The Wolf Gift (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 1)

But he couldn,t stop thinking about Laura. He didn,t want to go up there, because Laura was here.

Over and over in his mind, he played the details of their few hours together. Of course, Laura may have already called the authorities about what happened. But there had been something utterly strange and steely about Laura that caused him to hope that that had not happened.

He got some coffee and sandwiches from a nearby cafe, brought them back to the room, and started work on the computer.

It didn,t take a brain surgeon to figure out that Laura was in some way professionally connected to the forest, to the outdoors, to the wilderness surrounding her house. Yesterday, he,d found one tour guide website featuring tours for women - by an L. J. Dennys. He scanned that website now again looking for clues. But the only pictures of L. J. Dennys made it quite impossible to tell who she was beneath her hat and behind her sunglasses. Her hair was scarcely visible.

He found random references to L. J. Dennys, naturalist and environmentalist, all over the place. But no really good pictures.

He keyed in Laura J. Dennys, and let fly. There were several false leads, and then something entirely unexpected: a four-year-old news story from the Boston Globe concerning a Laura Dennys Hoffman, widow of a Caulfield Hoffman who,d died, with his two children, in a boating accident off Martha,s Vineyard.

Well, probably another false lead but he punched it, and up came the picture he,d been looking for. This was the wearer of the pearls, the mother of the two boys in the photo on Laura,s night table - staring out from a society picture of Laura with her late husband, a formidably handsome man with secretive eyes and very white teeth.

She was poised, quietly beautiful - the woman he,d held in his arms.

Within seconds, he was scanning any number of hits on the drowning at sea of Caulfield Hoffman and his sons. Laura had been in New York when the "accident" had happened, and the accident, it turned out, was no accident. After a lengthy investigation, the coroner had ruled it a murder-suicide.

Hoffman had been facing serious criminal charges in connection with insider trading and mismanagement of funds. He,d been arguing with his wife about a possible separation and custody of the boys.

That wasn,t all there was to Laura,s story. The Hoffmans had lost their first child, a baby girl, to a hospital infection when she was less than one year old.

It didn,t take much ingenuity now to close in on the life story of Laura J. Dennys.

She was the daughter of the California naturalist Jacob Dennys, who had written five books about the redwood forests of the northern coast. He,d died two years ago. His wife, Collette, a Sausalito painter, had died of a brain tumor twenty years before. That meant Laura had lost her mother very young. Jacob Dennys,s oldest daughter, Sandra, had been murdered in a liquor store holdup in Los Angeles when she was twenty-two, one of several innocent bystanders "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

It was a breathtaking litany of tragedies. It surpassed anything Reuben might have imagined. And part and parcel of it was that Jacob Dennys had suffered from Alzheimer,s in his last years.

Reuben sat back and drank a little of the coffee. The sandwich looked to him like paper and sawdust.

He was stunned by all this. And felt vaguely guilty reading it, even ashamed. Yes, he was spying on Laura, and, yes, to uncover a mystery in her, and maybe he,d hoped that she was something so exceptional that she could accept him for what he was.

But this was too much.

He thought of those two little kids in the house in San Francisco, nestled together in that bed. He felt a secret exultation that he,d saved them, and a deep resentment that he hadn,t been there in time to save the mother. He wondered where those little kids were now.

No wonder Laura had come home to disappear into the California forest. The L. J. Dennys website was three years old. She,d probably taken care of her elderly father. And then he,d left her, inevitably, like all the rest.

A terrible sadness for Laura settled over Reuben. I,m ashamed, ashamed that I want you and that it sustains me to think, just to think, that because of all you,ve lost, you might love me.

He could not conceive of being that alone, no matter what he was going through even now. In fact, the new isolation he was experiencing was driving him crazy.

But even in this, he was surrounded by love - intimately connected to Grace and Phil and, of course, his beloved brother, Jim. He had Celeste still, who would do anything for him, and Mort, his true friend. He had the warm hub of the Russian Hill house and the great gang of friends drawn perpetually into the family circle by all its vibrant members. And Rosy, beloved Rosy. Even Phil,s tiresome professor friends were a staple of Reuben,s life, like so many gracious old uncles and aunts.

He thought of Laura and that small house on the edge of the wood. He tried to assess what it would mean to marry, and then lose your entire family. Unspeakable pain.

Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical - and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger, and determined to live exactly as you pleased.

Reuben knew a dozen other ways to find out information about Laura - credit score, car registration, personal net worth - but that simply wasn,t fair. In fact, it was obscene. However, there was one more tiny item that he did want, and that was her address, and he found that quickly enough. The house in which she lived had been the subject of a couple of articles. It had belonged to her grandfather, Harper Dennys, and was quite literally grandfathered; no one could have built such a house so deep into the protected forest area today.

He wandered outside and walked around the small motel. The rain was a drizzle. It would be easy after dark to slip out of his room and go up the wooded slope and over the summit and into the thickly forested hills of Mill Valley. From there it would be simple to get to Muir Woods.

Very likely no one was looking for him here now. After all, he had only hours ago killed a man in San Francisco.

That is, nobody was looking for him here unless Laura J. Dennys had told the authorities what happened.

Could she have done that? And would they have believed a word of it?

He didn,t know. He couldn,t imagine her telling anyone.

If there was a television in that small house, if there were newspapers delivered to the door, or brought home from the grocery store in town, then she had to know what had been happening.

Maybe she understood that the Wild Man of the Wood would rather die than bring harm to her - unless harm was his love for her, and his near-mad desire to see her again.