This Is Not a Werewolf Story (31 page)

My dad looks at Mean Jack. Mean Jack looks at my dad. They both look down at Vincent. The whole time, Mary Anne stares at me.

So that's all it takes to get her undivided attention.

“No!” my dad shouts.

I jump down. I tuck my tail under and creep to the back of the cage. I curl up against White Wolf, who has watched it all so calmly. I sink my nose onto my paws. In one second I have ruined everything. My father will think I'm as wild as any other wolf. He'll forget all that I've done to show him who I really am.

“I've
never
seen that wolf do that,” my dad says as he helps Vincent sit up. “Are you all right?” He pulls Vincent's arm out to look at the cut.

Vincent looks like he's seen a ghost. He should. I'm the ghost he made.

“It's a superficial flesh wound,” Mary Anne announces after she glances at Vincent's arm. “It may or may not leave a scar.”

“That wolf is dangerous,” Vincent says, moving away on his knees. “You're gonna have to put it down,” he says to my dad. “That's what happens, isn't it? When a wild animal attacks a human? It gets put down.”

I feel a snarl start in my throat. I glance at White Wolf. Her body is tense. She moves forward slightly.

“Now, see here—” my dad starts to say.

But Mary Anne interrupts. “
Nobody
knows what you are saying, Vincent.
Nobody
saw that wolf attack you. I, for one, will testify that it was the fence and not the wolf that caused your injury.
Everyone
here will say the same thing.”

My dad and Mean Jack nod. “I think the lady has made a fine point,” says my dad.

There's a long silence, and then Mean Jack says in a voice like he can't believe it, “It was like the wolf had a score to settle.”

I sit up. My humans are smarter than I thought.

“That wolf despises Vincent.” Mary Anne nods.

Interesting. Whatever Vincent did to Mary Anne since I saw them last must have been pretty rotten, because she sure doesn't like him anymore.

“All I know,” my dad repeats, “is that I have
never
seen that wolf act that way.”

“Mr. Ranger here and me can vouch for this wolf. So, Vinnie, you gonna tell me why it thinks you're a problem?” Mean Jack asks.

Vincent starts walking really fast up the little steps to the back door.

“You wouldn't sink so low as to tease an animal, wouldja?”

I'll never call Jack “Mean” again, and that's a promise.

I slink over, really low to the ground. Then I push my nose out toward my dad. He scratches the top of it gently, the way I like.

All of them—even Vincent at the back door—stare at me. The blue jay comes to sit on the lowest branch of the cedar that shades the kennel. I could swear she winks at me.

Then Jack, Mary Anne, and my dad turn. Now all of us stare at Vincent.

My dad asks, “Dean Swift said you take your dirt bike out on the trails in the woods. Did you come across these wolves once and harm them somehow?” He glances back at White Wolf. He noticed the scar in her flank when we first got here.

Vincent looks at his feet. He digs his toe into the plank of the step and shakes his head.

“You can tell me the truth. It would be the right thing to do.” My dad walks toward him.

Vincent runs back into the trailer. We hear the front door slam.

“There's a mystery here,” Mary Anne says. She caps her pen and sits down on the bottom step.

Jack sits down on the step below. “Well, I, for one, ain't got nothin' better to do this summer than solve it,” he says.

I sit down and look at them. I'm grateful. Even though I know Jack has the attention span of a fruit fly and Mary Anne will probably spend days looking up synonyms for the word “mystery.” Even though I know the chances of the two of them working together well enough and long enough to figure this out are slim, to say the least. But it's funny to think that of all the kids I've ever known, these two are turning out to be my best friends.

The mobster and the novelist.

A few evenings later there's a knock at the door. Dad gets up to answer it. He must be tired because he forgets to send us outside.

“Hello, hello,” a cheery voice says.

I sniff. My tongue rolls out of my mouth, I'm so happy. Dean Swift.

He comes in and sets a shoe box down on the table.

“It's been a few weeks since . . .” Dean Swift stops like he doesn't want to say the rest.

My dad finishes for him. “Since the search for Raul was called off.”

“This has been a hard couple of months for all of us, and you especially,” says Dean Swift. “But I have discovered something that might answer at least one question.”

I stretch and crawl out from under the table. I come at Dean Swift very low, on my belly almost, with my tail droopy and my ears back. Dad is looking at me, waving his hand to tell me to get back under the table,
but I know better than he does. If anyone can help, it's Dean Swift.

“Is that one of the wolves?” asks the dean. He doesn't sound as surprised as you'd expect.

“Yeah.” Dad nods. He scratches his head. “The white one's over there, in front of the TV. She really likes prime-time dramas. This one stays close to the food. The darnedest thing—he loves cereal.”

Dean Swift looks down at me. I scoot up closer and try to put words into my eyes so that he can see the Raul me inside them.

Instead, what I see stuns me. Above Dean Swift's head I see the shadow of an eagle's head. And behind him, I see wings. Well, not
really
wings. More like a hologram of wings—like I could push my hand through them. Like the ghost of a skin.

In his eyes there's a flash that tells me that above my wolf head he sees the shadow of my Raul skin. He smiles and touches me above my eyes.

We know each other in the woods
. That's what he said to Ms. Tern. This is what he meant. This is the shadow my mother saw when she hunted with Tuffman. This is why she wouldn't eat his kills. This is how she figured out his evil secret.

Dean Swift takes a big breath. He smiles at me and then pushes the shoe box he brought toward my dad. “I found this among the belongings of our former PE
teacher. He left us suddenly.” The dean glances down at me. “In fact, he disappeared the night the cougar got shot.”

There's a long silence. Then he says, “Jimmy, there is no question that I made a serious mistake. Not once have you blamed me, and yet you should. I should have kept track of where Raul went on the weekends. I thought he was with you. You thought he was with me. I've been trying to figure out how I could have been so negligent.”

My dad looks sad, like he does whenever anyone talks about me.

“Well, here's part of the answer.” The dean opens the box. “It was Mr. Tuffman.” He pulls out a couple of yellow notepads.

“Do you see the traces here?” He points to the top sheet on one of the pads. “He pressed down so hard with his pen when he wrote that it left the imprint of the word on the next page. I took a pencil and gently shaded over the blank page.”

He reads aloud, “ ‘Dear Dad, We have been very busy. I go fishing with Sparrow and the Cubs. I have a lot of friends. I don't want to see you yet. You remind me too much of Mother. Please send more money because my shoes are too small. All my love, your son, Raul.' ”

My dad swallows and his lower lip moves a little.
Don't cry, Dad. Please don't cry.

“How much money did you send him?” Dean Swift asks.

My dad puts his head in his hands and shakes it. “I don't know. Couple hundred—a thousand. It doesn't matter. The money doesn't matter.”

“If we could only figure out where Raul went during all those weekends, we might have a chance of finding him.” Dean Swift pauses and then looks at me. “Of bringing him back,” he corrects himself. “In the meantime, it's now clear that Tuffman took advantage of Raul's loneliness and your desire to do whatever Raul needed to cope with the loss of his mother. We'll notify the police. But I wanted to know how many letters he sent, and if you kept them?”

My dad nods. He gets up and walks with hunched-up old-man shoulders to the bedroom.

Dean Swift bends down and whispers, “I suspected you were one of my kind. But I thought it would be many years before your second self would call you. We can recognize each other now only because we are both wearing our second skins. It's the way of the woods. It prevents us from hunting one another.”

I nod. He smiles. Then he stares at me, a long thinking line between his eyebrows.

“Are you hiding from someone in your wolf skin?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Are you trapped?”

I nod.

“Have you lost your threshold?”

I tilt my head at him.

“The place where you shift.”

No.

“Have you lost your light?”

No.

“Have you lost your clothes?”

Yes
.

“Was it Tuffman?”

Yes
.

Dean Swift runs his hands over his face. “I'm a fool. Ms. Tern warned me about him, but I refused to see the truth.”

He jumps as a crash comes from the back of the trailer.

“I'm all right,” my dad calls out. “It's a mess in here, that's all.”

Dean Swift exhales and then leans back down to me. “So few of our kind harm one another that it seemed impossible. I went down to the fort the night they captured the cougar. When I saw the shadow of Tuffman's face above the skin of that cougar, I began to wonder if he had something to do with your disappearance. I searched his room but found nothing. This morning Mary Anne came to my office and told me about her
visit here. She wanted to know about white wolves. It reminded me of Ms. Tern's strange theory that Tuffman is a notorious hunter of spirit animals. I decided to search his room again. What I found has led me to believe that he was trying to separate you from your father, and worm his way into your trust. But why? Was it simply to get to the white wolf through you?”

Yes.

My dad comes back with a stack of papers.

Dean Swift sits up straight and clears his throat.

“Here are all the letters,” my dad says. He drops the stack on the table and slumps back in his chair. “And you're telling me Raul didn't write them.”

I put my paws up on the chair and rest my head in his lap.

“No,” Dean Swift says. “He didn't write even one of them.”

“He must have wondered why I stopped coming,” my dad says sadly. “He must have thought
I
abandoned him too. Now he'll never know how much I love him. That I think of him every second.”

Dean Swift looks at me and talks to my dad. “I imagine he knows the truth. Children always do.”

He stays until the sun starts to fall behind the cedars, cruising down toward the water, lighting it up so that the blue sea glows like my wolf mother's eyes. They don't talk much, my dad and the dean. But Dean
Swift's silence is a kind of hug, warm and filling the room with his understanding.

When he leaves, he bends down and scratches my ears. “I'll get you out,” he whispers. “I will make inquiries. Have no fear.”

In the morning the phone rings.

“No,” my dad says. “We can't separate her from the gray.”

He listens. “They have to stay together.”

He listens. “No. You can't put her in a zoo.”

He slams the phone down.

I learn more when he calls a friend. “They're coming for the white one later today,” he says. “It's all about money.”

When he hangs up, he sits on the floor next to me. White Wolf settles down on the other side of him. I don't know how much she understands. Sometimes I think she's been a wolf so long she doesn't understand words.

I look at her for a long time. Ever since Dean Swift left, I've been looking at her. But no matter how hard I look, I never see the shadow of my mother's face above White Wolf's head. What does that mean?

Soon we will all be separated again. It will be like
when my dad stopped coming to get me and I hadn't found White Wolf. Only now I don't have Bobo or Sparrow. I don't have the other half of myself anymore either.

Cook Patsy is right. Love is a circle. It goes on forever. But I'm right too. It's also a chain that means you belong to someone. My family's chain keeps getting broken. When they take White Wolf from us, and me from the ranger, then I won't belong to anyone anymore. And nobody will belong to me.

I will have lost so much that there won't be much of me left.

I look again for the shadow of my mother's face. Maybe that's what happened to White Wolf.

I put my nose in my paws. It's despair. I can't change what's happening. Turn the light on me as much as you like, I'm just a dandelion seed floating in the wind—shining bright and alive but helpless.