Harvest Moon (Excerpt)

Chapter Two

The bar was deserted when Dawn arrived for her shift. She had a habit of arriving early, and this day was no exception. All her life, she had been early for everything, though it was different at the bar. There was no sense of duty or urgency there, but rather a respect for the owner, Jim Brewer, and her few coworkers that brought her in early every day.

"Hey, Jim," Dawn said as she hung up her coat just inside the double doors that led into the old, shabby bar. The place could definitely use a few repairs and a fresh coat of paint, but it was homey. There was something about the smell of beer, greasy food, and stale tobacco that just seemed right to her. It was the exact opposite of the life she'd led so long ago, and it suited Dawn just perfectly.

"God, girl," Jim said as he lumbered out from behind the bar and gave his number one waitress a bear hug. Jim might have looked more beast than man, with a short, unkempt beard and a healthy beer belly, but at heart, he was a big old softy. "I'm so glad to see you're okay."

"I'm fine," she assured him. "I take it you saw the commotion up the street?"

"Did I ever," he said, worry touching the crow's feet around his eyes. "Rumor is that it's some hiker who got tangled up with a momma bear, but I don't know about that. This close to town and all."

"It's happened before," Gabe, the cook for Jim's bar, said as he poked his head out of the kitchen. Gabe was in his thirties, married with a couple of kids. He was a little on the gruff side, but once Dawn got to know him, she saw he was an all right guy, just rough around the edges.

"It has?" Dawn asked as she grabbed the small apron she wore around her waist during her shifts.

"Well, not the mangled corpse part," Gabe said.

"Watch your tongue," Jim warned him. The two often acted at odds with one another, but really, they were pretty cool. Get a few drinks in Gabe and he'd go on about how much he respected the old bear that ran the bar, and Jim was no different.

"Sorry," Gabe said. "But I've lived here my whole life, Jim too, and it's not the first time a bear has wandered up Main Street."

"Has anyone been attacked before?" Dawn asked as she started to wipe down the bar.

"Well," Gabe said as he ran a hand through his shaggy dark hair, "there was this one time..."

"A long time ago," Jim cut in. At nearly fifty, he wasn't the oldest man in town, but he was the oldest in the bar. "When I was a pup, maybe fifteen or sixteen, we had a momma bear come through here a couple times. Now, most folks around here know that when you see a bear and her babies, you turn the other way, and that's what we did. Too bad some kids from Charleston who were up here looking for work didn't quite get that idea. You city kids need to have a healthier respect for nature."

Dawn knew he was talking about her. She hadn't said she was from New York City, she'd never even mentioned the state, but she did tell people she was from Cleveland. It was half true. She'd spent three months there before she'd hopped a train for something new.

"Did the bear kill them?" Dawn asked. She was so wrapped up in Jim's story that she was barely paying attention to the cleaning, though it didn't matter much. There was a layer of old beer on everything that would never come out, no matter how much she scrubbed.

"Nah," Jim said. "But those idiot kids tried to run that bear out of town one night after drinking in this very bar. Of course, that was long before my pappy passed it down to me."

"So, what did happen?" Dawn asked.

"One kid got mangled pretty bad," Gabe said, cutting into Jim's tale.