Hot Springs Werewolf Complete Series (BBW Werewolf Erotic Romance) (17 page)

There was a silent moment then Eadie started sobbing and I knew something terrible had happened.

*

M
y hands were shaking as I pulled up in Eadie's street. I'd had her on speaker as I raced across town but then the phone had cut out. I thought about calling the police but then dismissed it. Next was Red and the realization that for all the time we'd spent in bed together we hadn't done those normal things dating couples do, like exchange phone numbers. After Eadie hung up I'd searched for Guile Constructions while driving (making my fine retrospectively true) and rang the main number. It went through to a message.

"Red, it's Harper. Call me. It's about Donald Crisp." I'd left my number and hung up.

Now I was jumping out of Boris looking for number eighty-three. I soon found it - a beautiful white place with a magnificent garden in the front yard that could easily rival Red's hidden paradise. I pushed opened the gate in the white picket fence and as I did, I noticed the scent of blood. I turned, sniffing the air and then caught myself. What was I doing? Then I saw a droplet of blood, low on the fence, standing out against the white background. Donald's blood. It wasn't my imagination.

I ran to the door and knocked on it, trying to stop my hands from shaking.

"Eadie? It's Harper Finch. Are you there?"

I didn't hear anything. I tried the door but it was locked.

Okay Harper, just relax. Eadie is probably in the back of the house. Or maybe she went out... to the supermarket... while her husband was probably kidnapped or dead or whatever had happened.

I took a deep breath and relaxed, closing my eyes and letting my senses expand. At first all I could hear was my body. My heart beating, blood rushing in my ears. Then I heard birds in the trees and murmurs of voices in adjoining houses. This was really happening. I took another breath, concentrating without concentrating, trying to sense if someone was in the house.

"What are you doing?"

I squealed and opened my eyes to find Eadie Crisp standing in the doorway. So much for possibly heightened werewolf senses.

"I thought I could hear you better if I closed my eyes."

Yup, put on those crazy pants Harper.

Eadie nodded as though she understood and then stepped back, waving me inside. I followed her in and entered perfect old person house standard issue #5. Ornaments everywhere. Lace doilies. Framed photographs of family.

"Down here," she said and led me away from the lounge and down a corridor. She pushed open a door that had a framed sign reading "Donald's Den" on it and we walked in to a overflowing man cave. There was a desk against the back wall and a big lush brown leather chair that was cracked with age. The walls were covered in framed newspaper clipping and the desk was stacked tall with books, folders, bits of loose paper and in the middle a very new looking computer with huge screen that looked very out of place. The ground was strewn with papers in no discernible order. It looked like a bomb had hit it and then someone had attempted to clear it up. There wasn't much room to stand. Eadie turned to me, her bottom lip quivering.

"Donald has been working on your Great-aunt's diary and papers. Then he went outside last night and didn't come back. I went looking for him and when I came back, they'd done this."

She waved her hand around to indicate the mess around me.

"What diary and papers?"

"They stole it. Those thieving Toulouses. One of them at the post office stole your mail. Little shit had been standing outside our house at night watching us so Donald followed him to his work at the post office. Caught him coming out a side door to meet another little shit to pass off your mail. He took it off them and came here."

It was a little disconcerting to see a little old lady swear with such venom in her voice. She was unhappy but she was also incredibly angry. I tried to understand what she was saying.

"Millie sent me her diary and some papers and a Toulouse at the post office was going to steal it but Donald stopped them?"

Eadie nodded and then waved her hand at me to follow her out of Donald's den back to the lounge.

"I told him to give it back to you immediately but he was too obsessed about the transfer papers to do that, the stupid old fool."

Eadie directed me to a seat and I sat down. On a small table to my right was a photo of Donald and Eadie wearing rain jackets next to a sign that said Niagara Falls.

Instead of sitting down, Eadie knelt down and pulled back the rug to reveal the carpet. She reached into the pile and then opened a panel. There was a safe under it.

"Transfer papers?"

My head was buzzing at the speed of all this and so I'd defaulted to my usual repeat a few words mode.

"Land transfer papers. Finch, Guile, Toulouse. The
original
land transfer papers, not the fake ones that were placed in the archives."

With an expert hand she spun a dial back and forth until there was a soft click and the safe unlocked. The door to the safe must have been four inches thick but Eadie had no problem opening it. She reached inside and pulled out a torn yellow envelope which she passed to me. Inside was a diary bound in brown leather. I opened it to the first page. In flowing script across the first page it said:

For you, little Red.

BB

My mind immediately flashed back to that first night at Red's house and the copy of Millie's book
The Fire Complete
on Red's bookshelf. She'd written a note to Red's grandfather calling him Big Blue. He must have given her this diary as a gift.

Behind the diary was a manila folder. It was filled by a sheaf of papers that looked and smelt old. The papers were browning on the edges and well-creased. The first paper was dated 1898 and was a bill of sale of land from the Government to one Elgar Guile. I looked through the papers, being careful not to damage them as some were quite fragile. More bills of sale, land transfers and handwritten notes.

"That's not all of them. Donald was working on some in his office when he-"

She stopped and I saw she was about to cry. I leaned forward to stand up when I jumped in shock as she slammed the safe door closed.

"Those fuckers took him! I'm going to kill them!"

She roared it and then looked up at me. Her eyes were glowing gold.

"We'll find-"

I didn't get a chance to finish my sentence. Eadie Crisp, harmless little old lady, shifted into a white wolf tingled with gray. She tore off her flower-patterned dress and then looked up at me like she didn't know who I was. She growled, a low sound that sent a shock of ice right through me. Just when I thought she was going to leap at me to rip my head off she turned and bolted through the front door, nearly tearing it off its hinges. I ran after her, seeing her clear the fence. But the time I got the gate open and was out on the street she was gone.

I looked down at the diary and papers in my hands. These were important enough for the Toulouse pack to take Donald Crisp. Was he a werewolf too? And if they'd take him, what would stop them trying to hurt me to get them?

I glanced in both directions down the street but didn't see anyone obviously watching me. But there could be. For all I knew there might be werewolves hiding in the garden across the street. I stood still, watching the garden, waiting for a movement. A cold burst of adrenaline hit me when there was movement - a black cat leaping up from the garden to stand on the fence.

Time to get out of here before I drove myself crazy.

I scurried back to Eadie's and closed the door. As it locked with a click I realized I should have seen if there was a spare set of keys anywhere that I could have left somewhere outside for Eadie when she returned. Too late now. Besides, werewolves must have ways to get back into their houses after they change.

Back I went to Boris with one destination in mind: Red.

*

H
is house was empty but I kept banging on the door anyway. After my recent failure to sense Eadie in her house I wasn't going to be using those so-called werewolf senses anytime soon.

"Red! Are you in there?"

I hit the door a few more times but there was no response. Unless he was dead in there, he definitely wasn't home. I got the sudden image of Red in his suit, throat torn open, resting in his kitchen, his eyes staring at nothing. It went as swiftly as it came and I shook my head to dislodge any other thoughts like it. Where had that come from?

I left Red's, walking down the path to the cabin as fast as I could, cursing both me and him for not doing something as simple as exchanging numbers. Hell, even an email address would have sufficed at the moment.

I made it back to the cabin without completely freaking out although it was hard to take my eyes off the forest. It was broad daylight but it was easy to imagine wolves hiding behind trees, watching me. I fumbled my key in the lock which didn't help at all but finally I was inside.

Not that a locked door would keep a werewolf out...

I ignored myself and sat down at the table to read Millie's diary.

Big Blue came to me last night. I was standing at the window when I saw his eyes glowing in the dark. I slipped off my nightgown and stood naked in the window before-

Page one, first entry and it got very explicit very quickly. I skimmed over the entry and it seemed that naked girls at windows luring werewolves in at night was something that ran in our family.

I turned to another entry. Her and him in the clearing.

OMG.

Another entry. A civilized dinner in town. An uncivilized meeting in the alleyway next to the restaurant.

I kept flicking through Millie's diary, feeling myself sail out past sheer embarrassment at reading such private thoughts and now I was approaching oh my god was this girl for real.

My Great-Aunt Millie was old and feisty and kicked ass in six different ways. The Millie of the diary was young and feisty and didn't leave a single thing out. The diary detailed her meeting Big Blue and all the sexual exploits they'd had together and it was very detailed indeed. She also talked about her friend Ruby, a girl who was apparently as wild as Millie. Mixed in with all this were bits of werewolf information, as though she'd been gathering facts.
The Alpha's mate has as much power over the pack as he does. The Alpha's mate must bear children or he will be challenged. Despite this, Alphas do not change often.

About halfway through I hit an entry that wasn't about sex. It was a brief note about a barkeeper's son going missing. The boy was nineteen and had vanished after leaving work late at night. They'd found his bicycle in an alleyway, the front wheel buckled. Under the entry she'd scribbled
another pack?

I read straight on from this point. The sexual escapades of young Millie still appeared but increasingly she wrote about crimes in Hot Springs, the mayoral candidates and her opinions of them and about Big Blue. Big Blue is worried. Big Blue is angry. Big Blue came to me with a cut on his face.

At that note I remembered Red coming to my door with a cut on his face. He'd blamed it on a tree branch scratching him. Now that I looked back on it, it didn't make sense. A werewolf didn't see a fallen tree in the dark? Or it had fallen and just coincidentally had scratched him with the tip of a branch only?

Red had lied. Probably.

I put that aside for the moment and kept reading. Less sex and more concerned entries. She occasionally mentioned working on her novel but only wrote brief notes stating it was going well, good writing day and so on. Then she switched to writing about her family. Her brother was worried but wouldn't talk to her. Her father appeared distant. There was a family business, a bakery, and it had been broken into and the oven damaged.

I turned the page and came to the final two entries. The second-to-last was a note about her cousin, a girl, fourteen, who'd been found dead, her throat torn out.

The police believe it to be wild dogs but we know better
.

She wrote there was to be a meeting but gave no details.

Then the final entry. Just four words written over and over again.

THEY KILLED THEM ALL.

All the pages after that were blank.

I sat back in the chair staring at nothing. In my mind I was upstairs in the Historical Society office. On the wall there was a headline: Mass Slaying at Finch Farm. The article had been torn away but there was no doubt this was what Millie had been writing about.

Millie. My Great-Aunt. Amazing and wonderful and kind and she'd been old as long as I'd been alive. We'd been as close as best friends and yet she'd never told me about the past. I'd remembered being curious and asking her but somehow the conversation went off track and we never returned to it. I felt tears welling in my eyes as I looked down at the final entry. The letters were etched into the page so deep that they imprinted on the pages beneath them. It wasn't just Mass Slaying at Finch Farm. It was Millie's family who'd been killed and her grief had poured out of her.

I put the diary down, feeling the sting of the secret inside my heart. Maybe Millie and I hadn't been as close as I'd thought. Maybe she'd wanted to leave the past behind her and move on. I realized her brother, my grandfather, who died before I was born had presumably been a werewolf too. Given my dad hadn't said a word about werewolves before he'd passed away when I was sixteen I was guessing my grandfather had decided to leave the past behind as well.

I wiped my tears away, dried my hands on my top and then took the papers out. I was right earlier with my guess that someone, maybe Donald Crisp, had put them into chronological order. I start to lay them out on the table before I realized I wouldn't have enough room. I went to the lounge area, moved the battered coffee table and spread the papers out on the floor, reading each one before moving to the next.

Land bought from Government. Government granted land. Land bought from Jones family. Bill of sale. Transfer documents from brother to brother's son? Another bill of sale, this time to a Toulouse. Finch exchanging land with Guile. Guile purchasing Government land.