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“Would you have just told everyone if she’d agreed?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’m in love with her. I’ve been in love with her for yea
rs. I was engaged once, but I realized that Joshie had been my first love and still was, so it wasn’t fair to marry anyone else, not if I couldn’t really love them.”
“Noble,” Olaf said. “Many men would have married and tried to forget what they could not have.”
“It didn’t feel noble. I thought maybe if she found someone else and married, I’d finally be able to let it go, but she couldn’t find anyone either. We finally both realized that it was because we were meant for each other.”
“But you weren’t able to tell anyone,” I said.
Bobby shook his head. “She knew we weren’t really brother and sister, but to the rest of the town we were, and so she made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone that we were in love.”
“Or that you were lovers,” I said.
He nodded. “Or that.”
I was beginning to see why Jocelyn might have been a little hysterical in the hospital. She’d been hiding the fact that she was having an affair with the man who was raised as her brother; it’s legal, but if she hadn’t felt conflicted about it, she wouldn’t have made Bobby swear not to tell anyone.
“Why did she want to see the whole transformation from human to leopard?” I asked. Maybe if I concentrated on what we didn’t know, I wouldn’t get hung up on what we’d just learned. Was it incest if you weren’t blood relations? I mean, technically, legally no, but if you were raised together it just felt . . . wrong.
“I proposed, and she said she couldn’t decide if she didn’t see me change. She was comfortable with me being a wereanimal as her brother, but not sure about as a husband.”
“What happened that night, Bobby?” I asked.
He told the story pretty much as he’d told Newman from the beginning up to a point. They’d sat down to dinner with Uncle Ray at seven o’clock like normal, but then all the hired help had left, even Carmichael, who lived on-site in a small house on the grounds.
“Except for Carmichael leaving, it was a normal Friday night up to that point. Uncle Ray went to his study to look over the stocks and write in his journal like he did almost every night. We had some television shows that we watched together, and sometimes we’d watch a movie as a family, but other than that, he went to his study and left Jocelyn and me to entertain ourselves. That’s how he always said it: ‘You kids go entertain yourselves. I’m going to do boring old-man stuff.’”
Bobby’s eyes got shiny at that point. He raised his hands as if he’d rub the tears away, or pretend he had something in his eye, but the shackles brought him up short, and he couldn’t complete the gesture. “I can’t believe he’s never going to hug me and say that ever again. I didn’t see his body, so I don’t believe he’s dead. Does that make sense?” He looked at me.
“Yeah, makes perfect sense,” I said.
He nodded, and the tears started down his face.
“Go on, Bobby,” Newman said. “What happened after Ray went to his study?”
“We went up to my room and made love. She let me hold her for a while, and then she asked to see me change.” The tears were drying on his face by the time he’d finished the sentence.
He hesitated so long that I was debating on asking a question while he struggled to find the words, but Edward beat me to it. “You said she let you hold her afterward. Was that unusual?”
Bobby nodded. “She joked that I was the girl, because I liked to hold her after sex and she just liked to clean up and be done like a boy.” He smiled as he spoke, his face going gentle at the memory.
In my head I thought two things. One, if she could get up every time that fast, then she wasn’t having that good a time. Two, if she didn’t want to be held after sex, she had serious issues about the whole thing, or she was using him for sex or in general.
“How did she react to seeing you change shape?” Olaf asked from the corner to which he’d retreated.
Bobby glanced back at him, and there was an uneasy look on his face, but I think that had more to do with Olaf intimidating him earlier than anything else. “She didn’t scream or run away. She looked happy, smelled pleased. I rubbed up against her legs. She petted me like she always does in leopard form, and then I went out the open window and down the tree outside my window like I always do.”
“The same tree that you put your deer in?” I asked.
He frowned and nodded. “Unless one of the other animals in the area moved the deer, it should have been there.”
“Rico looked in the tree. He didn’t search the woods for it,” Newman said.
Bobby smiled and then looked utterly serious. He glanced at me and then at Newman. “Does she really think I killed him?”
“I’m sorry, Bobby, but yeah, she does.”
