Finding The Wolf (The Holbrook Brother Shifters Book 2) Page 2
“Ahh, the infamous Lizzie,” Millie laughed. “Isn’t she the one you told me about who dated that guy for all of high school and even afterward and then ended up breaking up with him by telling him she was engaged to the editor-in-chief of the local paper?”
I wrinkled my nose. “That would be her.”
Millie let out an exhaustive puff of air. “While you seemed like a badass chick when you were a teenager, at least in my opinion, you had some cutthroat fucking friends. That girl gave zero shits. I kind of like her style.”
I shook my head. “Trust me, if she is still like she was back then, you would not like her. I’m talking typical blonde cheerleader, town princess, homecoming queen kind of girl. The only reason we became friends was because her mother and my mother were friends. We were basically forced to be friends.”
I could hear a beeping sound in the background and Millie groaned. “That’s my alarm. I’ve gotta get going. You know how Roger is when I’m late for work. I swear my boss is not human. I won’t be surprised if one day he takes off his human suit and reveals his true self.”
“Satan?”
Millie laughed. “It’s very likely. But I was thinking more like one of those aliens with three heads and far too many hands.”
I grabbed my bottle of water and took a drink. “Have a good day, call me later.”
“You know I’m going to and you better answer,” Millie threatened. “I will come to Galena, dragging my city ass into their country town and save you if you need it. The codeword is ‘there’s a giant cult here and I need help.’”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s very discreet. Very discreet.”
“When you’re being attacked by a cult, there is no time for discreet,” she said, bursting out into laughter. “I’ll talk to you later.”
I turned off my phone and set it down next to me on the couch. Looking around, I smiled. I had just unpacked my last box. When I moved here, I seriously thought it would take me months to get unpacked, but I severely misunderstood what it would take to fill a house compared to an apartment. Actually, a half of an apartment because I shared one with Millie in Chicago. It was a little bit sparse inside with little decoration, but I didn’t care, it was the first house I’d ever owned. Finding rentals in Galena was difficult but there was always someone looking to buy since everyone seemed to recycle everyone else’s lives in that place. I figured, even if I just stayed here a year, at least I’d be able to sell the house afterward. Besides, my parents just lived down the street—it was a perfect location.
Standing up from the couch, I walked over to the mantle and stared at the pictures I’d set up. I picked one up and smiled. It was an old one, from my first year in high school in Galena. I stood there with my awkward grin, my arm around Lizzie, and Eric giving the thumbs up. He had a perfect smile, and it made me wonder what he was up to. I had no idea whether he still lived in Galena or not. If I were him, I would have bolted just as soon as Lizzie embarrassed the hell out of me like she did. But people like Eric and his brothers, they grew up in places like Galena and they didn’t leave. They just muddled through and kept going.
I spent a lot of time around Eric since Lizzie was trying to keep me involved and not let me be left out, but we really didn’t get to know each other that well. The truth was, I could have, but secretly I always had a huge crush on him. He was the kind of guy that everyone had a huge crush on. He was handsome, he had a great sense of humor, and he was always really artistic. He had a camera around his neck everywhere he went. I could still remember all of the projects he started because he saw something on the Internet about how cool an art project was or he had an epiphany about a sculpture. Most of the time, he was covered in paint, cut up from wire sculptures he was trying, or dusted with dirt from trying to get the perfect shot out at the bird sanctuary.
He always called me his twin because I was constantly covered in clay or paint. There wasn’t a single article of clothing that I owned that didn’t have some sort of medium on it. My mom used to go crazy over it, but after a while, I was pretty sure she got used to it. The one thing I could never figure out was what a guy like Eric was doing with a girl like Lizzie. They were completely opposite, and Lizzie never paid two bits of attention to him or his artwork. Honestly, they just really didn’t even talk that much. In the end, though, I was pretty sure it was because they were both really popular. Popular people always ended up together. When we were in school, there was no doubt in my mind that they would end up having a huge wedding and 12 kids and Eric would be miserable for the rest of his life.
Life always had a funny way of shocking you sometimes, though. I was blown away when I found out that she broke things off with Eric just to marry Dennis, the most boring man I had ever met. I had only met him once, and that was visiting my parents in Galena, but once was enough. Once was enough to put me to sleep every night for the rest of my life by just replaying the monotone reverberation of his voice in my head.
I put the picture down and grabbed the box, breaking it down as I walked out the side door and around to the detached garage. When I bought the house, before I even moved in, I redid the entire garage. I opened it up, put in shelving and flooring, and my father helped me install heating and air. It had been outfitted completely for my artwork. Walking in the doors, I tossed the flat box into the pile and stood there staring at the enormous half-finished sculpture in the center of the floor. It was making its way into looking like a larger-than-life copy of Moby Dick. It was for one of the libraries in Chicago. A few years back, I had done a similar project for a historical society in the city, and the library had seen it, contacted me, and hired me to do one for them.
In the grand scheme of exciting jobs, it wasn’t one to top the list, but it was a good-paying gig, and it was a really simple project. At the same time, though, they gave me a bit of creative freedom to add to the project bits and pieces of ideas that really meant something to the people of Chicago. In fact, it really meant something to me too. Chicago was part of me just like Galena was. I wanted to do right by the city, and I hoped that it would turn heads and make people think. That was part of being an artist.
3
Eric
The alarm went off above me as I lay face down in the pillow, sore from lying in the field the day before. I reached up without looking and slammed my hand down on the snooze button. I wasn’t going back to sleep, I knew I had too many things to do, but I hated the sound of that alarm. Putting both of my palms down on the bed, I groaned as I lifted myself up and turned to a seated position. The sun was bright outside, spilling into my room even through the blinds and room-darkening curtains. I was convinced that the sun was brighter in Galena than anywhere else on earth. Or at least it taunted me as if it were.
Dragging myself out of the bed, I threw on a pair of pants and a T-shirt and walked out to the kitchen, thankful I had invested in the coffee maker that had a timer. It was piping hot and ready for me before I was even awake. I poured myself a mug and stood there, leaning against the counter and sipping my coffee. On the table was the SD card with the, most likely, absolutely terrible pictures of the bird.
I needed to go through the photos and just check because I wouldn’t be able to feel comfortable if I didn’t. It was the exact reason that I was so happy about turning one of the bedrooms in my apartment into a digital photo lab of sorts. It was the entire reason that I got the three-bedroom instead of just a crappy apartment in the older part of town. Using the school lab was hard to maneuver since you had to book it and then find the time to pick up the keys the morning of. I was far too all over the place to remember to do something like that. So I bought a nice computer and a high-end printer. I had a method to my madness. I looked through the SD card, picked what I thought were the best prints, printed them, and then looked over them extensively with a bright light and magnifying glass. It was a bit OCD, I knew that, but when it came to my photography, I was a bit of a perfectionist.
I grabbed
the card and headed into the lab, leaving my coffee on the table. It would inevitably become another cold cup destined for the drain. Closing the door, I flipped on the lights. As I loaded the card in the computer, I thought about my upcoming projects at work. I made a decent enough amount of money with my photojournalism, submitting photos here and there, doing a little bit of freelancing on the side, and made more than most smalltime publications paid those days. But I wasn’t rich by any means. I lived like everyone else in the country—paycheck to paycheck, or in my case, job to job.
I went from slide to slide, immediately skipping the ones that I knew were total trash so that I could get to all of them pretty quickly. I used to hate being cramped up in a small room, but I had done it so much, I almost lived in there. I moved quickly, like a robot that had been programmed to do it. My body moved automatically and I was pretty sure that I had scanned through thousands of pictures at that point in my career. I had several stations set up so that I could move faster, never having developed patience. But when it came to seeing the pictures that I took, I needed to be careful. If I wasn’t patient, I could delete a picture I thought was bad, before giving it a good look. I liked instant gratification, though, and film photography was definitely not one of those things that gave you instant gratification. That and the cost and scarcity of film left me destined for digital.
The one thing about digital cameras that I did love was the fact that you could literally take a picture and look down at the screen and see what you had. I liked knowing I was on the right track—it gave me a sense of completion, a sense of pride in my work. I didn’t just run around clicking pictures everywhere. I was a professional, or at least that’s what I should have been after all the money I spent on college.
Focusing intensely, I worked for several hours in the lab before I was able to stand back and really look at the photographs I had printed out. Every single one of them was shimmering and new and I could see the intricate details on each page. I went down the line, shaking my head at every one that I saw. When I reached the last one, I tilted my head to the side in confusion. It was the bird, midflight, but at the angle that I took the picture, it looked like it was exploding. Not that it would be that big of a shock, it was the kind of thing that just seemed like my luck. To the naked eye, to someone that didn’t know the technicals of a good picture, some of the pictures weren’t bad, but I was looking for fantastic. I got the bird in flight, which wasn’t ideal, but on top of that, it masked any of the details where the beautiful color of the bird’s wings shimmered and shone. I wasn’t going to be able to use a damn one of them.
Frustrated, I left them on my light board and slammed the door to my lab, grabbing my keys and coat and heading out the door. I was hungry, and tired of staring at my failures.
* * *
“Hey, Eric,” my normal waitress said, smiling. “Cup of coffee?”
I looked up at Brenda and smiled. She was a middle-aged woman, had been a single mother, but her son was my age. “That will be wonderful. How’s Braun doing?”
It was as if she had waited all day for someone to ask her. Her smile grew huge. “He’s doing so well. After college, he got the job at that bank I told you about and moved from the banking section of the company to investments. It was what he went to school for. He’s a genius at it, and is making his way up the company ladder faster than anyone else. I just don’t know how he keeps it all straight in his head.”
I smiled at her. “Because he’s smart. And he’s motivated, which is wonderful. He learned how to be a hard-working person from you.”
She looked embarrassed but thankful and grinned as she shuffled off to get my coffee. The truth was, I didn’t really know Braun—he was an asshole jock in school but he still got really good grades. He had originally gone to school on a football scholarship. Once getting there, though, he got injured and couldn’t play. He didn’t want to have to drop out so he started working three jobs and completely changed his tone. The last time I’d seen him in Galena, he had come back to visit his mom and we actually had a pretty nice conversation. I was happy for him; he got out, just like he’d always wanted, and he was actually successful at it. There was more than one occasion when someone split from Galena to go make their fortune and ended up back here five years later, living in their parents’ basement.
It wasn’t like I was much better. I went to college, got a degree in photography, and moved back to Galena where I lived in a tiny-ass apartment working for the local paper. I wasn’t unhappy about it, though, even if it sounded like that. I chose to be in Galena because of my family. I had some exciting gigs freelancing and some not so exciting like the recent ones where I was being paid for some really generic pictures that I took, but it was money and I needed it to pay the bills.
I opened up my laptop and started scanning through, cringing as I found an email from Dennis telling me I had some work coming up. He wanted me to come in later to pick up the assignment.
Hitting reply, I rolled my eyes and hovered my fingers over the keyboard. Every time I wrote him back, I wanted to cuss them out. He had never been a jerk to me, and actually was really adult about the fact that he knew what he did with Lizzie and me was wrong, but it was what it was. Still, he irritated the hell out of me. Nonetheless, he was my boss so I filled an email back to him with sunshine and rainbows and let him know I would be there later.
Brenda was right on cue, bringing me my usual cheeseburger with fries and a side of ketchup. I ate as I scanned through the web, suddenly remembering the email I had gotten the night before for the publication. I went back to the email and opened it up, reading through all the fine details and rules. Unlike many of the smaller competitions, it seemed pretty straightforward. If I were to win, not only would I win a sum of money that was bigger than any other contest I had entered before, but I would also earn a contract with the publication. They would send me all over the world, giving me exciting assignments to take pictures of wildlife that most people never got to see. It was exactly what I wanted to do, but I also knew it was exactly what a whole lot of photographers wanted to do. With something that big, it wasn’t going to be an easy win.
The competition was open to residents all over the world. Living in the United States had its disadvantages. There were people that could literally walk outside into their backyard and look across the Safari, taking pictures of animals that were extinct in most other places of the world. All I could do was go down to the sanctuary, lie in the dirt for a few hours, and take a picture of a finch.
Glancing up, I smiled at a couple of the older gentlemen walking past. They nodded at me in recognition and sat down in the booth behind me. Normally, that would be where my interest in them ended. But that day was a little bit different. As they began to talk, one word caught my attention. Wolf.
“Oh yeah,” one of the older gentlemen said. “Merle said he had a whole conversation with the ranger over at the Apple River National Forest. They said at first they thought the sightings were a joke, but then one of the younger rangers was out for a walk and saw it himself. Enormous wolf lurking right there in Apple River.”
I furrowed my brow, surprised to hear it. Apple River National Forest was the same one where my brothers and I had gone fishing and camping for years. It was also the one where, most recently, just a year and a half before, my brother had been scratched by some sort of animal and it landed him in the hospital for weeks.
The other gentleman was stirring his coffee. “I’d heard about that. I thought it was interesting. That was the only reason why I figured Earl’s claim could be spot on. Those woods attach to the surrounding area of Galena. So, it wouldn’t be so far-fetched if they ran that wolf out of Apple River and it headed right over here to the Galena forests. He wasn’t the only one that saw it either; there have been several sightings of the same size of wolf. These were all different-colored wolves.”
On one hand, I knew that the stories could literally just be a whole bunch of old men si
tting around, trying to make excitement out of things, but at the same time, it could be true. I knew there was a wolf in Apple River, or at least that’s what my brother had said. The old guy was right, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think that it could make its way over to Galena. If it were true, if it were really true, it could be exactly what I needed to win the contest.
4
Misty
“Very good, Ella,” I said, listening as my 12-year-old student played Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano. “I can tell that you’ve been practicing.”
She looked at me with pride. “I have. And I played for my family too. Even my older brother clapped for me.”
I smiled broadly. “That’s so exciting! Before you know it, you’ll be playing Mozart and Bach and everyone will be blown away.”
She giggled and shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be that good at it, but I do have a good teacher, so it’s possible.”
“Now, let’s try that slightly harder piece that I gave you,” I said, pulling the sheet music out.
Ella straightened her back and nodded with certainty. “Good. I’ve been practicing that one too.”
I sat back and listened to her play, smiling at how far she had come since I started teaching her, and it had only been a couple of weeks. The first thing I was hired to do when I moved back to town was to teach private lessons through the school in whatever students were interested. It was only a couple of times a week, and it wasn’t flashy or making me a millionaire, but I got to teach music. I had gotten the music bug when I was just a kid and it never went away. It wasn’t my first love, but the money I made from doing that went toward my art supplies. I got to do two jobs that I enjoyed and I knew I was lucky for that.