Linger (4 page)

• SAM •

I had been sitting at Kenny's for about fifteen minutes, watching the waitress attending to the customers in the other booths like a bee visiting and revisiting flowers, when Grace tapped on the other side of the streaked glass. She was a backlit silhouette against the bright blue sky, and I could just glimpse the slender white of her smile, and saw her kiss the air at me before she and Isabel headed around to the front of the diner.

A moment later, Grace, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, slid into the cracked red booth beside me, her jeans squelching on the perpetually greasy surface. She was about to touch my face before she kissed me, and I recoiled.

“What? Do I stink?” she asked, not sounding particularly bothered. She laid her cell phone and car keys on the table in front of her and reached across me for the menus by the wall.

Leaning away, I pointed to her gloves. “You do, actually. Your gloves smell like that wolf. Not in a good way.”

“Thanks for the backup, wolf-man,” Isabel said. When Grace offered her a menu, she shook her head emphatically and added, “The whole car smelled like wet dog.”

I wasn't sure about the wet-dog label; yes, I smelled the normal, musky wolf odor on Grace's gloves, but there was something else to it — an unpleasant undercurrent that rankled my still-heightened sense of smell.

Grace said, “Sheesh. I'll put them in the car. You don't have to give me that about-to-hurl look. If the waitress comes, order me a coffee and something that involves bacon, okay?”

While she was gone, Isabel and I sat in a kind of uneasy silence filled by a Motown song playing overhead and the clattering of plates in the kitchen. I studied the shape of the saltshaker's warped shadow across the container of sugar packets. Isabel examined the chunky cuff of her sweater and the way it rested on the table. Finally, she said, “You made another bird thing.”

I picked up the crane that I'd folded out of my napkin while I was waiting. It was lumpy and imperfect because the napkin hadn't been quite square. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

I rubbed my nose, trying to rid it of the scent of the wolf. “I don't know. There's a Japanese legend that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish.”

Isabel's permanently arched right eyebrow made her smile look inadvertently cruel. “You have a wish?”

“No,” I said, as Grace sat back down beside me. “All of my wishes have already been granted.”

“What were you wishing for?” Grace interrupted.

“To kiss you,” I said to her. She leaned toward me, offering her neck, and I kissed her just behind her ear, pretending I couldn't still smell the almond scent of the wolf on her skin.
Isabel's eyes narrowed, though her lips stayed curved up, and I knew that, somehow, she had seen my reaction.

I looked away as the waitress came and took our order. Grace ordered coffee and a BLT. I got the soup of the day and tea. Isabel just ordered coffee, taking a bag of granola out of her small leather purse after the waitress had gone.

“Food allergy?” I asked.

“Hick allergy,” Isabel said. “Grease allergy. Where I used to live, we had real coffeehouses. When I say
panini
here, everyone says
Bless you
.”

Grace laughed and took my napkin crane; she made it flap its wings. “We'll make a panini run to Duluth some day, Isabel. Until then, bacon will do you good.”

Isabel made a face like she didn't much agree with Grace. “If by
good
, you mean
cellulite and zits
, sure. So, Sam, what's the deal on this corpse, anyway? Grace said that you said something about wolves getting fifteen years after they stop shifting.”

“Nice, Isabel,” Grace muttered, casting a sideways glance at me to see what my expression was at the word
corpse
. But she'd already told me over the phone that the wolf wasn't Beck, Paul, or Ulrik, so I didn't react.

Isabel shrugged, unapologetic, and flipped open her phone. She pushed it across the table to me. “Visual aid number one.”

The phone scraped across invisible crumbs on the table as I spun it right side up. My stomach gripped in a fist when I saw the wolf on the screen, clearly dead, but my grief lacked force. I had never known this wolf as a human.

“I think you're right,” I said. “Because I've only ever known this wolf as a wolf. It must've been from old age.”

“I don't think this was a natural death,” said Grace. “Plus, there were no white hairs on the muzzle.”

I lifted my shoulders. “I just know what Beck told me. That we get … got” — I struggled with tense, since I wasn't one of them anymore — “ten or fifteen years after we stopped shifting. A wolf's natural life span.”

“There was blood coming out of the wolf's nose,” Grace said almost angrily, like it annoyed her to say it.

I slanted the screen back and forth, squinting at the muzzle. I didn't see anything on the blurry screen to suggest a violent death.

“It wasn't a lot,” Grace said, in response to my frown. “Did any of the other wolves that died ever have blood on their faces?”

I struggled to remember the various wolves that had died while I was living in Beck's house. It was a blur of memories — Beck and Paul with tarps and shovels, Ulrik singing “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” at the top of his lungs. “I don't really remember any of them clearly. Maybe this wolf got knocked in the head.” I deliberately didn't allow myself to think about the person behind the wolf's pelt.

Grace didn't say anything else as the waitress set down our drinks and food. For a long moment there was silence as I doctored my tea and Isabel did the same to her coffee. Grace studied her BLT pensively.

Isabel said, “For a hick diner, they have really good coffee.” Part of me appreciated the fact that she didn't even
look
to see if the waitress was within earshot before she said it — the sheer insensitivity was somehow rewarding to watch. But most of me was glad that I was sitting next to Grace instead, who shot
Isabel a look that said
Sometimes I don't know why I hang out with you
.

“Uh-oh,” I said, glimpsing the opening door. “Incoming.”

It was John Marx, Olivia's older brother.

I wasn't really looking forward to talking to him, and at first it appeared that I wouldn't have to, because John didn't seem to see us. He went straight to the counter and pulled out a stool, hunching his tall frame as he leaned on his elbows. Before he even ordered, the waitress brought him a coffee.

“John's hot,” Isabel observed, with a voice that indicated that it was possibly a drawback.

“Isabel,” hissed Grace. “Maybe turn down the insensitivity meter slightly?”

Isabel pursed her lips. “What? Olivia's not dead.”

“I'm going to go ask him to come over and sit with us,” Grace said.

“Oh, no, please don't,” I said. “It's going to involve lying, and I'm not good at that.”

“But I am,” Grace said. “He looks pitiful. I'll be right back.”

And so she returned a minute later with John and slid back in next to me. John stood at the end of the table, looking slightly uncomfortable as Isabel waited just a moment too long to make room for him on her side of the booth.

“So how are you?” Grace asked sympathetically, leaning her elbows on the table. I might have been imagining the leading tone to her voice, but I didn't think so. I'd heard that sound before, when she asked a question she already knew the answer to, and liked what she knew.

John glanced at Isabel, who was leaning away from him, in a fairly tactless way, arm against the windowsill. Then he leaned toward me and Grace. “I got an e-mail from Olivia.”

“An e-mail?” Grace echoed. Her voice conveyed just the right combination of hope, disbelief, and frailty. Just what you'd expect from a grieving girl who was hoping her best friend was still alive. Only Grace knew Olivia
was
still alive.

I shot her a look.

Grace ignored me, still looking, all innocent and intense, at John. “What did it say?”

“That she was in Duluth. That she was coming home soon!” John threw his hands up. “I didn't know whether I should crap myself or scream at the computer. How could she do this to Mom and Dad? And then she's just like, ‘So I'm coming back soon'? Like she just went off to visit friends and now she's done. I mean, I'm really happy, but, Grace, I'm
so
angry at her.”

He sat back in his seat, looking a little surprised that he'd confessed so much. I crossed my arms and leaned on the table, trying to override the prickle of jealousy that had unexpectedly surfaced when John had said Grace's name with such a feeling of connection. Strange what love taught you about your faults.

“But when?” Grace pressed. “When did she say she would get back?”

John shrugged. “Of course she didn't say anything other than ‘soon.'”

Grace's eyes shone. “But she's
alive
.”

“Yeah,” John said, and now I saw that his eyes were rather shiny as well. “The cops told us that — you know, that we
shouldn't keep our hopes up — anyway. That was the worst, not knowing if she was alive.”

“Speaking of the cops,” Isabel said. “Did you show them the e-mail?”

Grace briefly turned a less-than-pleasant face to Isabel, but it had melted back into gentle interest by the time John turned back to her.

He looked guilty. “I didn't want them to tell me about how it might not be real. I guess — I guess I will. Because they can track it, right?”

“Yes,” Isabel said, looking at Grace instead of at John. “I've heard cops can track IP addresses or whatever they're called. So they could find out the general area it was coming from. Like maybe even
right here in Mercy Falls
.”

In a hard voice, Grace replied, “But if it was from an Internet café from a pretty big city, like Duluth or Minneapolis, it wouldn't really be useful.”

John interrupted, “I don't know if I really want to have Olivia dragged back here, kicking and screaming. I mean, she's almost eighteen, and she's not stupid. I miss her, but there had to be some reason for her to go.”

We all stared at him — for different reasons, I think. I was just thinking that it was an awfully perceptive and selfless thing to say, if slightly uninformed. Isabel's stare looked more like an
are-you-a-total-idiot?
stare. Grace's was admiring.

“You're a pretty good brother,” Grace said.

John looked down into his coffee cup. “Yeah, well, I don't know about that. Anyway, I'd better get going. I'm just on my way to class.”

“Class on Saturday?”

“Workshop stuff,” John said. “Extra credit. Gets me out of the house.” He slid out of the booth, pulling a few bucks out of his pocket for the coffee. “Would you give this to the waitress?”

“Yup,” Grace said. “See you around?”

John nodded and retreated. He had only been out of the diner for a moment when Isabel slid back into the center to face Grace.

“Wow, Grace, you never told me you were born without a brain,” Isabel said. “Because that's the only way I can figure you would do something that incredibly stupid.”

I wouldn't have put it in those terms, but I was thinking the same thing.

Grace waved it off. “
Psh.
I sent it the last time I was in Duluth. I wanted to give them some hope. And I actually thought it might keep the cops from looking so hard for her if they thought it was an annoying almost-legal runaway instead of a possible homicide-kidnapping thing. See, I
was
using my brain.”

Isabel shook some granola into her palm. “Well, I think you should stay out of it. Sam, tell her to stay out of it.”

The whole idea of it did make me uneasy, but I said, “Grace is very wise.”

“Grace is very wise,” Grace repeated to Isabel.

“Generally,” I added.

“Maybe we should tell him,” Grace said.

Isabel and I both stared at her.

“What? He's her brother. He loves her and wants her to be happy. Plus, I don't understand all the secrecy if it's scientific. Yeah, the greater world would definitely take it the wrong way.
But family members? You'd think they'd be better about it, if it's just logical instead of monstrous.”

I didn't really have words for the horror that the idea inspired in me. I wasn't even sure
why
it elicited such a strong reaction.

“Sam,” Isabel said, and I realized I was just sitting there, running a finger over one of my scarred wrists. Isabel looked at Grace. “Grace, that is the dumbest idea I have ever heard, unless your goal is to get Olivia rushed to the nearest microscope for poking and prodding. Also, John is clearly too highly strung to handle the concept.”

This, at least, made sense to me. I nodded. “I don't think he's a good one to tell, Grace.”

“You told Isabel!”

“We had to,” I said, before Isabel could finish looking superior. “She had already guessed a lot of it. I think we should operate on a need-to-know basis.” Grace was starting to get her blank face, which meant that she was annoyed, so I said, “But I still think you're very wise. Generally.”

“Generally,” repeated Isabel. “Now I'm getting out of here. I'm, like, sticking fast to the booth.”

“Isabel,” I said, as she got up, and she stopped at the end of the table, giving me this weird look, as if I hadn't called her by her name before. “I'm going to bury him. The wolf. Maybe today, if the ground's not frozen.”

“No hurry,” Isabel said. “It's not going anywhere.”

As Grace leaned in toward me, I caught another whiff of the rotten smell. I wished I'd looked more closely at the photo on Isabel's phone. I wished the nature of the wolf's death had been more straightforward. I'd had enough mysteries for a lifetime.