by Chant, Zoe
"Good thing, too, or he wouldn't have survived this long. He's absolutely amazing about, I don't know, 85% of the time, but hoo boy, that other 15%..."
Jake kissed her hair. "That's why we tag-team the little darling now."
Mabs gave him a starry-eyed smile that turned to pure exasperation as Noah came charging down the stairs again. "Now what, Noah?"
"I forgot to give Auntie Sarah a good night hug and kiss!" Noah flung himself across the room to hug Sarah, whom he had, in fact, hugged earlier.
She groaned and hugged him quickly before putting him back on his feet. "You did that once already, kiddo. Don't get me in trouble by trying to use me as an excuse to stay downstairs. Now scoot upstairs and go to sleep, or else!"
Suspicion filled his blue eyes. "Or else what?"
"Or else I won't let you play MegloBots in the library anymore."
"Auntie Sarah! You wouldn't!" Noah clutched his chest theatrically and staggered back. His mother choked on a laugh, but managed to be frowning when he looked her way in hopes of having scored a smile.
Sarah, heartlessly, said, "I would too, so go. Good night, Noah."
Noah, dejected, scuffled out of the room, and Jake closed the door behind him so the adults could all successfully muffle their laughter at his dramatics. "I remember being like that," Jake said. "Afraid of missing something. Sometimes it's hard to be a kid."
"Sometimes it's hard to imagine not wanting to stay in bed forever," Sarah said without thinking through the implications.
A moment later the implications became clear as Matthew gave her a sly grin and the other two burst out laughing. Sarah clapped her hands over her cheeks as they heated, laughed, then tossed her hair and took Matt's hand as she stood. "Yeah, okay, you convinced me. We're heading home to stay in bed forever."
"Not forever," Mabs objected. "I've got a wedding coming up, you know."
"Okay, I'll make an exception for the wedding. Otherwise, it's forever!" Sarah hugged both Mabs and Jake, then took Matthew home with heartfelt plans to keep her word.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Despite the promises of the night before, Sarah had the look of a woman who'd been up several hours when Matthew crawled out of bed quite early the next morning. She had coffee brewing and a bowl of mostly-eaten cereal forgotten on the kitchen table, although she was in the living room, feet tucked up under herself as she went through what looked like old phone books. Matthew came to kiss her neck sleepily and murmured, "What are you doing?"
"Looking through old phone books." Sarah tipped her chin up for another kiss. "Wallace Evans isn't anywhere in the town's online information, like, anywhere. There's no family history on Ancestry, there's no social media profile at all, there's not even any tax or employment records. So I thought I'd see if I could find him the old-fashioned way."
"Are you supposed to be able to find all that online? Isn't a bunch of it private?" Matt climbed over the back of the couch to sit down next to her.
"Nothing is private in a data-mining corporate future," Sarah said dryly. "Some of it you have to pay to access, but you don't have to pay to see that they're not there. But neither of them have phones, either, or at least, not according to the phone books going back to the fifties."
"Which you just...had in your house?" Matthew asked, bemused.
"For reasons exactly like this!" Sarah protested. "You can never tell what's going to end up being useful! Although in this case it's not exactly useful, I guess, since they're not in it. How do you even live in the modern world without leaving a footprint of some kind?"
"Carefully, I guess. Cash only, no internet, live off the land? I don't know. I don't think I could do it."
"I think I could but I probably wouldn't like it. Either that or it'd be great and I'd become a hermit." Sarah's eyebrows went up. "Which is, I guess, what they've done. Okay." She leaned over and stole another kiss. Matthew slipped his hands around her waist, trying to tug her closer, but she pulled away with a smile. "I have to get my hiney in gear now. I'm supposed to be at the library in 45 minutes."
"How are you supposed to solve all of Virtue's mysteries and problems if you have a job that keeps you busy nine hours a day?"
"In the margins, I guess. Although my margins are pretty full too."
Matthew leered. "I like your full margins. Will you let me doodle in them?"
Sarah shouted with laughter, kissed him again, and ran off to get dressed. Matt, grinning, flipped through the phone books, finding nothing, then went and got dressed too, thoughtful as they walked over to the library together. Sarah opened the doors to the hordes of ravening children—Noah Brannigan was among them, determined to play 'MegloBots'—and Matthew went into the archival room to stare thoughtfully at the boxes he'd been going through.
Sarah, bearing lunch in a paper bag, found him there four hours later, completely absorbed in reading one of Doris Brannigan's first diaries. "This was Mabs's...grandmother?"
"Great-aunt," Sarah said, sitting down and pushing a lunch bag across to him. "These are from Kate's cafe. She sent extra cookies and says to come back soon."
"Aw, that's nice," Matt said absently. "She started keeping a diary when she was eight years old, did you know that?"
"I knew she had some from the war because Mabs read one of them and was telling me about it. Is there anything interesting in the earlier ones?"
"Well, there's this." Matthew turned to an entry he'd bookmarked and pushed the book across the table at Sarah before opening his lunch bag. He watched as she read, and could tell, by the way her eyebrows drew down, first a little, then quite a lot, and how her gaze went back to the top of the page, that she was reading and understanding what was written the same way he had.
After she read it a second time, she said, "But this is from...this is from 1938. She can't mean the same Wallace Evans."
"She talks about him exactly the same way everybody here does," Matthew said. "'Old Mr. Evans' out in the woods."
"Yeah, but..." Sarah looked up, confusion spread across her gorgeous features. "But if he was old then, even to a kid, he'd have to be over a hundred by now. And don't get me wrong, he looks like an old man, but not that old. Surely not that old? You said shifters aren't immortal!"
"Michelle Whelan said she wasn't immortal," Matthew corrected. "And neither, as far as I know, am I," he added hastily, at Sarah's appalled glance. "I don't think we are, mostly. But...there are no marriage records, or even any scandalized entries in contemporary diaries about an unorthodox relationship. Which doesn't mean anything, of course, with him living so remotely. He could have had a family without anyone being aware of it." He put his sandwich aside and got the box that had included Elizabeth Todd's diaries and comments on the early town records books. The bound book he took out looked a little newer, but still very old. "But this is one of Elizabeth Todd's daughter's diaries."
"'Wallace Evans was in today,'" Sarah read aloud. "'A blight has got to his potatoes and he's in need of new seed. He'll hear nothing of help from the townsfolk, though he's one of our own, but Papa means to send a sack of corn seed and Grandmama says he's to have more than that if she has to carry it out to the north wood on her own back.' This is...this is from 1846, Matt."
"And 'Wallace Evans' isn't 'Old Mr. Evans' in it," he finished.
"It can't be the same man." Sarah sounded completely uncertain. "He must have had a family at some point. There must have been a New Old Mr. Evans without anybody ever realizing it. Or a series of drifters living up there in the woods, and the town just calls them all Old Mr. Evans? Because people would notice if it was really the same man for all that time. Wouldn't they?"
"Would they, though?" Matthew actually sighed. "I know it's a small town, and I know people talk. But...how often does anybody actually see Wallace Evans?"
"Oh, I don't know. Kate at the cafe does those bagged lunches often enough to expect him, but I guess even if he's around town he keeps to himself. You only notice him as part of the background
, you know?"
"And you said you thought he was old when you were a kid, but everybody thinks grown-ups are ancient beyond reason when they're children themselves. What if people just...kind of half-assumed they were wrong about how old he was when they were kids, and mostly never think about it?"
"Well, that's..." Sarah's slow frown grew deeper. "I want to say that's absurd, except...you might just kind of, like, end up saying, 'Wow, he must be 90 if he's a day', wouldn't you? And you probably wouldn't say it around kids, or they wouldn't think anything of it, and if they did remember when they were grown-ups they'd just laugh and be like 'Yeah, my parents thought he was old back then too.' You wouldn't really imagine he was immortal, would you? Because that would be ridiculous."
Matt grinned wryly. "It seems about as likely as thinking, 'Oh, my cat doesn't like Jake, which probably means Jake is a shifter.'"
"Exactly!"
"I really think we should go out to the north woods and try to talk to that man."
"I think you're right. But not until after work," Sarah agreed, then stretched her face with alarm. "Wait, is it Wednes...no, it's only Tuesday. Okay, that's fine then. I've got a dress fitting for the wedding tomorrow. And I have to talk to the caterers for Mabs, and make sure the bachelorette party this weekend is a go, and next week there's some Pride stuff going on, so we really need to try to get this charter thing sorted out before then because I'm running out of time. I need my sleep."
Guilt splashed through Matthew. "I've been keeping you from that."
"Oh! Oh no." She reached across the table, catching his hand with hers. "No regrets there. I want to enjoy this while it lasts, however long or complicated or simple that might be. I feel like—you might think this is silly."
"Tell me anyway?"
Sarah glanced down, then back up with a bright, wistful smile. "I feel like somehow it's going to work out. I don't know how. Maybe it'll turn out that 'working out' means we just have a wonderful few weeks and go our separate ways. You said you think it's fate. Well, we both knew this was a short contract and that you've got a great job waiting for you, but maybe there's a twist of fate lying somewhere ahead of us that we just can't see coming. I guess I'm kind of excited to see."
Surprise pulled a crooked smile at the corner of Matthew's mouth. "You're pretty incredible, you know that?"
"In fact, I do." Sarah winked at him, then tapped the diary. "Now, what are we doing to do about the apparently-200-year-old-man who's hanging around in Virtue's woods?"
Matthew's smile expanded. Sarah really was incredible. He'd never imagined fate could be willing to wait, but she seemed to be ready to take things at a leisurely pace. "Tell you what, I'll keep reading and see if I can find any more about Wallace Evans or who might have leverage over him, and when you're done we'll head out to his place?"
"We might have dinner first," Sarah said pragmatically. "Kate's sandwiches are amazing, but even a stack of cookies doesn't actually make up for a well balanced meal."
"I am willing to challenge you on that," Matt said, and Sarah laughed as she went back into the main library.
Matt sat alone with his sandwich and the diaries for a few minutes, thinking. Maybe there was a way to work around it, though. Long distance, with weekends together. He'd never tried a long distance relationship before.
But he'd never met a woman important enough to try it for, either. Maybe, maybe they really could find a way to make it work.
Feeling a little better, he went back to the diaries, being careful not to drop cookie crumbs between the fragile old pages.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dinner ended up being hot dogs from the local convenience store, which, Sarah had to admit, wasn't exactly a well-balanced meal after all. On the other hand, they could be eaten in the truck while they drove up the north road trying to figure out where Wallace Evans even lived, since nobody in Virtue seemed to actually know.
"He has enough land to have a large garden, or used to," Matt said thoughtfully. "Think we could see it on a map app?"
"That's an amazingly good idea." Sarah pulled the truck over to the side of the road, then slid across the seat to lean against Matthew and look at his phone with him. He still smelled ridiculously good. Licking him seemed like it might be appropriate. Although they'd be late finding Old Man Evans' place if they did that. Of course, 'late' implied they were on a timetable, which they weren't, not in any aspect of their relationship, but...she decided she'd better not lick him after all. "Okay, that's the Barlow house, obviously," she said, tapping her finger in the air above the image that came up.
"Obviously." Matt sounded both amused and in total agreement. "It even looks impressive from above."
Sarah muttered, "That's what she said," and Matthew shouted with laughter.
"I dare you to say that in Tom Barlow's hearing."
"Nope. He's a shifter and with my luck he'd turn out to be a shark or something that would eat me in one bite." Sarah paused. "Are there ocean shapeshifters, or are those mermaids, or do mermaids not exist, please don't disappoint me by telling me mermaids don't exist."
Matthew, diplomatically, said, "I've never met a mermaid."
"I'll take it. Okay, look, that's the Hartnell place here, but I don't know what this is." She tapped the air above another clearing in the map's satellite imagery again. "It doesn't really look big enough to have a self-sustainable garden, but it doesn't look like a natural meadow, either, and I've never been down that road at all. I didn't know there was a road there."
Because there wasn't, exactly. Something resembling a visible trail appeared maybe half a mile off the road leading up to the Hartnell house, but there wasn't any particular indication of an entry to a driveway or anything. Sarah scooted back over to the driver's seat and they drove out through the woods toward the Hartnell place, with Matthew watching their progress on the mapping software. "Okay, stop here."
"Yeah?" Sarah pulled over again and peered at the woods on both sides of the road. "I can't see any incursions."
"Me either, but I can just about sense a shifter." Matt got out of the truck and hopped down into the ditch at the side of the road, edging toward the forest. "Are you brave enough to follow a bear into the woods?"
Sarah killed the engine and climbed out of the truck, too. "Yes?"
"Good, because my sense of smell is better in bear form, and that might be helpful for tracking." Matthew walked far enough into the woods that the road became something to guess at, rather than something that was obviously there, and then he shifted.
She hadn't seen him do that before, and it looked nothing like she imagined. Not that she knew what she'd imagined, but...something dramatic, maybe. Not just a sort of difficult-to-see pop! that began with a man and ended with a bear, with no other fuss about it. She squeaked, and Matthew looked back, his spectacled bear gaze wide with concern. "No, no, it's okay," Sarah said, amused. "Lead on, Macduff."
He gave a very laugh-like snort of sound, lifted his nose, sniffed the air thoroughly, and ambled away through the woods. Sarah scurried after him, avoiding bits of thorn and sharp branches that he obviously didn't need to even take notice of. Several minutes later they came upon the trail they'd seen on the mapping software, and Matt shifted back to human. "Whoever lives out here is really careful to not let this get any more obvious. In fact, they're making it less obvious."
He pointed toward young trees and underbrush that—certainly from the ground level—was definitely starting to disguise the trail they'd found. "Good thing we're not looking five years later," Sarah murmured. "We'd have never found them."
"I could still sniff them out."
"Only if you knew where to start sniffing!"
"True." Matt grinned at her and Sarah thought it was too bad they were on a mission. She bet they could find a nice mossy bed somewhere and...
...and get eaten alive by mosquitoes, or discover the moss contained a patch of poison ivy. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea.
I
t was a terrific fantasy, though. She took Matthew's hand, smiling, and they walked down the semi-visible trail together, neither of them in any particular hurry. After a few minutes, Sarah murmured, "It's so quiet," and Matthew gave a happy sigh.
"Yeah. The mountains where I grew up were really quiet, quieter than this, even, and I'm always surprised when I get away from the modern world for a few minutes and remember what that was like. It's nice."
"Would you, uh, do you want to be a bear in it?"
Matthew cast his glance upward. "Not without more cover than this trail has right now. It was great back there in the woods, but I wouldn't want anybody to snap a picture of a spectacled bear three thousand miles north of its usual home range."
"Ooooh. Yeah, no, that'd be bad, wouldn't it? God." A pang shot through Sarah. "You must have to be so careful all the time. All of you."
"I think fewer and fewer of us spend any time shifted, honestly. Which comes with problems of its own, of course. It's hard to remain part of a community if the whole community has to deny or ignore what it is, or practice its magic in secret."
"It's not fair," Sarah said, aware she sounded a great deal like Noah Brannigan. "I'm sorry."
"Well, at least sometimes we find people we can share our secrets with." Matthew flashed her a brilliant smile and Sarah's heart flip-flopped.
That was true. That was something. No matter how things turned out, she would still share something with Matt that very few other people in his life would. That had to count for something. She leaned a little closer in a kind of walking hug, and he kissed her hair.
Man, she really liked this guy. More than liked, even, although she wasn't going to let herself think about that very much. Not with him leaving in just a few weeks, even if they'd talked about what that could mean. Even if love at first sight was real. It was still a lot to say out loud. Aloud, to distract herself, she said, "Think Old Mr. Evans will come after us with a shotgun?"
Matthew chuckled. "That might depend on what kind of shifter he is. He might just come after us."
