by Drew VanDyke
Elka nipped at my fingers, and then she led me out of the basement through a concealed door that slid open when she nosed a specific tile on the wall next to it. The tunnel branched out and up a ways, terminating at a camouflaged duck blind. At least, if anyone stumbled across it, that’s what it looked like.
I crept outside after the wolves. I knelt down as they thought at me, showing me their departure. They licked my face and ears playfully for a moment before they loped away.
I sat back and watched them disappear into the slowly fading sunset as the colors bled out of the sky. Jackson must have called them during my nap and given them instructions. He was still trying to rope me into his world. Was I really going to give up the chance to do something good in the world? Just because I didn’t like the way it had been handled? Hmm. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a paranormal prenup?
With that thought in mind, I went to enjoy my very own place for the very first time.
“No sign of Whelan anywhere,” Adam said as we sat down for donuts at Crave the next morning. That was after I gave him a big Ashlee hug and thanked him for what he’d done for me. The basement, tunnel and duck blind was going to be a godsend during MoonFall and the family had come through for me in a way that I never expected.
Adam was having a bear claw with sprinkles on the toes, while I was indulging in my favorite, the Bavarian crème-filled chocolate. “None of my local sources came up with anything. At least not in Knightsbridge. You said he had a job?”
“He said that.”
“I wonder if it’s over or under the table. Guys with his background often have to find cash work because a lot of people are afraid to hire anyone with drug convictions. But I’m not coming up with anything connected to his social security number. Maybe he’s using a fake.”
“Or maybe he took off. Wouldn’t be the first time he fell off the wagon.”
“Yes, well, I wish we had something with his recent scent on it. The pack could try to track him.”
I kept chewing. What was I supposed to say? Obviously I didn’t have all the information. From what I last saw of Whelan, he didn’t seem so terrible. Not a murderer, just a creep. Plenty of meth heads in the area. I wouldn’t trust him with my kids, but I could be civil.
Now, why did I think that? Did my subconscious know something I didn't. Mom says I really should listen to my intuition more.
Adam snapped, “Hey, nimrod. Earth to Amber.”
“Sorry.”
“You apologize way too much.”
“Sorr…um, okay.”
“Like I was saying…I’ve asked the pack to stay through the summer or until we’ve found Whelan and ruled him out as a threat to the family, whichever comes first.”
“Really?”
I must have seemed please, because he looked at me funny. “I thought you didn’t like them after all.”
“I never said I didn’t like the pack. I don’t like their expectations that I’m the Mary to their messiahs, without even a virgin birth. I can’t be a part of them if they put me on a pedestal.”
“But now you’re having second thoughts.”
“Third thoughts, I’d call them. Back around to the first thoughts”
Adam waved at my thoughts like imaginary flies. “Whatever. I mean, even though you said no, you’re actually still on the fence.”
“Well…”
“Man up, Ashlee. Make a decision.”
I punched my brother in the arm across the table as he laughed at me. “Underneath all your reasonableness, you’re still a sexist pig, and wolves eat pigs for breakfast.”
“Then you’ve never seen a wild boar with six-inch tusks.” He grunted like a pig, drawing looks from nearby tables.
That sparked a thought. “You’re not, like…a porcine, are you?”
“A what?”
I lowered my voice. “Well, if a supernatural werewolf is a lupine, a supernatural were-pig would be a porcine.”
Adam choked with laughter. “No, Ash. As far as I know, you’re the only were in this family.”
I thought I was onto something, though. “Dad’s a savant with math puzzles. Mom’s a ghost. Amber gets visions. I’m…you know. What do you have?”
“Have?”
“What’s your superpower?”
“I rock a mean tuxedo.” He tugged at an imaginary bowtie. “Scott. Adam Scott. Dry Martini. Shaken, not stirred.”
“Fine. Keep your secrets.”
“Confidences.”
“Whatever.”
Now that I knew the pack was going to be around and I had time to consider, I felt less pressured about becoming alpha mom to a litter of wolf puppies. Also, without Sierra in the way, there wasn’t any sociopathic element to distract me or confuse my emotions. I hadn’t been shot at lately either.
Amber and the family came back and I thanked Sully for organizing a clean sweep of the property inside and out, bringing the place back up to Amber’s standards and saving me from an onslaught of sibling disappointment coming in my direction.
My twin still looked at me funny as she wandered through the hallways and sniffed a lot. I followed her around, just daring her to make a comment. Then she smiled at me and went back to the garage where Elle and JR were still unpacking the truck.
“You knew we cleaned up,” I said.
“Psychic.” She tapped her forehead as she marched past me back through the laundry room.
“And security cameras.” Elle said, cocking her head at me as she followed Amber into their bedroom. “Hey, Amb. Whatcha think about us getting another dog?”
“Yeah, can we Mom? Please?” JR raced past me as I looked at them with envy and irritation.
“Another dog?”
Maybe I should volunteer to help out with choosing a good match for Spanky…although I think Elle had her heart set on a standard poodle.
Oy vey.
We had a nice group Fourth at the lodge: grilled meat and fireworks brought out my nostalgia. Dad and Will seemed oblivious to any oddities with the pack, though Rhonda’s nose kept twitching at Jackson and Sully’s easy intimacy like she expected them to begin having sex on the dining room table at any minute.
That made me remember what one of my gay friends told me when I was younger and dared to ask for details – for research, you understand. He’d said, “OMG, you straights are more obsessed with our sex lives than we are.” Probably a lot of truth in that.
Jackson spent the next few weeks educating me about wolf and canine pack behavior and I began thinking about how I was going to tell Will about my nocturnal adventuring. We hadn’t seen or smelled hide or hair of Whelan.
I was still stewing about the Con-Peg thing, but like most people I tend to procrastinate when it’s something I don’t want to do. And this conversation, I truly dreaded. Was it my business anyway? Con had me when he’d said he’d tell Peg when I told Will. I was procrastinating about that too.
The pack stayed as well, of course, picking up some construction jobs, but they remained invisible most of the time. I worked on a novel I’d been tinkering with for years and wrote up a fluff piece on Laguna Del Sol Life for some quick cash. Travel magazines are suckers for stories about naturist resorts, if carefully composed so as not to offend the masses – and life became a routine of bills, jobs, and as the Buddhists say “chopping wood and carrying water.”
Kind of peaceful, until I opened my mouth and said the wrong thing.
“So, why do you have a restraining order against Whelan?” Amber and I sat side by side on the edge of the pool and dangled our feet into the water while Spanky rested his head between us.
“You know Ashlee, I really wish you would let it go.”
“I just want to understand?”
“All you seem to want to do is dredge up the past.”
“He didn’t try to rape you, did he?” I asked, jumping to the worst conclusion I could think of.
“No, he didn’t rape me, or even try. Not hard, anyway.”
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I held my breath until she continued speaking. Okay, not really. But I did sit on my hands and grind my teeth until she sighed.
“Whelan got me hooked on Ritalin…to start with. Then some other stuff.”
“Ritalin? Like they give ADHD kids? That’s an amphetamine, right?”
“Ashlee, you don’t know what it was like after Mom died. Trying to take care of you and Dad and Adam and keep up with my grades and all the school activities? It was way too much work for a kid my age and you always sucked at being domestic. Hell, it was too much for Mom when she was alive and it was way too much for me.”
“Is that why when I came home for spring break my junior year I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of the vacuum? Lucky Adam was already in college and Dad slept like the dead.”
“Hey, I needed the energy and the concentration, but I couldn’t sleep until they wore off, and my OCD would kick in and I couldn’t stand the way the carpet looked. Besides, with you off at reform school after Shane died, I was the only estrogen in the house. I did what I had to do.”
“So Whelan was your supplier?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you pay him?”
Amber licked her lips. “You don’t want to know.”
“Oh my God.” I practically shrieked it.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“He traded drugs for sex and you’re defending him?”
“No, I mean…he only touched me some. Made me stick my hand down his pants. Stuff like that.”
“Gross. No wonder you became a lesbian.”
Amber rolled her eyes. “You don’t become a lesbian. You just are. Besides, I’m not, totally. I like guys too, sometimes. I just happened to fall in love with Elle.”
“Well, no matter what you call it, that was some fucked up shit.”
“Tell me about it. But once I turned sixteen and could drive to do the grocery shopping, I’d get cash back off Dad’s ATM card and use the money to pay him instead.”
“Yeah, that’s Whelan. Always needs money. God, what a creep!”
“Sometimes the pills were counterfeit, I’m sure. Now and then I had some weird reactions…and then I started having the visions. For a long time I thought it was the drugs.”
“But you’re done with all that now…” I trailed off with an implied question in my voice.
“Yeah, I eventually kicked it, for the pregnancy. And when Whelan started coming around after his first stint in rehab, I thought he’d changed. I made the mistake of going to Piccadilly Park with him, Mervin and John Robert. Well, before you know it, we’re surrounded by people Whelan owes money to and they’re threatening to take it out on all of us. Whelan grabbed a bottle and shattered it against a building to scare off the attackers, but a shard cut John Robert in the eye. We’re lucky he’s not blind today. After that I warned him off. Whelan, I mean.”
It bothered me that even a town like Knightsbridge, a place I liked to think of as safe enough for a woman to walk around alone at night and the neighborhood kids to play hide and seek past midnight in the summer, had its criminal underbelly. I’d had hints of it growing up – there were a few bad areas, of course – but I’d never thought much about it.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”
“You were having your own problems. Even before you turned for the first time, you did your own thing. Then, when you left for a year, we coped. By the time you came back, we’d handled it. Or we thought we did. The restraining order was Elle’s idea. That’s how I met her originally, though nothing happened between us for a while.”
“Yeah, you told me it was a court case, but I thought it was from the time when you were a working for the city.”
“Hey, I was still married to Mervin. I wasn’t about to tell you or anyone I had thoughts of batting for the other team.”
“You know, I still get pissed when I think about not going to your wedding.”
Amber glared. “You were invited. You just didn’t come.”
“I didn’t come because I was flat broke and living off unemployment at the time. Hell, Amber, you paid for your maid of honor to go and nobody in the family helped me out. Do you know how hurt I was?”
“I can’t believe that you’re still holding onto that. We weren’t exactly getting along right then. Why should I fork out a thousand bucks to include someone who was obviously going to make me less happy, not more?”
“Hey, I’m not the one who decided they wanted the fantasy wedding in the Grotto in Hawaii. You could have had it in town.”
Amber’s voice rose. “You have no idea what my life was like back then.”
“Then tell me! For God’s sakes, Amber, tell me.”
“You think telling you will fix everything?”
“You were mad when I didn’t tell you about my, uh, difference.”
She sighed. “Fair enough. But just remember, you asked. It ain’t pretty.”
“I don’t care. I need to know.”
“All right. The honeymoon was paid for and all of the flights had been arranged. I deliberately planned it over the full moon.”
“Really? You knew about me back then?”
“I knew something was weird about it. You always made some excuse and ran off every full moon – camping, some spa far away, whatever. I wondered if it was some kind of kinky sex cult you were into. Anyway, I figured that even if you could scrape up the money, you wouldn’t come.”
“Ouch.”
“Ash, I’m sorry now…but at the time, it was the culmination of years of planning and a hope chest full of programming. And I was terrified.”
“What was there to be terrified about?” I know, Miss I-can’t-help-but-interruptus.
“Who’s telling this story? Me or you?”
“Sor – er, go on.”
“I know everyone thinks I was the slutty one growing up, but the truth is, I was a virgin on my wedding night. With a guy anyway.”
“I never understood why you married Mervin.”
“I did what everybody expected me to.”
“Really? I never expected you to play house with a guy who looks like he could be our brother.”
“Mervin does not look like Adam.” She gave me this appalled look.
“Hell, yes he does. They’re both built like brick shithouses, but Adam moves like a gazelle and Mervin just lumbers along. You just can’t see it, ’cause then it would be…”
“Ew!”
We both laughed.
“Okay, I guess I can see it.”
“If it’s any consolation, they say you always marry someone with a combination of family characteristics.”
“What ‘they’?”
“Psychologists. Self-help gurus. People like that.”
“Never read them.”
No shit, I thought, but resisted the urge to say it. “Why didn’t you have a vision or premonition or something about how bad it would turn out?”
“It doesn’t work that way. We’re always too close to our own problems to see the solutions clearly. Especially when you’re lying to yourself about who you are. And since I’d shut down the twin bond, I’d locked myself up so tight so that I couldn’t smell my own bullshit. I can’t lie to myself anymore, and I can’t lie to you. So, I just try to stay away from subjects where the truth is going to hurt more than help. Why talk about the things I don’t like, but can’t control? I’m not a venter like you, Ash. Besides, you don’t tell me everything about your nocturnal habits and frankly, I probably wouldn’t want to know all the gory details.”
“Yeah. It’s not much fun waking up in a pool of blood and hoping it was just a rabbit.”
“Ew. And not funny. Anyway, I worry about you too much already. The whole family does.”
“Really? They do?” That made me feel good inside.
“Of course we do. We love you…. We just want you to be more stable than you are now.”
“God, you sound just like Rhonda.”
> Amber made a sour face. “Bite me.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that, Roz.”
“We used to love that movie.”
“Still do. It’s a classic.”
“Anyway, it’s all better now.”
“You and Elle. Nice and stable.”
“Shut up.”
“She’s totally great, by the way.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Um, backtracking a moment. You said you shut down the twin bond between us. What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t pick up your random thoughts anymore. About the only time my sixth sense twitches your direction is when you’re in deadly peril. Then I crave a cigarette and a glass of wine.”
“But you don’t smoke.”
“Used to.”
I waved my hands in the air. “Yet another thing I didn’t know.”
“I hid it from everyone.”
I snorted. “Funny how it’s more acceptable to smoke dope than tobacco nowadays, almost.”
“Speaking of which, you should really get a vaporizer. One of those pen things.”
“I tried that once, but the rednecks around here kept looking at me like I was smoking a doobie.”
Amber laughed. “Yeah, this is Knightsbridge.”
And then I did something I rarely did. I hugged her. That seemed to end the conversation, which was fine. I was emotionally exhausted from all this sharing anyway. In the back of my mind I knew I still didn’t know the whole story. Maybe I never would.
I left with the excuse of making a phone call.
Chapter 9
“So, how’s your mom?” I asked Will when I finally got a chance to see him after working my ass off to make my latest article deadline. It had been hard, because though I had good notes on the resort I was reviewing, the impressions weren’t really fresh in my mind. I erred on the side of praise, which is always good practice in the industry – nobody invites a travel writer who hurts business – and managed to bang out the draft. Only had to do a bit of cleanup and I could send it in.