“He picked you up?” Elliot was a huge badger. It was hard to imagine anyone picking him up if he didn’t want to be picked up.
“Dad’s—Dadwasa shifter, too.” Another lip twitch, although this one felt sad.
I’d caught the correction. And the sadness. I didn’t know what to do with that. What do you say to someone who’d just reminded himself that his father had been murdered? In the house he was now living in. I wondered what that was like—why he’d chosen to stay here in spite of it.
I hadn’t asked to see his dad’s office—and he hadn’t shown it to me. In fact, I hadn’t been down that particular hallway at all. And neither one of us had walked down that hall in our muddy feet, so at least there was one part of the house I didn’t have to clean.
Elliot gave himself a little shake. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I returned. “I’d forgotten he was a shifter, too.”
Elliot nodded once. “You’d have liked him,” he said, then, and I felt my pulse quicken. Not because he thought I would have liked his dad—although I’m sure that would have been nice—but because Elliot was thinking about it.
“He seems like a really great person,” I said. I didn’t know much about Elliot’s dad, but I definitely hadn’t heard anything that would make me think otherwise. Hart liked him, and Hart was, in my experience, a pretty good judge of people most of the time.
Elliot nodded again. “He was,” he said softly, then looked up and gave me a less-sad crooked smile. “And he’d skin us both for what we did to the carpet.”
It tookme almost four hours to get the carpet clean. During those four hours, Elliot decided that the solution to the mud-on-the-carpet problem would be building an outdoor shower where he could stash clothes—or at least a robe—and a towel, hose himself off, and then put something on before coming back in the house.
He’d then disappeared to literally design said shower. I didn’t mind—the whole reason he’d decided to plan the outdoor shower was because I’d threatened to steam clean him if he didn’t get out from underfoot.
By the time I’d left to return the steam cleaner, he was already in the garage cutting things.
I stuck my head in. “I’m returning the cleaner,” I told him.
“Okay,” he replied, distracted by what he was doing.
“Should you be using a saw while alone?”
He looked up at me, then snorted. “I have lived alone for most of my adult life,” he replied. “Aside from rooming with Val in college. I haven’t cut off my hand yet.”
I frowned a little, but left anyway. I supposed he had a point—he was a master carpenter. He’d been doing this for years, and there was no possible way he’d had someone in his garage or basement every single time he needed to saw something.
It did worry me a little, though. Not because I thought he wasn’t careful, but because it only takes one mistake for someone to end up missing a finger or even dead. I haven’t seen a lot of home-project-related deaths, but two was enough to make me extremely cautious about power tools.
Although Elliot had been using them as the foundation of his employment for like twenty years at this point, so I probably shouldn’t be too worried.
I also knew that he liked to do a lot of his work by hand—hand saws, hand sanding and carving—which was much less likely to end with him losing a finger or two.
Returning the steam cleaner itself was entirely uneventful, and I stopped on the way back to pick up ice cream—chocolate fudge swirl for Elliot and cashew milk caramel ribbon for me—because the lady at the hardware store where I’d rented it gave me some money back for returning it extra early. I didn’t think she was supposed to, but I wasn’t going to say no.
I could hear the saw as I carried the ice cream to the kitchen and put it in the freezer, although it had stopped by the time I poked my head back into the garage.
Elliot looked up. “Care to give me a hand?”
I shrugged. “As long as you tell me what to do.”
8
Elliot Crane
Good luck.
Seth Mays
Thanks
I was sittingin the parking lot of the Shawano County Sheriff’s Office, about to go in for an honest-to-God interview. I was terrified. And excited. But mostly terrified.
