Chapter 5: Elodie

Taking the road was not an option. Mortimer is a small town. My pulling an apparent hitchhiker routine on a stretch of pretty heavily travelled road was going to get me noticed, which was against The Rules. Plus, the last thing I needed was my dad finding out that I wasn't working where he thought I was working. Instead I struck out cross country, heading for the research station as the crow flew. It shaved off a mile and a half, but I was still forty-five minutes late.

The research station was housed in a trailer, one of those dealies you usually see at big construction sites. You know, where the foreman or architect or whoever hang out. This one was long and low, with corrugated tan walls and no sign to indicate I was in the right place. But this was the location Dr. McGrath had given me in his email, so after checking to make sure that my unscheduled hike hadn't totally blown my deodorant, I trudged across the gravel parking area, past a handful of mud-spattered vehicles.

Because they were shaking with nerves, I shoved my hands back in my pockets and started fiddling with the scrap of t-shirt. I wove the fabric through my fingers. Please let me not have screwed this up. I was just going to provide a calm, reasonable explanation for my tardiness, and hopefully Dr. McGrath wouldn't be so pissed he kicked me off the project on the first day.

At the door I hesitated. Should I knock? Just go in? In the end I opted for decisive and confident, even though I felt anything but. It was better than slinking in like a delinquent to the principal's office.

I stepped inside. Several people were clustered around a long table further down the room. All faces turned in my direction with expressions ranging from curiosity to irritation. Too much attention. Too much focus. In a moment of instinctual panic, my fingers tightened on the scrap of t-shirt in my pocket. It steadied me somehow, reminding me that I wasn't a coward.

Zeroing in on the older guy in glasses, I straightened my shoulders and said, in a voice that sounded a lot calmer than I felt, "Dr. McGrath, I'm Elodie Rose. I'm terribly sorry I'm late, but I had some transportation issues."

One of them stood up from the table and walked over. "Well, we're glad you made it, Elodie. I'm Grant McGrath. Come on in and join us."

I blinked, a little taken aback. Dr. McGrath wasn't the skinny guy in glasses who actually looked the part of a scientist. He was an enormous man, towering at least a full foot above me. His face was ruddy and windburned, with crinkles around his green eyes. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out, I thought, taking the hand he offered. His dwarfed mine.

"So did your car break down?" he asked.

"I don't have a car, actually. I had - " I paused, searching for words that did not reek of the angsty, teenage idiocy that had resulted in the destruction of my bike. " - a mechanical problem with my bike. So I had to hike in."

"Not too far, I hope," he said.

"Only five and a half miles, sir."

Now it was Dr. McGrath's turn to blink.

"Holy crap. You really just hiked nearly six miles to work?" This came from a pudgy, red-headed girl that I judged to be a grad student.

"The terrain is pretty moderate on this side of the park," I replied, shrugging.

"We'll see that you get a ride home this afternoon," said Dr. McGrath. "Come meet the team." He escorted me toward the table. Gesturing to the red-head, he said, "This is Abby Renfroe, one of my grad students. That's David Bryson, my post-doc." With his long, sun-streaked hair and hazy blue eyes, David looked like he belonged on a surf board instead of in a lab. "And this is Patrick Everett, my right hand man and co-investigator." The glasses guy nodded in my direction.

I nodded back to each of them in turn, relaxing a bit now that I knew I wasn't fired.

"We were just looking over a map of the park to start dividing things up into quadrants," said Dr. McGrath. "Part of what we'll be doing is tracking game patterns to establish prey density for the area. That was part of the problem when they did this the last time."

Taking a seat I slipped into a role I was comfortable with: attentive student. Some of what he told us I already knew from my research on the first attempt at reintroduction; some was new. I soaked it up like a sponge. School was something I was good at. When you have no friends and few activities to take up your time, there's nothing to distract you from your education. And when you've got a curse hanging over your head, you're pretty motivated to distract yourself by any means possible.

As I relaxed further, my brain began to register the scents around me. The stale, recirculated air. The rich scent of coffee. A sort of faint odor of mold. The various personal scents of the people around me. And somewhere layered over it all, a scent of something wild, with a trace of cedar. My nostrils flared, trying to capture and parse out the scent. The thing with the super nose was that I hadn't had it long enough to catalog stuff. I was scenting all kinds of things I'd never noticed before, and not all of them were familiar.

This scent tickled my brain, a teasing, fleeting recognition, then gone again. I lifted my head slightly, trying for a better whiff.

And then I knew.