Free The Beast by Shantea Gauthier Page A

killer.
    “They’re calling him the Beast of Hollywood,” Bob whispered loudly to his new desk mate, Lars.
    Lars didn’t seem to care at all that Bob was making a show of trying to be quiet. Lars kept typing and replied loudly in his thickly accented voice, “Why?”
    Shannon took the ear buds out of her ears and apparently pressed pause. She sighed and turned to face us.
    “It’s a reference to the Beast of Gevaudan,” she said.
    We all stared at her.
    She sighed again. “In Gevaudan, in France, in the 1700s there was an animal that ran around killing people and eating them. It was like more than a hundred of them. They all thought it was a wolf, which is ridiculous. People kept shooting it and it wouldn’t die. Some guy shot a big wolf and stuffed it to make it look bigger. The murders stopped for a little while and then they started up again.”
    She looked like she was going to put her headphones back in her ears.
    “Wait-.” I started.
    “What was it?” Bob finished.
    Shannon shrugged. “Eventually some rich guy shot it and it was stuffed and taken to some place but it got lost or destroyed or whatever so we have no idea. Some people think it was a wolf and some think it was like a lion wearing boar skin, some think that it was half mastiff and half wolf. I think it was a hyena.”
    “A hyena?” Apparently, Lars was paying attention.
    “Yeah, the Beast ate through bones. Wolves just eat around them. Hyenas are pretty much the only thing that can eat through bones. Plus, it looked like a hyena.” She shrugged. “Or it could be a throwback to the Beast of Bray Road from like the eighties and nineties, which was a werewolf Big Foot thing, but out here people are dying, and Bray Road was just some weird sightings.”
    “How do you know all this?” I asked, stunned with the realization that I did not know this person at all. I’d seen Shannon every week day for over a year and I knew nothing about her except that she wore headphones and could type.
    “Well,” she said. “When I was in kindergarten and first grade, I learned how to read.”
    With no more than that, the ear buds were back in and she was back to work.
    I decided to look it up online when I got back to Sandra’s house. If only I could figure out how to spell Gevaudan .
    I called the management company for the apartment building and let them know that I would be taking the “quit” option of “Pay or Quit”, which they didn’t particularly want to hear. I was told that I would owe even more money for breaking the lease. I cheerily agreed and promised to eventually pay it.
    I felt surprisingly lighter after the phone call, like things would actually be okay.
    And then I ran into Simon on the way to fill out the paperwork.
    When he saw me he froze for a split second like a deer in headlights before he recovered. His eyes passed over me again as if he didn’t recognized me.
    I stopped my car a few steps ahead of him and rolled the window down. Apparently realizing that he was busted, Simon trotted to my window.
    “Hello, Jade.”
    “Hello, Simon.”
    "You cut your hair. It looks nice."
    Long, awkward pause.
    I sighed.
    “Get in the car,” I said.
    He looked at me, dumbfounded. “What?”
    “Get in,” I said.
    Surprisingly, he did. After I made such a crazy fool of myself the last time we’d met, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he never wanted to see me again.
    “How was the burger?”
    I smiled. Like I’d never flipped out at all. “It was delicious.”
    “Are you taking me somewhere so you can leave me dead in a ditch?”
    “Probably,” I said.
    I didn’t actually know where I was going until I ended up outside of city hall. The little park area there was familiar, with a circle of orange trees that I had known and watched shrink from a lush orange grove since I was a kid travelling back and forth between our home and my parents’ jobs. It wasn’t as fantastic as Simon’s spot, but it was a place where the grass