Page 122 of The Turning of the Tables

Elliot was quiet as I turned out of the storage facility toward home.

“So tell me more about arsenic dresses,” he said, finally.

I blinked. “I mean, it wasn’t just in dresses. They put it in lots of things. Paint, fake plants, wallpaper.”

“So it was poisoning people in their houses?”

“Yeah,” I replied, warming up to the subject. “That’s what got Napoleon, actually. The arsenic in the wallpaper is probably what gave him cancer.”

“Shit. Maybe I should have you take a look at my walls.”

“Your house older than 1860?” I asked him.

“Nope,” came the response. “Mine dates back to the lead-paint era.”

“Do you lick the walls?” I asked him.

“I did as a kid.”

“Wait… seriously?”

“I’ve been a shifter since I was eleven. And in my defense, I was a badger every time I did it.”

“Your parents let you do that with lead paint in the house?” I must have sounded horrified, because he laughed.

“Fuck, no. My mother swatted my nose every time I did it. I’m also pretty sure they didn’t have any lead paint, since they built it, so most of our walls are wood panel or glass, anyway.”

“You have glass walls?”

“Floor to ceiling windows, yeah.”

“Sounds gorgeous.” I was honestly a little jealous. Theidea that Elliot had light and access to—well, I suppose it depended on what the windows looked out on. “Good views?”

“Dad’s garden or the woods,” came his response. “So yeah.”

“Damn. Now you’re just making me wish I could see it.”

He chuckled. “The house is pretty amazing. It’s part of why I moved back up here to the ass-end of nowhere.”

“You haven’t always lived there?” I was learning all sorts of things about Elliot today. I turned onto Laburnum, not too far from Noah’s apartment.

“No. I went down to Milwaukee with Val when he took the job with the Milwaukee PD, then to Madison when he moved down to Virginia.” He paused a moment, and I was trying to decide how to respond when he continued. “I came back when Dad died, and just… stayed. I couldn’t stand the thought of selling the house with everything my folks put into it.”

I wondered, as I pulled into the apartment parking lot, what it was like to actually have positive emotions connected with the house you grew up in. To want to preserve those memories by keeping the house they’d built. “You like it there?” I asked him, definitely envious. The idea of living in the woods, having a garden that wasn’t one pot on a windowsill that contained a tiny aloe plant that I’d been keeping alive for years—it wasn’t thriving, but I kept it alive despite a lack of anything but extremely indirect sunlight.

“You know, I do,” Elliot said, and it sounded almost like he was surprised at his own answer. “I always thought there was no fucking way I was going to move back to Shawano, but it’s grown on me. I like the woods. I like being close to the reservation, being a part of the Nation.” He let out a littlehalf-bark of a laugh. “I even like shocking all the small-town conservatives in the town.”

“Jesus,” I muttered as I slid out of the driver’s seat. “I can’t imaginelikingthat.”

“You always lived in Richmond, city-boy?” he teased.

“Nope,” I told him. “I’m from ass-end-of-nowhere Virginia, up in the Appalachians. The closest named thing to a town near us is called Swoope.”

“How many people live there?” he asked.

“Not enough to put on a sign,” I answered. “That was our post office, but they didn’t bring our mail—we had to go there to pick it up.”

“Okay, you definitely win for smallest-town.”