Chapter 34

Sarah POV

“This is amazing,” I said involuntarily after Agent Travis led me and Zane into the mock-up of Marshal Kim’s murder scene. The attention to detail was amazing, and the same cozy and charming cottage was laid out before us with the addition of forensic notation.

A mannequin wearing Kim’s clothes down to the slippers on its feet was placed where Kim had been, and there was a red rod to indicate the entrance and exit of the bullet through his head. There were red stains on the carpet and wall to indicate the blood pattern and a marker where a dress shoe had left an imprint.

“Is this copy of his furniture or the actual stuff from his place?” I asked.

Agent Travis nodded. “It’s the real deal, except for the carpet and wallpaper, and the ceiling, of course.”

I looked up and saw the ceiling of the warehouse the mock-up had been made in.

“There was no blood on the ceiling?” Zane asked.

“Yes, but it was consistent with the blood pattern of the wall and floor. Do you think it’s significant?”

“No, just curious.”

We looked around while I told myself that of course I felt déjà vu. I walked over to the photographs just as I had before, all of Chloe and some with me standing next to her.

“That’s odd,” I said to myself.

“What?” Zane and Travis both said.

“The photos, I didn’t notice before how cold they are.”

Zane frowned at me. “Cold?”

“I’ve taken thousands of photos of Chloe, and when they look like some of these do, I discard them. When her eyes are closed or she’s got hair in her mouth or she’s scowling. The person who took these pictures didn’t care.”

“On the other hand,” Zane said, looking over my shoulder. “All the photos are in excellent focus and reveal the faces fully. No shots of you in shadow or obstructed.”

“A professional, then, working for hire,” Travis said, nodding. “They were probably told it was for a custody case or something. After, well.” He stopped talking.

“After all, it’s a human overseeing a werewolf child,” I said, smiling at him. “I know how odd it looks.”

“I’ll have the team look into professional photographers who would be willing to do this sort of work, private detectives, etc.” Travis made a note on his phone.

I wandered over to the bookshelf, which was filled almost exclusively with books on horticulture.

He worked as a gardener on the ground, I thought. He must have known Mavis.

I met Mavis myself on my third day at the villa. I’d been walking the property with huge eyes and thinking about the different world Chloe was being exposed to, worrying, really, about how she would take it.

There was an outdoor tennis court, several small buildings that housed staff, a pool, a complicated hedge maze, a Zen garden, and marked-off gardens of different themes, like the rose garden and the cactus garden.

I particularly enjoyed a patch of garden that looked for all the world like a lawn bowling green, except it was lined with marble Greek statues.

The villa wasn’t just lovely, it was paradise, and the thought that Chloe would be free to enjoy it made me giddy and terrified at the same time. How would I prepare her for the life of both privilege and responsibility that lay before her?

The highlight of the day was definitely meeting Mavis, the groundskeeper, who was human and laughed when I stumbled across her and stared, bug-eyed.

I found her in one of the small gardens marked off by a low hedge. Somewhere in her fifties, she boasted sun-weathered skin and a permanent look of quiet joy. She wore denim coveralls and a utility belt that would put Batman to shame. She peered at me from under her Coolie-style straw hat with her sparkling blue eyes, and I had to remind myself that, as she was human, the eyes did not designate her status.

“Hello,” she said, smiling at me with teeth so even and perfect I suspected they were dentures. “I’m Mavis. You must be the nanny.”

“I am,” I said, holding out my hand for a firm shake. “I’m spending the day trying to get a feel for the place while the girls are in school. The grounds are lovely. Are you the gardener?”

She nodded. “Head groundskeeper. Alpha Zane trusts me to keep enough on staff even during the harvest season.”

“Harvest? You have vegetables here?”

She smiled even deeper, eyes twinkling, and took me over to a gold cart loaded with equipment. She brushed some dirt off the passenger seat and motioned for me to get on. I swung into the seat with a feeling of going on safari.

“You know that wolves prefer their food as fresh as possible,” she told me as the electric motor hummed us down a path over a grassy hill. “We grow as much food as we can without officially becoming a farm.” She shot me a look. “That means about 300 acres.”

“Goodness,” I said, holding onto my seat as she crested another hill and took me to what I would have thought was someone else’s land. It was all business, I could tell, with no statues or flowers, just cultivated rows of crops.

“I met Alpha Zane at the Mid-California Poppy Festival,” she told me.

“Poppies?”

“I specialize in the common poppy, AKA the Flanders poppy or corn poppy. Most of the cultivars came from Shirley, England, over a century ago. Not everyone loves them like I do, so they’re a little uncommon today. They’re not really a floral cash crop.

“My winning flowers were from the Mother of Pearl line, from the Sir Cedric Morris line, a lost strain from the early twentieth century. The petals have these wonderful smoky, dusky, and silvery shades over an ivory base color.”

“They sound amazing,” I managed to say as we rumbled over a rocky path.

“Wait until late summer,” she said, swerving us around what looked like a million-year-old placement of several boulders. Then we were in the Zen garden, and she brought us to a stop.

“That’s when poppies bloom the best,” she said. Then she looked at me with another twinkle. “Are you sorry you asked about poppies now?”

I shook my head, thinking about it.

“No, I love to learn about things like that. Werewolves tend to know so much about so many things. I find in conversations with them it’s helpful to know at least a little about a great many things.”

She stared at me in surprise, then threw her head back to laugh.

“Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that.” She tilted her head to regard me. “You’re worried about how you’re going to do here, a human in this werewolf Eden.”

I shrugged. “Basically.”

She nodded. “Quite understandable. I felt the same way when I started here ten years ago.” She fell silent for a moment and looked out over the Zen garden.

“Am I weird because this is my favorite place on the grounds?” she asked, startling me.

I looked over the garden: nothing but sand with rocks. Nothing grew in Zen gardens. Someone had meticulously raked the sand into the water-like ripples of a lake. As we sat there, I felt the silence like a taste in my mouth.

“This is the perfection of the untroubled mind,” I said, feeling my way a bit. “And there is nothing here you need to worry about, nothing to die because it got too much or too little water, nothing that’s a weed, nothing that will fall ill and die or be infested with some invasive insect.”

I looked back at her to see a calm and pleased smile. “I imagine this is a place where you can relax, but also where you can’t stay too long. You’ll start worrying about the plants that need you. So it’s your favorite place on the grounds, but only for a while.”

She smiled more deeply, nodded her head, and then started up the cart again. “You’ll do,” she said.

I asked her what she meant by that, but instead she told me about how Alpha Zane liked strength and told me never to grovel.

I assured her I wouldn’t.

She said, “Good for you both.”

Now, standing in front of all these books on gardening, I thought Mavis would be able to give us insights into Kim, and I turned and shared my thoughts with Zane and Travis.

“Good idea,” Travis said and sent me a wink.