“Bonnie, how could you? We’ve been going crazy looking for you!”
“I sleepwalked,” Bonnie said, embarrassed and defensive. “I woke up at Lerner Hall.”
“The night after we discover you need constant protection you begin to sleepwalk?” Elena asked, looking from Bonnie to Damon in consternation.
“Why Lerner Hall?” Meredith asked at almost the same instant.
“Are you sure you’re not just doing it for attention?” Caroline said, as coolly as if it were an ordinary question.
“We woke Caroline up accidentally,” Elena explained under her breath. “When Meredith saw that you were gone, Damon asked her to come over to stay with me, while he went out to look for you. All the noise woke her up.” Caroline’s room was between Elena’s and Bonnie and Meredith’s.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Caroline said in a voice which indicated she had said it more than once.
“And then Meredith and I called Matt and Jim Bryce and got them out looking for you, too,” Elena said. “We—well, we were terrified, really. We thought you might end up like that girl in Heron.”
Bonnie, still flushed with embarrassment, felt that she had a lot of explaining to do. She did her best to convey everything that had happened—and then had to backtrack when a series of knocks came at the door and a blinking, rumpled Matt was allowed in. When she got to the part about the bad dogs coming toward her, however, she saw Elena and Meredith and Damon exchanging glances like adults listening to a child tell about a dream.
“What?” she demanded. “Why don’t you believe me?”
Meredith said gently: “Bonnie—wild dogs? Here on campus?”
“I suppose,” Matt said, “that the campus kind of backs up onto forestland, but still . . . I never heard of wild dogs living in Dyer Wood.”
Elena was still looking at Damon, and Bonnie realized that he was looking uncomfortable.
“Maybe,” Elena said slowly, still looking at Damon, “you just dreamed the parts about the dogs, too—all three of them. Maybe you thought you were awake then, but you were really still asleep.”
“But I wasn’t asleep! I was too cold to be asleep! And Damon saw the white dog, didn’t you, Damon?”
Damon was pinching the bridge of his nose. “Oh, yes. She said it was an Alaskan Husky. I wouldn’t know, but it was damn big and white all over.”
“It had beautiful golden eyes,” Bonnie contributed. “It didn’t wag much; and it was afraid of the bad dogs.”
“These bad dogs—” Matt began.
“They were ginormous. More Alaskan Huskies, but they were brindled on top and only white on their stomachs—”
“Brindled . . . like a wolf?”
Everyone stopped talking and looked at Matt.
“People were always breeding wolf-dog hybrids back in Fell’s Church. They thought it was cool—but then after the puppies grew up, they dumped them around the Old Wood. I’ll bet that people do it around Dyer Wood, too,” Matt said, thinking it out.
“Wolf-dogs?” Meredith asked skeptically. “Wild ones?”
“And maybe Bonnie’s white dog, too. They might even run wild in a pack somewhere in Dyer Wood.”
“But—that’s impossible!” Caroline said, her voice tight. “There may be coyotes around here, but there aren’t any—”
She broke off, seeming uncomfortable. Matt just plunged on: “They’re way more vicious than dogs or wolves are. They might even track a human—especially if she was with the lowest-ranking member of their pack.”
Bonnie felt injured. “Why the lowest-ranking? He was just scared, and so was I. Does that make me the lowest ranking girl in our—”
“Animals that are all white or all black are often discriminated against—in packs in the wild,” Meredith said in her explaining-from-a-book voice. “But, Matt, do you really think a pack of wild wolf-dogs is roaming the Dalcrest campus?”
“They might be hanging out in the woods,” Damon said. He had a way of speaking that made everyone stop and wait for him to say more. “They might even have kicked the white dog out of their pack . . . and then followed him with unfriendly intentions when he went to hide on the campus where big blundering humans live.”
“But you didn’t let me keep him!” Bonnie wailed, turning toward Damon. Now she was really upset. “They’ll eat him or something! I could have saved him!”