what to say, but was spared the need for words when a squirrel flung itself at the window.
Bobby Walker whistled his astonishment. "Never seen a squirrel do that before."
"They're pallbearer squirrels."