Ten minutes later, Jack was driving Vanessa’s truck north toward Bear Lake. She’d handed him her keys without protest when he offered to drive, and she’d been on the phone since the minute she got in the truck. When she finally hung up from her fifth or sixth call, she shook her head.
Jack glanced over at her. “Nothing?”
“Nothing. And I don’t understand it. None of this makes any sense. Chuck says Maya just got there. She’d forgotten her elf shoes or some stupid thing and had run home to get them. She was freaked out and started hyperventilating over the blood, plus she keeps crying, so he hasn’t been able to get much sense out of her.”
“And what about this ten thousand dollars?” He didn’t look at her this time, keeping his eyes carefully on the road in front of him instead, but he didn’t need to see her face to tell that her bafflement was sincere.
“I have no idea. Apparently, some celebrity I’ve never heard of—a reality TV star who owns a ranch near here—was supposed to do some kind of photo op donating ten grand to the community to help renovate the town playground. He wanted to give it in cash, because Hollywood people are too stupid to have checking accounts, I guess,” she said bitterly. “So his people found Dad and handed over the cash to be stowed somewhere until the film crew got there later today.”
“And now your dad and the money are both missing, and there’s evidence of foul play,” Jack said. “Could it be a PR stunt on the part of the celebrity?”
Vanessa snorted in dismissal, but then her eyes turned thoughtful. “That would actually make sense, if it weren’t for my dad being involved. Nobody could get Ray Clark to do something like that, though. Stubborn old curmudgeon,” she said fondly, before her breath hitched again.
Jack pretended not to notice and carefully didn’t look at her while she discreetly wiped her eyes and blew her nose. They drove in silence for a while, and he waited until he was pulling into Bear Lake State Park to speak again, after he took the clearly marked turn toward pack headquarters.
“So, I have a few questions,” he said.
“Shoot. Oh, damn. What a poor choice of words,” she said. “If I lose him—”
“You won’t,” Jack said confidently, on the basis of nothing but the desperate urge to keep her from crying. “Look, I need to know a few things. Did the sheriff tell you who else knew about the money? Do you trust this elf? Why were you so eager to come see the Bear Lake pack with me? And why do you wear shoes like that when it’s forty degrees and snowy outside?”
Because it was snowing, coming down lightly for now, but the radio weather guy had sternly warned of dangerous conditions overnight. Jack didn’t want to be caught out on his bike in another storm. He’d been through it before and it wasn’t any fun, and he was a Bengal, not a Siberian. Give him a warm pool over a snowy tundra any day of the week.
“That’s a lot of questions,” she said, looking out her window as the distinctive turquoise lake came into view. “You know, sometimes I forget how beautiful it is here.”
“It definitely is that,” he replied. The sky went on forever, casting its cloudy reflection in the shimmering water like an artist’s fever dream.
“God’s country, Dad calls it,” she said, so quietly it was nearly a whisper.
“Well, if not, I bet God at least has a summer cabin here,” he said, hoping to make her smile, or at least keep her from crying. He’d rather battle blood-crazed vampires than face a woman in tears, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it to himself.
Vanessa didn’t smile, but at least she didn’t cry, so he decided to count it as a win.
Jack parked in the Bear Lake pack’s visitor parking lot, shaking his head over how bureaucratic some shifter groups had become in the years since supernatural creatures came out to the world. Maybe, though, if he actually had a pack—or, as tigers called them, a streak—of his own, he would want a pack headquarters and visitor parking, too.
On second thought, probably not. Tigers were meant to be solitary. Or so he told himself when his solitude started feeling less like freedom and more like a boulder sitting on his chest.
He turned off the truck, but didn’t get out. Instead he turned to face Vanessa.
“Okay. Who else knew about the money?”
She counted them off on her fingers. “Chuck said everybody on the town council, Dad, of course, and everybody connected with the guy who donated it, plus any press his people informed. So, not really a small group.”
“And the elf?”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Maya works at the bar part-time, cleans houses part-time, and I guess is an elf part-time. She’s kind of flaky. I don’t know what she knew.”
Jack studied her face, with its elegant bone structure and beautiful eyes. “Why did you want to come see the pack with me?”
She tightened her lips. “Alec Vargas, the pack alpha, and my father have had a running feud going on about territory. Maybe he’s behind whatever happened to Dad.”
“Your ranch borders the park, right?”
“No, not the park itself. But pack lands designated by treaty extend beyond the state park. They border our ranch at the northern end of our property line.”
“Just how big is this ranch?” Jack was rapidly revising his estimate of how important ten grand would be to the missing rancher/Santa.
“Sixteen thousand acres,” she said.
Jack’s mouth fell open and then he whistled, long and low. “That’s not a ranch, it’s a small country. Ten grand is pocket change, then.”
“To my dad, yes. He donates far more than that to charity, both locally and internationally, every year. But to the person who shot him—”
“So, let’s go talk to the wolves.”
She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Thank you. I know this isn’t any of your business or your problem, but thank you. Dad is all I have left. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose him.”
Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears, and he blurted out the first thing that popped into his mind. “So what about the shoes?”
She smiled—just a little bit, but it was a real smile—and then she glanced down at her heels and back at him, and he saw a hint of the fire in her personality that had been obscured by the worry for her dad. “The shoes? I wear them just because I can.”
She held his arm on the way into pack headquarters, because the sidewalk was slick with the fresh snow, and he caught a scent of jasmine in her hair and briefly considered sticking around Hope Springs, Utah, for a few days, if and when they recovered her dad. He hadn’t promised to be in Dead End on any specific date, after all, and the lawyers were probably out of the office for the holidays.
So, because he was speculating on what Vanessa would look like wearing a lot less clothing, instead of paying attention to his surroundings, naturally that’s when the three wolves jumped him.