time I spent with him, I felt a twinge of sadness that this close quiet time with Addie would come to an end in the morning.
Normally it would be Shelly’s week, but she said she’d picked up some extra shifts and wouldn’t be around in the evenings when he might need her. It was confusing—Shelly acted like she wanted to keep Dan from me, but then she also seemed to enjoy the flexibility that having me in his life offered her. That was Shelly. “He does.”
And with that, we each went to bed and miraculously, slept the night through with no otherworldly screaming.
22
Vintage ‘Vette
Addison
Friday morning arrived with a thunderstorm, and Dan was delivered by Shelly, who gave me evil looks the entire time she was in the house, which was much longer than anyone seemed to want her there. Evidently she was taking some different shifts at The Shack, and needed to drop Dan off early.
“Mom,” Daniel said after Shelly had interrupted breakfast and then demanded Michael give her a tour of the house to prove it was a safe place for Daniel to be for the weekend, “you can go now.”
“That’s not very loving,” she scolded him, looking hurt. I felt a little bad for Shelly. But Dan had sounded like he was trying for a joke that just didn’t go off well.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, and he gave her a warm hug that softened my heart a little bit toward her.
“All right,” she said. “But if anything at all happens, you call me,” she told her son.
“I still don’t think he needed a cell phone. He’s twelve,” Michael said, in a voice that suggested he didn’t want to rekindle the fight they’d had when she’d arrived, but that he also didn’t think the conversation was over.
“How else is he supposed to reach me if he needs me?”
“The same way he always has? On my phone.”
“If he doesn’t feel safe, he needs to be able to tell me.”
Michael took a step back, looking as if she’d slapped him. I had dueling impulses—one, I wanted to go to him, put a hand on his back or his shoulder to comfort him, and two, I wanted to step between them and give Shelly a piece of my mind. Michael was probably the best father I’d ever seen, though I honestly didn’t have a lot of experience with fathers in general.
“Fine,” Michael said, his voice tight. “He’ll call you if he needs you.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Bye Mom.”
Shelly hugged her son again, shot me a glare, and then turned and left. Daniel disappeared up the stairs.
And it was then that I noticed that the box with the ring, the one we’d left sitting open on the table the night before, was now empty. Had she taken it? Had we forgotten to put it back? Where was the ring?
“Michael?”
He rubbed a hand through his hair, sending it all standing on end as his shoulders slumped. “Yeah?”
“Did you put the ring somewhere? For safekeeping?”
His lips pulled up in confusion and he shook his head. “No, why?”
“It’s gone.” I pointed to the empty box on the table.
We both stared at it for a minute as Daniel’s footsteps overhead thumped and clunked.
“You don’t think Shelly took it, do you?” I asked, wondering if he was thinking the same thing.
“She wouldn’t,” he said. “I mean . . . I don’t think she would do that.”
I didn’t know what to think. “Maybe we should put the rest of the stuff back in the safe for now? Just in case we need it?”
“Yeah,” he said, ruffling his hair again.
“I’ll look around,” I assured him. “Maybe it just fell off the table or something.” I doubted this could have happened, but also didn’t insist that either his ex was a thief in addition to being a less-than-delightful houseguest or that our ghosts liked shiny objects.
The window replacement was beginning today, and the workmen arrived soon after Shelly had departed, and by the time Michael had taken Daniel to school and headed off to work, the house was abuzz with activity, so much so that I felt comfortable going up to the attic alone to sort through the letters and pictures there. I wanted to see if I could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the land deed. If there was a record showing the land had been sold to a Tanner, why did the deed to the land say Tucker?
It was like a stroll through history, pulling open newspaper clippings and