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It wasn’t bad food, just simple. Because anything my father deemed too fancy would incite us to gluttony.

Well, incite us to more gluttony, because even if we ate more than what he believed to be the necessary amount, we were pronounced gluttons and forced to repent and contemplate our sinful natures.

I was the one who more often fell prey to my greedy nature.

Probably because I was trying to consume enough calories to fuel my not-yet-six-foot-three growing body.

It was probably also why I ate more than I had to as an adult—too many years of desperately trying to eat enough made me more inclined to overeat now.

I also still felt guilty about it, although Elliot kept trying to convince me that I shouldn’t.

And that not only didn’t he mind the softness of my belly, he liked it.

At least these days I worked out enough—between the firefighter training and the training I did to get in shape for it—that there were actual abdominal muscles under the fat.

I justified another biscuit with the fact that I’d been eating erratically all week, often missing meals. Elliot passed me the dish of margarine, and I concentrated on spreading it on my biscuit when I spoke.

“Did you talk to Momma much recently?” I asked Helen.

A hush fell over the table, almost as though everyone was trying to chew more quietly.

“Not especially,” Helen replied, her tone thoughtful.

“We were never much for long conversations. Hello-how-are-ya and remarks about the weather is all.” She paused a moment, considering.

“I’m not sure if it’s hindsight memory now with all that’s happened, but it seems to me she was more distracted in the last few weeks.

Rushing. Anxious.” She shook her head. “Not that she shared nothin’ with me.

We weren’t friends. Just friendly neighbors. ”

I nodded. I hadn’t figured anything had changed in Helen’s relationship with my mother, but if Momma had started talking to outsiders, it wouldn’t have been that strange for Helen to have been one of them.

Then again, if it was my father she was afraid of, Helen was perhaps too close. Too easily suspected.

And if my mother had thought that my father might harm her, it wouldn’t have been a stretch for her to assume that he would also have been capable of, and even taken pleasure in, killing Helen.

It suddenly made me wonder if my mother had any friends, or if she’d been deeply lonely, up here with father and no one else.

I remembered how lonely I’d felt throughout most of my childhood—the other families in the Community weren’t like Noah and me.

We’d had each other, of course, but we’d both still felt desperate, unprotected by the two people—our parents—who were supposed to keep us safe and sheltered and loved.

Momma’d had us for fifteen years, then my sister for thirteen. But other than that… I couldn’t imagine living just with father. But, of course, she’d have done that before Noah and I were born, too. She’d married him, left her family to join him in the Community.

I wondered what her life had been like before that, what would make her choose this over the life she’d had.

Or maybe Father had been different when they’d first met.

People could change, although in my experience most people were mostly just themselves.

Not always. Things could happen that changed you forever.

I didn’t know much of anything about my parents’ lives before my own.

“I ran into Iris Tabbard last night,” I said, taking a sip of coffee, rich and robust. “She was really concerned about me staying away from here at night.” I met her light blue gaze. “You said something similar the other night. Why? What’s going on up here?”

Helen sighed, but didn’t answer.

Ray did. “There’s a lot of howling in these woods at night,” he replied. “And I’ll tell you right now that they’re wolves, not coyotes.” His yellow eyes narrowed. “Big ones. And not red wolves, either, and that’s all that should be out here.”

“Shifters?” Elliot asked, understanding what Ray was telling us before I did.

“Oh, yeah,” Ray confirmed. “Quite a few of them.” He met Elliot’s gaze steadily. “And while actual wolves move in packs, shifters usually don’t.”

“You know a lot about wolves?” Elliot asked, stealing a piece of bacon off the serving plate and biting into it.

“I’m an alpaca farmer,” came his response. “It’s my business to know about things that might eat my ’pacas.” He glanced over at me. “And that definitely includes wolves.”

“But shifters?” I asked.

Ray snorted. “Shifters that don’t like you are worse than wolves who don’t give a hoot,” he replied. “Smarter and meaner.”

“And these shifters don’t like you?”

“These shifters leave me alone, and I leave them alone. They haven’t come after my ’pacas or hurt me or mine, so I let them do whatever it is they do.” He looked at me, then, yellow eyes sharp. “Of course, things seem to have escalated recently.”

“Escalated how?” Elliot wanted to know.

“More howling. More tracks.” He paused. “No one has said as much, but I would bet every alpaca we have that it wasn’t a wolf that killed your mother, no matter what the Sheriff’s Department says.”

Of course, we knew that already—and so did the Augusta County Sheriff’s Department.

Funny how they didn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

After breakfast, Elliot and I went up to the house, me ignoring the nausea that was roiling around in my stomach. It had nothing to do with Helen’s cooking and everything to do with the house and the memories trapped within it.

“What can I do?” Elliot asked me gently.

I sighed. “Just… We need to keep cataloging stuff. I—didn’t get very far last time. Could you… come with me and take notes?”

“Absolutely.”

He followed me around, writing things down, occasionally asking questions for clarification.

We’d just finished the downstairs and were preparing to go up to the narrow stairs to the to tiny rooms that had belonged to Noah and me when I noticed the small closet door under the stairs. It had always just been storage for extra dry goods, but we hadn’t inventoried it yet.

I opened the door and stared at a bag of cat food.

“El, have you seen a cat? Litter box?”

“No, why?”

I moved out of the way, letting him see the bag of food.

“Huh,” was his response. “I don’t imagine a cat would like all of the strange activity around here. Poor thing is probably hiding under the porch or something.”

I frowned. “Nobody’s been feeding it,” I said, now genuinely worried about the cat. “It’s probably starving.”

“Cats are resourceful,” Elliot replied. “I’m sure it’s eaten mice and birds and is fine.”

“We should find it,” I insisted. Maybe it was what Ray had said about the howling wolves, or maybe I just felt a weird kinship for the poor abandoned cat that my father hadn’t cared enough about to feed. Hopefully he hadn’t eaten the poor thing.

“Seth—”

“Please, El.”

He put down the clipboard I’d given him. “Okay, but cats don’t just come when you call them,” he said. “It’s likely going to be as afraid of us as it is of everyone else.”

“It’s probably starving,” I argued back. “Poor thing.”

Elliot watched as I got a bowl out of the cupboard and put some of the dry cat food in it. I went out the back door—the one that faced up the mountain—to the wooden back stairs that gave access to the vegetable garden and compost.

Elliot’s garden was smaller, although we’d expanded it a bit this year to include corn, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and several types of beans in addition to the tomatoes, greens, and herbs that he’d already had going.

He had a much more impressive composting system, though—probably because there was just a pile here, where Elliot had constructed wooden bins so that he could have different piles in different states of decomposition.

Henry was taking care of the gardens while we were gone, and Helen had been feeding the goats and chickens, but there was no one taking care of the missing cat.

I sat down on the stairs and rattled the bowl with its dry kibbles. “Here, kitty-kitty!”

I heard Elliot snort behind me.

“You have a better idea for how to get a cat to show up?” I asked him, scanning the edge of the woods.

“Its actual name?”

I did turn to look up at him then. “And did you see anything at all in the house other than the bag of food that suggested there even was a cat, much less that it had a name?” I asked him.

“No…” he replied.

“So kitty it is,” I told him. I rattled the bowl again. “Here kitty-kitty!” I did this a few more times, Elliot snorting softly every time.

Until a tiny mew came from somewhere under the house.

“Holy shit,” Elliot breathed.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” I said smugly.

It probably wasn’t a good sign that this was the happiest I’d felt since I’d gotten the call from Humbolt. But I’d finally succeeded in doing something good about the absolute shit-show that was my family situation. I’d rescued a cat. Well, almost.

“Here, kitty-kitty!” I leaned down, shaking the bowl in what I hoped was a tantalizing manner next to the side of the stairs.

Another mew.

“Come on out, kitty-kitty,” I coaxed, trying to figure out where the damn thing was.

And then a small—surprisingly small—nut-brown head poked out from under the stairs. The cat, or kitten, maybe, it was that small, raised its nose to sniff.

“That’s right, kitty.” I rustled the bowl again. “Food.”

The tiny cat took a few hesitant steps forward, and I set the bowl down, still sitting on the stairs. The cat looked between me and the bowl, then decided that its stomach was more important than its fear of me, and it stuck its face in the bowl and started crunching away, clearly ravenous.

“See?” I said, looking back at Elliot.

“I do,” he replied, his lips quirking in that crooked smile of his. “I see that we now have a cat.”