You Will Be Mine (New Horizon Book 3)

Chapter 37: Jeannie

In the morning, after I get back from walking Kira and tending to my chickens, Mr. Bentley is sitting on the couch in the living room and beckons me over.

“I have to get to work in just a little bit, but first I wanted to ask you something,” he says, patting the seat next to him.

I go over and sit with him, starting to get concerned when it takes him a few seconds to get around to asking his question.

“When I was going through your memories, I saw one about a lockbox that your grandmother used to keep under her bed. Do you remember that lockbox?”

“Yeah, it was where she kept everything about my mom,” I tell him, already seeing where this is going. “Hold on. I’ll go get it.”

“Wait, you have it here?”

He seems shocked about that, and I can’t help worrying what it was that he saw. Is there something dangerous in that box? I’ve just been keeping it in my dresser unprotected.

“I do. Is that a problem?”

“No, I’m just surprised. I figured that with how little you knew about your mother, it might be something you haven’t seen since you were a child.”

“My grandpa gave it to me after my grandma died. It was her that couldn’t stand seeing all the reminders of my mom around the house and locked them away, but once she was gone, there was no reason left to keep them hidden.”

“Oh, I see,” he says, pursing his lips and nodding his head. “Well, if you’re comfortable showing it to me, then I would like to see it.”

“Sure. Be right back,” I tell him again, getting up so I can go retrieve it from my room, Kira following me in her clumsy, puppy way.

She lets out a cute little yip every time we pass through a doorway into a closed-off room like this, though I haven’t figured out why. Might just be that the new scenery surprises her.

The box is in the top drawer of the bureau where I keep my pajamas and underclothes, tucked in next to my stacks of sock rolls. The box itself is a dark gray metal, and it’s just slightly larger than the biggest of the photos kept inside. According to my grandpa, it’s the picture that used to sit on the accent table in the upstairs hallway, until Grandma went around and took down and put away all traces of anything that reminded her of my mother.

Inside the box is a stack of old photos of my mom, and behind those is a bundle of old letters that she sent to my grandparents. I can’t read any of what she wrote, though. It’s all written in some other language or something, though it’s not any language that I recognize.

I lift it out of the drawer and tuck it under my arm to carry it back out to Mr. Bentley, taking extra care just in case there’s something about it that he hasn’t said yet. Kira follows me, of course, but when she realizes that it’s the living room we’re headed back to, she charges on ahead, sliding and scrambling across the smooth floor when she gets there. She arrives with a crash, colliding with one of the end tables and letting out another little surprised yip.

Mr. Bentley is laughing by the time I get to him, seeming to be amused by my hyper little puppy.

“You know, I always wanted a dog growing up, but I didn’t know then that my dad was a werewolf, and it wouldn’t have been so easy to have animals around him,” he tells me, smiling when I pick up Kira and hand her over to him. “So, I’m enjoying this. I think we need her energy around here, and I’m sure you’ll do a fine job training her and making sure she has everything she needs.”

He scratches her ears and nuzzles her face with his before setting her back on the floor so we can talk.

“So, here’s the box,” I announce, holding it out to him. “The lock hasn’t worked in years, but it’s not like anyone is going to want to mess with what’s in there anyway. It’s just old photos and letters.”

He takes the box from me, setting it on his lap so that he can investigate what’s in it. Behind me, I hear heavy steps coming down the stairs and turn to see that it’s Tyler and Mrs. Bentley joining us.

“Dee, just change it,” Mrs. Bentley hollers up the stairs, presumably at Gideon, who likes to be called Dee. “I’m not arguing it with you any further, but I do expect your compliance.”

He mumbles something back at her, but without the senses that these werewolves have, I can’t make out what he says.

“Kids,” Tyler exclaims, shaking his head at me. “A house full of ornery Alpha wolves is the future you have to look forward to, Jeannie.”

“Oh, stop,” Mrs. Bentley chides him, playfully smacking his upper arm. “If you had your way, there’d be at least five more of them.”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he teases, grinning and grabbing for her, even as she’s squirming away from him. “Come here. Let’s make another.”

“Get off me, Mr. Handsy. We have to get ready for work,” she argues, though she’s still laughing.

I can’t help smiling as I’m watching them. I’ve never really seen this, not until moving in with the Bentleys anyway. They seem to be loving and playful all the time, in contrast to how serious and proper my grandparents always were with each other. They even called each other Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, even though I could tell that they said it with endearment. I know they adored each other, but I can’t help envying the Bentley children for the lively childhood I’m sure they enjoyed with these openly affectionate parents of theirs.

And I have to say, in a lot of ways, Gabe reminds me a lot of Tyler, especially when he gets playful like that. The sight of him on his knees and teasingly calling me “Mistress” the night before immediately comes to mind.

Mr. Bentley seems completely unfazed by the antics of his brother with his mate. He’s still intently checking out my lock box, finished with flipping through the photos of my mom and moving onto the letters now.

“Tyler, what do you make of this?” he asks, summoning Tyler over to us.

He shows him the stack of letters, handing him the open one that he’s been looking over.

“They’re all like this,” he explains. “Which tells me that the decision to write them that way was deliberate. Secret code, do you think?”

Tyler holds the letter in his hand and seems to be reading it over, and then he even holds it up to the light as if to look for something hidden in the paper itself.

I don’t know why I never considered that it might not even be a language, but a code. I guess because a secret code didn’t seem like something that my grandmother would humor, and she saved those letters as if they meant something to her. Now I’m wondering if whatever code my mother used was one that my grandma even understood, or if she kept them just because they were from her daughter.

“It kind of looks that way,” Tyler agrees after a moment. “There is a pattern, though it’s not one that’s immediately apparent. I can feel it, though. These characters aren’t just put here randomly.”

“Does this code make any sense to you?” Mr. Bentley asks me next.

I shake my head, feeling myself frowning at how unsettling it is to think about my mom going to the lengths of writing in code just to communicate with her parents. I thought it was odd enough when I believed it was some foreign language, which is the impression I got from how my grandpa talked about it, and eventually concluded that my mom must be staying in some other country. But now I’m worrying about what she was trying to hide, and from whom.

“No. I thought it was another language, and my grandpa never said much about it, kind of just letting me go on thinking that,” I explain to him. “So, I’ve never actually read those, and no one has told me anything about what they say, though I was under the impression that my grandma could read them. I don't know that for a fact, though. She never read them to me.”

“It’s looking more and more like Stella’s theory that your mother brought you to live with your grandparents because she didn’t want you growing up in whatever place she’d found herself holds some credence,” Mr. Bentley comments, kind of muttering it thoughtfully. “But there are some things I still need to talk to Clarice about before I say much more about what I learned from your memories.”

“You know, it could be a magical language of some sort,” Tyler proposes.

“Except her grandparents wouldn’t have been able to read that,” Mr. Bentley argues. “So, it wouldn’t have made much sense to write to them that way.”

“Unless the letters were never meant for them,” Mrs. Bentley chimes in, nodding her head at me. “Maybe they’re for her, but she just hasn’t learned how to read them yet.”

“That’s not a bad thought,” Mr. Bentley agrees. “But didn’t these come in the mail? Seems like a risky thing to send unsecured.”

“I don’t know,” I admit to him. “They’ve just always been in there, as long as I’ve known about them anyway.”

“There are no dates on them,” Tyler points out. “If you’re sending a letter to someone, wouldn’t you date it? Maybe she hand-delivered them.”

“But how would we know if there are dates if we can’t even read the code or the language or whatever?” Mrs. Bentley challenges his theory.

“Good point,” Tyler concedes.

“Well, Clarice will probably be back at some point today, and she’ll be contacting me when she’s ready to meet with you, Jeannie,” Mrs. Bentley tells me. “Just be sure and bring these to her and see what she has to say. If it is some sort of magical language, she would probably recognize it.”

Dee and Aaron come thundering down the stairs together looking freshly washed and dressed for school, and all three of their parents turn and look up at them.

“That’s much better,” Mrs. Bentley says, walking over to Dee so she can fix the collar of his shirt.

“There was nothing wrong with the other one,” Dee grumbles impatiently.

“I told you I’m done arguing about it,” Mrs. Bentley scolds him.

Now this is a scene I can relate to. Especially as I got older, my grandma took issue with a lot of the things I wanted to do and wear, and we’d go back and forth about it a little. Maybe not as much as I see these guys doing, but I suppose that can be attributed to them being “ornery Alpha wolves” as Tyler said.

“Alright well, I’ll call or text you if I hear anything from Clarice today, Jeannie, but we all need to get going,” she turns and says to me. “There’s plenty of food in the fridge, so help yourself, and I think Stella was planning to be here today, so you’ll even have company.”

“But don’t expect to see her until well after noon. She was out late last night,” Tyler informs me, shaking his head about Stella.

Mr. Bentley has gathered all the letters and photos and tucked them neatly back into my lock box, and he hands it back to me so I can stow it away again. I gather up Kira to make sure she doesn’t try to escape out the front door as they’re leaving, and we head back to my room to hang out.

I’ve recently discovered that I can play games on my phone, and that’s how I plan to spend the day until I can finally meet with Clarice. I lift Kira up onto the bed with me, and she settles right in against my hip and goes to sleep, so I guess there are no complaints from my little companion either.