A moment later, Grace, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, slid into the cracked red booth beside me, her jeans squelching on the perpetually greasy surface. She was about to touch my face before she kissed me, and I recoiled.
“What? Do I stink?” she asked, not sounding particularly bothered. She laid her cell phone and car keys on the table in front of her and reached across me for the menus by the wall.
Leaning away, I pointed to her gloves. “You do, actually. Your gloves smell like that wolf. Not in a good way.”
“Thanks for the backup, wolf-man,” Isabel said. When Grace offered her a menu, she shook her head emphatically and added, “The whole car smelled like wet dog.”
I wasn’t sure about the wet-dog label; yes, I smelled the normal, musky wolf odor on Grace’s gloves, but there was something else to it—an unpleasant undercurrent that rankled my stillheightened sense of smell.
Grace said, “Sheesh. I’ll put them in the car. You don’t have to give me that about-to-hurl look. If the waitress comes, order me a coffee and something that involves bacon, okay?”
While she was gone, Isabel and I sat in a kind of uneasy silence filled by a Motown song playing overhead and the clattering of plates in the kitchen. I studied the shape of the saltshaker’s warped shadow across the container of sugar packets. Isabel examined the chunky cuff of her sweater and the way it rested on the table. Finally, she said, “You made another bird thing.”
I picked up the crane that I’d folded out of my napkin while I was waiting. It was lumpy and imperfect because the napkin hadn’t been quite square. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
I rubbed my nose, trying to rid it of the scent of the wolf. “I don’t know. There’s a Japanese legend that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish.”
Isabel’s permanently arched right eyebrow made her smile look inadvertently cruel. “You have a wish?”
“No,” I said, as Grace sat back down beside me. “All of my wishes have already been granted.”
“What were you wishing for?” Grace interrupted.
“To kiss you,” I said to her. She leaned toward me, offering her neck, and I kissed her just behind her ear, pretending I couldn’t still smell the almond scent of the wolf on her skin. Isabel’s eyes narrowed, though her lips stayed curved up, and I knew that, somehow, she had seen my reaction.
I looked away as the waitress came and took our order. Grace ordered coffee and a BLT. I got the soup of the day and tea. Isabel just ordered coffee, taking a bag of granola out of her small leather purse after the waitress had gone.
“Food allergy?” I asked.
“Hick allergy,” Isabel said. “Grease allergy. Where I used to live, we had real coffeehouses. When I say panini here, everyone says Bless you.”
Grace laughed and took my napkin crane; she made it flap its wings. “We’ll make a panini run to Duluth some day, Isabel. Until then, bacon will do you good.”
Isabel made a face like she didn’t much agree with Grace. “If by good, you mean cellulite and zits, sure. So, Sam, what’s the deal on this corpse, anyway? Grace said that you said something about wolves getting fifteen years after they stop shifting.”
“Nice, Isabel,” Grace muttered, casting a sideways glance at me to see what my expression was at the word corpse. But she’d already told me over the phone that the wolf wasn’t Beck, Paul, or Ulrik, so I didn’t react.
Isabel shrugged, unapologetic, and flipped open her phone. She pushed it across the table to me. “Visual aid number one.”
The phone scraped across invisible crumbs on the table as I spun it right side up. My stomach gripped in a fist when I saw the wolf on the screen, clearly dead, but my grief lacked force. I had never known this wolf as a human.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Because I’ve only ever known this wolf as a wolf. It must’ve been from old age.”
“I don’t think this was a natural death,” said Grace. “Plus, there were no white hairs on the muzzle.”
I lifted my shoulders. “I just know what Beck told me. That we get…got”—I struggled with tense, since I wasn’t one of them anymore—“ten or fifteen years after we stopped shifting. A wolf’s natural life span.”
“There was blood coming out of the wolf’s nose,” Grace said almost angrily, like it annoyed her to say it.
I slanted the screen back and forth, squinting at the muzzle. I didn’t see anything on the blurry screen to suggest a violent death.
“It wasn’t a lot,” Grace said, in response to my frown. “Did any of the other wolves that died ever have blood on their faces?”
I struggled to remember the various wolves that had died while I was living in Beck’s house. It was a blur of memories—Beck and Paul with tarps and shovels, Ulrik singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” at the top of his lungs. “I don’t really remember any of them clearly. Maybe this wolf got knocked in the head.” I deliberately didn’t allow myself to think about the person behind the wolf’s pelt.
Grace didn’t say anything else as the waitress set down our drinks and food. For a long moment there was silence as I doctored my tea and Isabel did the same to her coffee. Grace studied her BLT pensively.
Isabel said, “For a hick diner, they have really good coffee.” Part of me appreciated the fact that she didn’t even look to see if the waitress was within earshot before she said it—the sheer insensitivity was somehow rewarding to watch. But most of me was glad that I was sitting next to Grace instead, who shot Isabel a look that said Sometimes I don’t know why I hang out with you.
“Uh-oh,” I said, glimpsing the opening door. “Incoming.”
It was John Marx, Olivia’s older brother.
I wasn’t really looking forward to talking to him, and at first it appeared that I wouldn’t have to, because John didn’t seem to see us. He went straight to the counter and pulled out a stool, hunching his tall frame as he leaned on his elbows. Before he even ordered, the waitress brought him a coffee.
“John’s hot,” Isabel observed, with a voice that indicated that it was possibly a drawback.
“Isabel,” hissed Grace. “Maybe turn down the insensitivity meter slightly?”
Isabel pursed her lips. “What? Olivia’s not dead.”
“I’m going to go ask him to come over and sit with us,” Grace said.