Crap. I wasn't going to be able to talk my way out of this. "Yeah. I'm with a friend."
"Oh. Anyone I know?" She spoke brightly. Trying to draw me out.
I thought of the white lies and half-truths I could tell her. Then I remembered the phone call to Ariel last night. Be straight. Tell the truth. "By reputation. It's Ben O'Farrell. I'm helping him with a case." This was going to worry her. This was going to make her pry further. No information was better than too little information. I shouldn't have told her anything.
"Well, be careful, okay?" She just let it go. Like she actually trusted me to take care of myself.
"I will."
The rest of the conversation went pretty much as usual. Except for the part where Ben was sitting there smirking at me.
"I hope you're not planning on taking me home to meet the family."
I smiled sweetly at him. "Do you want to meet the family?"
He didn't answer. Just shook his head, with an expression like he was close to laughter. "That just sounds so damn normal."
Yeah, it did. And we weren't. Muddied everything up.
The honeymoon was over. That night, Ben and I lay in bed, holding each other, but it was as two people shored up together against the fears of the dark. He twitched in his sleep, like he was fighting something in his dreams. I whispered to him, stroked his hair, trying to calm him. We were near the new moon, on the downhill slide toward the full moon, when the pressure built, when the Wolf started rattling the bars of the cage. I'd forgotten how hard it was to resist when it was all new. I'd had over four years of practice keeping it under control. This was new to him. He was looking to me for guidance, which was perfectly reasonable. But I felt out of my depth most of the time.
Take this place for example. This magic. A family that decided it was okay to hire a bounty hunter to kill their son and pretend like their daughter didn't exist. A family so steeped in magic that all its members were terrified of each other. I didn't understand it.
We thought out loud during the drive back to Shiprock the next day.
"What's the series of events?" I said. "John comes back from Phoenix and he's different. A werewolf. We know how that can mess with someone. Then their oldest daughter, Joan, dies. Then Miriam disappears. They hire Cormac to hunt John."
"It sounds like John coming back from Phoenix as a werewolf was the trigger. Everything else happened after that," he said.
"What was it Tony said? A witch has to make a sacrifice to become a skinwalker. So Miriam cursed Joan, killed her, became a skinwalker."
"But why? Why did she want to do that? And why at that moment?"
"She wanted John to have a pack," I said softly. She didn't want her brother to be alone. It actually made sense, from a twisted point of view. I knew how hard it was to be alone.
"Why didn't she just let him bite her?" Ben said.
I thought about it a moment. Some people wanted to become lycanthropes. They sought it out, got themselves bitten. Why wouldn't Miriam have been one of those?
"Control," I said. "She wanted to be able to control it. She probably saw how it affected John. He wasn't able to control it. She wanted the power without that weakness."
He winced thoughtfully, his face lined with thought. "Thus begins their reign of terror. God, it almost makes sense. But we still can't prove she was dangerous. We need proof that she killed her sister. No one's willing to pursue the connection. Maybe they're afraid she'd takerevenge on them. curse them, kill them—"
"But she's dead. She can't do anything now."
"I'm not sure that changes anything in some people's minds."
Spirits lingered. Evil spirits continued to spread evil. If they—Louise, her family, Tony, others—believed that, I couldn't argue.
Miriam's immediate family may not have lived on a beautiful estate, but at least they had a house, a bit of land, an aura of normality.
Lawrence, on the other hand, lived in an honest-to-God shack, with weathered planks tied together for walls and a corrugated tin roof that seemed to just sit on top, without anything holding it down. It looked like he'd been living this way for years, because the place was actually several shacks attached to each other, as if he'd been adding rooms over the years whenever the mood struck him. The desert scrub around his place was covered with junked equipment, including several cars, or objects that had once been cars. The place was isolated, out on a dirt road, behind a hill, invisible from the town.
The question remained, did he live like this because he had to, or by choice?
"I have a bad feeling about this," Ben said, staring at the desolate house.
"Let's get it over with." I left the car, and Ben slowly followed.
I was afraid to knock on the front door. It looked like a deep sigh would knock it in. I tried it, rapping gently. The walls around it shuddered, but nothing broke.
No one answered, which wasn't entirely surprising. This didn't seem like the kind of place where people threw open the door and welcomed you with hugs. In fact, I kind of expected to hear rattlesnakes or yipping coyotes in the distance.
I knocked again, and waited for another minute of silence. "Well?"
"Nobody's home?" Ben shrugged. "Maybe we can come back later."
We didn't have a whole lot of time to wait. We also didn't have a whole lot of choice. What could we do, drive all over town asking random people where to find Lawrence?
"What do you want?" A man spoke with an accent, as if English wasn't his first language.
We had turned to leave, when the man leaning against the farthest corner of the building spoke. He was shorter than me, thick without being heavyset. He was old, weathered like stone, rough and windblown. His hair hung in a long gray braid.
"What do you want?" he said again, the words clipped and careful.
Ben said, "Are you Lawrence Wilson? Miriam Wilson's grandfather?"
He didn't answer, but Ben stayed calm, and seemed ready to wait him out.
"Yes," the old man said finally. For some reason the word was earth-shattering.
"I don't know if the police have told you—Miriam's been killed."
He nodded, his expression unchanging. "I know."
"We're trying to find out what she did before then."
Did Lawrence smile, just a little? "What is it you think she did?"
"I think she killed her oldest sister."
He slipped past us and opened the front door. It wasn't latched, locked, or anything. It just opened.
"You have proof?" he said.
"Still looking for it."
"And you came here to find it?"
"You filed the missing person report. The rest of her family seems happy enough forgetting about her. But not you. Why?"
Lawrence stood in the doorway, gripping the edge of it. I thought maybe he'd slam the door shut, after a good hard scowl. But he stayed still, watching us with hard, dark eyes.
"If I'd found her first, I could have helped her. I could have stopped her. That's why I filed the report."
"But she never turned up. You didn't find her."
"She didn't want to be found."
He went inside, but he left the door open. Like an invitation.
Ben and I glanced at each other. He gave a little shrug. I followed Lawrence inside, into the cave of the house. I sensed Ben come through the door behind me.
I'd never seen anything like it. The floor was dirt. The place wasn't sturdy. The planks had weathered and warped so that sun showed through the cracks between them, and dust motes floated in the bars of light that came in. In this weird, faded haze, I could make out the room's decorations: bundles of dried plants hung by the stems. Sage, maybe, fronds of yucca, others I couldn't identify. Along the opposite wall hung furs. Animal skins. Eyeless heads and snarling, empty mouths looked at me: the pale hide of a coyote; a large, hulking hide that covered most of the wall—a bear; a sleek, tawny, feline hide of a mountain lion. And a large canine, covered with thick, black fur. Wolf. One of each. His own catalog.