#cryptidkeepers

Joanie's mother was usually imperturbable to the point where it was hard to get her attention. Now she flitted about the apartment  like a moth near a Christmas tree.

And Joanie couldn't believe her mother had asked Joanie for encouragement. "Mom, you look fine," she repeated. "Anyway, you said I could come over, and I had something important to talk about."

"Thank you dear. Now I'm sorry, but you'll have to go. I'll call you soon," her mother said. She was lashing the wall-mounted television with a feather duster now.

Joanie picked up her purse. "Who is this guy who's coming over, anyway?"

"Your mother still deserves to have a few secrets, dear."

To Joanie, that felt like the last straw. There just so many things they never talked about. "You always said your chili was special. You said we had to be careful who we gave it to. I thought that meant we should save it for people who were important to us."

"Oh, Joanie," her mother said. "You don't understand. The chili... it's like a gift."

"What do you put in the chili, Mom?"

Her mother dropped the duster and looked at Joanie directly for once. "He's in the building," she said. "You have to go now."

"I'm not leaving till we talk about this."

Her mother took a deep breath. "Joanie Gunderson, every one of us answers to a higher power. This is mine. I have protected you from this with every fiber of my being, and I'll be damned if I'll see you harmed now. I will call you tomorrow. But you have to leave now." With that, she opened the door.

Joanie stepped outside, slowly, trying to show with every move that she was serious about this even as she was being ushered out the door.

Then the building shook. She could hear footsteps on the stairs above her. Joanie went down half a landing, thinking she might be able to catch a glimpse of this mystery man who had made her mother so afraid.

But the flourescent lights in the stairwell flickered once, twice, and went out.

Last time on Cryptid Keepers, Joanie decided to confront her mom, but when she arrived at her mother's downtown apartment...

"Mom?" Joanie asked. She'd never seen her mother so agitated. She was running the vacuum cleaner back and forth.

"He's coming to visit," her mother said. "You shouldn't be here, Joanie. I mean it. I don't want him to see you."

"You don't want WHO to see me?" Joanie asked, but her mother just dropped the vacuum cleaner and started fumbling with the stack of bills she usually kept on the kitchen table. She shoved them in a drawer.

"I haven't seen ...it's gotta be twenty years," she fretted. "Do you think I look all right?"

Right now, her mother mostly looked frantic. Her hair had a tumbleweed quality. But most of the time Joanie envied her mother her looks and vigor. She hardly seemed to have aged a day since Joanie finished high school.

Sure, she'd put on a little weight. Her mother had always eaten well. But the woman was remarkably well-preserved. Why hadn't Joanie ever noticed that before?

"They're back."  Seven times over the course of a decade they'd repulsed the Walker from the Woods. Five years since the last incursion. Frank'd thought they were free. That he was free.

"They're back." He'd had to pay almost twice as much for a nonstop ticket from Austin, but it was worth it. Carolyn was safe, at least. And now he could wait no longer.

"They're back, you said. When did you know?" He didn't ask how. He knew the signs as well as she did. Bloodstained bark on the windowsill. A cow gone missing. A child.

"It's different this time," Carolyn said. The drive from the airport had been long but she didn't take her eyes off the road now. Soon they would be in Seney. "There's hardly anyone left in town. You expect people to leave."

"But the trees are gone," he said. "How could the Walkers come back now, after all this time?" He was thinking of his job at the University of Texas. Petrochemistry had taken him as far away from Seney as he could imagine, to one of the largest cities in the country. Now the Walkers were pulling him back.

"They started planting trees at Saunders Farm. I didn't even hear about it for a year. I didn't think we had to worry. The hills were dead, everyone said so. But this nonprofit came in with drones and seeds. It was like it grew up overnight."

If it grew up overnight, Frank thought, then maybe it could die overnight. He knew a thing or two about toxic substances. But Carolyn wasn't listening.

The ride home from the airport with his sister was awkward. She didn’t say anything about what she’d mentioned in her letter. And Frank was reluctant to bring it up. Now that he was back in the Upper Penisula, all the old inhibitions were coming back, too.

“Something’s wrong with her chili? Dude, don’t even joke,” Bash said. He turned the spray nozzle from the sink against the convex inside of his bowl and succeeded in splattering himself with water and food. “Dangit!” 

“Why not?” Joanie asked, raising an eyebrow.

 “I shared some of that last batch with my dad and he took it to the county chili cookoff.”

Not good. Not good at all. Joanie tried to think. She needed more information. She took the bowl from Bash and handed him one of the baby-blue dishtowels her mom gave them for Christmas. “Why on earth would he do that?” The main thing she knew about Bash’s father was that he’d sold Bash’s bike when Bash was fourteen, after Bash tricked it out with metallic stickers in an Iron Man scheme. He’d been endlessly proud of the bike but to Joanie it sounded like the dorkiest thing she could imagine. 

“Two reasons,” Bash said, waving off the towel. Instead, he took off his shirt. 

“One, he thinks your mom hates him, and he figures she’d appreciate the trophy. Although I don’t know why he thinks she’ll like the fact that he entered it in his own name.”

“And B, he’s determined to beat Gretchen Cosgrove for once.”

“What, your dad has a nemesis?”

“Listen, do not even mention Gretchen around my dad unless you’ve got a comfortable chair to sit in, ‘cause you’re in for the long haul.” Bash stretched both arms out and Joanie wondered at his physique. The guy ate like a teenager whose parents were in Europe, and to hear him talk he’d been King Nerd as a kid. But Joanie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she saw him at Zilker Park. 

She shook her head. She needed to focus. “How much chili did your dad take, anyway? I only gave you that one quart.”

“You know how much I liked it. And I need brownie points with your mom, too. I asked her for more and she gave me three containers.”

Last time on “Cryptid Keepers”: Joanie finds out her mother may be a secret Wendigo, but is more bothered by the fact that Grandma’s secret chili recipe came off a can label…and also involved a lot of long pig.