Page 18 of The Jackal

MAGNOLIA

The address Claire texted me dropped a pin along the harbor, down a road that ran out of houses and then nearly out of road altogether, the live oaks closing overhead until I was driving through a green tunnel with the morning light coming down in coins.

I'd dressed up for it, which for me, meant a clean shirt without a single visible dog on it and my hair actually brushed, blonde and behaving for once in a low ponytail instead of its usual escape attempt. I'd looked at myself in the rearview before I left and decided I passed for a professional who visits homes and judges fences. Tall enough, put-together enough. The kind of pretty that gets you taken seriously.

Then, the trees opened, and I forgot all about my hair.

It wasn't a house. It was a fortress that had been talked into wearing a mansion's clothes. Several stories of brick and stone, set back behind a wall I could not see the end of in either direction, and a gate—iron, spiked, easily ten feet of it—that swung open before I'd even fully stopped.

Because, of course, there was a camera. Of course, there was someone watching. Of course, a place like this knew you were coming before you knew it yourself.

A man stepped out of a little stone guardhouse I hadn't clocked. Big. Calm in the way that isn't relaxed at all. He looked at me, looked at my sun-faded SUV with its back seat full of leashes and its permanent understory of fur, and something in his face eased a half-degree.

"Ms. Bennett." Not a question. "Ms. Dixon's expecting you. Straight up the drive, park anywhere."

Anywhere turned out to be a courtyard of pale stone the size of my entire neighborhood. I left my dusty vehicle among cars that cost more than the house my father had helped me buy—several of them, low and dark and silent-looking, even parked. I got out feeling exactly as out of place as I was, a dog person with a clipboard at a billionaire's gate. I had the brief, hysterical thought that I should've come on foot like a peasant petitioning the manor.

The front doors—there were two of them, tall as a church's—opened, and Claire came out. I felt the ground come back under me.

"You found it," she called, coming down the steps. "I was about to send a search party, which around here is not a figure of speech." She reached me and took both my hands like we'd known each other years instead of a day.

"Come in, come in, it's a thousand degrees out here and I've got someone dying to meet you. Well—sitting very still and dying to meet you. She doesn't get up fast these days."

Inside, the cold hit first—real air conditioning, the kind that costs—then the floor, marble, gleaming so hard I could see my own brushed ponytail in it, then the chandelier, hanging in the entry like a frozen explosion, beautiful and faintly threatening. The stairs went up wide and steep and split, built so whoever stood at the top could see everyone who came through the door. I noticed that.

I'd spent my life around men who chose the seat facing the entrance without thinking about it. This whole house had chosen the seat facing the entrance.

Claire steered me into a bright room that smelled, improbably, of gardenias. There were flowers everywhere—buckets of them crowding a long table, fat white blooms and trailing green, stems and shears and the cheerful wreckage of someone who could not sit still, even under orders. And in the middle of it, in an armchair dragged close so she didn't have to reach far, sat a very pregnant woman with her bare feet up on an ottoman and a half-finished arrangement balanced in her lap.

She was blonde and golden and lit from within the way women get in the last stretch of it, all that warmth pushed right up under the skin.

She looked up, and her smile arrived a full beat ahead of any words, wide and unguarded and so plainly glad to see a stranger that it knocked something loose in me.

"You must be the dog woman," she said. "I'm Joy. I'd get up, but it's a production these days, so you'll forgive me." She lifted the flowers in her lap, explanation and apology at once. "And ignore all of this. I'm supposed to be resting. This is how I rest. My husband stopped fighting me on it months ago."

"She grows them," Claire said, perching on the arm of the chair, that red mouth tipping into a grin. "Whole shop downtown. She physically cannot be near a flower without bossing it around."

"They like to be bossed," Joy said serenely. "Most living things do, a little. They only want to know somebody's paying attention." She tilted her head at me, and the soft eyes turned out to be the noticing kind under all that warmth. "Sit. Tell me about this dog she's lost her mind over. And tell me what you actually do, because the version I got was about eighty percent feelings."

So, I sat among the flowers and told her. About Banjo first, and then—because she asked the right way, the patient way—about the rest of it. About Max. About the waiting. About sitting in the dark with a broken thing until it decides you're safe. Joy listened with both hands resting on the swell of her belly, her head tipped.

"That's the only way anything heals," she said when I'd run down. "You make it safe, and then you wait. You can't hurry a living thing into trusting you." She looked down at the half-made arrangement in her lap and smiled. "I say it to the roses. They don't listen either. But they come around."

And I thought, sitting there in that flower-smelling room, that I could have stayed all afternoon. There was something about this family I didn't have a word for yet—a gravity to it, a way the broken and the wandering seemed to drift in off the edges of things and simply get kept.

I had no idea yet how strange it was. Or how soon I'd find out.

Claire showed me the rest while Joy stayed with her flowers. The grounds were less grounds than a small green country. I did my job—checked the fencing, which was frankly a joke, the back of the property walled and sensored well enough to repel an invasion. I wrote no fence problem on my form and underlined it. Banjo would have space here a working dog could only dream of, people in and out all day so he'd never be alone, a high stone wall to keep his anxious heart from chasing the whole world at once. I told Claire he'd be approved before I'd finished the paperwork. She actually clapped.

It was on the way back through the house that I saw the wall.

A long hallway, dim and cool, lined floor to ceiling with photographs in heavy frames. Men. Generations of them. Soldiers, all of them, a whole dynasty, jaws set, eyes that had seen the thing my dogs had seen. A military family. Of course, they were. It explained the gate and the guardhouse and the seat facing the door, the whole grammar of the place. And under one of the photographs, engraved into a small brass plate, a single word.

DANE.

It went through me like a dropped stitch. Dane. I stood there in that cold hallway with my clipboard against my chest and felt the name land somewhere it had no business landing, because I knew a Dane. I'd loved a Dane, in the quiet way I loved things that didn't love me back, two states up the coast in a life that had nothing—nothing—to do with marble floors and ten-foot gates.

And that was exactly how I talked myself out of it. Because my Cash lived out of one battered bag and brought me cheap Chinese food on a Valentine's Day he insisted wasn't one, and wore the same two shirts in rotation, and would've looked at this chandelier like a thing to be removed before it hurt somebody. Whatever this family was—and it was clearly something, something the city bent around—it could not be his. Dane wasn't a rare name. The man I knew had come from nowhere and gone back to it, and the idea that he belonged to this was so absurd that I let it go, the way you let go of a coincidence too tidy to trust.