Free Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) by Mark Stevens Page A

Dawn Ellenberg’s people held up the oversized brown cloth the protester had been wearing. The television news stations showed a clip of Ellenberg reading the note the guy had left in his tent. The report showed pictures of the dog bounding through the snow to find the body and pictures of Ray Stern as a kid. Trudy let the tears flow and the tissues pile up around her on the blue comforter. And then there was an interview with the sheriff during which he basically said they would stop at nothing to find the stupid hunter who couldn’t tell the difference between an honest-to-goodness whitetail and a two-legged human in a cloth suit.
    It was a CNN reporter, an older one who looked like an entire vat of coffee wouldn’t put a jolt in his heartbeat, who first used the term “creative suicide.” The other stations picked it up. It was a neat, simple description that made her ache. She felt the strength of the dead protester’s decision, the conviction that went with it. There was nothing more admirable.
    They showed an extended interview with Dean Applegate, who had also been in the search party for the dead protester. He was dressed in his camouflage outfit sitting in a barn on a chair plunked down in the middle of the dirt and muck. The guy looked familiar. He talked about how the protest movement had affected him, how it had made him stop and ponder the real need for hunters, the real necessity of “ripping an animal apart” with a high-powered bullet. “The sport is an anachronism,” said Applegate. “Everything else has changed in this world except the way we treat animals. And that’s changed for the worse. Now we can scope ’em from a mile away, fire bullets that are really small missiles. I simply came to realize that it isn’t fair.”
    Something about him was old-friend-familiar, or met-once-familiar. High school?
    And still no Rocky. The wait was agonizing.
    Trudy sat on the corner of her king-size bed, her right hand absently snipping the air with her pruning shears and the left flipping the satellite dish from one end of the sky to the other, looking for bits of news about the dead protester. It was starting to get repetitive.
    Smoke, the gray cat, gave himself a bath on her lap while two black kittens played with a ball of string on the bed behind her. She glanced down the long driveway, watching for cars. The only delay that made any sense was that Rocky got mucked up with the animal people, an event so well orchestrated that it had drawn coverage by CNN, all the network news operations and, of course, every television station out of Denver.
    Trudy was impressed with Ellenberg’s pure sense of spunk. Ellenberg was one of those women willing to lead a rebellion on an entire cultural issue—fighting for all those living things, disrupting all of those hunters, screwing up all those cops.
    Trudy scratched Smoke’s chin and gently put him down on the bed. The delay was worrisome, the uncertainty worse.
    Trudy’s world was her house, a massive stone structure at the end of a long, snaking driveway off in the woods, a couple of miles west from the Colorado River and just outside the southeastern flank of the Flat Tops Wilderness. George had picked the spot for its seclusion. Eighteen trees had been plucked to make room for the site and they still had half the timber in firewood stacks off the garage. Six years in the house and nine trees’ worth of wood had gone up the chimney.
    A moss rock fireplace dominated the living room, a giant wood-burning stove nestled inside. A stone ledge fronted the fireplace as long as the living room was wide. Three matching leather couches formed a U-shape around a coffee table, which was a varnished slice of tree from the tallest Douglas fir they had destroyed to make room in the woods for themselves.
    The living room was for show. They rarely had guests or parties. Trudy spent half the time in her greenhouse, which was accessed through the kitchen. She had gradually