I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I’d gotten too close. My instincts warned against it. Especially when I remembered what had just happened to the boy.
The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness.
Too close.
I couldn’t stay away.
CHAPTER EIGHT • GRACE
65°F
For the next week, I was distracted in school, floating through my classes and barely taking any notes. All I could think of was the feel of my wolf’s fur under my fingers and the image of the white wolf’s snarling face outside my window. I snapped to attention, however, when Mrs. Ruminski led a policeman into the classroom and to the front of our Life Skills class.
She left him alone at the front of the room, which I thought was pretty cruel, considering it was seventh period and most of us were restlessly anticipating escape. Maybe she thought that a member of law enforcement would be able to handle mere high school students. But criminals you can shoot, unlike a room full of juniors who won’t shut up.
“Hi,” the officer said. Beneath a gun belt that bristled with holsters and pepper sprays and other assorted weaponry, he looked young. He glanced toward Mrs. Ruminski, who hovered unhelpfully in the open door of the classroom, and fingered the shiny name tag on his shirt: WILLIAM KOENIG. Mrs. Ruminski had told us that he was a graduate of our fine high school, but neither his name nor his face looked particularly familiar to me. “I’m Officer Koenig. Your teacher—Mrs. Ruminski—asked me last week if I’d come talk to her Life Skills class.”
I glanced over at Olivia in the seat next to me to see what she was making of this. As usual, everything about Olivia looked neat and tidy: straight-A report card made flesh. Her dark hair was plaited in a perfect French braid and her collared shirt was freshly pressed. You could never tell what Olivia was thinking by her mouth. It was her eyes you had to look at.
“He’s cute,” Olivia whispered to me. “Love the shaved head. Do you think his mom calls him ‘Will’?”
I hadn’t yet figured out how to respond to Olivia’s new-found and very vocal interest in guys, so I just rolled my eyes. He was cute, but not my type. I didn’t think I knew what my type was yet.
“I became an officer of the law right after high school,” Officer Will said. He looked very serious as he said it, frowning in a sort of serve-and-protect way. “It’s a profession I always wanted to pursue and one I take very seriously.”
“Clearly,” I whispered to Olivia. I didn’t think his mother called him Will. Officer William Koenig shot a look at us and rested a hand on his gun. I guess it was habit, but it looked like he was considering shooting us for whispering. Olivia disappeared into her seat and a few of the other girls giggled.
“It’s an excellent career path and one of the few that doesn’t require college yet,” he pressed on. “Are—uh—any of you considering going into law enforcement?”
It was the uh that did him in. If he hadn’t hesitated, I think the class might have behaved.
A hand whipped up. Elizabeth, one of the hordes of Mercy Falls High students still wearing black since Jack’s death, asked, “Is it true that Jack Culpeper’s body was stolen from the morgue?”
The class erupted in whispers at her audacity, and Officer Koenig looked as if he really did have due cause to shoot her. But all he said was, “I’m not really authorized to talk about the details of any ongoing investigations.”
“It’s an investigation?” a male voice called out from near the front.
Elizabeth interrupted, “My mom heard it from a dispatcher. Is it true? Why would someone steal a body?”
Theories flew in quick succession.
“It’s got to be a cover-up. For a suicide.”
“To smuggle drugs!”
“Medical experimentation!”
Some guy said, “I heard Jack’s dad has a stuffed polar bear in his house. Maybe the Culpepers stuffed Jack, too.” Someone took a swat at the guy who made the last comment; it was still taboo to say anything bad about Jack or his family.
Officer Koenig looked aghast at Mrs. Ruminski, who stood in the open door of the classroom. She regarded him solemnly and then turned to the class. “Quiet down!”
We quieted down.
She turned back to Officer Koenig. “So was his body sto- len?” she asked.
He said again, “I’m not really authorized to discuss the details of any ongoing investigations.” But this time, he sounded more helpless, like there might be a question mark at the end of his sentence.
“Officer Koenig,” Mrs. Ruminski said. “Jack was well loved in this community.”
Which was a patent lie. But being dead had done wonders for his reputation. I guess everyone else could forget the way he’d lose his temper in the middle of the hall or even during class. And just what those tempers looked like. But I hadn’t. MercyFalls was all about rumors, and the rumor on Jack was that he got his short fuse from his dad. I didn’t know about that. It seemed like you ought to pick the sort of person you would be, no matter what your parents were like.
“We are still in mourning,” Mrs. Ruminski added, gesturing to the sea of black in the classroom. “This is not about an investigation. This is about giving closure to a close-knit community.”
Olivia mouthed at me: “Oh. My. God.” I shook my head. Amazing.
Officer Koenig crossed his arms over his chest; it made him look petulant, like a little kid being forced to do something. “It’s true. We’re looking into it. I understand the loss of someone so young”—this from someone who looked maybe twenty—“has a huge impact on the community, but I ask that everyone respect the privacy of the family and the confidentiality of the investigation process.”
He was getting back on firm footing here.
Elizabeth waved her hand again. “Do you think the wolves are dangerous? Do you get lots of calls about them? My mom said you got lots of calls about them.”
Officer Koenig looked at Mrs. Ruminski, but he should have figured out by now that she wanted to know just as much as Elizabeth did. “I don’t think the wolves are a threat to the populace, no. I—and the rest of the department—feel this was an isolated incident.”
Elizabeth said, “But she got attacked, too.”
Oh, lovely. I couldn’t see Elizabeth pointing, but I knew she was, because everyone’s faces turned toward me. I bit the inside of my lip. Not because the attention bothered me, but because every time someone remembered I was dragged from my tire swing, they remembered it could happen to anyone. And I wondered how many someones it would take before they decided to go after the wolves.
To go after my wolf.
I knew this was the real reason why I couldn’t forgive Jack for dying. In between that and his checkered history at the school, it felt hypocritical to go into public mourning along with the rest of the school. It didn’t feel right to ignore it, either, though; I wished I knew what I was supposed to be feeling.
“That was a long time ago,” I told Officer Koenig, and he looked relieved as I added, “Years. And it might have been dogs.”
So I was lying. Who was going to contradict me?
“Exactly,” Officer Koenig said emphatically. “Exactly. There’s no point vilifying wild animals for a random incident. And there’s no point creating panic when it’s not warranted. Panic leads to carelessness, and carelessness creates accidents.”
My thoughts precisely. I felt a vague kinship with humorless Officer Koenig as he steered the conversation back to careers in law enforcement. After class was over, the other students started talking about Jack again, but Olivia and I escaped to our lockers.
I felt a tug on my hair and turned to see Rachel standing behind me, looking mournfully at both of us. “Babes, I have to rain check on vacation planning this afternoon. Step-freak has demanded a family bonding trip to Duluth. If she wants me to love her, she’s going to have to buy me some new shoes. Can we get together tomorrow or something?”
I had barely nodded before Rachel flashed both of us a big smile and surged off through the hall.
“Want to hang out at my place instead?” I asked Olivia. It still felt weird to ask. In middle school, she and Rachel and I had hung out every day, a wordless ongoing agreement. Somehow it had sort of changed after Rachel got her first boyfriend, leaving Olivia and me behind, the geek and the disinterested, and fracturing our easy friendship.
“Sure,” Olivia said, grabbing her stuff to follow me down the hall. She pinched my elbow. “Look.” She pointed to Isabel, Jack’s younger sister, a classmate of ours with more than her fair share of the Culpeper good looks, complete with a cherubic head of blonde curls. She drove a white SUV and had one of those handbag Chihuahuas that she dressed to match her outfits. I always wondered when she would notice that she lived in Mercy Falls, Minnesota, where people just didn’t do that kind of thing.
At the moment, Isabel was staring into her locker as if it contained other worlds. Olivia said, “She’s not wearing black.”
Isabel snapped out of her trance and glared at us as if she realized we were talking about her. I looked away quickly, but I still felt her eyes on me.
“Maybe she’s not in mourning anymore,” I said, after we’d gotten out of earshot.
Olivia opened the door for me. “Maybe she’s the only one who ever was.”
Back at my house, I made coffee and cranberry scones for us, and we sat at the kitchen table looking at a stack of Olivia’s latest photos under the yellow ceiling light. To Olivia, photography was a religion; she worshipped her camera and studied the techniques as if they were rules to live by. Seeing her photos, I was almost willing to become a believer, too. She made you feel as though you were right there in the scene.
“He was really cute. You can’t tell me he wasn’t,” she said.