Red (11 page)

“
I can’t go through that
again. Not with you.”

Go through what? The suicide?

“
Look, no more going out in
to the park on your own. No going off trail.”

Great, finally the man says
something
I whole-heartedly agreed with. Elodie being out on her own was
reckless and unnecessarily risky.

“
I’ll talk to your
boss—”

“
I’ll
talk to my
boss,” she interrupted. “I’m sure he’ll want to change procedure,
be sure we keep to large groups. There will probably be a staff
meeting in the morning after the sheriff makes whatever
proclamations he’s going to make about safety in the
park.”

“
Okay, fine. But I’m
serious. Be careful. Regardless of our own personal . . . problem,
there’s still some nut job out there who kidnapped Rich and his
sister. They’re lucky to be alive. Promise me you won’t take any
unnecessary risks.”

“
I promise.”

He kissed her forehead. “You wanna cook or
call for pizza?”

Food. The universal sign of truce.

“
Pizza,” she said. “Double
pepperoni. We’re celebrating a successful rescue.”

“
I’ll call it in,” he
said.

“
Okay. I’m going up to
change.” Elodie started across the room.

“
Elodie.”

She stopped in the doorway, carefully wiping
the expression of
oh shit
guilt from her face before looking
back at him.

“
I love you,
honey.”

Why did that sound so hard for him to
say?

Judging by the look on her face, it wasn’t
something Elodie was used to hearing. “Love you too, Dad.” Then she
went on and bounded up the stairs.

That was possibly one of the strangest
conversations I’d ever overheard between a parent and kid. Clearly
something
was going on, but I didn’t think it involved her
dad being some kind of abuser or molester, so I slunk back into the
trees and began to make my way toward home.

What was Elodie hiding?

This obviously went well beyond the bounds
of an over-protective, single dad looking out for his teenage
daughter.
I could have been compromised.
It was such a
strange thing to say. Whatever she meant, it wasn’t a matter of her
virtue. It had something to do with the scene where we’d found
Rich. Something other than the obvious threat of whoever had done
it still being loose. But how could that have compromised her?

Was it her emotional stability he meant?
That somehow the blood and death would send her over the edge like
her mother?

No. Elodie was clearly rock steady on that
front. It had to be something else. Yet still something to do with
her mother. Some secret she’d kept from Elodie’s father. What was
the connection between her mother, who’d killed herself seventeen
years ago, and the bloody scene of today?

Dad was waiting in the garage when I drove
up, perched on a stool at the makeshift lab that lined one wall. A
half empty bottle of water sat on the table in a ring of
condensation. He didn’t turn as I walked in, but I knew by his too
careful stillness that something was wrong. Tension coiled in my
muscles as I prepared myself, though I wasn’t sure if it was to
receive bad news or for a fight of some kind.

He didn’t turn as he spoke. “Where have you
been?” The question came out weary rather than accusatory, so I
unbent enough to answer with semi-honesty.

“
Elodie’s.”

“
Why?”

Okay, this whole talking to his back thing
was annoying me. “I went to let her and her dad know that the
little girl had been found. Elodie was really worried about
her.”

“
And what about last
night?”

“
Excuse me?”

“
Where were you last night?
You didn’t come home until hours after you dropped her
off.”

A fight then
, I thought. “I didn’t
realize I had such an early curfew,” I said, crossing to the
mini-fridge and grabbing a bottle of water for myself.

“
You didn’t answer the
question.”

“
I was out.”

“
Out,” he repeated, a low
thrum of anger seeping into his voice. “And I suppose that’s why I
found
this
on our search today?”

He swiveled and held out his hand. In the
center of his palm lay a large tuft of grayish white fur. Mine.

Shit.

“
So I went for a run. So
what? I was careful.”

“
And what exactly would you
have done if it had been Patrick who’d found this?”

I jerked my shoulders in a shrug. “It’s fur.
There are no timber wolves in this area naturally, so logic would
dictate that it was from somebody’s Malamute or a wolf-dog hybrid.
Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
There’s no reason why he should think it was from a wild wolf and
no reason why he or anyone else should connect it to me.”

“
You were out near where
that boy disappeared. Your scent trail crossed his.”

I shrugged again. “I scented him while I was
out. Followed his trail for a while, then got distracted.” By that
other wolf, which I still hadn’t told Dad about. Now didn’t seem to
be the time. I twisted off the cap of the water and took a drink,
waiting to see where he was going with this.

He said nothing, just continued to stare me
down, his gold eyes the only sign his patience was waning.

I lowered the bottle, slowly. “You don’t
think I had something to
do
with this, do you?”

“
Did you?”

“
No!” I exploded. “How
could you think that? What motive would I have for stalking some
guy and his kid sister? They were both attacked and drugged. I
don’t have access to that kind of stuff.”

Except that I did. I realized as soon as it
was out of my mouth that we had tranquilizers both here and at the
research station.

Still, he said nothing. Watching me. Waiting
for me to slip up. My temper spiked. I couldn’t believe he was
accusing me of this. But blowing up at him wasn’t going to help my
case. So I thought of Elodie and searched for patience. “I didn’t
drug them. I didn’t even see them. And I sure as hell didn’t modify
a bear trap to hack halfway through that guy’s leg, then tear up a
deer nearby for shits and giggles in order to attract predators.
All I did was go for a run. That’s it.”

Dad let out a breath and his eyes faded back
to their usual green. “Okay.”

I blinked at him. “Just, ‘okay’?”

“
You say you didn’t do it,
I believe you. But son, you’ve got to be more careful.”

“
Is this the part where you
point out that there’s some psycho out there like a normal parent?
Because we both know I can protect myself.”

“
We both know that doesn’t
necessarily mean jack shit. You have to see the threat to defend
against it.”

The stab of pain hit just below my
breastbone. Mom. If she’d been attacked directly, she probably
would have survived.

“
I can’t take it if
something happens to you too,” said Dad quietly. “So please,
promise me you’ll be careful.”

“
I promise.”

~*~

Elodie

By some miracle I held it together through
dinner. Dad didn’t seem to catch on to all the lies I was spouting,
so clearly I deserved an Oscar for my performance. Bully for me. I
even managed to scarf down three slices of pizza, though the meaty,
cheesy goodness sat like lead in my stomach. He’d have noticed if
my appetite had changed. And while I could have blamed it on Rich
and what I’d seen, I knew he’d pay more attention if I did. So I
stuck to the everything’s fine, everything’s
normal
routine
until I got upstairs to my room. Then I promptly shut and locked
the door, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower to mask the
noise, and lost my dinner.

The shakes started then. Full body tremors.
I wanted to fight them, to tense up my muscles and simply
refuse
to give in to my body. But after the day I’d put in,
I just couldn’t. I stripped out of my clothes and crawled in the
shower, sinking down to sit beneath the steaming spray. Jesus, I
was cold. And achy. Like that time I’d had the flu when I was
twelve. The last time I’d been really sick.

I’d forgotten how much it sucked.

As long as I was wrapped in the cocoon of
steam, my senses focused on the drumming spray, I didn’t have to
think, didn’t have to consider what I’d done today. But eventually
the hot water ran out. My skin was all pruney and sensitized from
the beating as I stepped out, still freezing. Quick as I could, I
toweled off and bundled up in my flannel pjs, buried deep in the
drawer from winter. Then I practically hurled myself beneath a
mound of blankets on my bed and lay there, shaking.

Oh this was not good. This was
so not
good.

If the fevers were starting, there was no
denying that I’d pushed the envelope today.

Who was I kidding? I’d been pushing the
envelope for days, ever since I woke up smelling that bacon. The
change was coming. After all the years of being so careful, of
doing everything right, it was happening anyway. All I’d managed to
do was delay the inevitable.

My mother had been right.

I’d never
really
believed it. That I
was cursed. I mean, seriously, who honestly believes in
curses?
That’s the stuff of fiction and fairy tales.

Which is fitting, I suppose, since my family
spawned a fairy tale. You know the story of Red Riding Hood? Yeah,
that’s my great, great, many times over great grandmother. The
original version, before it got diluted and Disneyfied, was a
morality tale, meant to keep good young women chaste and
obedient.

According to the story I’d parsed out from
the journal—which had been a slow process, as I’d had to translate
some pretty archaic French—this all started with a girl named
Sabine. Sabine was a good girl, pious, devout, submissive. A real
testament to her family. Then she fell in love with some guy. They
met on the road outside her village. She was on her way to visit
her grandmother, who was ill. He was, well, I couldn’t quite figure
out the translation. It was something like “wanderer.” I’d always
romanticized it to him being some sort of Gypsy. But whatever he
was, her family didn’t approve. So they forbade her from seeing
him. Of course. Because
that
always stops headstrong women
from doing whatever they want. She had an affair. I don’t know how
long it went on, but eventually, Sabine’s wanderer convinced her to
run away with him.

Her family found out and intercepted them,
killing the wanderer for besmirching their daughter’s virtue.
Sabine got shipped off to relatives in some other part of the
country. Right around that time, it came out that she was pregnant.
She was married to some other guy in a hurry. Sabine’s husband was
a good guy by all accounts, a widower with a son by his first wife.
When Sabine’s daughter was born, he took her as his own, and
everything was hunky dory for a while.

But the daughter, Brynne, was wild, even
more so than her mother. By the time she was fifteen, she’d gotten
involved with some guy. She was brazen about it, which really flew
in the face of the morality of the time. Her stepfather decided to
put a stop to it, and I don’t know what exactly that he did, but I
can guarantee it wasn’t some emotionally touchy feely intervention
Dr. Phil style. Things got physical and she . . . well, she
changed. That went over like a lead balloon and he attacked her.
According to the journal, she killed him in self defense, then left
her village alone, scared, and—like her mother before her—pregnant.
It pretty well went that way from generation to generation—not with
the killing part, but with each generation bearing a daughter who
also reached sexual maturity and turned into a werewolf. I’m really
not clear where the whole idea of a curse entered into things, but
the story perpetuated in various versions throughout the journal
was that Brynne was Sabine’s punishment for her lack of virtue.

Nobody really talked about love until my
mother.

According to her,
she and
my dad were a Romeo and Juliet, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, love
story. They fell in love in high school—a blistering,
lightning-strike, love-at-first-sight kind of thing. They kept
their relationship quiet because their families would never have
approved. When Mom got pregnant, she went through hell keeping my
father’s name a secret, no matter what her dad said or did, she
held her silence, and they planned.

She was supposed to give me up. It’s what
her father was expecting. One of those private adoption deals to a
couple in another town. Her mother, of course, wasn’t around
anymore to issue an opinion. But instead of some strange couple,
she handed me over to my father. He took me, left town, and waited
for her. She was supposed to take a Greyhound bus to meet him a few
days later, once she was out of the hospital. But she never
showed.

He told me she’d died from complications.
That’s less scarring, I suppose, than telling your child that her
mother slit her wrists, which is what I found out after some
unauthorized snooping in his room turned up the newspaper articles
about her death. I was ten. It was kind of hard to keep believing
the illusion of their love story after finding out she’d made the
choice to leave us. The fact that Dad still believed it made him
seem kind of sad and deluded. I didn’t have the heart to bring it
up. But even he didn’t know the real truth. Not until the letter.
Now I wonder if he wishes he left me behind.