The Taxidermist's Second

Cascade, Montana, didn’t forgive. It remembered.

Wren saw the sign through a scrim of March sleet—Welcome to Cascade - Population 8,000—the paint peeling at the edges like old bark. She slowed the truck, her breath fogging the windshield into a temporary blindness. Ten years. The road behind her was a gray scar. The road ahead was a reckoning.

Her hands tightened on the wheel, knuckles pale against skin the warm brown of river clay. In the passenger seat, her phone buzzed against a roll of cheesecloth. A text from the agency that had brokered the museum contract lit up the screen: Paperwork finalized per your request. Initials only on submission. Director Raines expects W. Blackwood Monday 9 AM. Welcome home.

The word home felt like a bone out of joint.

She had requested the initial-only submission. A coward’s move, maybe, but the only way she could make herself sign the contract. She’d told herself Jonah wouldn’t make the connection; “Blackwood” wasn’t uncommon, and her professional reputation as “Wren” was separate from the paperwork. It was a thin fiction, and she knew it. But it was the thread she’d used to pull herself back.

She was here for Ruth. Her mother’s mind was a house with doors closing one by one, and Wren could no longer bear to listen from the other side of the country. The museum job was the only position in Cascade that needed her specific, macabre skills and paid enough to cover the care facility. It was that simple. It was that impossible.

The truck rattled past the sign. The town emerged from the mist, clinging to the base of the Rockies: a huddle of Victorian facades, a single blinking stoplight, roofs slick with melting snow. It looked smaller. She felt smaller.

A memory, sharp as a scalpel: Jonah at twenty-three, standing right there on Main Street with a box of books, grinning like he’d just unlocked the universe. “They offered me the graduate fellowship, Wren. New York. Can you believe it?”

She could believe it. He was brilliant. That was the problem.

She’d smiled back then, her own secret already a cold, hard weight low in her belly. “I can believe it,” she’d said, her voice miraculously light. “You’ll be amazing.”

What she hadn’t said screamed inside her: I’m pregnant. We’re broke. Your future is a runway and I’m about to throw chains across it.

She’d chosen the clean, brutal cut instead. Let him hate her. Let him be free.

The truck found its way to the alley behind the bookstore on muscle memory. Mrs. Chen was already at the back door, a small, sturdy figure wrapped in a hand-knit shawl, her breath puffing in the cold air.

“You’re late,” the older woman said, her voice carrying the familiar, no-nonsense warmth that had once felt like a refuge. “I expected you at noon. The scones have gone from perfection to patience.”

“The pass was icy,” Wren said, climbing out. Her legs were stiff. Every movement felt observed.

Mrs. Chen enveloped her in a hug that smelled of cinnamon and paper. “It’s good to see you, child. Even if you look like you’ve been stuffed by a taxidermist with the shakes.”

A weak laugh escaped Wren. “Thanks. That’s the look I was going for.”

She started unloading her essentials—a locked case of tools, a portfolio of reference sketches, a duffel bag of clothes, and a small, sealed cardboard box labeled Archives - Personal. Mrs. Chen hefted the duffel.

“He’s at the museum most days till seven,” she said, without preamble. “Sometimes later. He lives for the place. Built it back from nothing, you know.”

Wren froze, a case of delicate glass eyes in her hand. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, he did. Came back five years ago with a fancy degree and a fire in his gut. Got the historical society funding, wooed the board. It’s his world now.” Mrs. Chen’s eyes were knowing. “You’ll be walking right into the center of it tomorrow.”

“I’m just here to restore the collection,” Wren said, the rehearsed line feeling flimsy.

“Mmm. And I’m just here to sell books.” Mrs. Chen turned toward the steep, narrow stairs leading to the apartment. “Come on. Let’s get you settled before the ghosts get too comfortable.”

The apartment was as she remembered, and utterly different. The same cream-colored walls, the same persistent draft from the east window. But the silence was heavier. The view from the main window was dominated by the Cascade Natural History Museum, perched on its hill across the street. In the fading afternoon light, its Gothic turrets and arched windows were a stark, beautiful silhouette against the bruised sky. Jonah’s museum.

“Home sweet temporary home,” Mrs. Chen said, setting the duffel down. “Rent’s the same as I quoted. Includes Wi-Fi and my unsolicited advice.”

“I’ll take both,” Wren said. She walked to the window, drawn to the view like a magnet. Her reflection in the glass was a ghost overlaid on the museum’s stone facade. She looked tired. Her dark hair, usually wound in a tight bun for work, was a frizzy halo from the drive. Her eyes—her father’s eyes, people used to say—looked too big in her face.

A light flickered on in a second-floor window of the museum—the restoration lab. Her new workspace. Then, a figure passed by the window. Tall, lean, moving with a familiar, purposeful stride. He stopped, facing the glass, looking out into the gathering dusk, directly toward her apartment.

Jonah.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. He was too far away to see details, just a dark shape framed by light. But she knew his posture, the set of his shoulders. She couldn’t look away.

He can’t see you, she told herself. It’s just a shadow in a window.

But the feeling was visceral, electric. It was the sensation of being precisely, intimately seen after a decade of hiding. It was the target finding the arrow.

In the museum window, the figure lifted a hand, rubbing the back of his neck as if working out a knot of tension. A gesture so achingly familiar it stole her breath.

Then he turned, and the light in the lab went out, plunging the window into blackness.

Wren took a step back from her own window, her pulse roaring in her ears.

“You saw him,” Mrs. Chen said softly, not a question.

Wren nodded, unable to speak.

“Good,” the older woman said, with surprising gentleness. “Now you know. The past isn’t in a box. It’s right across the street, turning out the lights.” She patted Wren’s shoulder. “Get some rest. Tomorrow, you walk in there and you do the job you came to do. The only way out is through, my dear. Even if ‘through’ is a room full of dead things and the man whose heart you stuffed and mounted.”

Wren managed a shaky exhale. The dark museum seemed to stare back at her, a silent challenge.

Some towns remembered. And some people, she thought, her hand drifting unconsciously to the small hummingbird tattoo on her wrist, were meant to be remembered. Whether they deserved it or not.

Tomorrow, she would face what she had preserved in memory. Tonight, the silence felt like waiting. And across the street, the museum stood guard over all the things left unsaid.