SEAL Wolf In Too Deep(68)
“He must not have seen Rose and Lori arrive,” Franny agreed.
“Yeah, we got damn lucky on that.”
Allan sensed Franny knew more than she was letting on. Suddenly, Debbie bolted from the couch, sending decorator pillows flying as she raced to the bedroom. He suspected she was shifting again, but it was the first time she was able to do so that soon after the last shift.
He and Franny waited for Debbie to rejoin them, not wanting her to miss out on the talk.
When she stalked back in the room, she was wearing a pale blue sweater, jeans, and fluffy blue slippers. She curled up with him on the couch and he wrapped his arm around her, glad she was happy to be back to her human form.
“Did you know Sarah?” Debbie asked.
Allan had never considered such a thing. As far as he knew, Sarah was a stranger to the pack and somehow had heard they were looking for wolves—courtesy of Lori’s grandma and his mother.
Franny hesitated, looking a little panicked.
“How did you meet Otis?” Debbie asked.
Franny let out her breath. “Through Sarah. We knew each other in drama classes at the community college in Boise. She was really wild; I wasn’t. She’d met these two guys—Lloyd and Otis. Only Otis went by the name of Cleveland when I knew him. She started dating Lloyd, and I went out with Otis. Then I met Gary, my wolf mate, and I called it quits with Otis. He was really angry about it. Kept stalking me and Gary. Then Sarah left for southern Montana and said that Otis and Lloyd had headed out that way too.
“I didn’t hear from her again until right before…before Lori and Rose found her. Sarah and I had been close friends. She had some notion we should come out as lupus garous—tell people what we were. That people would see we weren’t vicious or anything. I’d hoped someone would convince her how foolish the notion was. I figured she might get in trouble with a wolf pack over her wild ideas. Not that she’d die at the hand of some professed werewolf hunter.”
“Did you know Otis had notions of killing werewolves?” Debbie asked.
Franny looked at her lap. “Yes. His talk about finding werewolves amused me. He hadn’t found any, but he said he was looking. I said they could be just anyone, didn’t he think? No way did I believe he’d ever really run across any, other than Sarah and me, and he was clueless about us. We figured he always would be. I feel I am to blame for indulging in his illusion too.”
“Why didn’t you tell us before that you knew Sarah?” Allan asked.
“She wanted to be a member of the wolf pack in Boise that Gary belonged to. He was one of the sub-leaders who voted her down. He said she should be put out of her misery before some of our kind were killed because of her wild ideas. When I met him and heard how he felt about her, I didn’t want him to know I had been running with her. I hadn’t wanted him to know about Otis either because I’d stayed with him much longer than is safe for our kind. I just wanted that part of my life to be over and to start anew with Gary.”
“But you knew her name and the men who had been involved with her when we didn’t. We might have caught up with him sooner,” Allan said, annoyed.
“I was really shaken up with the car accident and nearly losing my baby. No one showed me the picture of the woman Lori and Rose had found.”
“Okay,” Allan said, backing off a bit. That had probably been Lori’s call.
“I didn’t learn of it until recently… I heard you went to southern Montana to investigate some lead, but not anything about it. As far as I knew, Otis had learned where Gary and I were and was stalking me, and now he wanted to kill me for leaving him. I had no idea he was in the area because Sarah was.”
“Sarah told Rose she was coming in a few weeks,” Allan said.
“I didn’t know she was coming. She had gotten in touch with me about my pack, sent me a letter and her new phone number. I had talked to her about it. I thought between you and Paul, because you were SEALs, you could set her on the right path. She never got in touch with me to say she was coming or had arrived. I just thought the dead woman was someone else who had come to check out the pack. Or a random wolf in the area.” Franny swallowed hard. “I jeopardized the whole pack. She said she was leaving Lloyd. She never told me she had turned him. If she had told him about our pack, I believe Otis would have tortured her until he knew her contact.”
“What if she told him you were the contact? And that’s why he tried to kill you?” Debbie asked.
Franny chewed on her bottom lip. “Why didn’t he try to coerce the truth out of me then?”
“Maybe he planned to but we came upon the accident scene too quickly,” Debbie said.
“Did you see him stop, then leave?” Allan asked.
“No. I was trying to get myself unbuckled and get out of the SUV because it was filling up fast with water. I was upside down, I think I was unconscious for a few seconds. I don’t remember the SUV flipping, just the rough ride down the slope. After I managed to get out, I was attempting to open the back door to reach Stacy. I don’t believe I was thinking straight at the time. Now, I realize I should have crawled between the seats and released her. It didn’t even come to mind.”
Allan could relate. “That’s understandable. You were hypothermic and in shock.”
Franny nodded. “He might have figured we had drowned when I didn’t leave the car right away, and then he left when he heard or saw you coming.”