Eden circled the car and slid onto the passenger seat, fiddling with the belt long after she’d buckled it. Her fingers slid up and down the nylon in near-silent strokes he could hear as clearly as her still-racing heart.
She was hiding something.
Jay cranked the engine and pulled onto the main road before speaking. “Anything you want to tell me, Eden?”
She started and shook her head with a shaky laugh. “I’m nervous, that’s all. When I was a kid, I thought the farm was haunted, you know.”
“Uh-huh.” The place looked it, spooky and practically abandoned, but it also wasn’t the true motivation for her galloping pulse. “Try again?”
She sighed softly. “Do you listen to town gossip? The older stories?”
“On occasion.”
“Green Pines Farm has provided its share over the years.”
They could talk in circles all the way out of town, but it would get them nowhere. “Sweetheart, why don’t you just tell me who you expect us to find out there?”
“I don’t expect anyone,” she protested. “But my father always hopes that my cousin will come back. That’s why he doesn’t want me to sell the farm. He wants Zack’s inheritance intact.”
Zack Green, not quite the prodigal son. Town gossip held that his father, Eden’s uncle, had run him out of town at eighteen—all because he suspected another man had really fathered the boy. “How much of it is true? The talk about Zack’s mother?”
“All of it, and then some.” Eden’s voice held a sharp edge, but as she continued, it mellowed into sadness. “My uncle wasn’t Zack’s father, and everyone in the family knew it. But he took it out on Zack more often than not, and my father didn’t care for that.”
Jay slowed for a red light and turned his upper body to face Eden’s. “Good. Circumstances of birth aren’t exactly within a kid’s control.”
Eden glanced at him, her features only clear in the darkness because of his sharpened vision. She probably thought he couldn’t see the way she opened her mouth and closed it several times before wetting her lips nervously. “Uncle Albus—” Her fingers tightened into fists. “He was an angry man. Once his wife ran off, the only kindness Zack ever saw was from my parents.”
And she felt guilty about that, though she’d been no more to blame for Zack’s situation than he himself had. “Eden, if your cousin is out at the farm, we’ll help him. Whatever he needs.”
“It’s probably not him. I don’t think he’d come back here unless he had no other choice. But thank you.”
They’d reached the edge of town already, and Jay took the right-hand turn that led toward the farm. “Don’t mention it.”
She hadn’t told him everything. He could hear it in the slightly high-pitched tone of her voice, see it in her unwillingness to meet his eyes. Little Eden Green was still hiding something, but Jay had no high ground there.
After all, he’d never told her he was a werewolf.
Next to him, Eden fidgeted. “If it is him…”
“What is it? Drugs?”
“No! No, not drugs. Not Zack.” She hesitated, and he knew from her pounding heart and shallow breath that she was getting ready to lie to him again. “I think he’s involved with people who are into them, though. Dangerous people.”
Soft moonlight drifted through the canopy of trees bending over the disused drive. “People you think might have come here with him?”
“Maybe.”
God damn it. “Then I shouldn’t have brought you along.”
“I’m probably overreacting,” she said quickly, as if concerned he’d turn the car around. “It’s probably those teenagers, breaking into the old barn to party again.”
She might be jumping to conclusions, but her fear was real. It prickled over his skin and raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and his unease deepened as he pulled up the long, gravel drive.
Everything looked dark from a distance, but not completely. At second glance, Jay could see the farmhouse’s windows glowing with faint flickers of light, as if candles or kerosene lamps were burning beyond the tattered curtains.
It wasn’t until they were a third of the way up the driveway that the moon illuminated the vehicles parked at haphazard angles across the front lawn of the main house—two trucks and a shiny silver sedan. Jay stared at the trucks as he parked his own SUV and cut the engine. “Shelby County plates,” he murmured. “Has your cousin been in Memphis?”
“I don’t know.” That, at least, sounded like the truth. “I think he called my father from there once.”