Kathleen Hale - No One Else Can Have You

Prologue

The Daily Friendship

Hunting Season

Stuffed

Gut Shot

Crosshairs

Fresh Meat

Beast

Ambush

Buckshot

Single Shooter

Animals Attack

Bear Spray

Mouse Houses

Bats And Snakes

Sheltered

Look Out

Quiver

Camouflage

Blood

Scent

Banzai

Snared

Bound

Loose

Trophies

Big Game

Hunting Party

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

A police officer comforts a woman on the shoulder of a rural highway. Behind them is a cornfield. The corn is shoulder high, not yet ready to be harvested. The officer has on a Green Bay Packers hat, and the woman is wearing a sweatshirt decorated in teddy bear appliqués. She is clutching a cell phone and crying hysterically. She and her husband own the cornfield. She’s just found something terrible in there.

“Deep breaths, don’tcha know,” the officer tells her. Trees line the opposite side of the road and starlings dive-bomb in hordes from one tree to another. The branches bend under the birds’ collective weight and fling leaves across the road with every ricochet.

“Now, Barbie Schultz, I sure know you’re upset,” he says. “You betcha—how many times do we have to deal with some hubbub in your cornfield? It’s disrespectful and deplorable, these delinquents and pranksters.” He raises his eyebrows. “But I can’t help you till I understand what’s happened in specifics—no ma’am—so I need to comprehend what all you’re saying.” He takes a step toward her. The scattered foliage makes Velcro noises underneath his feet. “So, let’s try this one more time, okay?”

“In the middle,” she says, gasping.

“Well there we go, Barbie.“ The cop nods encouragingly. “Okay then.” He gestures for her to continue.

“There’s a tree in the middle,” she sputters. “See, Frank and me set up scarecrows around it.” She presses her fingers to her lips. The nails have been lacquered pink to match the teddy bears’ noses. “But whoever did this they . . . they did something to the scarecrows, and even worse to the—”

“Another vandalism, eh?” The officer brings out a small pad of paper and a pen. “The nerve of these kids.”

“No.” Barbie shakes her head. “Not this time—no, she’s hanging from that big tree like a Christmas ornament—blinking!”

“She who?” The officer clicks his pen. “Talk at me.”

Barbie takes a deep breath. “Well she’s hanging by her neck but believe you me, it was not a suicide.” Her hands flutter at the field. “The poor thing’s mouth is sewn shut.”

The cop looks directly at her for the first time, blinking. He starts to tell her that she called in a disturbance, not a body, but she keeps on going.

“Fancy red thread all through her lips.” Her eyes are wide. “Straw coming out through some of the stitches. They tore apart our scarecrows and that’s what they did with the filling. From the looks of her cheeks, her whole mouth’s been stuffed full.”

The officer drops his pen.

Local Girl Found Murdered

Tragedy struck Friendship, WI, on Saturday, when the body of a local teenager was found in the cornfield off Route 51. Ruth Fried, 18, supposed missing since Friday night, was pronounced dead upon discovery. Police were unwilling to comment on the condition of the body.

“Suffice it to say that a lot of the guys cried,” said Sheriff Bob Staake. “I told them to stop the waterworks, but with something that gruesome, it’s to be expected. That’s what happens when you spend most of your time cleaning up after pranksters and luring lost pets into your squad cars with ham. Small towns make you soft.

“We’ve prematurely harvested the corn for evidence,” he added.

When notified of Staake’s plans to raze the corn, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Schultz, owners of said cornfield, expressed willingness to cooperate.

“The corn will be hard this year, I guess,” said Frank. “Overly firm, I mean. But I’m sure people in this great town will be more than ready to buy it and rally for a good cause.”

Sources around town confirmed this willingness to purchase the prematurely harvested corn. Profits will go to a Ruth Fried fund, the purpose of which is still being decided.

According to police, who are in contact with the victim’s parents, Fried was on her way to see her friend Kippy Bushman, 16. “I guess I’d rather not talk about it,” said Bushman. Fried’s boyfriend, tri-sport athlete Colt Widdacombe, could not be reached for comment.

Police are still investigating potential leads.

“At first we thought it was a foreigner, maybe a terrorist,” said Staake. “But now we’re focusing on someone local. I promise right here, right now, that justice will get served.”

When asked if he had any suspects, Staake answered, “Sure do.”

Fried was a junior at Friendship High School. This month, Fried was voted homecoming queen. She was also vice president of the school yearbook.

“Oh, we’ll miss her,” said Ed Hannycack, principal of the high school. “Ruth was a solid B student and a true delight.” Hannycack added that all schools have been closed until safety is restored.

My name is Kippy Bushman, and I am bereaved. Right now I’m bereaved on the toilet. Well, not like going to the bathroom or anything, more like using it as a chair. For some reason the motel put a television in here, so I’ve got the seat down and my pajamas on with my knees pulled up toward my face. When you’re sharing a motel room with your dad, the bathroom’s pretty much the only place you can have privacy. And the shower is pretty much the only place you can cry, if you want to avoid getting hugged. So I’ve been hanging out in here, watching a lot of Diane Sawyer, and occasionally taking off my clothes to cry my guts out.

Dom and I have been staying at the Great Moose Motel since last Saturday night. He says there’s no way he’s letting his Pickle run around when there’s a homicidal maniac on the loose. I’m getting a little claustrophobic, to tell you the truth, but I guess I can see where he’s coming from, hiding us here. I mean, they found Ruth in the corn behind our house.

Every so often while I’m sitting here thinking about her, my brain is bombarded by seminormal thoughts brought on by too much daytime television. “Should I start taking vitamin D supplements?” “Do I need a paraffin-wax-treatment tub thing for my foot calluses?” It doesn’t seem fair, in a way, because maybe I should be sad constantly for the rest of my life if I’m the one who gets to be alive. But the weirdest part is when this other feeling creeps in: a sort of vague annoyance, like Ruth has gone somewhere and not invited me.

The thing is, we were supposed to have a sleepover that night. She was on her way over and the next day they discovered her less than two hundred yards away from our back door. She almost made it. And the thing on top of that is I have a car and she doesn’t—didn’t—so I could have gone and gotten her. But I didn’t.

That’s the part that makes me keep climbing in the shower to cry. I should have picked her up. I should have gone and grabbed her.

Ruth Fried—pronounced Freed, like free, or freer—was my best friend. Around here, it’s first and last name every time you run into a person, at least to their face, no matter how well you know them. And if you can’t remember first and last, it’s ma’am or sir. No exceptions. Who knows who came up with our pleasantries, or how they did it, but that’s the way it is in Friendship, Wisconsin.

Anyway, people were always getting Ruth’s name wrong, calling her Ruth Fried, like a fried egg. “Do you think it would help if I put some of those pronunciation symbols next to my name in the yearbook?” she asked me once. “I’m yearbook vice president, so I could probably totally do that—Wait, sorry, does it sound like I’m bragging?”

“I think you’re very conservative with your power,” I told her honestly.

I thought pronunciation symbols were an awesome idea. But none of the other people on the yearbook knew what pronunciation symbols were, and didn’t think anyone else would, either, so they wouldn’t vote yes on it.

Certain memories of her like that keep playing on repeat in my head, but others I can’t even find. Unless I sit down and look through the yearbook, I can only recall her face at certain angles, like her profile in the passenger seat of my car. There’s one other recollection that won’t quit popping up, though, who knows why: how when we were little—maybe eight or nine—we saw this thing on TV about street performance, and afterward we decided to make some money by dancing at the end of Ruth’s driveway. We didn’t realize that it was different in a city, and that no one would slow down on a rural highway to put change in our hat. We must have stood there twirling crazily for an hour before Mr. Fried came out and asked what we were doing.

Ruth was the only person I ever knew who wanted to be somewhere else as much as I did. The only one who got what I meant when I said, “Friendship as in you and me is great, but Friendship, Wisconsin, sometimes feels like a bad dream that’s too boring to be called a nightmare.”