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Every now and then I’d find someone who listed a related charity—the suicide prevention hotline or save.org or RAINN—as a place to donate money in lieu of flowers or even attending the funeral service. I added them to my list.

It was also not common for people to list their loved one’s Arcane status, unless they were particularly active in the Arc or Nid communities. And that made it hard, again, to figure out whether or not a particular probable suicide was also a shifter.

Sometimes the charity would be Hands and Paws or the Arc-Arcanid Rights League, and one, that for Devon Swiftwater, even listed the Foundation for Arcanid Suicide Prevention as a preferred charity. Devon absolutely went on my list, especially because he was also Mamaceqtaw.

By the end of the day, when Taavi came up behind me and leaned against my back, his arms around my waist, I’d come up with a list of fifteen possibles. I was pretty sure some of them wouldn’t qualify, either because they weren’t Indigenous, weren’t shifters, or weren’t actually suicides, but it was still a longer list than I’d wanted for the last ten years.

I could also still be missing some. People whose families chose not to write obituaries, or at least didn’t list them with theShawano Leaderor somewhere where they could be archived by one of the obituary aggregators.

My current problem was that in order to actually eliminate anyone from the list, I needed more information than I had access to—and I was going to bet that the Shawano PD wasn’t going to be super forthcoming about giving me that information.

“Dinner?” Taavi asked me, the vibrations of his voice soothing against my back.

“Yeah,” I answered, pulling my eyes away from the mesmerizing, eye-drying glow of the laptop screen. “How was the basement?”

“Dusty,” he replied. “Elliot went to shower.”

Now that I focused, I could hear the faint sound of a shower running from down the hallway.

“You don’t want to?” He could use the guest room, and we had clean clothes because Taavi had gotten quarters at the hotel and done laundry this morning while I slept in an extra hour. I’d rewarded him appropriately for his enterprising domesticity.

“I will,” he answered. “But I wanted to come see you first.”

“Make sure you got dust all over me?”

“Exactly.” He let out a soft chuff, then pushed away from me, and I turned to pull him back, this time so that I could kiss him. And then kiss him again.

Taavi pushed a little against my chest, and I loosened my grip. “I need a shower, Val.”

I stole one more kiss, then let him go. “Fine.”

I decided that I should probably be the one to make dinner, since, one, I hadn’t been working down in the basement all day, and, two, I needed a mental break from staring at obituaries.

It seemed like Elliot hadfinallyrun through all of the porch-food that had been dropped off, but with that gone, the fridge was a very sad state of affairs. Condiments, some eggs, butter, a jar of pickles, beer—thankfully—and some cheese, because this is Wisconsin, after all.

Fortunately, there were two pans of Taavi’s enchiladas in the freezer, so I pulled those out—I could even eat one of them—and set them on the counter to start thawing, then turned on the oven and started rooting through cabinets for baking supplies.

I had enough for chocolate walnut chocolate chip cookies—because Elliot had once pointed out to me that there was no reason chocolate chip cookies couldn’talsobe chocolate cookies—so I got to work.

* * *

After dinner,I left Taavi and Elliot—who seemed to get along with each other just fine without me being a jackass in the middle—and went back into Gregory’s office. I didn’t need anything in there in particular, but I didn’t want Elliot or Taavi to overhear this particular conversation.

I couldn’t bring myself to sit in Gregory’s chair, so I hit the little icon of a cartoon tiger and paced as the phone rang.

“Hart. You back in Richmond?” Raj sounded cheerful.

“No. It’s—a mess,” I admitted.

“A mess how?” He didn’t sound so cheerful anymore.

I took a deep breath and explained, trying not to leave anything that might be important out. I told him about Gregory Crane, about talking to him through Ward, about Cammie and Tara Redsky, about the obituaries I’d flagged.

When I finished, he was silent for a few seconds.

“Fucking hell, Keebler,” was how he broke the silence.

“I—I’m not crazy, right?” I asked him. Sure, Elliot and Taavi—and even Ward—hadn’t seemed to think I was tilting at windmills, but these days I was starting to feel like I was losing my sense of equilibrium and reality.