He was good with birds. He’d learned from his father at a young age how to take care of injured birds or to gently nurse along babies in their shells when they were abandoned. When he thought about his father, he could see him standing over the incubator he’d put together after they’d found a dead swallow and noticed her nest above. He’d climbed up and brought the eggs down, and they’d nursed those birds until they were ready to be on their own.

They’d been tiny things and his father’s hand so large and yet gentle.

Roxie stopped. “Do you think Archie sits on the fertilizer a lot? Maybe uses it as a ladder?”

She was standing in front of a bunch of stacked bags of fertilizer Archie likely wouldn’t use for months. There was a good-size indention there, as though someone had been sitting on them. The rest of the top bag was coated in dust, so whoever had disturbed it had done it recently.

“I don’t think so. He doesn’t spend a lot of time out here this time of year. He pretty much only comes in to let the goats in and out of their pens. His sons come through a couple of times a month. They do a lot of the upkeep on this place.”

Roxie leaned over and picked up an orange wrapper that had been sitting on the floor. “Do any of the Johnsons eat a lot of flaming-hot chips?”

“Archie sure doesn’t. At least not anywhere his wife could see him do it,” he replied. “He had a mild heart attack a couple of months back and Lila convinced Caroline that eating a healthy diet might prolong his life.” Lila LaVigne ran the town’s medical clinic and had lots of thoughts on nutrition.

“Convinced? You know Lila is an expert, right?”

“I’m well acquainted with her skills. I’ve still got my pinkie finger because of them, but I’ve seen what Caroline’s putting on his plate, and death might be a good alternative,” he shot back. “So yeah, that absolutely could have been him sneaking some treats.”

He stopped because he heard something in the distance. A whine.

Roxie had gone still, too. “What was that?”

It was coming from outside the barn, to the back. But then he remembered there was a secondary door. Much smaller than the big barn doors that could open up to allow in large livestock, though Archie had given up his cows and horses years before. There was a small door at the back around the size of a normal house door. It was slightly open.

“It’s coming from behind the barn,” he said, listening again. “From the woods.”

Roxie stared at the back door. “It didn’t sound human.”

He heard it again and recognized it immediately—the low, mournful sound of an animal in pain. “It’s not. It’s a dog and he’s hurt.”

He strode through the back door and got his phone out again to turn on the flashlight function. It illuminated the ground in front of him, giving him a safe path to walk.

Roxie was hard on his heels, her light making another appearance, too. “Hey, slow down. You can’t be sure it’s a dog. What if it’s a coyote? Or something dangerous?”

“A dog can be dangerous given the right circumstances, and being injured is definitely one of them,” he said, still charging forward. The sound was coming from the woods behind the barn. He moved into the trees. “Watch your step. The ground is soft and there’s any number of critters out at this time of night.”

She sidestepped a moss-covered log, careful to not rub against it. “You know a lot about them, don’t you? Animals, that is.”

“Critters,” he said, his voice low. “Join the locals, Deputy. And yes, I do. Growing up, I probably spent more time with critters than I did people.”

“How far are we from the water?” Roxie asked, and he could hear the slightest trepidation in her tone.

In Papillon, they were never too far from the water, but he doubted there were gators running around here. “The bayou’s half a mile to our south. Gators are nocturnal for the most part. They’ll be near the water and hunting right now.”

“Someone tell Otis,” she muttered. “That gator is everywhere at all times of the day.”

The town’s largest gator often liked to sun himself on the highways. It was easier to go around him than try to get him to move, but Roxie never took the easy way out. More than once he’d seen her trying to shoo Otis off the main road that led into town.

Zep stopped suddenly. He’d lost the sound. The woods could be tricky, and it was easy to get lost if a person didn’t know what they were doing. Sounds could bounce off the trees.

Roxie stayed beside him and didn’t make a noise.

Tags: Lexi Blake Butterfly Bayou Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net