“What is it, Annette?” He recognized that glint in her eye. She had an inconvenient tendency to romanticize things when it came to Gray. It wasn’t hard to imagine the leaps she’d make having seen him and Maizie walking hand-in-hand.
“Yes. Of course, Mr. Lupo. Sorry.” Annette stiffened, all business. She read from her notepad. “You received the information you’ve been waiting for from Judge Woodsmen.”
“Thank you. Leave it on your desk and I’ll get to it later.” Damn, he hoped he wouldn’t need that information.
“Yes, sir. Also, Ms. Pi called from the bakery, for Ms. Hood. She said, and I quote, ‘Smoky Joe finally kicked the bucket and took a chunk of firewall sheeting, the Pearlman bar-mitzvah cake and half the dirty-girl pastries for the Richmen bachelorette party with him.’”
Maizie whispered an oath then moved to Annette. She took her hands, leaning close. “Annette, is it? You have to get me out of…” She glanced back at Gray. “I mean, I need to get to my shop. Help me get out of here. Please. No. Wait. My shoes.”
“Thank you, Annette,” Gray said, stepping beside Maizie. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, jerked her close. “I’ll make sure Ms. Hood makes it out of the forest. Personally.”
Chapter Seven
“It belonged to Maizie’s mother,” Gray said.
“Lilly’s?”
“Found it a few weeks after the accident.” He placed the gold quarter-sized locket in Granny’s hand. “The clasp was broken. I had it cleaned and repaired.”
Granny’s sad blue eyes peered at him beneath the hood of her lids. “You kept it all this time?”
Gray shifted his focus out the glass doors to the open backyard of the Green Acres Nursing Home. His face warmed. “I’m not sure why I didn’t return it sooner. Maybe because there was nothing left of Donna’s to keep. Maybe because Riddly and Lilly had taken something of mine and I wanted to take something of theirs. Foolish. I don’t know.”
Granny reached her withered hand over to his. He could feel her tremors, age keeping her constantly off balance, unsteady. “You needed it more than us. Maizie was too young for a piece like this and I…I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.”
“Thank you, Ester.” It was a poor excuse, but he’d take it. “You have it now and I believe you’ll find the photos inside quite useful.”
Granny looked to the locket, her thin fingers working its tight seal. Her thumbnail wedged between the oval halves and the locket popped open. Seconds passed as her mind processed the images and a bright smile blossomed across her face.
Gray knew what she saw. He’d stared at the photo of the young Hood family and the one opposite of Riddly holding an infant Maizie a million times over the years. Such a photo didn’t exist of his family. He and Donna never discussed children. Ironically, he hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted a photo like that until the possibility of it was taken away beneath the crush of an SUV.
Gray forced his thoughts from old dreams and wishes. “Maizie mentioned you’d had a visitor. Someone pretending to be Riddly.”
Granny’s cheeks flushed apple red, a bashful smile flickering across her thin lips. “Oh, I know Riddly wouldn’t want me to sell my little cottage. Not without a good reason. It was all my imagination. My mind plays tricks on me sometimes, y’know.”
“I don’t believe it was your mind playing tricks this time, Ester. I think someone is trying to take advantage, using whatever tactics he can, to get his hands on your property. And I’m fairly confident I know who’s behind it.”
The news brought a flash of relief to her eyes. An instant later resentment took its place. “Advantage, you say? Uhmph. We’ll see about that. The next time that ol’ dog comes around, I’ll…” Her pledge died on the air, her gaze flicking to Gray.
He knew her thoughts without hearing them. She’d been tricked once, believing her deceased son was visiting, issuing orders, how would she know differently next time?
Gray cupped his hands around hers, still holding the open locket. “This will help. Wear Lilly’s locket. Look at the pictures next time someone calls himself Riddly. Remember where it was found. That Riddly is gone. That Lilly and Donna are gone. Cadwick may resemble your son, but not enough to stand up to his photograph, or those kinds of potent memories.”
He couldn’t stay with Granny 24/7 and trying to ban Cadwick from the premises wouldn’t work any better than Maizie’s attempt had. Gray had used his werewolf-enhanced charm and familiarity with the staff to skirt around Maizie’s restricted-visitors list, but Cadwick was a master at zeroing in on a person’s pay-off point. He’d locate the weakest link in security and buy his way in.
No. Granny would have to use her mind and wits to protect herself. The locket would help.
“You never got to bury your wife, did you?”
Granny’s question caught him utterly by surprise. He stuttered. His mind shifting gears so fast he didn’t have time to throw up the barriers that would keep the most painful of the memories at bay.
“No. I…she… No. Donna died before she could shift back to human form. They disposed of her body as they would any roadkill.” He winced at the term, his heart pinching.
“You couldn’t request they leave her with you? The accident happened on your land.”
Gray shook his head. If only it’d been that easy. If only he’d been able to think clearly, quickly, maybe he could’ve come up with a way. “Taking the…carcass…is procedure. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t seem strange. I had to think of the pack. Protect the rest from curiosity or suspicion.”
Gray had given permission to the Hood family alone to use the shortcut through his forest from the housing subdivision on one side to the cottage on the other. He would never advance such trust again. The police arrived as fast as they did because Riddly and Lilly Hood had betrayed their agreement.
Another car, friends of the Hoods, was following behind when they’d hit his wife. Because of them, because of the police and ambulance and everyone else mulling around in his forest, he’d had to stand by, helpless as they thoughtlessly disengaged his wife’s body from the mangle of metal. They tossed it in the back of the tow truck like it was so much debris. Carted his wife away to be burned to ash in a city furnace. Or God forbid, something worse.
His only consolation was that nothing like it would ever happen again. He’d closed the single-lane gravel road, technically just two tire paths with weeds growing between, immediately after the accident. He planted trees, encouraged undergrowth, so that by now there was barely any sign the road had ever existed.
Granny shifted the locket to one hand and wrapped the other around Gray’s palm. “It was an accident, dear. I know you blame my Riddly, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He wouldn’t have wished the kind of suffering you and Maizie have endured on his worst enemy.”
“I don’t blame him.” Gray was surprised how easily he said it. He’d been thinking it from the start, but never out loud. “It was my fault. Donna and I were arguing…fighting. I accused her of cheating and she ran out. I didn’t go after her.”
He remembered the smell of another man on his wife, a man he recognized. There was no suspicion, no guessing. He knew she’d been with someone else. The rub was he wasn’t as upset over her infidelity as he was with himself for not feeling more betrayed. He loved Donna, but there was something missing between them, something that only became truly perceptible after she’d turned him. Maybe children would’ve made a difference, filled that missing piece between them. He’d never know.
“I was happy for the distance between us,” he said. “Until…Jeezus, I can still hear that sound, that crash, like an explosion. I knew before I started running. I knew Donna was gone. I could feel it.”