Cain had said that his protege's name was Victor Olson and that he'd broken him out of jail in Arizona where he'd been imprisoned for sex crimes. Since Daniel had found Olson, his crimes must have been big enough to warrant media attention. A simple search on the name and city brought up seven complete matches. The first one was for some long-dead city father named Victor Olson. The next four matches were for Vic "Mad Dog" Olson, which sounded promising, until I clicked on one site and found an advertisement for a personal injury lawyer. On the last two I hit pay dirt. Victor Olson had escaped from jail four months ago, cutting short a life sentence for raping and killing a ten-year-old-girl. I reread his victim's age several times. Cain said Olson had been in jail for "screwing around with a couple girls." I'd assumed by "girls" he really meant women. Obviously not. Suppressing my revulsion, I read the article. Olson was a lifetime pedophile who'd been charged several times with acts of indecency, but the charges had always been dismissed when the judge ruled his victims' testimony "unreliable." With the last victim, the judge had to admit the testimony provided by her dead body was reasonably reliable. I skipped to the news article on the other site and discovered why Daniel had chosen Olson. He was a stalker. He chose his victims with care and trailed them for weeks before making his move. One detective said he'd never seen someone so skilled at "the hunt"-his choice of words, not mine.
I spent another hour going over what I knew. When that led nowhere, I tracked down Nick in the exercise room and repeated everything to him, hoping either he'd think of something or the very act of verbalizing it would help me think of something. Nick listened, but didn't have any ideas. Nick wasn't used to having ideas. That sounded worse than I intended. What I meant was that he was accustomed to following the plans of others. He was an enthusiastic lieutenant and a loyal friend, but he wasn't exactly-how do I put this nicely-not exactly a deep thinker. Talking to him didn't help me think of anything either. So I put aside my papers, turned off the laptop, and did the most mind-numbing, menial chore I could imagine. I did the laundry.
No one had done laundry since we'd gone to Toronto, probably because it was the last thing on anyone's mind. I didn't realize the full implications of that until I was folding the first load and came across one of Clay's shirts. I stood there in the laundry room holding the shirt. Clay had worn it the day before we left. I don't know why I remembered that. It was a dark green golf shirt, one of the few departures from Clay's plethora of plain white and black cotton T-shirts. It must have been a gift from Logan, who'd considered it his thankless job to add some fashion to Clay's wardrobe. I stared at the shirt, thinking about Logan and the grief surged fresh. Then I thought about Peter, remembered him ribbing Clay about his monochromatic wardrobe, threatening to give him a stack of the most garish concert T-shirts he could find. Blinking hard, I tucked the shirt under a stack of Nick's pants and kept going
After I'd folded the first load, I took it upstairs to put the clothes away. I left Clay's pile for last. For several minutes, I stood outside his closed bedroom door and screwed up the courage to go inside. I rushed through the job, stuffing shirts, underwear, and socks into his drawers. His jeans went in the closet. Yes, he hung up his jeans, probably because if he didn't, there wouldn't be anything in there. I was putting the jeans on hangers when I saw the pile of wrapped presents on the closet floor. Without even checking the tags, I knew what they were. Part of me wanted to slam the door shut and run. I didn't want to see them. Yet I couldn't resist. I reached down and picked up the top gift. It was wrapped in Christmas paper, bright candy canes and bows. On the tag, one name scrawled across, obliterating the to: and from: label. Elena.
Nick had said Clay expected me back. I'd half expected to come back last Christmas myself, not through my own volition, but magically, as if I could fall asleep in Toronto on Christmas Eve and wake up in Stonehaven the next morning. Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays, they'd all passed unnoticed, untainted by the urge of return. Christmas was different.
Growing up, I'd hated Christmas. Of all the holidays, it was the one that most glorified the family, all those movies and TV specials and advertisements and magazine covers showing happy families going through the rites of the season. That's not to say I was deprived of the normal trappings of Christmas. My foster families weren't complete ogres. I got presents and turkey dinners. I went to parties and midnight mass. I sat on Santa's knee and learned to sing "Up on the Rooftop" for the school concert. But without real family bonds, all the rituals of the season were as phony as sprayed-on snow. So when I moved out on my own at eighteen, I stopped celebrating. Then I met Clay. That first year together, I finally felt that a true Christmas was possible. Sure, I wasn't surrounded by parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I had someone. I had the first link to everything else I wanted so bad.
I should say that Clay had no idea how to celebrate Christmas. It wasn't an official werewolf holiday. Okay, there were no official werewolf holidays, but that wasn't the point. The Pack recognized Christmas only as a time to get together as they did umpteen other times a year. They exchanged presents, the same as they did on birthdays, but that was the extent of the celebration. So what did Clay do when I hinted that I wanted a full-blown Christmas? He gave me one.
Although I didn't know it at the time, Clay spent weeks researching the holiday. Then he gave me Christmas with all the trimmings. We went out and cut down a tree-then realized the impossibility of getting it back to his apartment on his motorcycle. We had the tree delivered and decorated it. We made shortbread, gingerbread, and sugar cookies, and discovered how hard it is to form gingerbread men without a cookie cutter. We made a fruitcake, which was probably still on the balcony of his old apartment, where we'd eventually used it to hold open the door. We bought lights for the balcony, then had to go back to the hardware store for an extension cord, then had to go back for wire cutters to snip a hole in the screen to slip the cord through. We listened to Christmas music, watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and rented It's a Wonderful Life, though Clay fell asleep during the latter-okay, we both fell asleep during the latter. We drank eggnog by the fire, or by a magazine photo of a fire that Clay stuck on the wall. No tradition went unobserved. It was the perfect Christmas. We didn't make it to Easter.
There was no Christmas the next year. I assume Christmas still occurred in the outside world, but at Stonehaven, it passed unnoticed. I'd barely got out of the cage by winter. Clay was still banished. Logan came to see me, but I drove him away, as I'd driven him away the half-dozen other times he tried to visit. Nick sent a gift. I threw it out unopened. Before Clay bit me, I'd met both Logan and Nick, had even started considering them friends. Afterward, I blamed them for not warning me. So, Christmas came and went and I barely realized it.
The next year, Clay was still banished. I was well on the road to recovery by then. I'd forgiven Logan and Nick and even Jeremy. I'd started getting to know Antonio and Peter. I was coming to accept life as a werewolf. Then came Christmas. I expected it would pass again with little fanfare, like the year before. Instead, we had a full-blown Christmas, complete with presents under the tree, colored lights sparkling against the snow, and a turkey on the table. The whole Pack came to Stonehaven for a week, and for the first time, I knew how hectic, stressful, loud, and wonderful a family Christinas could be. I thought this was how the Pack normally celebrated Christmas, when they didn't have an angry new female werewolf to contend with. It wasn't until January that I learned the truth. Clay had contacted Jeremy and asked him to do this for me. That was his gift to me. My gift to him was to ask Jeremy to repeal his banishment.