Page 42 of The SnowFang Storm

“Interesting. So that’s why you were willing to negotiate. But if the box is still there.”

“Mom couldn’t have left anything scandalous in that box. She wasn’t a lightening rod for drama.”

“Was your mother well-loved?”

“She always tried to keep her paws out of trouble and controversy. I mean… I was a kid, and it was before I’d become an archive brat, so I don’t know what I don’t know. But I do know that when she died, the world just carried on. Nothing surfaced, nothing crawled out from under any rocks.” A hollow feeling formed within me, so intense and familiar I pressed my palm to my belly to convince myself I still had organs. “She wasn’t sentimental. She would have approved of the world moving on so quickly. I didn’t.”

Sterling put his hand on my thigh.

I added, “She got the proper respect for her station, but she’s ultimately just a name in the Volumes, and that’s what she’d want. She said Jerron and I were her marks on history, and as long as she wasn’t remembered badly, she didn’t care about being remembered fondly.”

“That sounds like something you’d say.”

“Does it? I’ve never thought about it.”

He squeezed my leg. “So would she be upset that we’re making waves?”

I wasn’t explaining my mother very well. “Mom wasn’t a pacifist. She was a feral. She once told me she wasn’t a peace-keeper, she was a peace-maker.”

“Also sounds like something you’d say.”

I dipped my head and blushed. “Let’s go. Jerron’s probably still passed out.”

Inside the bank there was, as usual, one teller. Bill, the manager, sat to the left of the door, talking to the elderly Mrs. Beetle. A fake ficus tree provided a modicum of privacy, while the three people in line discreetly chatted among themselves so as to not overhear the matter of Mrs. Beetle’s vastly overdue mortgage, and her quavering voice.

Everyone in town had been there. I’d sat in that chair at one point trying to get Bill to waive an overdraft charge.

“Winter?” one of the people in line asked me, Hortense.

“Hi, Hortense. How have you been?” I asked her in return.

“Where did you get off to?” She looked at Sterling. “New man?”

The woman next to her, Bea, slapped her on the arm and tittered. “Hortense!”

“I don’t recognize him,” the third woman present, Jemma, commented, giving Sterling the old lady do they make him in a 60-year-old version side eye.

Sterling had on a battered pair of jeans, a battered leather belt, a scuffed up pair of work boots, and a battered flannel shirt under an equally battered wool jacket. He had three days of scruff on his jaw, and that I’ve been up all night doing something physical, but I’m ready to go another thirty miles look to him. Ground-in grime traced lines in the cracks of the pale, calloused skin on his hands.

I shifted my shoulders. “This is my husband, Sterling.”

The women startled, and Sterling, not wanting to impose himself, just nodded politely. “Ladies.”

“You two look a little rough,” Bea said gently.

“Wild night?” Hortense winked.

“Long night hike and supposed to meet Jerron here. Didn’t have time to sleep,” I said, trying to sound pleasant and failing.

“Such a shame about your father. You didn’t come back for the funeral?” Jemma asked.

I briefly weighed how much grief to show, decided I was a crappy actress. “Jerron didn’t tell me. When was his funeral?”

Gasps and fluttering as they digested this.

At least I could make Jerron very uncomfortable with the nice old ladies of town peppering him with aggravating questions. I pressed delicately, “When did he die?”

Hortense and the other two women looked a little confused, but she recovered to say, “Oh, goodness. A month ago? Sometime in October. I heard he just keeled over in his sleep. Popped a blood vessel in his brain or such.”

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