Timber Wolf (Virtue Shifters Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  "Yeah, I know Jen, we went to school together. Well, I went to school with her brother. She was a few years behind us, but we'd hang out sometimes. What about her?" Jake put his chin on top of Mabs's head, like he was trying to read through her.

  "Preston was trying to get her to sell, too. Doris says the fact that she wouldn't gave Jennifer the resolve to hold her ground. She sounds proud of that. 'No sense in being 92 if you can't be stubborn for the young folks,' she says. What does he even want all this land for? They can't want to put an outlet mall in, there aren't even enough people in the area to support it. Did they find gold or oil beside the river or something?"

  "Developers always think they can eke another few dollars out of the locals," Jake said with a shrug. "Maybe they want to turn Virtue into a sleeper community for Schenectady."

  "Oh, come on, we're closer to Ottawa."

  He grinned against her hair. "I didn't say it was a good guess." After a moment's silence, he said, "A resort is probably more likely, though, now that you make that point. Nobody's gonna drive two or three hours from Virtue to work, but they might drive up here for a week's vacation."

  Mabs, thinking of the creek on the land, and the acres of forest and green, as well as the open fields, nodded. "Yeah, maybe it was a resort. They sent me paperwork ages go, right after I'd inherited the place. I threw it away without really looking at it, but that sounds familiar. Too bad, I'd have been willing to dig for some gold." She turned another page of the diary, her eyebrows drawing down as she read further. "He was really nagging her."

  "Preston was never a great human being."

  "Yeah, but no, I mean..." Mabs flipped ahead a few pages, frowning. "She mentions him more and more. She even talks about calling the sheriff."

  Jake shifted behind her so he could actually look at the diary's pages. "Did she?"

  "Not that she says, but..." Mabs fell silent again, rifling through the book. "But she got to where she was afraid of him and then—Jesus. And then I guess she died, because the entries stop. Well, that's horrible. God." She put the diary down and twisted to face Jake, her head starting to ache from the intensity of her frown. "I mean...you don't think he could have had anything to do with her death, do you?"

  "She was 93," Jake said gently.

  "Yeah, I know, but that's like—would you even think to look for any evidence of foul play if the victim was a 93 year old woman who lived on her own? They said she just died in her sleep, which you'd expect, right? But what if she didn't? But that's probably just...I don't know. Crazy talk."

  "Maybe. Probably," Jake admitted. "I don't know how we'd tell, either, without exhuming her, and even then..."

  Mabs shook her head. "She was cremated anyway, so that wouldn't help. I don't know. I might try talking to her doctor, or the sheriff, or...both..."

  "Would it make you feel better?"

  "It kind of would, yeah."

  Jake leaned in to kiss her, murmuring, "Then it's what you should do. But not tonight," against her mouth. "It's too late for investigations tonight."

  "I can think of some things I'd like to investigate."

  "Yeah? Can they be investigated on the couch?"

  "You know what, I think they can..." Mabs, gratefully, let questions about her great-aunt slip from her mind, and they finally went to bed much, much later.

  * * *

  Mabs was up early the next morning, but then, she was always up early, since Noah considered 7:30 to be an unbearably late morning. She left Doris's bedroom alone for the time being, not wanting to try moving the mattress and bed frame out without Jake's help, and as soon as it was late enough, called the sheriff's office to see if Doris Brannigan had ever filed a complaint about Preston Cole.

  "Not as such," the deputy told her thoughtfully. "She told the sheriff he was a nuisance, a couple of times when he saw her around town, but no formal complaints. How come?"

  "I don't know," Mabs said unhappily. "I'm just wondering. And...there wasn't anything suspicious about her death?"

  The deputy's voice sharpened. "Not that I'm aware of, no. Why do you ask?"

  "I don't know," Mabs said again. "I'm sure it's nothing."

  "But you're not," the deputy said, "or you wouldn't be asking these questions."

  Mabs sighed. "Yeah. But I don't have any reason to be suspicious, except a twitchy feeling. I'm given to understand that gut feelings aren't actually basis for police work."

  A little to her surprise, the deputy chuckled. "No, not really, but you let us know if anything more than a gut feeling comes to light, all right? Everybody around here liked Doris Brannigan. Nobody would want to imagine something worse than old age happened to her."

  "I'll let you know." Mabs hung up the phone and went to deal with the pillows and quilts on Doris's old bed, at least. Noah came bouncing in after her and jumped on the bed, sending dust everywhere, and Mabs coughed, trying to brush it off him. He squirmed away, and she paused just before dusting her hands together, staring at the fine crumbs stuck to her palms. Holding her hands carefully open so she couldn't knock any of it off, she went to find Jake in the kitchen. "What is this?"

  He turned her palm up, looking at the dust in the light. "Looks like sawdust."

  "That's what I thought." Mabs wet her lips. "It was all over Doris's bed."

  They both looked at the kitchen ceiling, as if it would hold answers. "It could've fallen through the slats in her ceiling," Jake said after a moment. "From the attic."

  "I don't remember seeing sawdust up there. Of course, I was shoveling snow in the middle of the night."

  "You know what," Jake said slowly, "I put the weather barrier up in the middle of the night, too, and I didn't take any of it down again when I was nailing the plywood in place. I haven't really looked at that broken beam up there. Maybe we should."

  "Are we going into the haunted attic?" Noah appeared in the kitchen door, looking hopeful.

  "Is the attic haunted?" Mabs asked, amused. "Jake and I are going up. You're not."

  Unmitigated devastation rose in Noah's face. "But I want to see the ghosts!"

  "Ghosts don't come out in the day," Mabs said absently. "But we'll need you and Wolf to protect the bottom of the ladder in case I'm wrong."

  Sheer delight replaced Noah's dismay and he charged up the stairs, yelling, "I'm gonna get you, ghosts!"

  Mabs and Jake, both smiling, followed him upstairs, and Jake pulled the attic ladder down. Mabs thought she could watch him do that forever, stretching all long and lean like that, but to her sorrow, the show ended as quickly as it had begun. She went up first, aware that even if she didn't get a good view that way, Jake did, as proven by his sound of appreciation as she climbed up in front of him.

  He started moving plastic sheets out of the way as soon as they got up there, mostly directing her to hold something, or step over there, as her part of helping. Noah yelled, "No monsters yet!" from the foot of the ladder. "Can I come up?"

  "No, baby. Okay, let's see, Doris's bed is about over here..." It was, as far as Mabs could tell, pretty near to the middle of the attic. With the plastic moved aside, she could see traces of sawdust on the floor, and squinted upward to see where it had come from.

  The broken roof beam was almost directly above her. Jake nodded at a pale spot where she was standing. "Looks like there used to be a support beam there. And it wasn't..." He trailed off and took a utility knife out of his jeans pocket to slash apart the vapor barrier he'd wrapped around the broken roof beam. "It wasn't nailed or screwed in," he said when he'd pulled the plastic away to reveal the beam. "Just braced. You can see where it left an impression." He traced a space on the broken section of beam that matched the paler spot on the floor.

  "So what happened?" Mabs asked, baffled. "Somebody removed it?"

  "Looks like. There's no cut in the beam itself, but the wood's soft. You could tell that from the outside, though, with the break in the roof's spine. So I'd say it had mostly rotted a long time ago, and the support bea
m was all that was keeping it up. It was just waiting on a heavy snowfall, or even a bad storm, to come down."

  "Bastards," Mabs said incredulously, even if she didn't know who the bastards were. "Why would somebody do th...to make me sell," she realized wearily. "Or to make Aunt Doris sell, before me. Shit, Jake. It has to be Preston, doesn't it? Only I don't know when, or how, or..."

  "He came over to help with the house in September," Jake said in a low, angry voice.

  "Shit. He did. And I know he was working inside the house, but..." Mabs exhaled a sigh. "But I don't know how I'd prove anything. And he kept nagging and being nasty after that, but he stopped a few weeks ago, like he'd given up. There's no way he doesn't know the roof fell in. Everybody in Virtue knows. The judge had pictures on her phone, for heaven's sake. So why wouldn't he have started leaning on me again about it?" She looked for something to sit on, feeling defeated, but between shoveling snow out the window and moving everything that couldn't be shoveled, there was nothing left but cold bare floor.

  "Well, your ex showed up around then, and you know everybody was talking about that, too. Maybe Preston figured if he shut up, you'd sell and leave with Brent."

  "Ugh. I'm so glad the judge sent him packing. I still don't know how he even found us." Mabs went to lean on one of the small windows she'd shoveled snow through, staring down at the yard below. Brent had been out of her life so long, and she'd been cautious enough, that she really didn't know how he'd found her, but a shiver ran down her spine. "What if he didn't?"

  Jake came to her side, frowning with curiosity. "Didn't what?"

  "Find us." Mabs looked up at him. "What if someone found him?"

  Jake's expression slowly cleared. "Somebody like Preston. But how could he? You didn't tell him Brent's name, did you?"

  "No, but he knew Noah's, and..." Mabs bared her teeth. "And my mom's old-fashioned. She put a birth announcement about Noah in the paper, with Brent's name in it. I bet with my name, Noah's name, and a little effort, you could find it."

  "You think Preston would go to that much trouble?"

  Mabs lifted her eyebrows. "I dunno, you know him better than I do. But I think Brent wouldn't. He's never had to try for anything in his life. I can imagine it bugging him that he didn't know where I'd gone, but I can't imagine him bothering to do anything about it. I just don't know how I prove any of it."

  "I could go have a chat with Brent," Jake offered with a kind of protective, not-quite-threatening growl to his voice. It sent a spill of delight through Mabs, and she stood on her toes to kiss him.

  "That's nice of you, but it doesn't matter, I don't think. The judge got rid of him and I'm sure he didn't take the support beam out of the attic. If we could find a way to prove Preston did, though...."

  "If I'd known to three months ago I could have sniffed around and found out, but any scent is long since gone."

  Mabs grinned. "Sniff around. Literally. That's so cool. Okay, I'd better get back downstairs and make Noah—"

  "Moooooooooommmmmmmmyyyyyyy? Wolf is hungry. Is it lunch time yet?"

  "—some lunch," Mabs finished, and went to feed her poor perishing child and his dog.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It bugged Jake that he couldn't pin anything on Preston Cole. In the grand scheme of things, Mabs was right: it didn't really matter. She'd kept the house, the roof could be repaired, and—

  And she's our mate, his wolf said with satisfaction. That's all we need.

  "It is," Jake said aloud, if softly. He'd gone to strip Doris's old bed while Mabs made lunch for Noah, and by the time he got everything into the washing machine, she'd finished and invited him to sit down and eat. Jake had, but absently, then went back up to the attic, hoping he could find something to tie Preston's presence that day to the broken roof beam.

  Honestly, though, if the attic smelled of anything, it was old dust and cold air, neither of which was any use. He made himself busy lashing the roof beam back together, hating the hack job of it, but it was plywooded over, above that, and it wasn't likely another storm would break through the plywood. At the very least, they needed to finish clearing out that whole side of the house before he started doing real repair work, but it made him grumpy to think about it.

  Late in the afternoon he and Mabs took Doris's bed apart and wrangled, with an enormous amount of effort, the bed's old mattress downstairs and onto the front porch. It weighed a ridiculous amount, even for a mattress, and just the idea of hauling it out to his truck so it could be brought to the dump left the adults panting with exhaustion. Noah and Wolf, delighted, spent half an hour jumping up and down on it, until Mabs finally said, "What if we put it on Noah's sled and dragged it over to the barn for him to play on until spring? We can throw it out then."

  "The barn is farther away than my truck," Jake pointed out.

  "True," she said. "But we don't have to lift it into the barn."

  "Sold."

  Mabs commandeered Noah's old-fashioned wood-slatted, metal-runnered sled, which he'd found in the barn himself, and they hauled the mattress out to the barn much more easily than it had come down the stairs. Noah and Wolf followed them and bounced merrily while Jake and Mabs flopped on the pallet bed Jake had been sleeping on until his move into the house. Mabs rubbed her hand over its surface, coming up with longish grey and white wolf hairs, and said, "You were sleeping as a wolf out here!"

  "Silly not to use a built-in fur coat if you've got one." Jake pulled her close for a kiss, and then another, until they had to back away from each other, breathless, so that things wouldn't go too far while a four-year-old was ten feet away. "You are the most gorgeous woman I've ever met," he murmured. "I can't believe how lucky I am."

  She laughed, a tiny, almost disbelieving sound. "You're lucky," she said, "I'm lucky. You're incredible. Skilled with your hands and devastatingly handsome."

  "I am skilled with my hands, aren't I?" Jake pretended to pull her close again, making her laugh a second time.

  "You are, but stop that." Mabs didn't sound like she wanted him to stop, but Noah, shrieking happily across the barn, would no doubt lose interest in bouncing on the old mattress if Jake tried to engage in any, uh, bouncing, of his own. Maybe trying to remind herself of that, Mabs rolled to the edge of the pallet bed and sat up, pushing her hands through her hair to get it away from her face. "Okay. I think that was everything in Doris's room. We can close it up now, until spring."

  "Well..." Jake sat up, too. "I was thinking of going ahead and putting insulation strips into the floor and ceiling in there. It'll help."

  Noah yelled, "Can I help?" and at Jake's agreement, bellowed, "Yaaay!" and fell onto his back on the mattress, clearly exhausted.

  "Right. Okay. I'm going to finish moving things out of the parlor and downstairs bedroom, then. They got a lot of it in September, but if we're just winterizing that side of the house..." Mabs stood, stretching, then offered Jake a hand up. He took it, mostly for the excuse to curl her close when he stood, and she stole a kiss before they headed for the barn door.

  "Mama, I'm gonna CAMP OUT in the barn FOREVER with Wolf, okay?"

  "Okay, honey! See you at dinner time!"

  Noah, evidently seeing no conflict between camping in the barn forever and coming in for dinner, shouted, "Okay!" at their backs.

  Jake's wolf growled a warning as the barn door closed behind them, just before Jake himself caught a whiff of a familiar scent on the wind.

  Brent Mitchell, and half a dozen near-strangers, stomped through Mabs's front gate.

  * * *

  Mabs, under her breath, said, "What the hell?" and cast Jake a quick look that darted to the barn and back to him again. His gut clenched, but he nodded, slowing so he would remain between Noah and whatever trouble Mabs's ex had stirred up. He chafed a little, but his wolf preened with pride at being asked to protect the cub.

  Wolves, Jake thought, were probably smarter than humans, at least in some ways.

  Most.

  A tense
grin pulled at Jake's mouth as Mabs marched away from him. Okay, maybe most.

  The little crowd Brent had gathered faltered as soon as they saw Mabs, glancing uncertainly at one another. Brent stalked forward, though, meeting her a bit closer to the barn than the house. "I'm taking my kid, Mabs, and nobody's gonna stop me. All these people," he waved at them, and it obviously stiffened their resolve a little, "have seen a wolf around here lately—"

  "Did they?" Mabs sounded exactly like she did when Noah was telling her an incredibly unlikely story. "That's amazing. Where did they see it?" Jake was surprised she didn't add a 'honey' on the end of that, and fought off a grin.

  "Right here," Brent snarled. "On this property. Hanging around this house."

  Mabs made a show of leaning to one side, obviously taking a better look at the crew of men—mostly men, there was one woman—that Brent had rounded up. "Hey, Bill. Hi, Matt. Tonya. Gosh, I never even saw any of you at the house lately. Were you spying on me?" She said it like it was a game, not an accusation, and the guy who'd nodded when she'd said 'Matt' suddenly looked embarrassed.

  "No, nah, nothing like that, Mabs. Just driving by, you know?"

  "In your Toyota Leaf?" Mabs asked, encouragingly. "That cute little car? The one you can't see over the fence with? And you saw a wolf? Wow! Good job! How's that thing handling the snow, anyway? You must have to really watch the ruts in the road."

  Jake's wolf, mystified, said, what is she doing? and Jake, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing, said, making them think about what they're doing.

  The wolf said, oh, and tipped its head dubiously. Don't humans usually think about what they're doing?

  Far, far less than you'd imagine. Even as he talked with his wolf, Matt, obviously mortified, backed off, and another of the men with him did too, mumbling something about not really being able to see over the fence either.

  "Well," Mabs said brightly, "you can get a glimpse through the gate sometimes, and goodness knows Noah's out here all the time with that puppy of his. I can see how things would get conf—"