“I think maybe they all were. She—”
“I don’t mean to interrupt this little powwow,” Jack said, “but why are you here?” He was on the chain ladder, with just his head above the ground.
“To offer help,” Kate said. “He’s come all the way from Nelson, Australia, and he wasn’t born until after the night his mother disappeared. He’s our one true innocent.”
“And Teddy,” Jack said as he climbed the rest of the way out.
“How could I have forgotten Teddy?” Kate mumbled. “Teddy is—” She broke off because her phone buzzed—as did Jack’s and Chris’s. “Please, please don’t let anybody else be dead,” Kate said.
“Do people often drop dead around here?” Chris took his phone out of his pocket.
“Here, there, everywhere we go,” Jack said. “Put a shovel in the ground, hit a bone.” He looked at his phone. It was a joint text to Kate and him from Sara.
Find Christopher, Diana’s son, and hide him. Don’t let any of the Pack see him!! Mega important.
Chris’s text was from his mother telling him to go somewhere and stay out of sight. “And here my mother always told me I wasn’t an ugly troll.”
Kate laughed a bit too much at his joke; Jack didn’t even smile.
“What are we supposed to do with him?” Jack asked.
“Toss me down the well?” Christopher asked in a way that was almost a challenge.
“Gatehouse!” Kate said. “I think it’s empty now.” She looked at Jack. “You can open the lock.”
“Sure you don’t want to get a kangaroo to break a window?” Jack asked.
Kate gave him a look that took the smirk off his face.
Jack sighed. “Okay, let’s go, Crocodile Dundee. I’ll take you there through the outskirts. Who’s seen you since you got here?”
“Only Isabella,” Chris and Kate said in unison, then smiled at each other.
Jack rolled his eyes.
“I have a horse here and—”
“Of course you do,” Jack said.
“It’s a big black stallion that only I can ride. Named Lucifer,” Chris said.
Jack and Kate stared at him.
Chris grinned. To Kate’s astonishment, Jack put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. “Chris, my boy, I’m starting to like you. They walked away from Kate. They were too far away for Kate to hear more of their conversation. At her feet was the chain ladder. Was she supposed to pull the huge iron thing up, hand over hand like an anchor? Then untie it from the tree and haul it back to the storage bin?
She looked about but the men were gone. She began pulling up the heavy ladder. “Give me back corsets and crinolines,” she muttered.
When she got the ladder up—and she was sweating—Jack and Chris were standing there, both of them grinning down at her.
“I’m all for corsets,” Jack said.
“What’s a crinoline?” Chris asked.
Kate stood up, the end of the ladder in her hand. “I hate you both,” she said, then let the ladder drop back down into the well. Let them pull it back up! She straightened her shoulders, put her chin up and walked toward the house. “Men are sli
me,” she said over her shoulder. She didn’t wait to see if they commented.
Twenty-Three