Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 (11 page)

“I’m this strong in my physical body as well,” he assured me. “I’ll be happy to show you when you return to Little Rock. Which room should I put you in?”

“The one in the gable.” He put me on the daybed and pulled my shoes off. I shivered with the absence of his warmth, and the events of the past few days came crashing down on me.

“Are you warm enough?” he asked. “I can find another blanket.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Hold me for a few minutes?”

He stretched out on the bed behind me and spooned me. I drifted off to sleep with his breath on my ear and his hand on my waist.

Later that morning, I woke disoriented. The sun poured through the leaves of the tall magnolia trees outside the gable windows and made dancing shadows over the walls, bed, and me. The first thing to orient me was the smell. Aunt Alicia’s house had always smelled like cinnamon, ginger, and anise, the flavors in the Italian cookies my mother liked. I’d always gone for the chocolate ones, Italian Brownies, which had a kick of cinnamon as well. I listened for her, or for any sound of someone moving around, but aside from the creaks and pops of the old house, there was nothing inside. Max was, of course, gone, but my body reached for him all the same without my moving. My nerve endings registered the cool air even through the blankets.

Nothing here but us…whatever the heck I am.

Figuring who or what you are is part of achieving full adulthood. I’d thought I was done with that.
If I was a true grownup, I’d be okay with being on my own. Aunt Alicia, why didn’t you tell me?
I sobbed my loneliness and frustration out, and of course some grief, although I knew that would take a while. The tears left warm tracks down my cheeks that cooled as soon as the air hit them. Aunt Alicia and Gladis Ann had always been constants in my life. Even if I didn’t talk to them but two or three times a year, there was security knowing they’d be here, in this old house, a refuge if I needed them.
Now I am truly alone. Well, if I don’t count the men who seem to pop into and out of my life.

Meh.
I dismissed them with a physical and mental shrug.
My next relationship will be with the real thing.

When I got down to the kitchen, I put on a pot of coffee. Something seemed different, and when I looked into the small workroom off the side of the kitchen, I found a plate of assorted Italian cookies wrapped in plastic wrap, a note in Gladis Ann’s elegant handwriting, and a manila envelope on my aunt’s work desk.

So sorry to leave you like that last night, honey. I’m glad the help I called for you came. Max is a good guy, but he also has his secrets, so be careful. Say hello and goodbye to Giancarlo for us.

Your aunt and I have gone on our final journey together, earlier than we thought, but who ever knows how her life will end? We didn’t have much time to gather stuff up for you, but you’re a smart girl—you’ll find the answers in the house, which is now yours, as is everything in it. Look with your eyes and your heart, and let the light be your guide and the past your key. Just don’t get caught in the shadows and remember the odds are with you.

The will is in the envelope. We’ll miss you, and remember, we’ll always love you. Your mother says the same.

Alicia and Gladis Ann

Chapter Nine

I thought I’d cried myself out upstairs, but I found a few more tears. Okay, a lot more. By the time I finished crying, the coffee I’d put on when I came downstairs had brewed.

Why didn’t she come say goodbye upstairs?
I knew so little of all of this—the strange metaphysics of multi-part souls and their manifestations. Maybe dashing off the note and pulling the cookies out of the freezer was all she’d had time for, and she couldn’t get caught by my questions. I read the missive again.

What does Giancarlo, my alcoholic Italian boyfriend who sucks in bed, have to do with this bizarre situation?

I shook my head.
Too many questions, too little time for answers.

“Well, it looks like I’ve got my agenda set for the day,” I said out loud to combat the quiet in the house. Nothing, of course, replied, and I missed Wolf-Lonna especially. Without her presence in my head, I found myself talking to myself internally and externally more than I had ever before. With a sigh, I sat at the kitchen table with the will to see what I had been left with physically.

By the time I finished deciphering the legalese of the will—yeah, I know, since I worked for the government, I should be good at it, but I’m not a lawyer, and they just don’t write the darn things in plain English—it looked like I was the beneficiary of the house, the property, and a nice, tidy sum from not just one, but two life insurance policies. Apparently doubling had some ethical gray areas. The upside of it was I wouldn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to. The downside was that I still had to gather myself up, figure out what the hell I was, and get all my parts in accord.

I also had to discover what Giancarlo had to do with all of it and who Max was working for. No, I hadn’t missed all his references to superiors and assignments. Oh, and then there was the original problem of who was bribing or intimidating my boss and who or what had gone dancing and gotten me in trouble in the first place.

Joanie always said I was a party girl.
I looked at Gladis Ann’s note again.
What clues are in the house? And why didn’t she just leave clear directions?

Wolf-Lonna would have urged me to action rather than contemplation, so I started in my aunt’s work room, now warm from the sun having risen above the trees. It was an addition to the house, maybe a converted porch. The tile was similar to that of the kitchen but didn’t match exactly, the clay-colored squares just a hair smaller. I confirmed this with a ruler.

Okay, Nancy Drew, you’ve proven this isn’t original to the house. Now what?

I stood and tapped my lips with the end of the ruler, trying to see things as my aunt would have. We were about the same height, so I didn’t worry about missing things from that level. Then again, if someone wanted to make something less obvious, she might have put it above or below. I’d done some consumer training as part of my job, and that’s one thing I always taught my clients: look high or low to find the deals because stores make the expensive stuff easier to find and reach.

I wandered through the kitchen, into the back hallway, and around the stairs to the living room. It sat facing the north Georgia mountains—a gorgeous view, especially now during the day with the sun illuminating everything in waves of brown with hints of green where pine trees stuck out. Loneliness carved out a hole in my chest when it occurred to me that Joanie might be looking over her mountains at that moment and wondering where I went. I’d forgotten to call her the day before, so I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and found the battery had died.

Ashamed I didn’t know my best friend’s number by memory, I plugged in the phone and waited for it to get at least enough juice for me to scroll through the Contacts and find her. I tried to call from the house phone and ended up getting her voicemail. I left a short message explaining Aunt Alicia had died, and that I’d be in touch—essentially what I’d told Leo. The bottom of the west gable made a reading nook, and I sat in the window seat and looked outside.

From my seated position, I looked back into the living room, my heart thudding in my chest. Aunt Alicia had always said that the living room, not the kitchen, was the heart of the house because everyone was most equal there. It had not been her only strange pronouncement, and I wondered for the thousandth time what her and my mother’s family life must have been like.

Don’t focus on what may have been, at least not yet. What do you see?

There was a fireplace on the back wall of the room, the chimney shared by the living room and downstairs bedroom. It had bookcases on either side, and these held a variety of framed photographs as well as old books, the titles long worn off their spines and the binding faded by light exposure. I stood and walked to the bookcase on the left. A photograph of two young girls with a big black dog caught my eye. I had seen it before, of course, but now I looked at it with new eyes.
Not a dog, a wolf.
It lay between them, docile, with its tongue hanging out. Each child tangled a little hand in its fur. Both squinted like the sunlight was behind the camera, but from their faces, they looked like my aunt and mother.

But the age difference isn’t enough. These two look like they’re two years apart, max.
I studied it further to see what the setting was but couldn’t make it out, other than they were in a grassy field somewhere with a dark line of trees in the background. The photo must have been fading because the trees seemed to mingle with and accentuate the line of the wolf’s back. I gently pulled the back of the old frame off. Someone had scribbled on the back of the picture in pencil,
Aunt Lucia, Alicia, and Julia, 1956.
I raised my eyebrows and turned the photo over again, looking for Aunt Lucia. There were only the two little girls, now confirmed in identity, but still not far enough apart in age, and the wolf. I closed my eyes.
Lucia is the wolf. She was like Aunt Alicia and me.

Interesting…
I replaced the picture. Then there was a photograph of Alicia and my mother taken later. My mother had grown into a gangly teenager, and she posed by a car with fins. Alicia looked to be about twenty, but she had already started taking on that ageless quality that I remembered about her. She stood in the background, her arms folded, and a frown on her face. My mother, who wore a halter top and shorts that showed off her long, tanned legs, tilted her sunglasses down and smiled at someone off camera. My father, perhaps? This photo also had a scribble on the back:
Alicia and Julia, 1969.

A pang of sorrow split my chest. They both looked so young and, if Alicia wasn’t happy, she had not yet developed the frown lines I remembered as her constant accessory. There was something else in her eyes—sorrow? In this picture, they looked to be about four or five years apart in age. I compared it to the other.
How is this possible?
I could have been mistaken, but in my role as a family evaluator, I’d gotten good at accurately guessing kids’ ages since sometimes people lied for tax or other financial reasons.

My stomach growled, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten since the cookies that morning. I attributed my head spinning to low blood sugar, but the thoughts that knocked around in there wouldn’t let up.

How is Alicia aging in those photos differently than my mother? How does she only look a few years older when I know the age difference was eight years? Or was it?

I needed to find Aunt Alicia’s birth certificate, but I hadn’t located a safe or anything that might hold such important documents.
I also had to find out about Aunt Lucia. But first, food.

The refrigerator held little more than a half a pint of milk that teetered on the edge of its expiration date and some random plastic containers of various liquids and sauces. There was no telling what they were, and the few I looked at closely seemed to have been in there for quite a while, judging from the science experiment-like mold on the sides. The pantry had cereal and dried pasta, and the freezer a few containers of tomato sauce and some frozen pesto cubes.

“Man may not live by bread alone,” had been another of Aunt Alicia’s sayings. “So that’s why God gave us pasta.”

I smiled and put on some water to boil. She had been quite a character, but it had been difficult to get to know her. She was an expert at diverting questions about herself and her past, and my mother had always warned me not to push because Auntie had a temper.

“I wish I could’ve gotten to know you better,” I whispered into the quiet. I tried to remember other Auntie sayings. When I was a teenager, I teased my mother when she started unconsciously imitating my aunt and using her expressions.

Tears pricked my eyes again, and I sat at the table and buried my face in my hands. I wanted more time with my aunt, sure, but I really wanted another opportunity to sit with my mother and ask her some questions, especially now that I knew she knew about my great aunt Lucia.

Or maybe she was too young to remember? I wish I could at least tell her how much I miss her and that I’m okay. Or am I? I can’t even seem to keep track of all the parts of myself.

The water boiling in the pot made it clang on its burner, and it startled me. I had dozed off.

I’m more tired than I thought.

Then I saw I wasn’t alone in the kitchen and almost screamed.

“What’s for lunch?” asked Max. He sat across from me and wore his long white lab coat over a white shirt and pink tie.

“You could knock,” I said and put a hand on my chest to make sure my heart wouldn’t pound its way through my sternum.

“I tried, but you weren’t answering, so I popped through the door to make sure you were okay. Good thing, too. You might’ve burned the house down.”

I put two servings of pasta in the water and turned the heat down so it wouldn’t boil over. “It’s spaghetti. And what are you doing here? Aren’t you at work?” I gestured to his coat.

“It’s lunchtime there. I’m napping in my office with strict instructions with the nurses not to disrupt my meditation time.”