Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  I forgot about Duncan’s dinner parties. The small living room is at capacity. Holly is here, and so is Fergus Monroe, our pilot, which surprises me because I didn’t realize he and Duncan were friends, and the policewoman, Bonnie. They’re all squeezed in, doing what seems to be woodwork on a huge piece of calico that’s been put out to protect the floors. Duncan himself is in the kitchen cooking, and when he looks up to see me he frowns.

  Who will I be tonight—suspect in a disappearance, or woman who recently ended things with him? Either way, I guess, he doesn’t have much reason to welcome me here. He pours me a glass of wine and when he hands it to me our fingers touch and I think it might be on purpose. He’s playing a game then, one that marries the two women together and could get him in trouble. I wonder if I have the stomach to play it right back. I think, in fact, that I do.

  “What are you doing?” I ask the group.

  They all chuckle, except Duncan who turns away to hide his smile. “Duncan’s decided the mission of his life is to become a carpenter, only he’s truly, inarguably rubbish at it,” Amelia explains, “so we get together every now and then to help him fix the crap he’s made, and he cooks for us in return, which he’s actually not rubbish at.”

  At least now I understand why his place is so full of poorly made furniture.

  “How are you with sanding?” Bonnie asks me.

  I sink down next to her on the floor. She’s sanding down the leg of what looks like a small, crooked coffee table. “It’s my middle name,” I say.

  She grins. “Best get started, then.”

  I listen to the others chat as we work. Their voices drift over me as I concentrate on my task. I don’t want to become too overwhelmed with the feel of what they’re doing. I’m tired tonight, and my own sensations are enough.

  Duncan finishes cooking and brings us each a bowl of shepherd’s pie. “No thanks,” I say.

  “Did you eat already?”

  “I don’t eat meat I haven’t hunted myself.”

  He bursts out laughing. “You’re too much, Inti Flynn.”

  I can’t help laughing, too. He has on another hand-knitted woolen jumper, this one cream-colored and diamond-patterned. It darkens his eyes.

  “So have Duncan and Bonnie interrogated you yet, Inti?” Amelia asks me with no small measure of mirth.

  “We interviewed everyone,” Bonnie says, like she’s said it before. “Had to.”

  “Actually I had Duncan all to myself for that one,” I say, glancing at him, and for a moment we are back there in that room together.

  “How’d she come off then?” Amelia asks him. “Do we have a killer in our midst?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he says, and then he smiles that crooked smile, and I’m not altogether sure he’s joking.

  “She had an alibi, actually,” Bonnie says.

  “What was it?”

  Bonnie seems to be finding it funny too. “Not my place to say.”

  So Duncan told her then. I suppose he was my alibi and I was his. “You never asked me,” I say.

  “What?” Bonnie says.

  “You never asked me for my alibi. Don’t you think you should have?”

  “We got it from someone else.”

  “And you didn’t think to follow up, confirm it with me?”

  She has the grace to look embarrassed.

  I turn my eyes to Duncan.

  “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” he says.

  “What are you on about?” Amelia demands.

  “I was here that night,” I say, because I want to see how Duncan reacts.

  “Duncan’s your alibi?” Fergus says, then erupts into giggles. “That’s gotta be some kind of conflict of interest.”

  Amelia and Holly seem to find this amusing too, while Bonnie fidgets uncomfortably.

  “And I’m his,” I say. “Not that I was asked.”

  “An oversight,” Duncan says. “I’ll have you back into the station at your convenience. I have some follow-up questions I’ve been wanting to ask you anyway.”

  “Goodie.”

  “It’s all a great waste of time, isn’t it?” Holly asks. “When we know the bastard must have taken off. In debt up to his eyeballs.”

  My ears prick up at that. “Who was he in debt to? The bank?”

  “Among others,” Holly says.

  “We don’t need to be talking about the man’s finances,” Fergus says.

  “No, but it’s a good reason to duck out of your life,” she says.

  “Could have been Lainey,” Amelia says.

  “Meels,” Bonnie admonishes.

  “I’m just saying! If it’d been me he was slapping round like that I’d have buried him years ago. You can’t tell me she’s not your number-one suspect.”

  “He hasn’t been ruled dead,” Bonnie says.

  “It was more than slapping round,” Holly says.

  “My point,” Amelia says. “He was a nasty thug.”

  “Wasn’t always,” Fergus mutters.

  “And should we give a shit?” Amelia says, her perpetual humor evaporated now. There is a sense of betrayal in her, and I think she must have known Stuart a long time, like they all did.

  “What changed him?” I ask.

  Nobody has an answer, they just shrug, shake their heads.

  It’s Duncan who says, “Men get taught to expect control but a modern society no longer supports that, so some men feel it slipping and it humiliates them. The humiliation makes them angry, and then violent.”

  “Topple the patriarchy!” Amelia roars.

  “Jesus,” Fergus mutters, clutching his chest.

  “I don’t blame her for looking elsewhere,” Holly says.

  “Holl,” Amelia warns quickly.

  “Sorry.”

  There’s a silence at that. My mind darts ahead to make sense of it—was Lainey having an affair? I try to imagine who it might have been with. Seems to me like he’d be the prime suspect in Stuart’s death.

  Fingal pads over to curl up on the floor beside me, resting his head in my lap. I set aside my sanding duties in favor of stroking him. He has fallen asleep by the time the wolf howl cuts starkly through the cottage.

  “God help us,” Fergus sighs. “There she goes again.”

  Fingal lifts his head to listen, bristling with tension, ears peaked. He looks at me questioningly, then at his master for instruction. Should he be protecting us? Is this a call to him, a warning or an invitation? Does it stir some primordial heart of him?

  I think it must, for he lifts his snout and lets out a long, excited howl of his own. It sets my skin alight.

  “Jesus!” Fergus exclaims, louder this time.

  The howls echo outside and in.

  “See what you’ve done to me?” Duncan asks, and I realize he’s talking to me. “He does this every damn night.”

  I can’t help it—I smile. Something about the dog’s response thrills me.

  “I love them,” Holly says. “Could I get a pup, do you think?”

  “A wolf pup?” Amelia asks, laughing.

  Holly is looking at me and she seems serious. I shake my head.

  “Why not?” she asks. “If it was ours from a young age, if it didn’t know any differently … That’s how dogs came to be, isn’t it? Someone did it, way back.”

  “Forty thousand years back,” Fergus says. Then adds, “During the Mesolithic era.”

  I grin. “You’re a history buff, huh, Fergus?”

  He shrugs. “I try to know a little about a lot of things.”

  “But not a lot about anything,” the others chorus, a well-worn tease.

  I stroke Fingal to calm him. He’s fallen quiet for the moment, intent on listening to the howls from the forest. They aren’t for him; Ash has bigger creatures to warn off.

  “The pup would come to know you,” I tell Holly, “and you might train him. They’re intelligent and they learn quickly, and they�
��re very loyal.”

  “See!” Holly says.

  “But why would you want to?” I ask. They’re all watching me now; I can feel their eyes, because this is the thing, isn’t it? This is the fear they live with now. The children in us long for monsters to take forms we understand. They want to fear the wolves because they don’t want to fear each other. “Wolves don’t understand or socialize with humans the way dogs do, even when raised from birth,” I say. “Domestication is a product of breeding. It takes many generations to breed the wild from a creature. This dog and the wolf outside aren’t even the same species anymore. No matter how much you loved a wolf pup, it would grow into the predator its nature dictates, and keeping something like that chained up or bound to a house is about as cruel as I could imagine.”

  Fingal lets out another mighty howl and we all jump.

  Duncan gets awkwardly to the floor beside me and pulls his dog into his lap. “Easy, boy. She’s not crying for you.”

  Fingal wags his tail and licks Duncan’s hand.

  “I can’t take this tonight,” Fergus announces, and gets up to put on some loud music. As the others go back to their chatter and woodwork, I glance at Duncan. He is lost in thought. Maybe now is the moment to tell him, quickly and be done with it. But the words don’t come.

  “Do you think it can ever be?” he asks me softly. “Bred out of a creature?”

  “The wild?” I reach to pat the dog and my fingers come very close to his. I want to touch him so badly I could combust. “It happened to us, I think,” I murmur. “Most days I think we couldn’t be farther from it, that it was slowly bred from us until we became more like machines than animals.”

  “And the other days?” he asks.

  “On the other days,” I say slowly, “I think I will go mad with the wildness.”

  * * *

  Several hours have passed when a second knock comes at the door.

  “It’s like Grand Central fuckin’ Station around here tonight!” Fergus says. He has become steadily drunker by the minute, his accent growing concurrently thicker. I can barely understand him. He sways where he sits, still pretending to work but having long since lost the ability to wield tools.

  Amelia has remained sprawled closest to the door so she rises to answer it a second time. “Hello, love,” she says, but there is no response, only Lainey Burns pushing past her into the living room. Her eyes dart in search of Duncan.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she asks him. “I told you—” Lainey sees me and falls silent.

  Duncan struggles to get up off the floor, and I can see his leg is really hurting him so I reach a hand for him to push off from. He glances at me in thanks, then goes to Lainey and guides her down the hallway.

  “I need to bury him, Duncan,” we can hear her saying. “I need for this to be over.”

  They disappear into Duncan’s bedroom and the door closes, shutting off the sound of their voices. I guess it wasn’t Lainey who killed him then, unless she’s one hell of an actress.

  I take a gulp of my previously forgotten wine.

  “Poor girl,” Fergus says.

  “She’s better off,” Amelia says.

  “Hey,” Fergus says. “A little respect for an old friend.”

  “He was no friend of mine.”

  “And that may be true but no one deserves to get eaten alive.”

  An awkward silence descends. They’re all careful to avoid my eyes.

  “It’s what we’re all thinking, isn’t it?” Bonnie pipes up. “There’s been no answers to find because the man was eaten by the damned wolves we’re all pretending we can’t hear. You said so yourself, Inti. They’re predators and nothing can change that.”

  I get to my feet.

  “Inti—” Amelia tries.

  “I just need the loo,” I say, which is true, and head down the hallway. But when I reach the bedroom door I pause to listen. I can hear them from here, the lilt and cadence of their words, and there is something that strikes me about them, about the way those words have become hushed, intimate. I see again the way he took her arm to lead her down the hallway, the way she went straight into his bedroom. They’re friends, of course, they’ve known each other a long time, but some instinct in me recognizes something more. When their voices drop away completely the knowing in me is even louder; there is far more intimacy in a silence this long.

  I return to the living room without having used the toilet. I sit on the couch beside Fergus and say, soft enough that no one will overhear, “It’s Duncan, isn’t it. The one she’s seeing?”

  “Nah, ’course not,” he says, but he’s so drunk I can see through him with ease. “Look, we don’t know, who’s to say?” he tries. “They had a thing, way back in high school before she ever got with Stuart. They were sweethearts and everyone thought they’d get married but it didn’t work out, what with him going through that bad time. These days there are rumors but you know how rumors are.”

  I grab my jacket and head for the door. I don’t want to be here anymore. I bid a quick farewell to everyone, ignore the cries for me to stay longer, and head out. The night air is fresh on my hot cheeks. I’ve only made it to the tree line when I hear the door open and a deep voice. “Inti?”

  I don’t need to stop. I’m beyond the sphere of light thrown by the house, I could be gone before he’s seen me. But something is surging up within, an all too familiar fury, and beneath it something more sinister. A slow, horrifying realization of something I should have seen.

  “I’m here,” I say, and wait for Duncan to meet me in the dark.

  He moves slowly, as he always does. “You wanted to talk to me.”

  “Why didn’t Bonnie follow up with me? Why didn’t she ask me to confirm your alibi?”

  He takes a moment to adjust. “Because she trusted me when I told her you and I spent the night together. She didn’t feel the need to embarrass you.”

  “Why should I be embarrassed?”

  He shrugs.

  I look up into his face. “Should she trust you?”

  Duncan’s eyes are black in this light. I can only just make out the lines of his face, his nose, his mouth.

  “We didn’t spend the night together, did we? Not the whole night. I woke and you were gone, Duncan.”

  The silence ignites.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I told you.”

  “You went for a walk.”

  You went for a walk right at the time a man was killed near your house, and you were fucking his wife.

  The blood rushes in my ears.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Duncan says.

  “I’d rather walk,” I reply, because I’m not getting into a car with him. I don’t know this man. He said it himself. He told me the truth of what he’d done, and I didn’t listen. We are all capable of killing.

  16

  It was only a year or so after the incident with Gus. I was late to meet Aggie, which she made no small thing of. “Of all the days,” she kept saying, as she smeared lipstick on my mouth and tugged me down the street.

  “Of all what days?” I asked, but she powered on. She was wearing a T-shirt dress that made her look skinny and leggy, and she’d cut her hair into a chic bob, her bangs reaching her huge sooty eyes. She looked gorgeous, and painfully cool, and light-years from the girls we were in the forest. “Wait, where are we going?” I demanded.

  Aggie only smiled. And pulled me into the Births, Deaths and Marriages registry.

  * * *

  Gus’s cousin James was there to be the second witness. They weren’t brothers, but they could have been—there was a striking similarity to them, though James was the slightly shorter, slightly skinnier, less handsome version of his older cousin. There was a running joke within our little foursome that if he and I happened to fall in love it would make life a lot easier for us all. It would make sense, the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  James smiled at me as Aggie and Gus were married. I tried
to smile back. I think I did. But the blood had leached from me and I honestly felt like I could throw up.

  * * *

  After, we went for dumplings. The restaurant was more of a bar, with graffitied black walls and dim red lights and intimate velvet booths. Gus and James did shots of Fireball, because that’s what they always drank. Aggie and I hated the stuff but she was in such a good mood that she had a couple anyway. The chemistry she and Gus had was astounding; they came alive in each other’s company and I could see the spell they cast on each other. He held her hand on the table and, because I looked, he also held mine.

  I had to force my eyes from his touch because it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t for me. I was only a thief.

  I went to the toilet to splash cold water on my face. Aggie pushed in and sat on the sink, despite it being wet. “Go on then,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’ve got him wrapped around my little finger.”

  “Good for you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Cut the crap, Inti.”

  I looked at her reflection in the mirror. “What are you doing?”

  She folded her arms.

  “What is this?” I pressed. “What the fuck is all this?”

  “Chill out.”

  “What are you trying to prove?”

  “Nothing! Why are you so pissed off?”

  “Because you sprung this on me out of the blue and you didn’t invite Mum because you know she’d hate him and you know you’re rushing the hell out of this and it’s all making me think you’re really out of control right now.”

  “What’s wrong with being out of control?”

  “You hurt yourself.”

  She held my eyes. “Did you think one day he’d end up with you?”

  The air left me. A reminder that her temper could flare without warning. I crossed to her and held her face. Her cheeks were so hot in my hands. “No, you idiot. You’re a force of nature. No one would ever choose me over you.”

  “Shut up, Inti,” she snapped, pushing my hands away. “Stop saying things like that.”