I let out a soft grunt as I mounted the last step, hating my body and the pain that it carried around with it constantly. It was better today than it had been when I’d half-fallen out of the car last night, but I wouldn’t call it one of my better days.
The door at the top had one of those little plastic signs that hung on a hook stuck to the glass pane on the door. It saidOpen, Come on in!
So I did.
I stareddown at the document Humbolt had given me.
“I—don’t understand,” I said slowly.
“To be quite honest, I don’t, either,” the lawyer admitted. “Not completely.” James Humbolt looked to be nearing retirement, with pale skin that hadn’t seen nearly enough sunlight, light grey eyes that tended to squint behind metal framed big lenses, and thick grey hair he’d swept to one side. He wore a grey suit, plain white button-down, and a solid tie in an inoffensive shade of grey-blue. His mask was grey, but a slightly different shade than his suit, which told me he probably didn’t care all that much about color-coordination. He seemed tired,his body the kind of soft that said he hadn’t so much as gone for a walk for exercise in at least a decade.
I wanted to invite him to walk down to the coffee shop with me just to get him outside. Because James Humbolt actually was a nice guy—and he didn’t at all seem to be part of the Community. He hadn’t said any of the buzzwords I’d have expected to hear from someone who was, and he’d put aside Momma’s will for the first two hours to talk with me about what was happening with Noah.
Who had twenty-six hours left before the Augusta County police had to release or charge him.
Humbolt determined that Noah did, in fact, have a lawyer—someone from Richmond whom I assumed Lulu had hired, which was good, because Lulu had the money to hire a good lawyer. I hoped that would mean good things for Noah.
So Humbolt couldn’t actually talk to Noah, but he did manage to get more information.
While the police hadn’t found anything to directly implicate Noah, apparently his fingerprints had been found on a glass in the kitchen and on the front door. Which meant that he’d either lied to Lulu or had kept the fact that he’d gone to see Momma from them. And from me.
That hurt.
The worst part was that Humbolt told me that my mother’s body had been mauled by some sort of animal—which was delaying determining cause of death, if it hadn’t been the cause of death itself. That was the real reason they were holding Noah.
Because to the cops, he was an animal.
And so was I.
I hadn’t told Humbolt that. Not yet. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I wasn’t ready to trust him with my shifter identity within the first few hours of meeting him.
So, instead, I asked him what my mother had wanted. What she’d left or what it was I needed to do. Why he’d insisted that I come back to Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.
“Your mother, Mrs. Mays, left you this,” he said, and put an envelope down in front of me on his desk. I opened it, and found a single sheet of paper.
The piece of paper I was staring at, trying to make sense of.
If anything should happen to me, please contact my children, Seth and Eleanor Mays.
To Eleanor I bequeath my grandmother’s onyx brooch and pearl necklace, and the table linens embroidered by my mother.
To Seth, my father’s tools and toolbox, and the crocheted bed-spread from the master bedroom, made by my aunt.
To both my living children, the land bought with the money I brought to my marriage to Bartholomew Mays.
Please see that my children read the following.
There was empty space below that, and then the words continued. This was where things got confusing.
To the only true loves of my life,
We all make decisions we regret. I cannot say that I regret meeting your father, because that is how I got both of you. But I do regret not taking you in the night and running away, although I know I would never have been able to run far. But I should have tried.
I can only excuse my lack of action as fear—fear that if I ran, I would be killed and you would have been left only to your father. Or fear that your father would have killed you as he would have me. I thought I could help to protect you. Could make things better. Could convince him that God is merciful.
I can only think that if I had taken you away, things would have been different. That your father’s harshness would not have driven you into sin as it did.
When you left, your father declared you dead. Refused to even try to find you. I know some social workers tried to find us. But by then, you were dead to the Community, and no one would acknowledge your existence.
