Excerpt: Wehrhause II: General Lunacy 101

Well, summer was almost over, and I, for one, was glad to see it go. Still, we had a couple of months to go, really, but in late August, it is easy to see the year begin to wind down. The trees leaves are fading, although not quite yet to their brillant reds and golds as we might see in late fall, just a dull, lifelessness that creeps and fades out that vibrant green of early spring and summer. Late summer was also, amongst other things, tomato harvest time, and festival time. Every municipality in Ohio had some kind of festival, the weekend of labor day, whether it was the Popcorn Festival, the Italian Festival, the Strawberry Festival, or some ethnic festival, and Wehrhause was no different. We had the Wehrhause Werewolf Heritage Festival.
Granted, I had no way of understanding why any town of people would want to celebrate having a werewolf heritage. Werewolves were, according to folklore, vicious and bloodthirsty. Proud of that?
But having grown up around the stories, I guess, it would seem that everyone needs something to be proud of, and from my own experience, I would say that the attraction to werewolves had more to do with power, and the ability to go from a 98 pound weakling to a powerful beast, with the ability to rip out a man's throat in a single heartbeat. Still, every town had to have something to celebrate, and for this summer, earlier summer events involving werewolves, those who believed they were werewolves, and some for whom the jury is still out, had changed my somewhat skeptical leanings toward the notion that werewolves were just stories, to well..... maybe.......hmmmmmm... I'm Katie Sch..... and I am a cop, the only female officer on the Wehrhause City Police Department. Wehrhause is my home, and quite frankly, I love it here. Our crime rate is low enough that if someone gets a ticket for a missing headlight, it causes quite a huge scandal. And not many cities around, well, anywhere can boast a werewolf as its founder, even though the claim is completely unsubstantiated. Not too many towns can say it's most southern border, borders next to wooded government land that the crazies insist is a burial place for dead space aliens. Only in Wehrhause.
Except this summer. I saw more of dead bodies than I ever ever wanted to. Little did I know that as the summer dragged on, that that number would rise.
I headed off to work, this morning being no cooler than any of the other early mornings. It was already mid eighties and I could see heat waves rising up out of the asphalt like so many blistering summer mornings already. My best bud and sweetheart, a small black and white cat, Mildred (also boss, supervisor, slave master, etc.) ran ahead of me, as she normally does, in order to climb trees as fast as possible. This was merely so she could take a swipe at my head as I ducked beneath some of the lower branches. And today was no different. She literally streaked up a tree, a small maple sitting in front of the Wehrhause Nursing Inn, which, ironically, sat right next door to the funeral home, where up on the second floor, I had my own apartment, and my next door neighbor, Pascal, who raised chickens in his apartment for pets, Mildred's tail swished back and forth, and once I got around the other side of the tree, I saw what I would call the “GLEAM” in Mildred's eyes. Her teeth were bared and I couldn't be sure if she were playing or if something was bothering her enough to put her into defensive mode. Still, this was Mildred and she was just being herself: little BADASS Lioness who will eat you up if you aren't careful. Not that I care about the stakes here. For Mildred, she always won. And the stakes were that since you lost, which is something you will always do, since you don't really know what the rules of the game are (and Mildred, who really makes them up as she goes along), you can only lose. Mildred wasn't about to tell.
“Hey, you, get down from there!” I called up to her. She made her way up a particularly tall branch that fanned out over the front porch of the nursing in.
“Goddamned squirrels,” came a bellicose voice from a seat up under the overhang of the porch. Poor old Mr. Geldstachler, the oldest former alcoholic in the county, who insisted that he take his breakfast