Becca was pretty worried about how Erin was going to react when they showed up with Lizzie in tow. One look at Erin’s groggy face when she saw them told her all she needed to know. They had taken her by surprise and she was afraid, feeling betrayed and isolated. It made Becca’s heart ache to see it.
But when she reached out to touch Erin’s arm, Erin didn’t seem to notice, and she dropped her hand. Was this whole mess going to destroy what they had or could have had? On the other hand, she paused, trying to still the whirlwind in her brain, Erin going to jail for murder wasn’t going to do them any favors either. She gave Lizzie a sidelong glance. She’d only be sitting here, all casual and hanging out, if she thought Erin was innocent, right?
“We’ll wait for Erin to get back before we discuss things.” Shelly’s tone didn’t leave room for much of an argument and Becca closed her mouth and clenched her jaw to hold the questions in.
Instead, they made small talk about contractors and architects and what they would like to see in a new Wolf’s Point Women’s Club. Not that Becca was paying much attention. Her brain swirled with memories of her years at the club before she changed, duking it out for precedence with her memory of changing for the first time there and how painful and scary it was at first. It seemed like an eternity before Erin walked back up the trail, accepted a sandwich from Shelly and sat down in their little circle.
They waited in silence while Erin ate the sandwich and finished off her water bottle. She put it down gently, like the noise might draw more attention to her. “Okay,” she said, “now what?”
She still wasn’t looking at Becca, but it didn’t feel as deliberate as it had earlier. It was s still a barrier though and Becca knew that she had to break through it. “We read your appointment book and some of the papers in your desk!” she blurted out, then clapped her hands over her mouth. Her face flamed red and hot as embarrassment shifted into a hot flash and she forced her hands down to her sides. “And I wanted to apologize for that, but I was trying to make sure that Lizzie was convinced…” she trailed off.
“Wait,” Erin glanced from her to Lizzie, then back again, “has anyone not read my appointment book?” She scowled at each of them and Becca buried her face in her hands. Carla raised a tentative hand and got an abrupt nod. “Fine, now you know about all my dentist appointments, my meetings, my clients…”
“We didn’t read all of it!” Becca covered her face again and wailed behind her fingers. “Just the last couple of weeks of entries!”
“If I may.“ Lizzie interjected, “Erin, you are still a suspect in a murder investigation and you did confess to the murder. Your appointment book is potential evidence in our investigation. But no, before you ask, I didn’t turn it over to the sheriff. And that’s something I’d like all of you to keep under your hats.”
“Our lawyer said that Leroy had been dead for five or six hours before he ended up in your trunk, see? So we had to know where you’d been and what you were doing because I wasn’t sure that I remembered everything from that day. We only looked at it so Lizzie had somewhere to start to confirm that you couldn’t have done it.” Becca tried not to sound pleading, but she still winced at the look on Erin’s face.
Shelly pulled a wrapped package from her backpack and handed it to Erin. She shook her head at Erin’s unspoken question. “While I understand a little of how you feel about this, Erin, I did encourage them to check once I remembered that you used to keep a journal as well as a date book. You can blame me, if that helps any.”
Erin swore under her breath and gestured at Carla. “You’re now my best friend, right after Molly. The rest of you need to do some very fast talking about what you found out. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t black out for six solid hours.” Her knuckles were white as she clasped her hand together around her knee and Becca dropped her own hand down over Erin’s and squeezed lightly. Erin’s fingers trembled, but she didn’t pull back.
Lizzie took a sip of her own water bottle and cleared her throat. “Right. So based on where you said you’d been and what you said you were up to that day and right before the incident, I followed a trail of receipts to stores in town, interviewed a couple of your neighbors and did some verification of security footage at the bank and the gas station. My conclusion: no, you didn’t black out for a day. In fact, right up until two hours before you called me, I couldn’t find any evidence that you’d had a drop to drink.”
Erin shuddered and Shelly patted her shoulder. “But…I still might have once I got up on the trail. I mean, if I brought it with me.” She gave Lizzie a faraway stare that suggested that her mind was somewhere else.
“You passed the labs that we gave you when we took you in. We found an interesting drug cocktail in your system, but no booze.”
“Wait, drugs? I’ve never been on…” Erin’s voice trailed off and she gave Lizzie a wide-eyed look. “Are you saying someone drugged me and planted a dead body in my car so I’d think that I killed him?”
“It’s looking like a good possibility.”
“But who…how?”
“And so we come around to why we’re all here and Molly and the others are on their way. In the meantime, Molly told me that you had a vision in your dream last night, Erin. I’d really like to hear more about that. What do you remember?” Shelly’s voice cut like a knife through the confusion and pain of the last few minutes, refocusing them all as if this was just another problem that they had to solve. Becca sighed with relief, but just a little. The mess was still there and she wasn’t sure if Erin was completely in the clear yet.
They all listened quietly while Erin recounted what she remembered of her dream, right up until she got to the part about the voice that spoke directly to her wolf. “Wait, can you remember any of the sounds?” Shelly leaned forward, her gaze sharp and intent. Becca belatedly remembered her new role as archivist and pulled out her phone. She set it to record while Erin stumbled through a few yips and growls before trailing off.
“We need a hypnotist,” Carla volunteered, breaking the silence. “Someone who can figure out how to put Erin under so she can translate from wolf to human for us. Or, you know, you.” She blushed bright red and looked at her hands when Lizzie looked at her incredulously.
Erin frowned and cocked her head to one side. “That might be a great idea, but I’m not sure where we’d find one around here. They’d have to be Pack-friendly too.”
“We do have a version of that. I think my cousin has experimented with hypnotherapy on some of his patients,” Shelly put in thoughtfully.
Becca thought back to her time at Dr. Green’s clinic, remembered waking up wounded with her leg cuffed to a gurney, and her stomach turned. For a cowardly moment, she hoped that someone else was going to volunteer to take Erin to the clinic. Or bring Dr. Green here, if Erin wanted to give this hypnosis thing a try. Or…maybe she should stop and consider that this wasn’t about her. She cleared her throat and interjected, “That sounds like an interesting idea, if you’re open to it, Erin.” She gave Erin a tentative sidelong glance, trying to gauge her reaction.
Erin rubbed her face with her hands, then held them out over the cook stove to warm them. After a moment of silence, she gave Becca a weary smile. “I am open to anything and everything that makes Leroy’s corpse someone else’s problem and gets me back home for a hot bath.”
Lizzie laughed quietly. “That may be the best list of priorities that I’ve heard all day. I want to figure out what the werebear and his mate are up to, but I think checking in on Annie, if you can, isn’t a bad idea either. I’m liking the scenario in which the reality TV couple found out about the Pack and the valley from Leroy, and maybe Annie, then had a falling out with one or both of them. But we need some proof. We also need to show some evidence that you were kidnapped, Erin, not just involved in a jail break.”
“I know you said there was nothing on the jail cameras, but did anyone check the parking lot one? Or the one at the bank across the street? Maybe it caught them taking Erin out,” Carla said. She was looking into space, clearly cataloguing every camera she could remember from downtown.
Lizzie raised one dark eyebrow and shook her head at Shelly’s startled glare. “We thought she broke out, so no one saw any need to check all that other stuff. And since I’m getting the family death glare, I’m sorry for the assumptions I made at the time. I should have given you more benefit of the doubt instead of assuming that you were trying to pull one over on me.” She sighed contritely.
“And you’re not just saying this because you’ll be running for sheriff, right?” Becca couldn’t hold the words back. Much as she liked Lizzie, she couldn’t help but feel that all of this could have been handled better or at least, differently. She should have just known that Erin wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood. Except she hadn’t been sure about that herself.
Erin and Carla both flipped around to stare at Lizzie. “Wait! You are? Cool! You’d be the first woman! The first Native woman!” The flood of words poured out in a wave. Apparently Deputy Blackhawk wasn’t going to lack for campaign support, at least amongst Pack members.
Shelly wrinkled her nose, held up her hand and looked at her watch. “Sorry to interrupt the love fest, but I have to get back to town. We’ll assume that this isn’t a ploy to gain our votes, unless something else happens. I think under the circumstances, Erin, you better look for Annie tonight, with Carla’s help. You got closer than anyone else did, which might not mean anything, but then again, it might. Please try not to get that close again. Carla, you put me on speed dial and text or call the minute you see her. There’s a satellite phone in the emergency pack if you can’t get a signal.” Carla nodded, her expression serious.
“Can I be on the team that goes to look for Jim and Kari?” Becca’s lip curled involuntarily. Her wolf gave a quiet growl from the depths of her brain. They had scared her, threatened her, kidnapped a woman she cared deeply about and were a danger to her Pack. She wanted to taste their blood, but figuratively, her human brain insisted.
Shelly scowled at her. “No bloodshed. Unless there’s no other option.”
“It’s like you don’t trust me.” Becca grimaced at her boss. At the same time, she was trying not to catalogue all of the recent events that would have caused Shelly not to trust her. She had to admit that there were quite a few.
Some of that must have shown in her face because Shelly reached out and rested her hand on her shoulder. “But they are dangerous and I want you to pick up Lin, Adelía and Gladys before you go anywhere. They should all be at Gladys’ by the time you get to town. Start by going to the warehouse where they were holding Erin. I suspect they’re either using it as a hideout or they’ve left a trail from there. I take it you haven’t seen any new signs of them at your old place?”
Becca wondered when there would have been time, but then Gladys kept a close watch on the street. She’d have mentioned it if she’d seen anything new. She went with a shrug and a headshake. “Alright. I’ll get going now.” She stood up, glancing at Erin to see she could catch her eye, at least wish her luck. For a moment, it seemed like that wasn’t going to happen but at the last minute, Erin gave her a thumbs-up. “Good luck,” Becca walked past and squeezed her shoulder.
An instant later, Lizzie got up too. “Hang on, Becca, I’m coming with you.” They walked down the trail in silence, but Becca’s head was buzzing with thoughts about how she should have given Erin a hug or a kiss or a ring or a declaration or…something rustled in the bushes nearby and she yanked herself out of her thoughts in a hurry. Her nostrils flared as she looked around, trying to figure out what it was.
Lizzie stopped when she did and looked around, her head cocked to one side as she tried to listen for whatever she thought Becca was listening to. The sky had clouded over, tinting the mountain gray and shading the trees and bushes a light shade of silvery green. Striking as it was, it made hard to see, at least for human eyes. Becca closed hers and reached out with her wolf senses to taste the woods around them.
At first, there was nothing, at least nothing out of the ordinary. The wind whistled, the clouds hovered, distant birds chirped, the Pack members on the ledge outside the cave murmured amongst themselves. Then, a flash of predator and a dash of perfume, followed by the crash of branches as whatever it was fled into the woods. Becca lunged forward to follow, only to be stopped by the deputy’s hand on her shoulder. “No. Let’s not go for a repeat of the stuff we went through last time. Rally the troops, then pursue.”
“But…” Becca could feel herself tremble with conflicting urges. She drew in a shaky breath, trying to swallow down a boiling rage, a flash of desperation and a bunch of things she wasn’t ready to analyze too quickly.
“Hey there, come on back. You can’t take on a bear or even Annie, not as a nice middle-aged lady all on her lonesome. And I ain’t going into those woods on a wild bear chase.” Lizzie had her hands on both of her shoulders now, turning Becca so she had to face her.
After a minute, the fight drained out of Becca and she shuddered, pushing Lizzie’s hands away. “C’mon then. Let’s go get them before we lose the trail.”