The Wolves of Midwinter (The Wolf Gift Chronicles 2)

Yes, the guesthouse, and the promise of Phil coming to spend long leisurely visits with him. Phil had indeed promised. And Reuben wanted that so very much.

9

AS IT TURNED OUT, there was nothing on the news about the Man Wolf appearing again in Northern California. Reuben searched the web, and every local news source he knew. The papers, the television, all were silent on that score. But there was a big story, getting quite a bit of play in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Susie Blakely, an eight-year-old girl, missing since June from her home in Eureka, California, had at last been found—wandering near the town of Mountainville in northern Mendocino County. Authorities had confirmed that a carpenter, long suspected of the crime, had in fact abducted her, and kept her prisoner, often beating her and starving her until her escape from his trailer last night.

The carpenter was believed dead as the result of an animal attack, which the child, too traumatized by her ordeal, had witnessed but could not describe.

There was a picture of Susie, taken at the time she went missing. And there was that tiny radiant candle flame of a face.

Reuben Googled the old stories. Her parents, obviously, were extremely good people who had made numerous appeals to the media. As for the older lady, Pastor Corrie George, who had taken the child from Reuben, there was no mention of her on the news at all.

Had both the minister and the little girl agreed not to talk of the Man Wolf? Reuben was amazed. But he worried. How would the secret weigh upon both these innocent people? More than ever he was ashamed, yet had he not gone into the forest, would that precious little life have been snuffed out in that filthy trailer?

Over a late lunch, with only the housekeeper, Lisa, in attendance, Reuben assured the Distinguished Gentlemen that he would never again risk their security with this kind of careless behavior. Stuart made a few sulky remarks to the effect that Reuben should have taken him with him, but Margon cut him off with a quick and imperious gesture, and went on to toast Celeste’s “marvelous news.”

This didn’t stop Sergei from lecturing Reuben at length on the risks of what he had done, and Thibault joined in as well. It was agreed that Saturday they would fly out for a couple of days, this time to the “jungles” of South America, and there hunt together before returning home. Stuart was ecstatic at the prospect. And Reuben felt a low arousal very much akin to sexual desire. He could already see and feel the jungles around him, a great swooshing fabric of moist greenery, fragrant, tropical, delicious, so very different from the bleak cold of Nideck Point, and the thought of prowling there in such a dense and lawless universe, in search of “the most dangerous game” caused him to fall quiet.

By suppertime, Reuben had conferred with Laura, who was genuinely overjoyed about the developments, and he and Lisa were removing all Laura’s belongings to a new office on the east side of the house. This would suit Laura wonderfully, as the room was flooded with morning light, and a good deal warmer than anything on the ocean side of Nideck Point as well.

Reuben walked around the now-vacant bedroom for some half an hour, imagining the nursery, and then went to investigate all the necessary accoutrements online. Lisa chatted happily about the necessity of a good German nanny who would sleep in the room while the little boy was an infant, and all the marvelous Swiss shops from which the finest layette imaginable could be ordered, and the necessity of surrounding a sensitive little one with fine furnishings, soothing colors, the music of Mozart and Bach, and appealing paintings from the very start of his life.

“Now, you must leave the nanny to me,” said Lisa forcefully as she straightened the white curtains in the new office. “And I will find the most marvelous of women to do this job for you. I have someone in mind. A beloved friend, yes, very beloved. You ask Master Felix. And you leave it to me.”

Reuben was fine with it, yet something about her suddenly struck him as strange. There was a moment when Lisa turned and smiled at him that he had an uneasy feeling about her, that something was not quite right about her and what she was saying, but he shrugged it off.

He stood watching her as she dusted Laura’s desk. Her mode of dress was prim, old-fashioned, even out-of-date. But she was spry in her movements and rather economical. It nudged at him, her whole demeanor, but he couldn’t quite figure out why.

She was slender to the point of being wiry but unusually strong. He’d seen that when she forced the window which had been stuck fast with fresh paint. And there were other strange things about her.

Like now, when she seated herself before Laura’s computer, turned it on, and quickly ascertained that it was in fact going “online” as it should.

Reuben Golding, you are a sexist, he said to himself silently. Why do you find it surprising that a forty-five-year-old woman from Switzerland would know all about checking that a computer was online? He’d seen Lisa often enough on the household computer in Marchent’s old office. And she hadn’t been merely pecking away.

She seemed to catch him studying her, and she gave him a surprisingly cold smile. Then giving his arm a squeeze as she passed, she moved out of the room.

For all her attractiveness, which he did like very much, there was something mannish about her, and as he heard her steps echoing down the hall they sounded like those of a man. More shameless sexism, he thought. She did have the prettiest gray eyes, and her skin had a powdery soft look to it, and what was he thinking?

He’d never paid much attention to Heddy or Jean Pierre, he realized. In fact, he was a little shy around them, not being used to “servants,” as Felix so easily called them. But there was something a little strange about them too, about their whispering, their almost stealthy movements, and the way that they never looked him in the eye.

None of these people showed the slightest interest in anything ever said in their presence, and that was odd, when he thought about it, because the Distinguished Gentlemen talked so openly in front of them, at meals, about their various activities that you would have thought there would be a raised eyebrow, but there never was. Indeed no one ever dropped his voice when talking about anything just because the servants might hear.

Well, Felix and Margon knew them well, these servants, so who was he to be questioning them, and they couldn’t have been more agreeable to everyone. So he ought to let it go. But the child was coming, and now that the child was coming, he was going to care about a lot of little things, perhaps, that he hadn’t cared about in the past.

By evening, Celeste had changed the terms of her agreement slightly.