And then Jill came up and put her arms around me and her head on my shoulder and bawled, and I could put my arms around her and my cheek against her hair and not look at Val although I didn’t like turning my back on him (and the shadows) either. But what was he going to do with twenty-five other people in the house? Turn me into a space alien or an alligator? Call his creepy minions and have them carry me away to his secret lair?
The woman who said the legal words over them had come to our house and we had the reception there too. It was just food, there wasn’t an official wedding cake, but there were several cakes, and one of Mom’s friends had made a cake in a fancy pan with a hole in the middle and Gwenda put a little vase with some white roses out of Mom’s garden in the hole, so that’s the one they cut like a wedding cake while almost everybody but me took pictures. Mom did look gorgeous in her gold dress, and Rhonwyn had made her a sort of cap of yellow roses that should have looked totally woopy but was fantastic. (There’s a fourth sister—Blanchefleur—but no one’s seen her in like twenty years, and a half brother, Darnel, but he’s in a cobey unit, and on the wedding day was off being deployed somewhere saving Newworld from gaps in reality.) But Val was there all the time too, wearing a suit that fit him about as well as a horse blanket on a goat (his trouser legs were rolled up. He couldn’t have got them shortened for his wedding?) and he was pretty much glued to Mom’s side so that kind of ruined photo ops for me.
Mongo was totally thrilled by all the people (in Mongo’s opinion we didn’t entertain enough) and since these were nearly all friends of his too no one said anything about getting long black and white hairs on their good clothes. But after I stopped the third person trying to give him a piece of cake—sugar is so not a good idea with a dog who’s mental to begin with—I hooked my hand through his collar and dragged him out. He was all stiff-legged and resisting on the way to the kitchen door but as soon as I got him over the sill into the back yard he collapsed and turned into a sad hairy forlorn dog blob. I looked at him and laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. He raised his head and thumped his tail hopefully.
“No,” I said. “You may not go back in there and cruise for handouts.” But I did go back indoors myself long enough to grab a handful of dog biscuits and started running him through all of his tricks. He learned stuff really fast if there were biscuits involved but he forgot really fast too so you had to keep reminding him. I heard the kitchen door open as Mongo was dancing on his hind legs. I looked around warily but it was only Jill.
“Your mom says to stop playing with your dog and come in and talk to people,” she said. Her eyelids were still swollen from crying. I wanted to know why she was crying at my mom’s wedding, but I wasn’t ready to ask her yet.
“In a minute,” I said. “Go stand in the middle of the lawn and be herded.” She rolled her eyes but she went. It would be really useful if I could teach Mongo to fetch critters rather than just balls and sticks and towels with knots in them. Clare’s shelter had been a farm in her dad’s day before the town ate most of it, but she still owned several acres, and when someone wanted to adopt a wether or a goat or a pony you could guarantee they’d all be at the farthest end of their field. So I was trying to teach Mongo to herd. Jill did what I told her while I semaphored at Mongo. Uggh. Well, we’d get it one day. Maybe. I’d better watch the Teach Your Dog Herding vids again.
Jill walked back to me with Mongo at her heels. He was very likely to follow her around anyway, but when he came to me and sat hopefully, I gave him his last dog biscuit. First rule: If your dog doesn’t do what you want, it’s your fault.
I watched Jill look around our back yard. It was a corner lot, so it was pretty big. It was big enough for both Mongo and Mom’s flowers, if nobody was dumb enough to leave Mongo out here by himself for longer than he needed to pee (I’d like once asked Ran to put Mongo out when I was going to be home late from a school thing, Ran forgot to bring him in, and Mongo ate a rosebush. I have no idea why he didn’t cut his mouth to pieces. Special border-collie thorn-proof chromosome). And there was the old shed. It used to be Dad’s workshop. Mom had cleared it out really soon after Dad died—the only thing left was the old hammer that now lived under the kitchen sink. Since then it had filled up again and Mom had cleared it out again (Ran’s space station with the zillions of drone ships and the cheesy wormhole finally went to the charity shop to make some other family’s life miserable) because it was now Val’s office. I saw Jill’s eyes settle on the shed and stay there.
I turned around to look at it myself. Dad had built it out of a kit so it was pretty buggie, but Mom had planted stuff around it, and some of the vines and things had covered most of it up. Val had started moving his stuff in this week and . . .
. . . there were more of those kusatta shadows. Whatever was throwing them out here had just amazing numbers of legs unless it was several of them doing a synchronized team thing uggggh. . . .
I looked down at Mongo. He was whuffling through the grass around my feet, hoping for dog biscuit crumbs. Val’s shadows had never bothered Mongo. Fat lot of good you are, I thought at him. Aren’t dogs supposed to be sensitive to the weird and the icky? In the absence of crumbs, Mongo began licking the grass. I took a deep breath and looked over at Jill. She was scowling at the shed but it wasn’t a holy-electricity-what-is-that scowl, it was a trying-not-to-cry-any-more scowl. “Does the shed look . . . funny to you?” I said carefully.
Jill stopped scowling and looked blank. “No. Uh. What do you mean, funny? It’s a shed.”
“Never mind,” I said, suddenly very tired. I put my arm around her. “Now tell me what you’re crying about.”
She gave a drippy sniff. “Aren’t you supposed to cry at weddings?”
I didn’t say anything and she sighed and said, “I broke up with Eddie.”
“You—oh.”
“Try not to cheer,” she said.
I had never liked Eddie. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“No you’re not,” she said, but she put her head on my shoulder. “Oh, flastic, I bet your dress is silk. If I leave tear marks on it your aunt will kill me.”
“Gwenda only kills plaintiffs,” I said. “And then only when they’ve had a chance to withdraw and haven’t taken it.”
But Jill had stopped paying attention. “You know . . . there is something weird about—I think it’s the shadows on that shed. Is that what you mean?”
I went cold. Maybe it was better to think you were imagining things.
Jill was still staring at the shed. “Maybe it’s just the wind in the vines and stuff. Your mom sure knows how to make things grow.”
“Yeah,” I said.
My best friend turned her head and stared at me. “Why do you dislike Val so much?”
I shrugged, staring at the shadows snaking over the shed. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Oh, Maggie,” said Jill, worried. “Not like—”