by Chant, Zoe
"Well, Jake's family didn't, but they did live kind of out in the woods, now that I think about it. Mostly yes, though. Keeping the rest of us little people in our places with their magnificent houses, or something."
However, unlike at the Barlow residence, Michelle Whelan came out to the front porch when she heard the truck and waved to them. She was much younger than Tom Barlow, perhaps in her early forties. Like Barlow, she was white and well-dressed, wearing a summer dress with strappy sandals. She had dark blonde hair pulled back in an elegant twist, and a curious expression on her face as they got out of the truck. She called, "Sarah," pleasantly enough, and shook Matthew's hand as they came up to the porch. "You must be the new librarian."
"Matt Rojas," he said. "Nice to meet you."
She gave him an interested once-over. "You too. I see why Tom thought I should talk to you two. You're not from around here."
"No, but you have something in common anyway," Sarah said, and Michelle gave her an appraising look.
"So I was told. I didn't...well, come in." She turned and walked into the kitchen of her house, leaving Matthew and Sarah to trail behind her.
Sarah whispered, "What is she? Can you tell?" and Matthew winced.
"Other than a predator, no, but, Sarah...shifters have really good hearing."
"Oh. Oh!" Horror flooded Sarah's face and she clamped her mouth shut.
Matthew almost laughed, and even Michelle Whelan was grinning as she poured them lemonade, unasked. "So you don't know much about us," she said to Sarah. "I hadn't realized you knew anything at all, although I suppose your grandmother did."
Sarah's eyebrows shot up and she clawed them back down. Matt thought she was trying to look like she'd been aware of Virtue shifters all along. He wanted to ask about her grandmother, now, but this wasn't the time, particularly while Sarah was saying, as casually as she could, "Who else does know? It's not the kind of question I can go around asking."
Matt, fighting off a grin, thought that sounded very confident, like Sarah hadn't spent the afternoon being floored with one revelation after another about Virtue's secrets. "Oh, the Owens family, and the Alcotts, and...I'd say most of the families who were here in the beginning were aware of us, honestly, but they were all very hush-hush in that clench-jawed Puritan kind of way, so a lot of the knowledge has been lost. Karen Owens certainly remembers, though. That woman's like an elephant. Never forgets anything."
Sarah, sharply, said, "Like an elephant, or...?"
"Like one," Michelle said easily as she took a seat and gestured that they should, too. "As far as I know the last time an elephant of any sort was in Virtue was with P.T. Barnum. All right, fine, with the Barnum and Bailey Circus," she said to Sarah's indrawn breath of protest. "It was a better line the other way, though."
"It was," Sarah said sheepishly. "It's just that I remember the circus elephants being here when I was a kid, which was about a hundred years after P.T. Barnum died."
"More than," Michelle replied. "So what is it you're really looking for?"
"A way to cow developers into not trying to buy up Virtue," Sarah said. "The judge has notarized copies of the town charter, but the original has more pomp and circumstance, so she'd prefer to use that. But it's disappeared. Do you know why? It couldn't have had anything to do with the shifters here, because it was on display in the historical society building until the fifties."
"I don't know where it went, but I know why it's gone."
Sarah and Matthew both caught their breaths, leaning forward, and Michelle got the wicked smile of someone who knew she had a captive audience. "The public charter referenced the secret one, in passing. Only in so far as to say that it was the second, and public, copy of the charter, but that was enough that by the 50s, the community was starting to get worried about whether people would want to look into what the private copy said. My father mentioned his father talking about taking the copies of the charters out of the town council books."
"They were right to," Matthew said. "The interest in the histories—the real histories—of these small colonial towns is on the rise, and someone would have gone digging." Someone like Matthew, in fact, since that was very much the job waiting for him in New York.
"Someone is going digging," Sarah pointed out, as if she'd heard his thoughts. "It just happens that it's us. The good guys. What happened?"
Michelle shrugged. "One day the original charter just wasn't there anymore. It was about the same time the library was opening, so I think a lot of us figured it had been moved there, and we didn't want to make a fuss about it for the same reasons we don't now, so it just kind of got forgotten about."
"'We?'" Sarah squeaked, and Michelle laughed.
"Not 'me,' we. My dad's parents. I'm not immortal."
"Well!" Sarah burst out. "You could have been!"
"God, that would be a pain in the ass," Michelle Whelan said philosophically. "Can you imagine the paperwork?" Then her tone softened, becoming almost sad. "The trying to re-establish yourself in a new identity, or the hiding away to make sure nobody realized you weren't aging? No, I'm just a shifter, not an immortal on top of it."
Sarah rolled her eyes expressively. "'Just' a shifter. Is it—can I ask what you shift into? Is that rude?"
"The Whelans are a wolf clan." Michelle's friendly expression went cool, even calculating. "And only a handful of people outside of the old families here know that, so remember that even now people love to hear about wolf attack stories."
Genuine anger bristled through Matthew, a low growl rumbling in his chest. He wasn't about to let anyone hurt—or even threaten—Sarah Ekstrom, regardless of how well-connected they were in their community. Bears outweighed wolves.
And we'd be fighting for our mate, his oso said with satisfaction.
Michelle turned the calculating look on Matthew before it changed to an expression of thoughtful speculation. Her attitude softened and she offered an almost-apologetic smile to Sarah. "Sorry. You probably don't need the warning."
Sarah said, "I don't think so, no," stiffly. "I know I've got my finger in every pot in Virtue, but I don't spill secrets, Ms. Whelan."
"Oh, she's mad," Michelle said lightly. "She pulled out 'Ms. Whelan' instead of 'Michelle.' Fair enough. I am sorry I can't help you more, for what it's worth. We've spent a lot of time quietly resisting pressure to develop Virtue, but it worked better even just a few decades ago. It's one thing to buy off the guy down the road with big ambitions. It's a lot harder when you're facing a multi-billion dollar corporation."
"Is a multi-billion dollar corporation really going to be stopped by something like a royal charter?" Sarah asked, sounding sad.
"I suppose there's only one way to find out. Good luck in finding it." Michelle Whelan rose, clearly ending the interview.
"Thank you for your time." Sarah and Matthew rose as well, and left Michelle's house in thoughtful silence.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sarah kept her jaw clenched shut until they were in the truck and well on their way off the Whelan property. Matthew, who seemed burdened by his own thoughts, didn't appear to mind, until Sarah half-yelled, "My grandmother knew about you!"
"What?" Matthew jumped, stared at her in confusion, then visibly caught up with what she meant.
"Not about you," she clarified anyway. "About shifters. She knew about Virtue! And she didn't tell me! She didn't do anything but move away, in fact! How is that okay?"
"In her defense," Matthew said, "it's not easy to believe unless you actually see it with your own eyes."
Some of Sarah's frustration drained away. "Yeah, I guess that's true. Just...ugh. I was so close to knowing, and I hate not knowing."
"Is she still alive?" Matthew asked cautiously. "Could you talk to her about it now?"
A sigh burst from the woman driving. "No, she died when I was in my teens. I wish I'd been a little older. Wise enough to ask her more about her life, you know? She probably wouldn't have dropped 'oh, and by the way, Virt
ue is full of shapeshifters' on me, but...it's one of those regrets you can't fix."
"I do know," Matt replied softly. "Mis abuelos told me more about their lives than most grandparents do, maybe, because they had to prepare me for who I was, but there are still so many things I'd like to have talked to them about. Things I didn't know enough to ask about, when I was a child."
She gave him a sad, grateful look. "Yeah. Like that. I still wonder if Mom knew. Knows. I can ask her, at least. Just not on the phone," she promised, remembering his warning from earlier. "She might be coming up for Mabs's wedding, though, so maybe then."
"That's at the end of the month?" Matthew smiled at Sarah's nod. "Maybe I'll get to meet her. I'd like to meet your mom."
"She's a force to be reckoned with," Sarah warned.
"She'd have to be. She raised you."
Sarah barked a pleased, "Hah! Even by her standards I'm a busybody."
"Not at all," Matthew said strenuously, like she needed defending even from herself. "You're involved in your community and help people out, but from what I've seen you don't seem to be a busybody at all. You're not a gossip or malicious or even doing any of what you do for your own glory, I don't think. You're what Mr. Rogers would have called a helper. Look for the helpers, he said. The world relies on people like you."
Sudden high emotion swept through Sarah, making her eyes and nose sting with tears. "Wow." Her voice sounded hoarse, even to her. "Wow, that's probably the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me."
"I have a whole list of other nice things I could say," Matthew offered anxiously, as if he was afraid he'd made her unhappy. "You're amazing, Sarah. I know I haven't even been here a week, but so far I mostly feel like I'm following you around being blown away by how dedicated you are to everybody and everything in Virtue. I don't think anybody else would have spent a sweaty morning in an attic and then the rest of the day running around interviewing people in hopes of digging up a piece of paper that's been lost for seventy years."
Sarah whispered, "Ah, jeez," and rubbed the heel of her hand under her eyes. "That's really nice. Thank you. I mean, I'm sure somebody else would have—"
"If somebody else would have, Judge Owens would have asked somebody else," Matthew said with conviction.
"Well." Sarah gave him a brief, watery smile. "You did."
"I had an ulterior motive."
"Oh?" Sarah's voice was still shaky. Apparently having someone really notice how much work she did was more important than she'd imagined.
"Well, two ulterior motives," Matthew admitted. "The first was solving the mystery of the missing charter."
Sarah blurted a laugh. "I'm sure that's a Nancy Drew title."
Matthew grinned. "I'll be your Ned."
Heat rushed through Sarah, partly because Matthew knew enough about Nancy Drew to pull out another character name from the books. Mostly, though, because of which name he'd chosen: Ned wasn't just one of Nancy's friends. He was her boyfriend.
The idea of Matthew Rojas being Ned to her Nancy sounded pretty dang terrific. Sarah whispered, "Sold," and tried to tell herself not to read too much into it.
Except then Matt said, "My other motive is spending as much time with you as possible. Sarah, look, I know we've only known each other a few days and I don't want to come across as too much, but—shit!"
Wallace Evans stepped out into the middle of the road and stopped, facing them with a glower.
* * *
This, Sarah thought as she hit the brakes, maybe this was why she kept herself too busy for boyfriends. Because when she finally found a truly great guy, lunatics threw themselves in front of her truck to keep any romantic declarations from being made. She'd been watching the road even though she wanted to look at Matthew, and she still barely got the truck stopped before it smashed into Wallace Evans.
The old man didn't look as if he was even slightly concerned with the possibility of being hit by three thousand pounds of fast-traveling metal. He just stood there, a snarl on his weathered face, while Sarah tumbled out of the truck, her heart beating so fast she thought she might throw up. "Mr. Evans, what the—what—! Are you okay?"
He obviously was, at least in the physical sense. The truck's grill was a few feet from his knees, and his glare suggested Sarah had been in the wrong for driving on the road at all. Matthew got out of the truck on his side, a concerned shadow at the corner of Sarah's eye while Evans glowered at them both.
"I'm sent to tell you," he warned. "I'm sent to tell you to leave it alone."
"Sent?" Sarah's voice cracked upward on the word. "Sent by whom? To leave what alone? Why?"
Evans growled, "You know what," and stomped on across the road like he'd just been out for a walk in the middle of the woods and they'd inconvenienced him, rather than him endangering all of them.
Sarah put her hand on the truck's hood, leaning heavily as she pressed her other hand against her chest. Her heartbeat was still sickeningly fast, and when Matthew came around the truck to offer a hand under her elbow in support, she was incredibly grateful. She whispered, "Thanks."
Matthew, cautiously, pulled her closer, until she leaned on him instead of the truck, and that was...
...that was a lot better. That was wonderful. Sarah closed her eyes, drawing shaky breaths of his delicious scent until her heart slowed a little. "I thought I was gonna hit him," she said, muffled against his chest.
"I did too," Matthew admitted against her hair. "You okay?"
"I think so. Shaky. Confused." She pulled away a little, sudden anger starting to burn away the shakes. "What on earth was that about!"
"Somebody obviously doesn't want you looking up the charter," Matthew said. "Or doesn't want the development stopped. Either way."
"Yeah, but the old crank in the woods sending the message? That doesn't make any sense." Sarah's shoulders caved. "Of course, what do I know, it turns out the old crank in the woods is a shapeshifter, so why should I expect anyone to make sense anymore?"
"Someone sent him," Matthew murmured. "We'll figure out who, and find out what's going on." He hesitated. "You're trembling. Would...would you like me to drive you home?"
Sarah let out a breath of laughter and stepped into his embrace again before mumbling, "Yeah, actually. That would be great, if you didn't mind. I'm sure I could, but..."
"But sometimes it's okay to not do everything yourself." Matthew hesitated, looking down at her, and Sarah's heart thumped in a whole different way. He looked as if he might want to kiss her, and she absolutely, profoundly wanted to be kissed.
But then he looked like he also remembered they were standing in the middle of the road. Disappointment flashed in his dark eyes, but he turned it into a smile and walked her to the passenger side of the truck before going back to the driver's side himself, and driving them home.
* * *
Two things crowded Sarah's mind as they drove home. One was obviously that Wallace Evans had walked out into the middle of the road, issued a strange ultimatum, and walked off again.
The other was that Matt had asked if she would like him to drive her home.
He hadn't just assumed that was what she wanted. He hadn't thought he knew best and told her what would happen. He'd asked, trusting her judgment and putting voice to the idea she'd been wrestling with for the past few days: that it was okay to not do everything herself, sometimes.
Sarah honestly couldn't remember not doing everything herself. She liked being involved, she liked doing things well, she liked knowing things were going to get done. Her last boyfriends had seen that aspect of her as a bug, not a feature. Her most recent breakup—years ago now—had involved the words 'control freak,' after which Sarah had decided romance wasn't worth it and that she was too busy anyway.
Matt didn't think she was a control freak. He admired her involvement. He'd said so openly. He'd said he wanted to help. And not just help, but help by doing things the way she wanted them done.
He was leaving at the end
of the month, and it was going to kill her.
And that was every reason she needed, right there, to not take it any further. She was working with a stupendously hot, sexy, charming man, building an amazing friendship with him, even having a few adventures with him. The sensible thing to do was to let that be enough.
Sarah was really, really tired of being sensible.
Matt pulled into her driveway, saying, "It's supposed to rain tonight. Want me to park in the garage?"
"Please. That'd be great." Sarah reached up and pressed the garage door opener as they approached, and a moment later, pressed it again to close the door behind them as Matthew killed the engine and slid a smile at her. "There you go. Home again safe. You okay?"
"Yeah. I have to figure out what that was about with Old Mr. Evans, obviously, but...not tonight. It's been a long and very weird day, even if it's only..." She checked her phone and made a face. "Five thirty. Wow. It has been a long weird day."
Matthew made a face, too. "I added a whole lot of the weirdness to it. Sorry."
"No, don't be. I'd rather have weird than be in the dark." She smiled and got out of the truck, walking around to the front of it to meet Matthew, whose grin was both for her and the garage.
"This is the tidiest garage I've ever been in. There's actually room between the front of the truck and the wall." He spread his arms demonstratively, and Sarah laughed.
"It's so I can work on the engine if I need room to."
"You work on the engine. Of course you do. God, you're amazing." Matthew's smile was awe-struck.
For a few seconds she just gazed up at him, almost star-struck herself. He was so handsome, with his smiling eyes behind the borderline-nerdy glasses. He was so comfortable to be around, even after the staggering revelation that he was a part-time bear. And he was so nice, ready to stand up for total strangers, and for her.
