“What happened?” I asked. From a closer distance I was beginning to smell hints of other scents underneath the chemicals. I’d expected skunk, maybe. Something like that. But it wasn’t skunk.
“I hate stupid people,” she told me. “I also hate that I was the smallest person on our team today when our firehouse got called to extract a fifteen-year-old from an outhouse vault.”
Outhouse. Yep. That was the scent.
Mary Jo watched me out of gimlet eyes and brought the glass to her lips again. This time she didn’t choke. I didn’t smile. Or laugh. But it took an effort.
The only outhouses I knew of around here were in some of the parks outside of town. Most of those weren’t in much use this time of year.
“In the winter?” I asked.
“It was damn cold,” she said, eyeing the remainder of her drink. “It was why I had to go in without waiting for equipment. I’m not sure what equipment might have helped anyway. Hard to get to the hole because of the building covering it. By the time we got there, the kid had been half submerged in cold and wet goo for at least half an hour already.”
She finished her glass, blinked at me owlishly, and then put her forehead down on the table.
She didn’t say anything else—and I needed to hear the rest of the story. “So how did this person manage to find themselves trapped in the business end of an outhouse?”
She tipped her head sideways and glanced at me, then returned to her former position. Her voice was a little muffled when she asked, “Do you know where Big Flat is?”
Big Flat was a park on the Columbia River about fifteen miles out of Pasco. People went there to hunt birds and fish—but also to jog or ride horses. The pack didn’t go out there on moon hunt nights because we didn’t usually hunt fish or birds.
I nodded, but she couldn’t see me with her head down, so I said, “I do.”
“Teenagers.” She slapped the table and sat up, her face a little flushed, but the wolf was out of her eyes and she was fighting down a grin. “I thought I was bad. But the things I’ve seen. And Renny has—”
She fell silent, running a finger around the edge of her empty glass as though she wished it weren’t empty. I wondered what had happened between Mary Jo and her boyfriend to put that look in her eye. I waited for her to tell me. The longer I waited, the more worried I was.
Eventually, deciding to avoid Renny for now, I redirected her back to the story. “Mary Jo, how did someone fall into an outhouse? What were they doing at Big Flat in this weather, anyway?”
She shook off whatever mood she’d fallen into and said, “It took ingenuity. This group of kids skipped school to go hiking—and drinking—around Big Flat because they thought no one would see them. It’s pretty deserted during the weekday this time of year. Did you ever skip school?”
“I grew up under the Marrok’s rule,” I told her. “He was very strict.” I paused. “Of course I did.”
We exchanged smiles acknowledging our mutually reprehensible pasts. I had always liked Mary Jo. We had a lot in common.
“This one kid had a new cell phone,” she said. “When she used the restroom, it fell out of her pocket and into the pit. They’d all been drinking a bit, just enough to take the edge off their common sense.” She ran a finger over the lip of the empty glass beside her. “About like I am right now, I expect. Anyway, she was crying and her boyfriend took a couple of the guys in to assess the problem. There it was, bright and shiny and sitting right on top of the mound below.”
“Like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae,” I said.
She gave me a look. “Thanks for that. Every time I see ice cream now, I’m going to think of that cell phone.” She went back to her story. “Anyway, they decided that if they took the toilet stool off, they might be able to reach it.”
I snickered. “They dismantled the toilet.”
She nodded. “With tools they had in the car. With the stool off, they were definitely closer. But it was still out of reach. They evaluated their assets.”
“No holocaust cloak,” I murmured.
“Or wheelbarrow, either,” she agreed. “They were doomed to fail, though they didn’t know it. What they did have was a small dog on a leash.”
“You didn’t fish a dog out of the pit,” I said.
“It’s not really a pit,” she said, though she’d used the word herself. “It’s a vault—” She stopped herself from breaking into a technical explanation about the differences between a vault and a pit outhouse. “Never mind. No, though the dog was one of those little yappy things that bite everyone. Maybe it would have grabbed the phone if they’d dangled it down there by its leash. But no one tried that. They used the leash.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Failed.
She nodded. “They took the lightest-weight guy—today was really not a good day to be small—and attached him by the back of his jeans to the leash so they could lower him down to get the phone.”
I put my hands over my eyes. “Holy wow. Tell me they didn’t just attach him by his belt loops.”
When I took my hands down, Mary Jo’s laughing eyes met mine.
“To his belt,” she said. “But the leash was meant for a teacup poodle. The guy was small but still around a hundred pounds. They were trying to hold the leash like a tug-of-war rope.” She mimed with her hands together. “The end guy was supposed to put his hand in the loop, but his hands were too big. As anyone with the common sense of an avocado could have predicted, it slipped right out of their hands as soon as our sacrificial lamb leaned out for the phone.”
“Headfirst?”
She nodded, her grin widening as her shoulders started to shake. “He—he had to use the phone to call us, because no one else had cell coverage out there.”
She started laughing then—I thought it might be Uncle Mike’s magical drink, because in between bouts of laughter she would say a word or two and then have to stop because she didn’t have the breath to continue.
The words mostly didn’t make too much sense. “Purple leash.” “Twenty minutes to find the damned dog.” “Poodle. Get it? Poo-dle.”
She wiped her eyes and recovered herself a bit. “By the end of it the parents arrived. The girl’s mom”—she had to giggle for a minute—“her mom said, ‘At least this phone is waterproof.’ ”
“I would never use that phone again,” I said sincerely. “Even if it was waterproof.”
“My hiking boots were waterproof, too,” she said before giggling some more. “I tossed them.” She stuck her feet out and wiggled her toes. Something about that set her off again.
She was back to being face down on the table, this time laughing helplessly, when Uncle Mike came in with two bowls of stew and two frosted glasses containing some sort of amber liquid. He set my stew in front of me and put Mary Jo’s near the center of the table, where it would be safer from being knocked over by the incautious moves of someone who had had a bit too much to drink.
After he’d deposited the glasses, he tapped the one in front of me and the color changed slightly.
“For your headache, Mercy,” he said. “It shouldn’t affect the taste.”
I nodded. Not quite a thank-you, so it should be safe.
He nodded back, and then snuffed out the candle. Immediately the room filled with the scent of stew and apple cider, more strongly than I’d have expected. As if they flowed in to fill the gap in scents the candle had left behind. I hadn’t noticed when the sewer-and-chemical smell had vanished, but it was gone.
“Effective,” I said.
Uncle Mike gave me a professional smile, warm but without intimacy, and said, “It’s done its job. No reason to ruin the meal.” He looked at my helplessly laughing companion and said, “That elixir doesn’t last long with werewolves. She’ll be herself again in a minute. Eating will help.”