“About Jack. About knowing anything about him.”
I looked at her, wary. I had heard once that lawyers never ask a question they didn’t already know the answer to, and Isabel’s voice was surprisingly sure.
She reached a long, unnaturally tanned arm into her bag and pulled out a sheaf of paper. She tossed it on top of my poetry book. “Your friend dropped these.”
It took me a moment to realize that it was a stack of glossy photo paper and that these images in front of me must’ve been digital prints of Olivia’s. My stomach flip-flopped. The first few photos were of woods, nothing particularly remarkable. Then there were the wolves. The crazy brindle wolf, half-hidden by trees. And that black wolf — had Sam told me his name? I hesitated, my fingers on the edge of the page, ready to flip to the next one. Isabel had tensed visibly next to me, preparing for me to see what was on the next sheet. I knew whatever Olivia had caught on film was going to be difficult to explain.
Finally, impatient, Isabel leaned across the aisle and snatched the top few prints from the stack. “Just turn the page.”
It was a photo of Jack. Jack as a wolf. A close-up of his eyes in a wolf’s face.
And the next one was of Jack himself. As a person. Naked.
The shot had a kind of raw, artistic power, almost posed-looking, the way Jack’s arms curled around his body, his head turned back over his shoulder toward the camera, showing scratches on the long, pale curve of his back.
I chewed my lip and looked at his face in both of them. No shot of him changing, but the similarity of the eyes was devastating. That close-up of the wolf’s face — that was the money shot. And then it hit me, what these photos really meant, the true importance. Not that Isabel knew. But that Olivia did. Olivia had taken these photos, so of course she must know. But for how long, and why hadn’t she told me?
“Say something.”
Finally, I looked up from the photos to Isabel. “What do you want me to say?”
Isabel made an irritated little noise. “You see the photos. He’s alive. He’s right there.”
I looked back at Jack, staring out of the woods. He looked cold in his new skin. “I don’t know what you want me to say. What do you want from me?”
She seemed to be struggling with herself. For a second, she looked like she might snap at me, and then she closed her eyes. She opened them and looked away, at the whiteboard. “You don’t have a brother, do you? Any siblings, right?”
“No. I’m an only child.”
Isabel shrugged. “Then I don’t know how I can explain. He’s my brother. I thought he was dead. But he’s not. He’s alive. He’s right there, but I don’t know where there is. I don’t know what that is. But I think — I think you do. Only you won’t help me.” She looked at me and her eyes flashed, fierce. “What have I ever done to you?”
I stumbled over the words. The truth was, Jack was her brother. It seemed like she ought to know. If only it wasn’t Isabel asking. I said, “Isabel … you have to know why I’m afraid to talk to you. I know you haven’t done anything to me personally. But I know people you’ve destroyed. Just … tell me why I should trust you.”
Isabel snatched back the photos and stuffed them back in her bag. “What you said. Because I’ve never done anything to you. Or maybe because I think whatever’s wrong with Jack — I think that’s what’s wrong with your boyfriend, too.”
I was abnormally paralyzed by the thought of the photos that I hadn’t seen in that stack. Was Sam in there? Maybe Olivia had known about the wolves for longer than I had — I tried to replay exactly what Olivia had said during our argument, trying to remember any double meaning. Isabel was staring at me, waiting for me to say something, and I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I snapped, “Okay, stop staring at me. Let me think.” The classroom door thumped as students began strolling in for class. I ripped a page out of my notebook and jotted my phone number on it. “That’s my cell. Call me after school sometime and we’ll figure out someplace to meet. I guess.”
Isabel took the number. I expected to see satisfaction on her face, but to my surprise, she looked as sick as I felt. The wolves were a secret no one wanted to share.
“We have a problem.”
Sam turned in the driver’s seat to look at me. “Aren’t you supposed to still be in class?”
“I got out early.” Last class was Art. Nobody was going to miss me and my hideous clay-and-wire sculpture, anyway. “Isabel knows.”
Sam blinked, slowly. “Who’s Isabel?”
“Jack’s sister, remember?” I turned down the heat — Sam had it set to hell — and shoved my backpack down by my feet. I explained the confrontation to him, leaving out how creepy the Jack-human photo was. “I have no idea what the other photos were.”
Sam immediately bypassed the Isabel question. “They were Olivia’s photos?”
“Yeah.”
Worry was written all over his face. “I wonder if this has something to do with the way Olivia was at the bookstore. With me.” When I didn’t answer, he looked at the steering wheel, or at something just past it. “If she knew what we were, it makes her entire eye comment very logical. She was trying to get us to confess.”
I said, “Yeah, actually. That would make a lot of sense.”
He sighed heavily. “Suddenly I’m thinking about what Rachel said. About the wolf that was at Olivia’s house.”
I closed my eyes and opened them again, still seeing the image of Jack with his arms wrapped around himself. “Ugh. I don’t want to think about that. What about Isabel? I can’t really avoid her. And I can’t keep lying; I just look like an idiot.”
Sam half smiled at me. “Well, I would ask you what sort of person she is and what you thought we ought to do —”
“— but I suck at reading people,” I finished for him.
“You said it, not me. Just remember that.”
“Okay, so what do we do? Why do I feel like I’m the only one in panic mode here? You’re completely … calm.”
Sam shrugged. “Total lack of preparedness for such a thing, probably. I don’t think I know what to plan for without meeting her. If I had talked to her when she had the photos, maybe I’d be worried, but right now, I can’t think of it concretely. I don’t know, Isabel sounds like a pleasant sort of name.”
I laughed. “Barking up the wrong tree there.”
He made a melodramatic face, and the twisted rueful agony in it was so overdone that it made me feel better. “Is she awful?”
“I used to think so. Now?” I shrugged. “Jury’s still out. So what do we do?”
“I think we have to meet her.”
“Both of us? Where?”
“Yes, both. This isn’t just your problem. I dunno. Someplace quiet. Someplace I can get a feel for her before we decide what to tell her.” He frowned. “She wouldn’t be the first family member to find out.”
I knew from his frown that he couldn’t be talking about his parents — his expression wouldn’t have changed if he had. “She wouldn’t?”
“Beck’s wife knew.”
“Past tense?”
“Breast cancer. It was long before me. I never knew her. I only found out about her from Paul, and by accident then. Beck didn’t want me to know about her. I guess because most people don’t do well with us, and he didn’t want me thinking I could just go out and get me a nice little wife of my own, or something.”
It seemed unfair, that two such tragedies should strike a couple. I realized, too late to comment on it, that I’d almost missed the unfamiliar bitterness in his voice. I thought about saying something, asking him about Beck, but the moment was gone, lost in noise as Sam turned up the radio and hit the accelerator.
He backed the Bronco out of the parking space, his forehead furrowed with thought. “To heck with the rules,” Sam said. “I want to meet her.”
The first words I ever heard Isabel say were: “Can I ask why the hell we’re making quiche instead of talking about my broth
er?” She had just climbed out of a massive white SUV that basically took over the Brisbanes’ entire driveway. My first impression of her was tall — probably because of the five-inch heels on the ass-kicking boots she wore — followed by ringlets — because her head had more of them than a porcelain doll.
“No,” Grace said, and I loved her because of the way she said it, no negotiation allowed.
Isabel made a noise that, if converted into a missile, had enough vitriol to obliterate a small country. “So can I ask who he is?”
I glanced at her in time to see her checking out my butt. She looked away quickly as I echoed, “No.”
Grace led us into the house. Turning to Isabel in the front hallway, she said, “Don’t ask any questions about Jack. My mom’s home.”
“Is that you, Grace?” Grace’s mom called from upstairs.
“Yes! We’re making quiche!” Grace hung up her coat and motioned for us to do the same.
“I brought some stuff back from the studio, just shove it out of your way!” her mom shouted back.
Isabel wrinkled her nose and kept her fur-lined jacket on, stuffing her hands in the pockets and standing back while Grace shoved boxes toward the walls of the room to clear a path through the clutter. Isabel looked profoundly out of place in the comfortably crowded kitchen. I couldn’t decide whether her perfect artificial ringlets made the not-quite-white linoleum floor look more pathetic or whether the old cracked floor made her hair look more perfect and fake. Until now, I hadn’t ever seen the kitchen as shabby.
Isabel shuffled back even farther as Grace shoved up her sleeves and washed her hands at the sink.
“Sam, turn on that radio and find something good, will you?”
I found a little boom box on the counter amongst some tins of salt and sugar and turned it on.
“God, we really are going to make quiche,” Isabel moaned. “I thought it was code for something else.” I grinned at her and she caught my eye and made an anguished face. But her expression was too much — I didn’t believe her angst entirely. Something in her eyes made me think she was at least curious about the situation. And the situation was this: I wasn’t going to confide in Isabel until I was damn certain what kind of person she was.
Grace’s mom came in then, smelling of orange-scented turps. “Hi, Sam. You’re making quiche, too?”
“Trying,” I said earnestly.
She laughed. “How fun. Who’s this?”
“Isabel,” Grace said. “Mom, do you know where that green cookbook is? I had it right here forever. It’s got the quiche recipe in it.”
Her mom shrugged helplessly and knelt by one of the boxes on the floor. “It must’ve walked off. What in the world is on the radio? Sam, you can make it do something better than that.”
While Grace fumbled through some cookbooks tucked away on a corner of the counter, I clicked through the radio stations until Grace’s mom said, “Stop right there!” when I got to some rather funky-sounding pop station. She stood, holding a box. “I think my work here is done. Have fun, kids. I’ll be back … sometime.”
Grace barely seemed to notice her leaving. She gestured at me. “Isabel, eggs and cheese and milk are in the fridge. Sam, we need to make plain old piecrusts. Would you preheat the oven to four-fifty and get us some pans?”
Isabel was staring inside the fridge. “There’s, like, eight thousand kinds of cheese in here. It all looks the same to me.”
“You do the oven, let Sam get the cheese and stuff. He knows food,” Grace said. She was standing on her tiptoes to get flour out of an overhead cupboard; it stretched her body gorgeously and made me want in the worst way to touch the bare skin exposed on her lower back. But then she heaved the flour down and I’d missed my chance, so I traded places with Isabel, grabbed some sharp cheddar and eggs and milk, and threw it all on the counter.
Grace was already involved with cutting shortening and flour in a bowl by the time I’d finished cracking eggs and whisking in some mayonnaise. The kitchen was suddenly full of activity, as if we were legion.
“What the hell is this?” Isabel demanded, staring at a package Grace had handed her.
Grace snorted with laughter. “It’s a mushroom.”
“It looks like it came out of a cow’s rear end.”
“I’d like that cow,” Grace said, leaning past Isabel to slap some butter into a saucepan. “Its butt would be worth a million. Sauté those in there for a few minutes till they’re nice and yummy.”
“How long?”
“Till they’re yummy,” I repeated.
“You heard the boy,” Grace said. She reached out a hand. “Pan!”
“Help her,” I told Isabel. “I’ll take care of yummy, since you can’t.”
“I’m already yummy,” muttered Isabel. She handed two pans to Grace, and Grace deftly unfolded the pie pastry — magic — into the bottom of each. She began to show Isabel how to crimp the edges. The entire process seemed very well-worn; I got the idea that Grace could’ve done this whole thing a lot faster without me and Isabel in her way.
Isabel caught me smiling at the sight of the two of them crimping piecrusts. “What are you smiling at? Look at your mushrooms!”
I rescued the mushrooms in time and added the spinach that Grace pushed into my hands.
“My mascara.” Isabel’s voice rose above the increasing clamor, and I looked to see her and Grace laughing and crying while cutting onions. Then the little onions’ powerful odor hit my nose and burned my eyes, too.
I offered my sauté pan to them. “Throw them in here. It’ll kill it a bit.”
Isabel scraped them off a cutting board into the pan and Grace slapped my butt with a flour-covered hand. I craned my neck, trying to see if she’d left a print, while Grace rubbed her hand in leftover flour to get better coverage and tried again.
“This is my song!” Grace suddenly announced. “Turn it up! Turn it up!”
It was Mariah Carey in the worst possible way, but it was so right at the moment. I turned it up until the little speakers buzzed against the tins next to them. I grabbed Grace’s hand and tugged her over to me and we started to dance like we were cool, terribly clumsy and unbearably sexy, her grinding up against me, hands in the air, my arms around her waist, too low to be chaste.
I thought to myself, A life is measured by moments like these. Grace leaned her head back, neck long and pale against my shoulder, to reach my mouth for a kiss, and just before I gave her one, I saw Isabel’s wistful eyes watch my mouth touch Grace’s.
“Tell me how long to set the timer for,” Isabel said, catching my eye and looking away. “And then maybe we can talk … ?”
Grace was still leaning back against me, secure in my arms, covered in flour and so entirely edible that I ached with wanting to be alone with her, here, now. She gestured lazily toward the open cookbook on the counter, drunk with my presence. Isabel consulted the recipe and set the timer.
There was a moment’s silence when we realized we were done, and then I took a breath and faced Isabel. “Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with Jack.”
Isabel and Grace both looked startled.
“Let’s go sit down,” Grace suggested, removing herself from my arms. “Living room’s that way. I’ll get coffee.”
So Isabel and I made our way into the living room. Like the kitchen, it was cluttered in a way I hadn’t noticed until Isabel was in it. She had to move a pile of unfolded laundry to sit on the sofa. I didn’t want to sit next to her, so I sat on the rocker across from her.
Looking at me out of the corner of her eye, Isabel asked, “Why aren’t you like Jack? Why aren’t you changing back and forth?”
I didn’t flinch; if Grace hadn’t warned me of how much Isabel had guessed, I probably would have. “I’ve been this way longer. You get more stable the longer it’s been. At first you just switch back and forth all the time. Temperature has a little bit to do with it, but not as much as later.”
She immediately fired a
nother one off: “Did you do this to Jack?”
I let the revulsion show on my face. “I don’t know who did it. There are quite a few of us and not all of us are nice people.” I didn’t say anything about his BB gun.
“Why is he so angry?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Because he’s an angry person?”
Isabel’s expression became … pointy.
“Look, getting bitten doesn’t make you into a monster. It just makes you into a wolf. You are what you are. When you’re a wolf, or when you’re shifting, you don’t have human inhibitions, so if you’re naturally angry or violent, you get worse.”
Grace walked in, precariously carrying three mugs of coffee. Isabel took one with a beaver on the side and I took one with a bank name on it. Grace joined Isabel on the sofa.
Isabel closed her eyes for a second. “Okay. So let me get this straight. My brother wasn’t really killed by wolves. He was just mauled by them and then turned into a werewolf? Sorry, I’m missing the whole undead thing. And isn’t there supposed to be something about moons and silver bullets and a bunch of crap like that?”
“He healed himself, but it took a while,” I told her. “He wasn’t ever really dead. I don’t know how he escaped from the morgue. The moon and silver stuff is all just myth. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s — it’s a disease that’s worse when it’s cold. I think the moon myth is because it gets cold overnight, so when we’re new, we change into wolves overnight a lot. So people thought it was the moon that caused it.”
Isabel seemed to be taking this pretty well. She wasn’t fainting, and she didn’t smell afraid. She sipped her coffee. “Grace, this is disgusting.”
“It’s instant,” Grace apologized.
Isabel asked, “So does my brother recognize me when he’s a wolf?”
Grace looked at my face; I couldn’t look back at her when I answered. “Probably a little. Some of us don’t remember anything about our lives when we’re wolves. Some of us remember a little.”
Shiver Trilogy (Shiver, Linger, Forever) Page 20
