Driftwood - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,3

was a deep depression in the sand, a jumble of footprints—and wolf tracks, leading away.

"You're right, Burke. I can smell you all over the sand, and a few other people—tourists who just came out for the day, people just passing by—and that's it. Certainly there's no scent of a woman who'd been trapped in the bottom of a hole for over twenty hours."

"Well, if you can't smell her, and Burke can't smell her…" Jeannie trailed off, then mumbled, "He needs a girlfriend."

"I'm not making it up."

"Of course not," Michael said with a hard look at his wife. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he continued. "But there have been, ah, concerns. You've lived alone most of your life. No one sees you. The only time any of us see you is if I summon you—God knows I don't do that unless it's a real emergency, or to meet a new baby—"

Burke didn't say anything, but he knew where Michael was going. Werewolves were not solitary creatures. They were designed to mate young and drop lots of pups. Rogues—even gentle ones—made everyone nervous. Now they thought that the stress of never having children had driven him over the edge. If he hadn't been so miserably ashamed, he would have laughed.

"At least yesterday was the last night of the full moon," Jeannie said, shading her eyes as she watched the sun dip into the ocean. "Or there'd be no talking to either of you in another five minutes."

"I came back to the mansion as soon as I could," Burke explained. "When I woke up this morning, I was in Vermont." No surprise. He had run and run and run, but had never managed to leave his shame and guilt and horror behind.

"Well, no one's around. Why don't we do a little digging and see what, uh, comes up?" Jeannie asked with faux brightness.

Burke knew, as did Michael, that despite the deepening gloom there were people around, but no one was close. And in any case, digging holes in the beach wasn't exactly suspicious behavior. Hell, people paid money for clamming licenses just to dig at the beach.

He dropped to all fours and began to scoop out great handfuls of sand with his hands, ignoring the shovels Jeannie had brought.

"Cheer up," Jeannie said, shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. "There probably isn't anybody—I mean, we might not find anything."

"And if we do find anything, it wasn't your fault."

"Excuse me," Burke said politely, "but it was entirely my fault. I appreciate you coming out here with me."

"Like we're going to let you dig around in the dark by yourself, thinking you'll stumble across a corpse? Yuck, Burke! Besides, the whole thing's a joke. You're only the nicest, gentlest, quietest werewolf out there. You'd no more kill a woman than I'd break Lara's arm."

"Not that she couldn't use that sort of thing," Michael said shortly; he was saving his breath for digging.

Burke grunted and kept digging. He knew Lara, a charming creature and the future pack leader, and frankly, he wondered how Jeannie had kept from breaking the high-spirited girl's arm. The cub wasn't even in her teens yet, and some of her exploits were already legendary, like the time she jumped off the roof of the mansion and used her quilt as a parachute; except it hadn't worked out quite the way she planned and she'd come down like a stone, breaking one ankle and scaring the holy old shit out of her parents.

Heh. That had been a day.

"How long—are we—going to dig—before we decide—Burke isn't a killer?" Jeannie panted.

"Until we find the—" Burke froze, reached deeper, and felt his fingers closing around… a forearm. He leaned back and pulled, tears stinging his eyes from the sand. Yeah, the sand and the thought of that poor woman dying alone, dying in the dark, dying as the sand filled her nose and lungs and finally stopped her heart.

Dying alone.

"Oh my God!" Jeannie screamed in a whisper as he stood, pulling the body free from the sand until it was dangling from his strong grip like a puppet whose strings had been cut. "Burke! Oh my God!"

"You—I guess we'd better try to find her family," Michael said, recovering quickly, which was why he was the boss and Burke was the Clam Cop. "If we can't, we'll give her a proper—"

"Oh no you don't!" the body snapped, swinging in the air and kicking Burke in the shin. "You didn't dig me up just