Grey Lore

by Jean Knight Pace

  His dad came into the room, took in the mess, and the suitcase. He didn’t respond how Sam thought he would. He just stepped toward the suitcase and peered over Sam’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “I’d forgotten about all this stuff.”

  Sam didn’t find that perfectly believable, but he didn’t argue.

  His father sat beside him and looked at the wedding pictures just like Sam had—his face lost for several long minutes. “Guess I shouldn’t have stashed this stuff away.”

  “Sorry I got into it,” Sam said. “There was a mouse.”

  “You get it?”

  “Nope.” Sam was quiet for several minutes.

  “You okay, son?”

  Sam shrugged. “This is gonna sound crazy, but there’s this girl in my class who looks just like this picture of Grandma. I kept thinking the girl looked familiar, but couldn’t place her face. Now I can.” He pushed the picture toward his father. “I must have seen it sometime when I was younger. And remembered.”

  His father was silent for several minutes, staring at the photograph. Finally, he cleared his throat and laughed. “Well, you should ask that girl where her people hail from.”

  Just then the orange cat hopped onto the ledge outside the window and stared in.

  Sam jumped. His dad stood up. “Shoo now. Go on.”

  The cat didn’t shoo. It just narrowed its amber eyes and flicked its tail nub.

  The next day the cat was back. But it wasn’t on the windowsill. It had crept through the window Sam had opened, even though his father told him not to, and then it had plunked itself down into the old suitcase with the picture of Sam’s grandmother.

  “Shoo,” Sam said, just like his dad had.

  The cat licked a paw.

  “I mean it. Out.” Sam reached in to pick up the animal. He lifted her out of the suitcase and then lifted the picture to blow off the fur. On the back of the picture were the words, “With love, to my two beautiful daughters.” It was a perfectly normal inscription. Except that as far as Sam knew, his mother had been an only child.

  Ella turned off her light so Vivi would think she’d gone to sleep. She used the dim glow from her cell phone to see into her mother’s jewelry box. Once again she lifted up the fake bottom, and once again she held her mother’s note. Ella ran her finger along the cursive letters of her name—written on a secret paper, found in a secret compartment, a glance at a secret part of her mother’s life.

  She held the note for several minutes before setting it aside and looking at the stack of papers. On the top of the first sheet, her mother had scribbled, “If you’ve found all of this, I’m guessing that things aren’t great. Since I can’t tell you much or kiss you good-night, let me finish the tales I always told before bed.”

  Ella sat in the near darkness, holding the stack of papers. These words, these stories—they were her mother—her voice, her handwriting. And yet, hidden like this, they were her mother as a secret agent—as something more than a waitress at a diner who came home after midnight with a pocket full of ones.

  Ella sighed, flipping through the stack. She’d listened to her mother’s stories until she was twelve when, suddenly, she felt way too old for bedtime stories. They hadn’t been just stories either—poems, riddles, rhymes. They were all here. Her mother’s tales had involved monsters and monarchy—evil werewolves, beautiful queens, and sometimes beautiful werewolves and evil queens. Ella had always fallen asleep with teeth and swords, betrayal and impossible loyalty swirling through her dreams.

  Now Ella wished she’d never asked her mother to stop. She blinked away the tears that threatened to splatter her mother’s beautiful words. And then, she began to read.

  Once, in a world before our world, when a garnet sun sat in an amethyst sky, a werewolf king ruled, offering neither love nor mercy to any who opposed him.

  Ella settled into the corner of her closet, flipping through the pages of her mother’s manuscript. This was a familiar story, and one her mother had loved.

  While the wolves wore the fur of beast, their masters could also don the skin of man. Called the Veranderen, or the Changers, they were a nearly immortal, magical race of man-like creatures who could shift at will, day or night, full moon or no moon, into hulking, intelligent, wolven beasts. No one dared speak the ancient and degrading name “werewolf.” In the land of the great red sun, one ruler reigned supreme…

  The words were a blur of tears, memories, and sadness. The words were her mother right there, but not; her mother was gone. Ella would never see or hear or hug her again. Even so, she could hear her mother’s voice as she read—the voice that knew the story up and down. “Oh my gosh,” Ella whispered. “She was writing a book.”

  Chapter 19

  The farmer, Mitchell Jones, wanted that dog. It looked strong and had clearly been trained. Not only that, but when it looked at you, you got the feeling it was saying something. Jones liked that.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the acned boy at the Humane Society desk mumbled, looking down at his half-eaten roast beef sandwich. “The papers say I can’t give this one up. He’s fit to be put down come morning. Fancy lady in some shiny black car dropped him off last week and said he’d done took a bite outta her little toddler.”

  “That so?” Jones asked. “’Cause it doesn’t look like he’s gonna take a bite out a nothing, much less a baby. “

  “I’m sorry, sir. I just can’t set you up with him. We got other dogs.”

  “Yup,” the farmer said. “I see ‘em, but I don’t much like ‘em. That one’s a good dog. I’d say he’s even worth more than the fifty dollars the pound asks for these mutts.”

  As he said it, the dog let out a whimper like he was pleading his case.

  The boy looked at the dog and Jones could tell that even though the kid was skinny and pimpled and talked like he’d just been dumped off the pumpkin cart, he wasn’t really dumb. Sometimes kids were like animals—if you could see past the dirt and scruff you got a much better look. It was clear that the boy knew the animal wouldn’t do any harm either. In fact, as the farmer watched the boy look at the animal, he got a hunch. “You know, son, I’m not much of a gambling man, but I got a little bet for you.”

  The boy looked up.

  “You stick that half a sandwich in that cage. I’m going to tell that mutt not to touch it. If he so much as licks it, you win and I pick another dog. If he leaves it alone, I walk off with that animal today.”

  “But what’ll I tell Miss Mandy?” the boy asked, looking down at his sandwich. “I mean, if you take the dog.”

  “You tell her to come talk to Mitchell Jones,” the man said. “She knows a good animal when she sees one just like you do. She knows that dog didn’t do nothing.”

  “Sure didn’t,” the boy grumbled, handing the man his sandwich.

  Jones put the half-eaten roast beef sub in the cage. The dog looked at it, hungry.

  “Stay,” Jones said loudly. The dog lifted its head, then laid back down on the floor of its kennel.

  Jones looked at the boy, and the boy grinned. “I knowed he didn’t do nothing to no kid,” the teenager said.

  “Nope,” Jones said. “Sometimes fancy ladies’ll say whatever they can to get a mutt away from their pretty grass.”

  The boy nodded.

  “You know where my farm is?” Jones asked, fishing five ten dollar bills out of his wallet.

  “You train dogs and sell trinkets and run the corn maze every year, sir.”

  “That’s right,” Jones said. “You got a girlfriend?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, get you one, and come on out to the corn maze for free.”

  Sam had been thinking about the inscription on the back of his grandmother’s picture for the last two days. He wanted to ask his father about it, but didn’t know how. Bringing up potential family skeletons was always awkward.

  As soon as his dad walked through the door, Sam took a deep breath and cornered him, waving the pictu
re in his dad’s face like a lunatic.

  His father looked at him and said, “Sold two vacuums today,” then walked past Sam into the bedroom to put the money away.

  His dad’s announcement was enough of a shock that for a minute Sam forgot about the picture. He forgot about the fact that his mother might have a sister, which meant he might have an aunt, which meant he might have a cousin. He forgot about everything.

  “Two?” Sam asked, letting the picture hang at his side.

  “Two,” his dad practically sang from the next room. “Dos. Twee. Deux.”

  “That’s awesome, Dad,” Sam said.

  It was kind of a record. Sam couldn’t remember his dad ever selling two vacuums in a day. “Where’d you go?”

  “West side of town,” his dad said. “Nice folks.”

  “I guess,” Sam mumbled, looking down. He saw the picture in his hand, read the inscription again and then said, “Hey, Dad?”

  “Yeah,” his dad said. “Let me get my coat. We’ll go get one of those five-dollar pizzas.”

  Sam shook his head. It had to be a dream. Getting a pizza with his dad was possibly even weirder than finding a mysterious inscription on a picture or running through a pouring thunderstorm into an old lady’s house and eating her food. So, yes, pretty weird.

  “Dad,” he said again, looking at the picture.

  His father strode out of the room, jangling his keys like a teenager. “Come on, son, I’m starving.”

  Sam was too. He set the picture back into the box, inscription-side down and followed his father out the door.

  Chapter 20

  The Silver Shooter settled down on the couch, watching the news special about the shootings. All around the country other people were doing the same thing—curious to know the gory details of the murders, to surmise about what the killer’s motivation might have been, to gawk over the senselessness of the crimes. To wonder whether it would happen again.

  The Silver Shooter smiled, sipping a macchiato.

  The teeth, the reporter was explaining, were not just broken or bashed from the mouth, but carefully extracted. A forensic scientist had come on and was describing the procedure and displaying replicas of what the teeth would have looked like once pulled. After that, they brought out an old gun that was similar to what they believed the killer was using, as well as silver replicas of the bullets that had been found in the bodies—oblong silver discs that had travelled through healthy, beating hearts.

  The reporter concluded, “At risk of making light of these horrible murders, these crimes could be compared to graffiti: They serve no practical purpose, require quite a bit of effort, and make no clear statement. Yet the cost is so much higher than graffiti. These deaths aren’t something that can be washed up or painted away.”

  Indeed, the shooter thought. That was pretty much the point. To make an impression that would only be understood by those who were involved, to leave a blood trail that could not easily be cleaned up.

  Vivi’s computer had been left open. It was one of those things that wasn’t weird until you realized it was. Ella really didn’t mean to look at it, but she was drawn to the bright screen like a person might be drawn to an unusual piece of art, reading the words before she even realized what she was doing.

  A photo of a much younger, surprisingly handsome Charles Napper was in the upper left corner with a brief bio underneath. Ella guessed that her aunt was writing a grant for the wealthy philanthropist. Which should have been boring enough to make her stop reading. Except that near the bottom of Napper’s bio was a little blurb on the Central Indiana Hospital—a hospital famous, apparently, for the pioneering and funding of various types of genetic testing. And the place where Ella’s mother had spent the last few days of her life.

  Ever since the latest silver shooting, Ella had been sucked in by almost any headline having to do with the shootings, or the hospital.

  Years ago, Napper had been a chemist there.

  “Crazy,” Ella muttered to herself and sat down. She didn’t know what chemists did in hospitals. And she didn’t know what you could do in chemistry to make the kind of money Napper had made.

  It only took a tiny click to find out.

  Napper had worked in genetic testing, developing a blood test from a strand of ancient DNA—extracted from a piece of primordial human ear that had been found and preserved. The whole thing was kind of gross, yet fascinating.

  The test had been developed to detect whether you had a certain genetic disorder—pTr4, Napper called it.

  He went on to develop special test tubes that could be used for the testing. After their experimental stage at Central Indiana Hospital, the tubes had been given to every hospital throughout the U.S. This meant that any time a patient went in for any kind of blood work, they’d find out if they had the disease.

  The disease itself seemed like a strange combination of physical oddity and mental disorder—people whose skin didn’t react to certain elements like other people’s did, people who would begin to hallucinate and see animals speaking to them. The disorder was often associated with premature death.

  If it wasn’t for that last part, Ella might have laughed. The disease seemed so random, almost ridiculous. Who on earth would have such a disease? And supposing you did, who on earth would think to study and develop testing for this disease? And why were so many hospitals willing to conduct that testing? It seemed like the perfect example of bad bureaucratic spending.

  Ella reached out to scroll down just as the door shut behind her.

  “Ella Peterson.”

  She swung around to see her aunt standing there with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Her aunt had never before spoken to her so sharply. Ella stood up and fought the urge to hide her hands as if she’d been caught stealing. She must have looked sorry because Vivi’s face softened.

  “Listen, Ella,” Vivi said. “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t read anything from my computer. Most of the reports I write for the Conservatory are confidential. Honestly, you should know not to snoop around on someone else’s laptop.”

  Ella did know. It had been really rude. “I’m so sorry,” Ella stammered. “I just saw it there and didn’t really think.”

  Her aunt didn’t argue.

  Ella squirmed, searching for something to say that would release a bit of the tension between them. “So I never would have guessed that Mr. Napper started out in chemistry.”

  “He’s definitely an interesting man,” her aunt said, clicking the page closed.

  “Or that he’d been so good looking.”

  Her aunt actually laughed. “Well, I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Ella smiled. “Do you know him?” she asked, curious.

  Again her aunt laughed, though this time the sound wobbled a bit like it’d lost some air.

  “No, not really,” she said. “The whole town kind of knows him, of course. And, in working for the Nature Conservatory, I naturally do work for him sometimes. But mostly he keeps to himself. So I’d never really have the opportunity to tell him you found his thirty-something-self good looking.”

  “Thank goodness,” Ella said, expecting another laugh, but her aunt had turned to gather up a file that sat near the computer, neatly tucking all of the pages out of view.

  “I’m really sorry,” Ella said again.

  “It’s not a big deal,” her aunt said, but she didn’t meet Ella’s eyes when she said it. And that made Ella feel even worse. Why couldn’t she and her aunt just find a spot where they could be not awkward.

  Chapter 21

  Sam came home from school Friday afternoon determined to talk to his dad about the picture. He slipped down the hall. The suitcase wasn’t out like it had been. Sam figured his dad had put it away. He dug back behind the coat, boxes, and boots, and pulled it out.

  When he opened it, the contents were a wreck. Some postcards had come out of their rubber band and were all over the place, and a few colored stones were mixed up
with everything else. Sam was worried that when he found the picture, it would be scraped or bent. Turns out he didn’t need to worry. Because he couldn’t find the picture at all.

  He went through the items in the suitcase three more times. Sam stacked and unstacked the postcards like they were face cards he was shuffling and replaying. He moved all the rocks into a corner. He checked each pocket of the suitcase and felt around for any he might have missed. The picture was gone.

  He turned a circle in the room as if that would help him see the picture—like he’d look up and find it tacked to the wall.

  When Sam turned back to his original position, he still didn’t see the picture, but he did see the orange cat running out the front door. Where she had come from or been, he had no idea, but he followed her.

  The cat ran down the road and squeezed through the wrought iron bars of the gate, then sat there looking at Sam, as though inviting him to join her. Sam might have been a skinny kid, but he definitely wasn’t going to be able to fit through the gates that way. He went to the locked gate and shook it. The chains rattled and the four padlocks banged against the iron.

  “Did you steal it,” he asked, looking at the cat. “I mean, you couldn’t have, but where did it go? I know I put it right there.”

  The cat looked him squarely in the eyes and it was then that Sam noticed a long pink tail hanging out of the cat’s mouth.

  “You got the mouse,” Sam said, a little grossed out, but also impressed.

  “Now dear,” a voice said, and Sam jumped. “You mustn’t talk to the cats like they can understand you, or people will begin to say you’re crazy.”

  The old woman stood on the other side of the gate, walking cane in hand.

  Sam didn’t know what to say.

  “You haven’t come back for cookies, dear,” the woman said.