A Face at the Window by Sarah Graves

would do that. But it wasn't going to. In mating season, the males were irritable and would charge you, and later in the year females would defend their calves.
    This one, though, was just munching along placidly. "Honk the damn horn at it," Anthony said impatiently, reaching for the wheel.
    Driver-guy slapped his hand. "What're you, nuts? Just wait. Maybe it'll…"
    As he spoke, the moose ambled unconcernedly away along the edge of the swamp. After twenty yards or so, it stepped off the dirt road into the underbrush and vanished.
    "There, see?" driver-guy snapped, and started the car. "You and your bright ideas," he groused as they moved forward again. "You'll get us killed out here."
    Helen hoped so. Meanwhile, though, hearing them talk about shooting the moose—and knowing that Jody would really have done it—had given her an idea. The driver had a gun, and though Jody had never shown her how to shoot a pistol, she knew how to pull a trigger, all right.
    She definitely could do that. "How much farther?" Anthony wanted to know. Then a partridge rocketed up from the road just in front of them with a loud whir of wings, startling him so he gasped.
    Driver-guy laughed. "Hey, whoa, there, cowboy. It's only a freakin’ bird," he teased Anthony, who reddened in silence.
    The first time she'd fired a rifle, the sound had been like a thunderclap, the weapon's concussive kick against her shoulder surprising her and sitting her down hard. She'd started crying and when Jody tried helping her, she'd swung out at him blindly, hitting him in the face with the back of her hand.
    Later, though, she'd sucked it up defiantly and let him show her. Being able to shoot the rifle, however inexpertly, felt like proving something, that she chose not to be the kind of girl who went hunting and fishing and ate moose meat.
    That she wasn't a weakling, that she could do it if shewanted. She'd learned a lot of things, in fact, just to wipe that "She's only a girl" look off his smug face. Cold-water swimming had come pretty naturally to her, kayaking was flat-out easy, and righting an overturned canoe wasn't so bad once you got past the fear of overturning it in the first place. Besides, and this she'd have never admitted to Jody, once she'd started dating Tim Barnard, being able to shoot a gun seemed only prudent.
    But she still didn't enjoy any of those things. She just did them to shut Jody up. She liked clothes, music, hanging out with her friends, and kids.
    Little kids. Lee's eyes drifted open, her lips moving.
Mama,
she murmured silently Then her lids fell shut again under the effect of whatever they'd given her, some licorice-smelling stuff whose sharp, medicinal scent still clung faintly to the child's breath.
    You poor little thing,
Helen thought.
You're having a bad day, too, aren't you? First your doll and then this.…
    "Couple more miles yet," Anthony told the driver.
    The gun was in the driver guy's inside front jacket pocket; she knew from the way he kept patting it every so often without seeming to know he was doing it. Reassuring himself, she guessed, that he had the upper hand.
    But if she got the gun, which she thought maybe she could if she moved fast enough, then the shoe would be on the other foot, wouldn't it?
    Soitanly!
Jody would have agreed, imitating Curly from the Three Stooges. He had all their movies and shows on DVD and never tired of them.
    She hated the Stooges. But thinking about Jody going Woo! Woo! in that silly way made things now seem a bit less hopeless. And she needed hope, because from the sound of it she had only a few minutes left to get her hands on that weapon.
    By now the swamp was behind them, the track curving uphill between huge granite boulders, then down again and over an old log bridge running across the still water of a beaver pond. A fat black snake sunning itself atop the lodge flickered its tongue at them.
    If she did it fast, she could get the gun from the guy's pocket before either of them