Charlaine Harris - Crimes by Moonlight

“Where’s the goddess?” one of them says, taking a step closer.

“I left it right there,” says the other one.

“You idiot! You brought that stupid bear.”

The other starts to protest when suddenly the bear gives a tremendous roar. To their horror, it lurches forward and swipes its claws at the woman in front.

Terrified, both women bolt screaming down the alleyway.

The bear drops to all fours, growls menacingly, then stops and turns toward me. I concentrate on being cardboard. I think cardboard thoughts and try to give off a cardboard smell.

The bear laughs and says. “It’s okay, Laurel. You can come out now.”

A shimmer of fur, and there’s Kendall Loring.

I stare at her, stupefied, and slowly shift into my own shape.

“I see you didn’t think to wear a coat either,” she says. “Come on. Let’s see if they left a cell phone in the car.”

I’m too stunned to argue and just follow her meekly out to the car, where we find a purse and a cell phone. When the women get up the nerve to return, we’re locked inside the SUV with the heater going, and Kendall ’s called the police. They bang on the windows and threaten us with seven kinds of hurt until a police cruiser pulls up outside the gate and an agile young patrol officer climbs over the gate and demands to know what’s going on.

Neva Earle tries to bluster her way out of it, but she and her accomplice sound crazy when they start raving about a bear, and besides, I’ve identified the lacquered chest that she stole from the store last week.

The police take us down to the station to sort it all out. Kendall tells a convincing story of how we saw them take the Ming dynasty vase from the store and followed them. They don’t think to ask where Kendall ’s car is or how we got past the locked gate. The vase and the chest are enough for them to charge Neva Earle and her partner, and the nice young patrol officer drives us both to Kendall ’s apartment.

That’s where I learn that she’s my cousin. My grandmother actually had two daughters, not one as I’ve been told.

“My mom was a shape-shifter, too,” Kendall says, “only our grandparents were horrified and so scared of her that she ran away from home when she was sixteen. Your mom was only four at the time, and maybe they never told her she had an older sister. When I finally got Mother to tell me her real name, her parents were dead, and no one knew what happened to your mom. One of the neighbors thought she’d married a man named Hudson. Do you know how many Hudsons there are?”

I shake my head.

“Thousands,” she says grimly. “From Alaska to Florida. Two years ago, though, Mother was on eBay looking at jewelry for our store in Detroit, and she spotted this.”

She hands me an oval cameo brooch, set in gold and rimmed with garnets. White on pink, it’s carved with the profiles of three women. Nothing I’d ever wear, I had assured my dad when I asked if I could put it on eBay along with some other pieces of antique jewelry. I think it fetched around $300.

“It was my grandmother’s,” I say.

“I know. My mom recognized it.”

“You came here because of a brooch?”

“Mother’s gone,” she says simply. “I suppose you could say she drowned. She was dying of cancer, and last summer she just merged into Lake Michigan. I have no other family.”

She won’t beg. I can see that.

“Okay,” I say at last. “But you have to teach me how to do animals. I can’t keep myself from wilting when I’m a plant, so I’ve been afraid to try a living form.”

She laughs and shifts into the shape of a large golden retriever and almost licks me to death before I can make her stop.

OH, and the shoplifter? The next time Jane covered for Dad, I said, “I’m sorry you’re having a rough time right now, Jane, but you can’t steal any more money, okay?”

See, the stolen items were portable, but they were also so cheap that most customers wouldn’t bother with a credit card. On Saturday morning, I watched a woman pay cash for a Blue Willow cup and saucer from Neva Earle’s booth. Jane pointed out a tiny chip on the underside of the saucer and told her it was being sold “as is,” meaning it could not be returned. Then she simply pocketed the cash.

I suppose I should have had her fired or arrested, but she’s been around since I was a baby. Besides, business is starting to pick up again, so Dad has her working more hours, and she’s gradually paying back what she stole.

Dad’s as absentminded as ever, but he’s noticed that Kendall and I are friends.

I’m still not totally convinced that Kendall ’s interested only in me and not Dad, too, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. A cousin’s one thing. A shape-shifting stepmom’s quite another.

Oh, and last week? I changed into a tiger and scared Tommy Bertram so bad he wet his pants.

Wait’ll he sees my dragon.

I was dreaming that something was chewing on my ankles when the phone thankfully rang, and I fumbled at the side of the bed and grabbed the cordless phone, and murmured something intelligible into the receiver. I looked at the bloodred numerals of the clock radio and saw that it was 2:34 a.m. A hellish time for about anything, especially a phone ringing in the dark.

The female voice on the other end said, “Sorry to wake you, Chief, but you’ve got a situation.”

I yawned, scratched at an intimate place or two, and swung around and put my feet on the carpet. Behind me my wife, Tracy, kept on slumbering. Sweet girl, she could sleep through most everything, including a Cat Five hurricane hammering at the windows.

“Go ahead. What’s going on?” I asked.

The voice-which I now recognized as one of the duty dispatchers for the county-said, “You’ve got an untimely death.”

Damn, I thought. It was Saturday morning. This meant that I probably had to kiss the weekend good-bye, even though I had earlier promised Tracy a nice drive south to visit her parents in Concord… but with an untimely death in town, that was all done.

“Go on. Where?”

“ Fourteen Mast Road. Officer Harris is there, securing the scene.”

“Fourteen? Did you say Fourteen Mast Road?”

“That’s right, Chief.”

Damn. The Logan place. Tracy shifted on the other side of the bed and then started gently snoring.

I yawned, scratched myself in another, somewhat less intimate place, and said, “All right. Tell Harris I’m rolling, should be there in about fifteen minutes. All right?”

“Absolutely,” the dispatcher said. “You want me to contact the state police?”

I hesitated. Protocol demanded that the state police be called in for something like this, especially in a small town like Salem Falls, New Hampshire, which had a three-man police department, one-third of which was on vacation, one-third of which was on the job, and one-third of which was sitting in a pair of pajama bottoms, talking to a young lady who probably wasn’t more than twenty-one years of age.

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “I’ll take care of it when I get to the scene.”

I sensed the uneasiness coming through the phone line, but she was a professional and said, “As you say, Chief.”

I hung up the phone and managed to get dressed and out the door without waking my wife or our two girls-ages eight and five-which I thought was a major accomplishment.

IN my cruiser the engine started on the third try, and I backed out to Rutland Road, where I live with my family. I flipped on the heater as I drove down Rutland, the headlights picking up the dead leaves scattered across the cracked asphalt. It was the middle of October, just a couple of weeks left before Halloween, but I didn’t see any trick-or-treaters about, just quiet homes with one or two displaying a flickering blue light in the window that either meant an insomniac or someone who had fallen asleep while watching The Tonight Show. There were also a couple of lighted displays of pumpkins or witches from those who really enjoyed celebrating this time of year, and I’m sure they were new arrivals to our fair town.