As soon as I jumped out of the Jeep, the strangest of smells hit my nose. I knew I recognized it from somewhere, but it was so faint I couldn’t precisely place it. Where did I know it from? It was just on the tip of my nose, like a word you say every day of your life, but you forget how to precisely place it from your mental dictionary. I shook my head, trying to shake that feeling of how significant it was.
In the meantime, though, I spotted Sheila’s little Lexus and stomped over to where she was sitting on the driver’s side with her door open, her legs swung out so both feet were planted on the broken pavement.
“Where is she?” I asked as I approached. “Where’s Jessica?”
Sheila looked up at me, the dried remains of tears streaking her face.
“I-I-I don’t know,” she said. “She was here one minute, then I came back out to grab my wallet, and she was gone when I came back out again.” As she finished speaking, though, a pensive look came over her face, a look as if she’d just swallowed a bug.
“What is it, Sheila?” Jake asked as he came up beside me. “Spit it out, lady.”
She shook her head, groaning. She twisted around awkwardly in her seat and reached back into her car. “When I came back out because I forgot my wallet, I asked her to grab it for me.” She turned back around as she spoke, a disposable cell phone in her hand. She held it up for us, her watery eyes fixated on it. “She must have seen this and freaked out.”
Frank and I both rocked back on our heels. “You’ve been making the calls?”
“What?” she gasped, her eyes flickering up to meet ours and dancing between them. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Well, not all of them. Just the one earlier today.”
“The one just after we left your house, then?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why?” I growled. “To muddy the water for someone else? So you could bring the bikers up there? This isn’t some fucking game, Sheila!”
Her shoulder slumped and she sank into the driver seat.
“Think I don’t know that? Look,” she said, raising her eyes back to mine, “I’ve been doing the accounting at the Curious Turtle. When I pushed Jess to take Wyatt’s deal? Yeah, that was for a fucking reason. I told Jessica the business is failing, because it really is. He was offering a fucking king’s ransom for that place, a better deal than she’d ever get otherwise, and I knew it. She knew it, too, but she didn’t want to listen to reason.”
“So you moseyed on down to the store and grabbed you a phone?” Frank asked, nodding along. “Then made the call, figuring you could maybe nudge things along, huh?”
She nodded with a wince. “I wanted her to take it,” she said. “Not because I want her to leave town, but because I knew no bank would ever invest any money in the gallery or give her a loan for it. Financially, she’ll be screwed if she doesn’t find another investor and find a way to turn the business around. But who’s going to take a chance on it?”
Frank looked to me, shaking his head. “Makes sense.”
I nodded, my arms crossed. “Yeah, a stupid kind of sense.”
“Oh, come on,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You know Jessica’s more hard-headed than anyone. How long did it take for you to get her up to the safe house?”
“Good point,” I said grudgingly. “But that still doesn’t explain how you got wrapped up in the whole thing with the Skull and Bones, and how you ended up as a hostage. What about that?”
“Want to know the truth?” she asked, sighing and shaking her head again. “Because it’s going to make me sound like a fucking idiot.”
“Shoot,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Try us.”
“I thought, in one of my bright moments of genius, that you all had to be wrong about them, about those bikers, that Wyatt just really wanted the gallery as a piece of his uncle’s legacy. I was so wrong, though. So, so, wrong. I was just trying to talk to him about it, see what he said, then he got a call about Lacy and they dragged me along because they knew I knew you because of my asking questions about the gallery.”
I shook my head again. “Yeah, you’re right. But, fuck, mistakes happen.”
“That’s all, as they say,” Frank drawled, “water under the bridge now. More importantly, we need to know what the hell happened with Jess. And now.” He sniffed the air, then, wrinkled his nose. “You smell that, buddy?”
I nodded. “Smelled it when we first walked up.”
“Smells like something rotting, don’t it?”
Then, it clicked. I did know that smell. Rotting turtle. No, rotting tortoise. I huffed deeply, realizing I could smell Jessica, too, could smell my mate. I turned and grabbed Frank by the shoulder. “The package! The fucking package, Frank! Her stalker was here! Whoever it is, she climbed into the car with them.”
Sheila jumped up from the seat in her car. “She went with them? Willingly? So it’s someone she knows, then!”
I nodded. “Frank, we’ve gotta find her. And soon, before it’s too late.”
We were off at a run to the Jeep, abandoning Sheila in the gas station parking lot. “Reckon you can smell her the whole way?” Frank called as we approached the Wrangler.
“Not in this form,” I said, throwing him the keys to my car. “But I bet I can as a wolf.”
“Do it, buddy,” he said, running to open the passenger side for me as I began to strip out of my clothes. Once I was in my wolf form, the whole world and all its smells seemed to come truly alive. It was like I could see Jessica’s smell covering the whole place, the trail she had left as she’d left in the car with her stalker. Her smell, and the smell of that rot, seemed to brain together, to become as distinct as a bright pink strip of paint down a golf fairway.
I gathered up my human clothes and bound into the passenger seat, panting heavily as I dropped the unkempt bundle into the passenger side foot well.
“Can you smell her?” Frank asked.
I nodded and whimpered. I could smell her.
“Let’s go, then,” he said, knowing perfectly well what I was trying to say. He was part wolf, after all.
As we pulled out of the gas station and turned left onto the highway, something deep inside me screamed that we needed to hurry. We didn’t have much time to find her. Or her stalker.