The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

Suddenly she drew back. It was as if she,d been startled. She moved several steps away. She stared at him.

"What on earth is the matter?" he asked. He actually didn,t want to say much of anything, but it was clear something had made her very uncomfortable and it seemed the decent thing to ask.

"I don,t know," she said. She forced a smile. Then gave up on it. "I could have sworn, it was like, well, you seemed like a different person - a different person looking out of Reuben,s eyes at me."

"Hmmmm. It,s just me," he responded. Now he was the one smiling at her.

But her face was puckered, fearful. "Good-bye, sweetie," she said quickly. "I,ll see you at dinner." He figured he,d cook a roast for dinner. He looked forward to having the kitchen to himself.

The nurse was in the door. She,d come to give him an injection. This was her last day.

Chapter Five

IT WAS FRIDAY.

The call came while he was going over the first sheaf of papers from the title company regarding the Mendocino property.

Kidnapping: an entire busload of students from the Goldenwood Academy in Marin County.

He threw on one of Phil,s old corduroy jackets, the one with the leather patches on the elbows, and rushed down the stairs and into the Porsche and headed over the Golden Gate.

He had the news blaring from the radio all the way. All that was known was that the entire student body of forty-two students, aged five years old through eleven, and three teachers had vanished without a trace. A sack containing the teacher,s cell phones and a couple of phones that had belonged to the students had been found at a call box on Highway One, with a printed note:

"Wait For Our Call."

By three o,clock, Reuben was in front of the huge old brown shingle Craftsman style building that housed the private school, along with a mob of local cameramen and reporters, as more and more people arrived from the local news.

Celeste confirmed by phone. No one knew where the students had been taken or how, and no ransom demand had been received.

Reuben managed to get in a few words with a volunteer at the school who described conditions there as idyllic, and the teachers as "earth mothers" and the gentlest "flower children" in the world. The kids had been en route for a field trip in nearby Muir Woods, which included some of the most beautiful redwoods in the world.

Goldenwood Academy was private, unconventional, and expensive. But the school bus, specially made for Goldenwood, had been old and without a GPS tracker or its own phone.

Billie Kale had two researchers on it at the city room.

Reuben,s thumbs were going as he typed on his iPhone, describing the picturesque three-story building, surrounded by venerable oaks, and masses of wildflowers, including poppies, and marguerites and azaleas blooming on the shady grounds.

Parents were still arriving, and the authorities were shielding them from the press as they rushed them inside. Women were crying. Reporters were pressing too close, trampling the flowers, even shoving. The police were getting testy. Reuben chose a spot well to the rear.

These were mostly doctors, lawyers, and politicians, these parents. Goldenwood Academy was experimental but prestigious. No doubt the ransom demand would be outrageous. And why bother to keep asking if the FBI had been called in?

Sammy Flynn, the young photographer from the Observer, found him finally, and asked what Reuben thought he should do. "Get the whole scene," said Reuben a little impatiently. "Get the sheriff up there on the porch; get the feel of the school itself."

But how is this going to help, Reuben wondered. He,d covered five criminal cases before this, and in each he,d thought the press played some laudatory role. He wasn,t so sure here. But then maybe somewhere somebody had seen something, and in watching this spectacle flashing on every home television in the area, somebody would see this, remember, make a connection and then make a call.

He stood back, on the roots of a low gray live oak, and rested against the rough bark. The woods here smelled of pine needles and green things, and reminded him very much of that walk with Marchent over the Mendocino property, and a little fear came to him suddenly. Was he unhappy to be here, instead of there? Was that unlikely and remarkable inheritance going to lure him away from his job?

Why hadn,t that crossed his mind before?

He closed his eyes for a moment. Nothing much was happening. The sheriff was now repeating himself endlessly, as the same questions kept flying at him from different voices in the crowd.

Other voices intruded. For a second, he thought they were coming from the people around him, but then he realized they were coming from the distant rooms in the house. Parents sobbing. Teachers babbling platitudes. People reassuring one another when they had no real basis for reassurance.

He felt uneasy. No way in the world was he going to report these voices. He shut them out. But then it came to him. Why the hell am I hearing this? If I can,t report it, well, what,s the point? The fact was, there was nothing much to report.

He typed in what was obvious. Parents were breaking down under the strain. No ransom call. He felt confident enough to verify that. All those voices told him there had been none, even the low drone of the crisis manager, assuring them that such a call would likely come.

People around him talked about the famous Chowchilla school bus kidnapping of the seventies. No one had been hurt in that one. The teachers and the kids had been taken off their bus and moved by van to an underground quarry, from which they,d later managed to escape.

What can I do, really do, to help this situation? Reuben was thinking. He was exhausted suddenly and agitated. Maybe he wasn,t ready to go back to work. Maybe he didn,t want ever again to go back to work.

By six o,clock, when nothing had changed in the situation, he headed back across the Golden Gate and home.

He was still suffering waves of unusual exhaustion, no matter how robust he looked, and Grace said this was a simple aftereffect of the anesthesia used in the abdominal surgery he,d endured. And then those antibiotics. He was still on them and they were still making him sick.

As soon as he hit the house, he hammered out a visceral "on the scene" piece for the morning,s paper and e-mailed it in. Billie called a minute and a half later to say she loved it, especially the stuff about the crisis counselors, and the flowers getting totally trampled by the press.

He went downstairs for supper with Grace, who was not her usual self for a number of reasons, among them that two patients had died on the table that afternoon. Of course, no one had expected either one to survive. But even a trauma center surgeon takes two losses painfully, and he sat just a little longer at the table with her than he might have done otherwise. The family talked about "The School Bus Kidnapping," with the television on mute in the corner of the room so Reuben could watch for developments.