by Holley Trent
“Do you ever think about getting in touch with them?”
“With who?”
“Either side of your family.”
“Oh.”
For a long while, she didn’t say anything, and Eric didn’t force her to. He drove, she ate.
After about five miles, she set the empty yogurt container into the cup holder and pulled her feet up beneath her. “I think about it all the time, and it seems so silly. So…weak of me to want to pursue them.”
“How would getting in touch with them to see if there’s a chance for a relationship be weak?”
“My mother taught me to believe that I don’t need them. That I don’t need anyone except me and her, and less her, obviously, now that I’m past quarter-life.”
That didn’t sit right with him. The mysterious Ms. Weisz has to have been hiding some things. Eric kept that suspicion to himself, though. He’d keep his aggressive queries at bay until Maria had said all she was going to say. She was talking. He wanted more than anything to hear it all—not just because he wanted to know her, but she needed to say it. Maybe if she spoke those words and heard them from her mouth, she’d process her circumstances in a different way. She’d see that it needed to be discussed, and further—that maybe there were things she could do to fix the way she felt.
“You can’t fix things in the dark,” his grandmother used to say.
He considered asking Astrid to put that on a cross-stitch hanging with maybe some bats and owls and shit. He’d staple it in front of Maria’s desk at the Shrew office in Durham and install a spotlight beneath it.
Maybe if she looked at it enough, she’d take the sentiment to heart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Usually when Maria thought about her estranged family members, she experienced an uncomfortable tension in her body in that Danger, danger! way that always made her back off the subject. She’d always thought that anxiety was her body’s way of telling her brain, “Hey, lady, something’s wrong with those people. Don’t waste your thoughts on them,” but for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel that. If anything, she just felt confused—which wasn’t a station she particularly enjoyed dwelling in.
“That’s weird,” she said softly.
“What is?”
“Oh. Nothing. I’m just…thinking.”
“Feel free to do it aloud. It won’t bother me.”
“That’s okay. I don’t want to bring down your mood.”
“You’re an empath. Do I seem bothered to you?” He shot her a look and raised an eyebrow.
She checked in with herself and opened herself up psychically to digest the energy he was putting off. It was pretty neutral, surprisingly.
Huh.
She didn’t try to make sense of it. She was just going to roll with it until he changed his mind and got bored with hearing her speak.
She cleared her throat and leaned forward to turn on the radio. She wasn’t so much scanning the stations, limited though they were, as fiddling with the knobs. Stalling. Generally, she preferred having no background noise at all, even when she was meditating or practicing yoga. Sound sometimes stressed her out, but she needed there to be something competing with her for Eric’s attention—so the focus wasn’t entirely on her.
“I think about my family in Jamaica a lot,” she admitted, staring out her window. There wasn’t much to see as they neared the turnpike. Just cars and a lot of asphalt and concrete.
“Why did you stop visiting them?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. No one ever gave me a reason. It might have just been one of those things that fell through the cracks when there were other movements in my life. The last summer I went, I was thirteen or fourteen. Hard to keep track without having school grades as time references, but I know I was older than twelve. My mother and I had just moved again, and there wasn’t time for a trip that summer, and I guess, no money, either. She usually sent me on my own and my father’s family would collect me on the other end.”
“Did you ever ask her to send you after that?”
She shrugged again. “Conversations like that with my mother tended to be futile things. I’d broach one subject, and she’d move on to another so quickly that I couldn’t bridge a way back to what I wanted to talk about. I think after a while, I just let it drop. And then I got busy with that failed attempt at college and work and then…”
“The Shrew Study.”
“Yes.” She picked up the pendant between her breasts and fondled it idly. She couldn’t even remember who’d given it to her anymore. It wasn’t valuable—at least, not as far as she could tell, but she’d never had it appraised. She’d had the silver thing since she was ten or so. It was a simple disc with some inscription on the front that she couldn’t read but that she’d been told was important. They’d said it’d keep her safe.
“No, my grandmother said that,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry?”
Maria shook her head and looked at the road ahead. “My memory. It’s disordered. Because I don’t have a lot of milestone references in my life other than big moves, I sometimes have a hard time ordering memories. Things don’t get attached in my brain the way they should. I was trying to remember who gave me this pendant. It was my grandmother. I guess I didn’t understand her emphasis back then, but she was very concerned that I should take it. When I got home, my mother didn’t want me to have it, but I wouldn’t let her take it. I think she…I think she liked when I visited. My grandmother, I mean.”
Maria unfastened her seatbelt and squeezed between the seats. In the kitchenette, she caught Eric glancing back at her through the rearview mirror.
“Why did you think she didn’t?” he asked.
She fiddled with the small coffeemaker, put in a filter and grounds, added enough water for two servings, and started it up before returning to her seat up front. Hope it doesn’t splash.
She tucked her hair behind her ears and fixed her seatbelt. “I guess I believed what my mother told me.” Maria laughed, but it came out sounding choked. “Looking back, I think she might have been the most toxic person around me, and I just didn’t have enough context to determine it.”
“Why would she have wanted to sow discord between you and them?”
“This is just speculation. If I had to guess, I’d say it was because she wanted to isolate me, as much as she could, so it was just the two of us. So that the only ideas I had were her ideas. So that I would see her as my safe place and cling to her. I remember now that she used to say ‘It’s just you and me, kiddo.’ That didn’t make sense to me because there were always people around.”
“And you have no idea why she left home?”
“No. She never talked about her parents, except in very general terms. I don’t even know their first names, or if Weisz was their surname, too. All I know is where they lived, approximately, and that they probably weren’t hurting for money. My grandfather supposedly had a very good job. Um…something in…” She closed her eyes and tried to uproot the memory, but it was it was stuck. “I can’t remember. It was something technical. I…”
She didn’t realize she was gripping the armrests so hard until Eric used gentle fingers to loosen her left hand from one.
“Hey. Don’t frustrate yourself over it. It’s okay if you don’t remember. You can’t be expected to remember things, and especially not things people didn’t want you to know in the first place.”
“I wonder if they’re still alive. My grandparents. All of them, I mean.”
“You’re an investigator. If anyone could find out, it’d be you, and asking Sarah or Dana to help would certainly increase your odds of success.”
Sarah and Dana were the absolute best at finding missing people. In Maria’s case, the people she was curious about weren’t missing so much as estranged, and she only had piecemeal information about them.
“I’d have to think about it,” she said, though she’d more or less already made up her mind. Curiosity would eat her alive i
f she didn’t try to reach out. “I could be kicking up a hornet nest or two by trying to get in touch.”
“Or alternately, nothing bad is going to happen at all, and you’ll get some resolution.”
“And probably offend my mother at the same time.”
“You need to stop worrying about her feelings and start concerning yourself with your own. She did everything she could to make herself feel emotionally anchored, and now you have to do the same thing. You can’t keep carrying all this bullshit around with you—the what ifs and the curiosity about whether things happened the way you remembered or if you’re just projecting.”
“I told you to stop trying to psychoanalyze me.” There wasn’t any real heat to her words that time. She knew he wasn’t judging her or trying to make her say more than what needed to be said, but she was still uncomfortable with any one person knowing so much about her. No one knew all her secrets, and she liked it that way.
Maybe she was just like her mother, though, and trying to isolate herself and keep everyone else out so she could remain stuck in her ways—so that she’d feel justified in her ignorance.
Maria’s phone vibrated in the console compartment, and she leaned forward and plucked it out.
The coffeemaker chimed at the same time, indicating it had finished brewing. She glanced at the phone display and, seeing Tamara’s number on the screen, hit the speaker button as she depressed the seatbelt release.
“What’s going on, Tamara?”
“Fuckin’ Bear shit-storm.”
“What?”
Tamara growled. “Ugh. Mating frenzy. Started earlier than Bryan anticipated.”
“Amongst who?”
“There are at least five born-Bears getting antsy and unpredictable right now, including Drea.”
“Oh, boy.” Maria now understood why Tamara had growled.
Bryan’s sister Drea worked out of the Shrews’ Durham office as a receptionist and administrative assistant. In a nutshell, she held down the fort when the Shrews were away, which was frequent. The only other Shrew nearby at the moment was Sarah, and that was only because she was on maternity leave.
Maria grabbed a couple of travel mugs out of the cabinet over the sink and poured coffee into them. “What are they doing?”
“They’re a lot more surly and aggressive than usual. That’s probably not saying much for people like my brothers because they’re always surly and aggressive, but Drea is usually so mild-mannered.”
“So it’s noticeable from her.”
“Ding-ding-ding.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing yet, but Sarah and a couple of the grandmas in our network of psychic friends are keeping an eye on her. They’re not going to let her do anything foolish, but we have no idea how long this is going to last and whether we need to confine her.”
“I’m confused. She’s not around any other Bears except Chauncey, and he’s just a kid.”
Teenager, anyway. Chauncey was an orphaned born-Bear Gene had sent out to antagonize Patrick’s Catamounts, but because Chauncey was just a kid, he’d done the childish thing and chickened out before completing the task. Sarah’s family had taken him in. He lived with the Millers, but he still hung out with the Shrews and their associated weirdoes on occasion.
“You’re right. She’s not around any other Bears, usually, but apparently my stupid brother swung by the office to drop off some case files for Dana a couple of days ago.”
“You mean Peter?”
“Of course, I mean Peter.”
Peter had been eying Drea as if she were a tasty salmon filet for half a year or more. Tamara and Bryan had said, “Nuh-uh,” because Drea was too naive and Peter had that “ruthless Romanian mercenary” thing going on.
“He never delivers case documents by paper. He just emails his reports,” Maria said.
“Yep.”
“Oh, boy. Did he know what he was doing?”
“Of course he did. He knew perfectly well what he could have been triggering, and I think Mr. Shit-for-brains did it on purpose.”
“Him or his inner bear?”
“Probably the bear. The bear wants his mate, but the bear’s gonna have to wait.”
Maria cringed, dumped some sugar into the mugs, and pressed the lids on. “Anyone else?”
“Yeah, as I said, a few born-Bears and a couple of made-Bears. They’re all in isolation right now until the urges past.”
“Damn. That takes the muscle on our side way down.” She handed a coffee cup to Eric, turned the radio off, and then took her seat again.
“Now you’re understanding the shit-storm. I suppose, though, that if we’re having problems, Gene may be having some with his Bears, too. We can’t guess how many, but perhaps if there’s enough chaos going on with them, we can get in and make the disruption even bigger. We’re conferring with Dana about ways we could do that now. Trust me, everyone’s awake here. It’s going to be a long-assed day.”
“Let me know what’s happening.”
“Will try. How far from the school are you?”
“Ninety minutes, according to GPS,” Eric said. “We don’t want to get too close to the school in this RV because with that awful painting on the side, it’s going to be too memorable, so we’re going to scout it before school starts, and then park somewhere nearby until we do the pull.”
“Who’s driving getaway?”
“Maria will have to go in. She’s on the pickup list, but I’ll do what I can to sling my scent around.”
“Good plan. I think Bryan has a rendezvous point for you to meet with the kids’ mother.”
“It’s out of the fuckin’ way,” came Bryan’s muffled voice. He must have been far from the phone. “Sorry, but it was the best we could do. Keely got asylum with some Bears in Alaska and thinks she might permanently relocate there. They’ve got low numbers, and they’ll make it worth her while to stay.”
“How many hours of driving are we talking?” Eric asked.
“I haven’t done that math, but you’ll be driving to Buffalo. Keely and the kids are going to fly out of Toronto to cover their tracks a little. Fortunately for her, that dipshit she married didn’t think to take the kids’ passports.”
Eric groaned. “Okay, so Secaucus to Buffalo, and then back down to North Carolina.”
“Maybe not,” Tamara said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Look, we don’t know where Gene is. You’re mobile right now, and you might need to stay that way depending on how close to him you are.”
“Got ya,” Maria said.
“We’ve got to be flexible, right?” Tamara asked. “But, we’re Shrews. We’re used to that.”
“Yeah, I guess we are.”
“We’ll send you both some information. You know the score. Keep your phone charged.”
Tamara disconnected. Maria set her phone back inside the console and sipped her coffee.
Great.
She was on what could end up being an open-ended mission, which wasn’t unusual for Shrews, but that wasn’t what bothered her. Uncertainty—that she could handle. She grew up with that go-with-the-flow mentality thanks to her mother’s inability to plan far in advance. But Maria was adding another unpredictable element to the mix.
Bending Eric’s ear for a few minutes here and there wasn’t a big deal. They were in close quarters and it made sense that she tell him some things, if only to quell his curiosity and keep the peace. The idea of spending more time with him in a cramped space made her stomach lurch.
What would she tell him next? With all probability, something that would make him turn his back on her for good, and remind her that she’d had it right in the first place—keep him at arm’s length.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eric watched Maria comb the curls out of her dripping wet hair—the best she could in the tight space that was the bathroom—and wind her locks around themselves in a tidy bun that was almost conservative.
He leaned
against the kitchenette counter and peered out the RV’s side window at the young mom and toddler walking past. He’d parked in a subdivision near the school in front of the community’s pool house. Folks were walking by on their way to the park, barely giving the RV and its paint job a second look. Maybe they’d seen worse.
Maria was doing the best she could to disguise her looks. The Shrews all had a few tricks up their sleeves in that regard, but because Maria operated in stealth most of the time, she likely didn’t have to work as hard at it for the mission at hand.
She pulled a baseball cap onto her head—letting the bun stick out the back—and added another coat of mascara to what was already becoming a dark, heavy clump.
“It’s going to take you all afternoon to get that shit off,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
“And frosted pink lipstick, though?”
“Think about it. No one who sees me in a full face of makeup will be able to spot me when I don’t have it on. I think I blend in more when I’m wearing it.”
She was probably right about that. Maybe people didn’t pay much attention to her in her typical clothes in their muted colors and unostentatious cuts, but if they happened to let their gazes land on her face, it was hard not to stare. She had one of those hypnotizing intensities that was hard to pull one’s attention from. For the mission at hand, it was best if she looked like everyone else around her.
“What time ya got?” she asked.
He turned his wrist over and stared at his watch’s face. “Eleven-forty.”
“Okay. One kid goes to lunch at noon and the other at twelve-fifteen.” She tossed her beauty implements into her duffel bag. “I’m going to be at the office at eleven-fifty. No one’s seen the stepdad since drop-off time. The attendance clerk Bryan spoke to is there today. Everyone in the office knows the score, but she’ll be the one to implement the plan on the school’s end. She just has to call each classroom and have the teachers send the kids to the office with their things.”
“Do the teachers know why they’re being pulled out?”
“No, the only folks who know are the ones in the office. Dana didn’t think it was a good idea to have too many people know what’s happening. We doubt Gene is going to terrorize everyone in the building to get information, and as far as he knows, it’s credible that the office staff wouldn’t know much, either. They’re only going by what the paperwork said they’re allowed to do.”
