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Chapter Eight
Edie
Inmydream,awolf was running under a thin moon.His legs and body were impossibly long, stretching further over the landscape beneath him with each bound.Every time he touched the ground, he forced himself to leap further, harder.Stars strobed overhead, pulsing at the same rate as his racing heart.He held himself extended, nearly flying, until gravity inevitably pulled him down.His feet hit the ground for a millisecond as he prepared to leap again.
The ground collapsed beneath him.
My body jerked along with the wolf’s as he tumbled into darkness.
I blinked awake, staring up at a now-familiar ceiling.Outside the open window, birds chirped and leaves rustled.From the light, I judged it to be around eight, but I couldn’t say for sure without looking at my phone.Which I didn’t want to do just yet.
The dream had been so vivid, it was still with me now.In fact, I’d had vivid dreams every night since I arrived in Montana.I chalked it up to my brain trying to make sense of a flood of new information.Of course I was dreaming about shifters; I was spending all day reading about them.And if Jasper’s face appeared in my dreams from time to time, it only meant that I was trying to make sense of him too.
I hadn’t heard from him, but his real estate agent had reached out.I’d politely declined a meeting, but he’d called again.Jasper, it seemed, was very interested in the property.I’d googled both their names and come up with nothing.Moore was a common last name, but I should have been able to find a social media page, property records...even a Montana phone number.But there was nothing.
I threw back the covers.I’d changed the sheets and unearthed a soft, faded quilt from the linen closet.Unlike my father, I slept in the center of the bed, and left the blankets in a messy pile that I could crawl back into later tonight.The morning was chilly, so I slipped his robe over my pajamas.I went downstairs and cut through the now-more-organized living room on my way to the kitchen.
On the first day, I’d thrown out all the newspapers and magazines on the theory that if they’d contained something important, my father would have clipped out the info.All of his machines and contraptions had gone next.I didn’t know what any of them did, and he hadn’t left instructions.That was the easy part.Now, what was really slowing me down was my own fascination with his research.I couldn’t decide what to ignore until I had paid attention to it.
I’d already thoroughly searched his computer, which had taken me on a trip to a shady section of the internet.His search history was full of message boards and chat rooms where he traded theories with other conspiracy theorists.I suppose I should have been glad that my father’s only hobby horse was the existence of shifters; there were a lot crazier things he could have believed in.
I’d also read his journals.Or tried to.His handwriting was indecipherable, and he’d used initials and shorthand with no explanation.The journals also held emotional land mines I couldn’t detect until they’d already blown up in my face.“Cld E for B-day,” one read.“No ans, No msg.”I checked the date.It was from the year I turned 30.I remembered seeing that missed call, returning it, leaving him a message.And never getting a call back
My father’s kitchen had been mostly bare, but he’d stocked prime coffee beans and had the grinder and French press to do them justice.That, we had in common.My mother preferred tea, and one of her many hobbies was making her own blends with supplies she ordered online.
While the coffee brewed, I went into the living room and took stock my project.I’d decided, as I laid on the floor of my father’s bedroom, that I wanted to understand him.I would never get to ask him the questions that had plagued me.Maybe I could get to know him through his work.
I had quickly found myself both embarrassed at his field of research and impressed by his thoroughness.He’d pursued every avenue he could think of with rigorous research, doing everything he could to prove the existence of shifters.
Unfortunately, there was no way to prove an impossibility.
My mother had spent years bemoaning the way my father had wasted his mind and time on an insane theory.So much intelligence, so much diligence, wasted.When she saw the same hyperfocus in me, she’d directed me firmly toward medicine, where my interest in research and my stubborn need to solve a problem could be put to the most good.She’d be furious if she knew that, despite all her efforts to keep me from my father’s interests, I was saw the methods to his madness.
As if she could hear me thinking about her, my mother chose that moment to call.I could have sent her to voicemail, but she’d only call back.“Good morning, Mom.”
“Morning?It’s almost noon here.”
“It’s barely ten there, which means it’s barely eight here.”
“I’m surprised you slept so late,” she admonished.“Normally you have to be at work by seven, right?”
“Yeah.”It turned out that being perpetually sleep-deprived since high school had left me with a sleep debt that was coming due.“I had another weird dream.”
“That place isn’t healthy for your psyche,” my mother said.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said automatically.If I was going to have this conversation, I was going to do it with a view.I picked up the French press and a mug and carried them out to the front porch, where the table and chairs Jasper had set up were still sitting.“I’ve made a lot of progress.”
She made a doubtful sound, but didn’t launch into another lecture about how I had better things to do with my time.“I’ve been researching real estate prices in Missoula.”
Of course she had.As the screen door squealed shut, I put the coffee things on the table and turned to take in the view of the mountains in the morning.“Did you find anything interesting?”
She cleared her throat.I could practically see her, perched in front of her computer wearing her blue-blocking reading glasses.“It looks like a couple of other houses have sold in that neighborhood in the past two years.One for much more, but it was fully reno’d.You say the place needs some work?I thought you were going to send me more pictures.”
“I will,” I said, biting my lip.Sending her pictures of my father’s house felt too intimate, but she’d asked several times and I couldn’t come up with a good reason to refuse her.To placate her, I put the phone on speaker and snapped a photo of blue mountains against a blue sky.“I just sent you one of a view from the front porch.”
“Hmm, the rest of the comps are all below your offer,” she said.“I think you sell before someone else in the neighborhood gets wind that a developer is interested in the area.”
I made a non-committal noise and leaned against the rail.There had to be paths up those mountains, right?People probably climbed them.Maybe I could look into a beginner hike, before I left.“Thanks for looking into it.”
