I couldn’t help it—I giggled. He handed me a glass of Australian shiraz on a tray. I sipped it and studied him. He gazed into the fire, apparently lost for a moment in memory.
“Well, he’s legit,” Lonna said as she came through the door. She took the glass of wine he offered from the same silver tray.
“How do you know?”
“Called Galbraith. The poor man was asleep. I also checked with the National Registry of Domestic Help, and they were kind enough to verify that yes, he is a real butler with impeccable history.”
“Thank you, mademoiselle.”
“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder.” I yawned.
“Are you ready to retire?” asked Gabriel.
“I think so.” I rose with my half-finished glass of wine and headed toward the kitchen to put it in the sink. That was odd; I’d never been unable to finish a glass of wine before, but I was so exhausted I didn’t care. Maybe it was the half-bottle I’d had with dinner.
“I’ll take that, Doctor Fisher.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“I made up the bed in your old room and put your friend across the hall. Miss…”
“Marconi. Lonna Marconi.”
“Thanks.” I placed the glass on the tray. “I’m glad we didn’t have to go upstairs in the dark.”
Lonna and I climbed the stairs together. The first rooms were guest rooms. Mine was at the very end of the hall on the left. Fresh flowers stood in a vase on the bedside table, which was covered in a lacy cloth. My grandfather had decorated the room for a young girl, and it hadn’t changed at all since my first visit twenty-something years before except the twin bed had been replaced by a queen-sized one. Stenciled pastel carousel horses careened across the top of the cream-colored walls. Each horse was different and at a different place on its pole to mimic the motion of the carousel. I picked out my favorites—a blue unicorn directly across from the bed and a green stallion with peach-colored mane, tail and hooves over one of the French windows that opened onto the upper back balcony.
“Wow,” Lonna murmured. “Someone spent a lot of time in here decorating.”
“I think he had one of the local artists do them.”
We walked across the hall into the room that had once been my brother’s. The jewel-toned colors were more compatible with the tastes of little boys. The walls were painted cream, but instead of carousel horses, the top border was of vines and tree branches the clever artist had intertwined with berries and pinecones so it was impossible to tell where the pattern started or repeated.
“This is incredible.” Lonna was wide-eyed. The furniture, all of darkly stained wood, had brass fixtures. The bed was situated on the wall to the left facing the two windows that looked over the front lawn. No balcony. In between the windows was a large painting of a mother wolf with two cubs reclining in the brush.
“Your brother’s room?”
“Yes.” Andrew had loved wolves—the larger, gray kind—so my grandfather had decorated his room to be forest-like. Andrew had never seen it.
A heaviness hit my eyelids, and I bade goodnight to Lonna. I could see fresh towels in the bathroom off my room to the left, but I decided to wait until the morning to take a shower. I washed my face, brushed my teeth and crawled into the larger bed, grateful for the extra space. Part of me had been dreading sleeping in a twin bed again. My head hit the pillow, and I was asleep.
At three o’clock I was wide awake. Sure, I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a wine bottle, but something had awakened me, and for once it wasn’t the usual nightmare. Although at that time of night, it seemed like bad dreams couldn’t be too far away. No, it had to be something else, something external. I listened and discerned voices coming from outside. For a moment, I dismissed it as the usual hubbub outside my apartment, but then I jerked fully awake. I was at my grandfather’s manor in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. The only people in the house were me, Lonna and the butler.
I put on my robe and slippers and tiptoed down the hall and stairs. My feet remembered the location of the creaky boards and avoided them. Instead of going through the front door, I crept through the kitchen and out the side door to the small kitchen garden.
The almost full moon illuminated the lawn and surrounding trees with weird shadows. I paused and crouched behind a hedge and tried to still the beating of my heart so my ears could pick up the voices again.
“Let Ronan make the kill,” one of them, a female argued. The voice sounded familiar. I peeked through the shrubs and saw a pack of wolves too large to be Arkansas red wolves or coyotes. Two of them, the largest and smallest, were black, and they were accompanied by a silver wolf and a golden one. They circled a deer, the animal’s eyes wide with fear at having been driven out into the open and surrounded by predators.
“He’s messy.”
“He’s young,” another replied.
Talking wolves? Am I dreaming? I shut my eyes and opened them after a few seconds. Nope, still there.
“I don’t know, guys. We shouldn’t be here.”
“The old man always let us hunt here. Why should now be different?”
“His granddaughter—”
“Is a flat-chested, elf-faced ivory-tower academic who won’t even know we’ve been here.” It was the female’s voice again. “If you’re careful, Ronan.”
The golden wolf lunged at the deer but misjudged its angle, and two of the others leapt aside as the animal crashed through their circle, hooves flying.
“We’ve got to figure out how real wolves do this,” panted the silver one as they took chase.
Real wolves? I shook my head. It was too incredible. What were these things? And what did my grandfather have to do with them?
I waited five or ten minutes to make sure they wouldn’t come back and staggered to my feet, my head still reeling from what I’d just witnessed. Especially the last comment by the gray wolf. If they weren’t real wolves, what were they?
“Amazing night, isn’t it?”
The voice shocked me, and I wheeled around. For a moment, it sounded like my grandfather, and I was transported back in time to my childhood as he and I stood on the balcony and found constellations. I was never good at it, my brain already bent to the reality of math and science rather than fanciful creatures in the stars.
A flicker of flame and then the smoldering ash of the end of a cigarette brought me back to the present. I coughed.
“Thought I’d light up while you thought about your answer.”
Leonard Bowman stood there, leaves stuck to his sweater and jeans. The light of his cigarette and the moon flickered in his dark eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I could ask you the same question.”
“It’s my grandfather’s house.”
No answer, just a long stream of smoke.
“It’s my house,” I finally said. The words felt awkward on my tongue, and I became aware I was standing in my nightshirt and boxers in a flimsy robe on a cool night. I shivered.
“So your lawyer says.”
I tried my best imitation of a Gabriel shrug. Leonard smiled and dropped the cigarette, which extinguished with a hiss in the dew-damp grass.
“So do you always lurk in the bushes of your own house?”
My cheeks burned with the flush that crept up my neck. “Not always. Sometimes I lurk in the trees.”
“I’d be careful if I were you, then.” A smile flickered across his lips, but his eyes remained serious. “You never know what might be in the woods around here.”
Why am I putting up with this stupid questioning? I took a deep breath. Because he might know about the talking wolves. “As long as it speaks, I can handle it,” I snapped.