Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 by Cecilia Dominic Page A
Authors: Cecilia Dominic
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for. No, I hadn’t missed all his references to superiors and assignments. Oh, and then there was the original problem of who was bribing or intimidating my boss and who or what had gone dancing and gotten me in trouble in the first place.
Joanie always said I was a party girl. I looked at Gladis Ann’s note again. What clues are in the house? And why didn’t she just leave clear directions?
Wolf-Lonna would have urged me to action rather than contemplation, so I started in my aunt’s work room, now warm from the sun having risen above the trees. It was an addition to the house, maybe a converted porch. The tile was similar to that of the kitchen but didn’t match exactly, the clay-colored squares just a hair smaller. I confirmed this with a ruler.
Okay, Nancy Drew, you’ve proven this isn’t original to the house. Now what?
I stood and tapped my lips with the end of the ruler, trying to see things as my aunt would have. We were about the same height, so I didn’t worry about missing things from that level. Then again, if someone wanted to make something less obvious, she might have put it above or below. I’d done some consumer training as part of my job, and that’s one thing I always taught my clients: look high or low to find the deals because stores make the expensive stuff easier to find and reach.
I wandered through the kitchen, into the back hallway, and around the stairs to the living room. It sat facing the north Georgia mountains—a gorgeous view, especially now during the day with the sun illuminating everything in waves of brown with hints of green where pine trees stuck out. Loneliness carved out a hole in my chest when it occurred to me that Joanie might be looking over her mountains at that moment and wondering where I went. I’d forgotten to call her the day before, so I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and found the battery had died.
Ashamed I didn’t know my best friend’s number by memory, I plugged in the phone and waited for it to get at least enough juice for me to scroll through the Contacts and find her. I tried to call from the house phone and ended up getting her voicemail. I left a short message explaining Aunt Alicia had died, and that I’d be in touch—essentially what I’d told Leo. The bottom of the west gable made a reading nook, and I sat in the window seat and looked outside.
From my seated position, I looked back into the living room, my heart thudding in my chest. Aunt Alicia had always said that the living room, not the kitchen, was the heart of the house because everyone was most equal there. It had not been her only strange pronouncement, and I wondered for the thousandth time what her and my mother’s family life must have been like.
Don’t focus on what may have been, at least not yet. What do you see?
There was a fireplace on the back wall of the room, the chimney shared by the living room and downstairs bedroom. It had bookcases on either side, and these held a variety of framed photographs as well as old books, the titles long worn off their spines and the binding faded by light exposure. I stood and walked to the bookcase on the left. A photograph of two young girls with a big black dog caught my eye. I had seen it before, of course, but now I looked at it with new eyes. Not a dog, a wolf. It lay between them, docile, with its tongue hanging out. Each child tangled a little hand in its fur. Both squinted like the sunlight was behind the camera, but from their faces, they looked like my aunt and mother.
But the age difference isn’t enough. These two look like they’re two years apart, max. I studied it further to see what the setting was but couldn’t make it out, other than they were in a grassy field somewhere with a dark line of trees in the background. The photo must have been fading because the trees seemed to mingle with and accentuate the line of the wolf’s back. I gently pulled the back of the old frame off. Someone had scribbled on
Joanie always said I was a party girl. I looked at Gladis Ann’s note again. What clues are in the house? And why didn’t she just leave clear directions?
Wolf-Lonna would have urged me to action rather than contemplation, so I started in my aunt’s work room, now warm from the sun having risen above the trees. It was an addition to the house, maybe a converted porch. The tile was similar to that of the kitchen but didn’t match exactly, the clay-colored squares just a hair smaller. I confirmed this with a ruler.
Okay, Nancy Drew, you’ve proven this isn’t original to the house. Now what?
I stood and tapped my lips with the end of the ruler, trying to see things as my aunt would have. We were about the same height, so I didn’t worry about missing things from that level. Then again, if someone wanted to make something less obvious, she might have put it above or below. I’d done some consumer training as part of my job, and that’s one thing I always taught my clients: look high or low to find the deals because stores make the expensive stuff easier to find and reach.
I wandered through the kitchen, into the back hallway, and around the stairs to the living room. It sat facing the north Georgia mountains—a gorgeous view, especially now during the day with the sun illuminating everything in waves of brown with hints of green where pine trees stuck out. Loneliness carved out a hole in my chest when it occurred to me that Joanie might be looking over her mountains at that moment and wondering where I went. I’d forgotten to call her the day before, so I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and found the battery had died.
Ashamed I didn’t know my best friend’s number by memory, I plugged in the phone and waited for it to get at least enough juice for me to scroll through the Contacts and find her. I tried to call from the house phone and ended up getting her voicemail. I left a short message explaining Aunt Alicia had died, and that I’d be in touch—essentially what I’d told Leo. The bottom of the west gable made a reading nook, and I sat in the window seat and looked outside.
From my seated position, I looked back into the living room, my heart thudding in my chest. Aunt Alicia had always said that the living room, not the kitchen, was the heart of the house because everyone was most equal there. It had not been her only strange pronouncement, and I wondered for the thousandth time what her and my mother’s family life must have been like.
Don’t focus on what may have been, at least not yet. What do you see?
There was a fireplace on the back wall of the room, the chimney shared by the living room and downstairs bedroom. It had bookcases on either side, and these held a variety of framed photographs as well as old books, the titles long worn off their spines and the binding faded by light exposure. I stood and walked to the bookcase on the left. A photograph of two young girls with a big black dog caught my eye. I had seen it before, of course, but now I looked at it with new eyes. Not a dog, a wolf. It lay between them, docile, with its tongue hanging out. Each child tangled a little hand in its fur. Both squinted like the sunlight was behind the camera, but from their faces, they looked like my aunt and mother.
But the age difference isn’t enough. These two look like they’re two years apart, max. I studied it further to see what the setting was but couldn’t make it out, other than they were in a grassy field somewhere with a dark line of trees in the background. The photo must have been fading because the trees seemed to mingle with and accentuate the line of the wolf’s back. I gently pulled the back of the old frame off. Someone had scribbled on
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