Page 2 of Beau (Sheppard’s Shadow #5)

“I didn’t actually die, but was in a coma. Your father told them to tell you that.” She didn’t know whether or not to believe her. Then she started spouting off things that only she would know. Or someone who had done a good background check on her. “Do you believe me now?”

“No. I don’t know who this is, but surely you could have called at a better hour than one in the morning.

” She told her that she’d only just arrived in town.

“Good for you. If you are my mother, which I still don’t believe that you are, you know that I’m a very hard-working person who needs to be in bed by ten to get up at an ungodly hour to work. Who is this really?”

“My name is Glenda Watson. I’ve been looking for you and your brothers and sister for the last three months.

If not for the advertisement in the paper, I might well still be looking.

” Lying down, snuggling next to Weston as he asked her who it was, she told him that someone saying she was her mother was calling.

He, too, couldn’t believe it was now that she decided to call.

“What will it take for you to believe that I’m your mother?

I don’t know what else to tell you. You’re not being the least bit nice to me. I deserve respect.”

“Respect? I don’t think so. Call back tomorrow at a decent hour.

I’m not saying that I’ll believe you any more than I do right now, but I know that I’m pissed off because of the time and the fact that you were supposed to have died nearly ten years ago.

Where is Dad in all this? I heard too that he’s gone to another country just to deal with his grief.

Nothing you can say will change my mind at this hour. Call back tomorrow.”

Hanging up on her mom gave her a satisfaction that she’d never felt before.

Rogen had never gotten along with her mom, her father, either, for that matter, but telling her that she was still alive when she’d gone to her funeral with the rest of her family just wasn’t cutting it.

Awake now, she got out of bed and made her way downstairs to look up on the computer about her mother’s death.

She knew all the details but wanted to make sure that she’d not missed anything back then.

Her mom had been in a car accident while driving drunk.

Something that she’d never thought of until right now was that it would have taken a great deal of alcohol to get her mom drunk, as she was a shifter too, but at the time, she or any of the others had thought about that.

Their mother had been drinking since they were born and didn’t really think about how much it would take for her to be drunk enough to have an accident and for it to have killed her.

It just didn’t make any sense as to why she’d come around now.

If she remembered correctly, it had been Calhoun who had notified them of her death. She thought about waking him up to see what he had to say, but just as she was convincing herself that this was all a scam for some reason, her brother called her.

“I just heard from someone telling me that she was our mom.” She told him that she’d gotten the same call just a little while ago.

“I hung up on her. I don’t know what sort of scam this is, but I’m not playing with her.

Mom died, the insurance policies that we had paid off.

We went to the funeral and had a party in her honor.

Who is this person who is trying to cause trouble?

I don’t believe for a minute that it’s our mom.

Especially after all this time. What’s it been, about ten years? ”

“Did you actually tell her that we had a party in her honor? And yes, it’s been about ten years since the accident.

” He said that he had not, but wished that he had thought about it.

“Why couldn’t any of this have waited until a decent hour?

She told me that she just got into town, and I no more believe that any more than I do she’s our mom.

What do you suppose is going on right now? ”

“Hang on, I’m getting a call from Toby. He’s going to be pissed.

” When she hung up the phone, she reached out to her family to get things settled up about this.

If this person really was their mother, why the fuck didn’t she reach out to them all instead of using a phone?

And how did she get her phone number? It wasn’t the company number but her personal one that no one had but family and a few take-out places.

Damn it, there were more questions than answers about this, and she wanted to hunt her down and figure this out.

“She said that she was in a coma for the last few years and that Dad lied to us.”

They had each heard from her by now, and the only one that hadn’t had been Belinda.

If the person really was her mother, then she’d missed out on a lot of things.

Like the death of Benson and the grandchildren, Belinda moving to Ohio to start a new life, and even Toby’s kids, all of them under the age of ten.

“I was just thinking about contacting dad. It’s been a while, but I should be able to talk to him.

” Calhoun said he’d do it now, and Rogen thanked him for that.

“All right. I know that we should more than likely wait until later in the morning, but whatever this woman is up to, it’s not going to go over well with anyone if she’s lying. ”

Calhoun didn’t contact their dad with all of them on the same link.

She thought that was smart of him. If she were indeed alive, then he’d be the one to get pissed off at their father rather than all of them at one time.

If she were really alive, she was going to be really pissed off at both of them.

There just wasn’t any reason for them to be told that she was dead when she had been kicking around for some time now.

At least the three months she’d told her that she was looking for them.

And that, too, bothered her. Why didn’t she reach out like family could do?

Why do this on the phone, trying to convince them one at a time who she was to them?

No reason that she could think of other than she wasn’t really their mother.

Weston joined her in the office and brought her a cup of tea and some of the cookies that had been in their picnic dinner tonight. She was just munching on them when her brother contacted her again. The news wasn’t good.

“Whoever she is, she’s not our mother.”

~*~

Danielle knew that her family had been killed in the living room.

Her father had done it when he just simply couldn’t take it anymore.

His mother had treated him like dirt, and his grandparents didn’t have the backbone to deal with her.

So he’d killed both his grandparents, hating that she’d been told that he’d killed his own grandda, but he’d seen too much when he had killed his mother with an axe to the back of her head.

She never cared for her grandmother—not that many people did, but she was gone now, and thankfully, she’d been the last person alive in the Pine family to inherit.

She’d not only gotten the house, a big nine-bedroom estate, but she’d gotten all the money that had been left behind as well.

There was even a trust set up so that the taxes were paid each year for her, so she’d not have to worry about it.

With the land surrounding the house that was rented to farmers around the area, she had a tidy income so that she’d have food in her belly when she was hungry.

And it couldn’t have come at a better time than it had.

About a year ago now, she’d not just lost her job but her apartment as well.

The company that she’d worked for had decided that they didn’t want to deal with the public anymore, and her apartment complex had decided to sell out, and the new owners were giving everyone two weeks to get their things out of their building before it was torn down.

Some of her neighbors had lost everything when the bulldozers showed up on the fourteenth day and dozed all their belongings into the ground like they were nothing.

She’d been living out of her car since then and had only just been notified by the family attorney to say that she had inherited the estate and everything that had gone with it.

Jameson Sheppard, a good friend of hers from college, had been very helpful to her since he’d been one of the attorneys who had been notified about the family being killed, leaving her everything.

He and the family had been helpful too in getting things cleaned out of the house that she didn’t want, and she was well on her way to getting the house set up just the way that she wanted it to be.

He’d also said that he was going to be looking into her losing her apartment.

No one could just tell you that you had only two weeks to get out of a place, and them not offering compensation for her to find another apartment wasn’t right either.

She wasn’t worried about that now, as she had a roof over her head, but he’d been really nice to her so far that she couldn’t turn him down when he said he wanted to help her. He was a good man, she thought.

The only room that she’d been having trouble with was the master suite.

It wasn’t the room that was giving her trouble, but what she’d found in the room.

Her grandmother had had notes in thick books about every person in town.

Little snippets of information that could have been used for blackmailing them, even children.

One that bothered her the most was about five-year-old Peter Day.

The note said the little boy picked his nose.

What reason would she have for keeping that sort of information about a child?

She didn’t want to know, nor did she care to find out.

Grandmother wasn’t the best sort of person to be around, even when you were family.