Free Harvest Moon by Helena Shaw Page A

chance it. It could be the bear, or the wolf,
or whatever animal was out there killing hikers. Dawn had no intention of
finding out for sure.
    She leapt up the three steps of her porch like it was nothing
and jammed her key into the lock. No one in Goosemont ever locked their doors,
but she did, and for once, she regretted it. She had to fight with the old
tumblers, but once they clicked, she threw herself through the door and slammed
it behind herself.
    The moment she was inside, Dawn couldn’t help but
laugh at her own paranoid behavior. What had to have been a family of raccoons
had sent her running scared. She laughed and laughed at herself until she was
sobbing and her whole world began to collapse around her.
    “Goddamn it!” she let herself scream as she cried.
“Just... goddamn it.” Her second outburst paled in comparison to the first. Her
adrenaline was running overtime, and nothing was making sense. She just wanted
things to go back to how things were a few days ago, when life was quiet,
normal, and boring.
    When her tears began to slow, she finally pulled
herself away from the door and moved to the kitchen. Her mind had begun to
race, debating her next move. She had already begun to agonize over whether she
should go looking for Courtney, how she really felt about the oddly-comforting
FBI agent, and she knew the only thing that would shut those thoughts up.
    In a cupboard under her sink was a large bottle of
Johnnie Walker Red, a gift from Courtney on Dawn’s fake birthday. Though she’d
really been born on the twentieth of September, Dawn Garrett claimed the date
as August thirtieth. She grabbed it and poured herself a shot, and then another
before she put the bottle on the counter along with the glass.
    The whiskey burned her throat even after she’d
finished her second shot, but at least the sensation took her mind off
everything else that was troubling her. It was pure alcohol, and it worked its
way through her veins at a rapid pace. The world around her was finally
starting to slow down some, and Dawn was beginning to think that she might just
be able to get some sleep.
    Suddenly, from the porch, she heard something crash
against the creaky old wood. A startled scream rose up in her throat, but she
forced it back down as her body froze. Her porch creaked heavily under
footsteps, and there was no denying that there was something out there, and
that it wasn’t a raccoon.
    In a moment of panic, Dawn grabbed an old butcher’s
knife out of the block that rested on her counter. She wasn’t sure what she was
going to do with the knife if she had to use it, but with the blade in hand,
she stalked her way toward the front door and waited to hear another sound.
    At first, there was nothing. It seemed whatever had
been out there hadn’t found what it was looking for and left again. Still, Dawn
pressed her ear to the door and listened hard for a hint of what might be out
there.
    A loud thud slammed against the door and sent Dawn
screaming as she tumbled backwards from the shock. On her porch, the footsteps
returned, and she swore she heard claws as they scrambled across the wooden
planks. It was an animal, it had to be, yet somehow she swore it knew she was
inside.
    “Oh shit, oh shit,” she gasped as she crawled to the
center of her tiny cabin. She threw herself behind the couch before she
realized she’d dropped her knife somewhere along the way.
    The footsteps were quiet again, and Dawn peered over
the sofa to see if she could spot her makeshift weapon, but instead her eyes
caught something else. On the kitchen counter sat her outdated rotary phone,
and she lunged for it.
    “Please there, please be there,” she chanted to
herself as she dug her fingers into her jeans pocket. She didn’t know why she
was searching for the tattered business card that Agent Nash had given her, but
in that moment, he seemed like the only person in the world that she should
call.
    At the bottom of her pocket, Dawn’s