Beware the Wolfman Read online

  BEWARE THE WOLFMAN

  Written by

  Kate William

  Created by

  FRANCINE PASCAL

  Copyright © 2015, Francine Pascal

  To John Stewart Carmen

  Gradually, Elizabeth slipped back into a troubled sleep, only to be visited again by the nightmare she'd had as the full moon hung over Pembroke Manor, the night Joy Singleton was murdered in Jessica's bed. Elizabeth stood helpless as the werewolf chased her sister, as he grasped Jessica with hairy, muscular arms, as he bent with a howl to tear her throat with his teeth. . . .

  Wait a minute. . . . In her dream, Elizabeth heard the snarl close to her own ear; she felt the claws digging into her flesh, the hot breath against her throat, the point of a knife-sharp fang. This time, the girl the werewolf was pursuing was herself.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Wakefield passed a platter of warm breakfast scones to her Housing for International Students roommate, aspiring young actress Portia Albert. After choosing a plump raisin scone, Portia passed the platter along to freckled, auburn-haired Emily Cartwright.

  "I wonder what Lina's having for breakfast this morning?" mused Emily as she added a scone to her plate, already piled high with farm-style bacon, eggs over easy, and juicy broiled tomatoes.

  Elizabeth's blue-green eyes crinkled in a smile. "You mean Eliana. Princess Eliana."

  "She's probably having the same thing we are," Portia guessed. "Only, she's eating her eggs with a silver fork from a solid-gold dish."

  The three girls laughed merrily. "I don't think snooty old Mrs. Bates will ever recover from learning that the Queen of England's daughter was living in her dormitory," said Elizabeth, pushing back a long strand of golden blond hair. "And the whole time, she'd been looking down her nose at her, thinking Lina was just a poor working-class girl from Liverpool!"

  "She practically fainted when she saw the special edition of the London Journal with your article," Emily agreed. "Her fat old face turned white and then purple and then green. If there hadn't been a chair right behind her, she would have fallen flat on the floor."

  "Maybe Mrs. Bates will learn a lesson," Portia speculated, filling her cup with steaming hot tea. "In the future, I wager she won't be so quick to play favorites based on whether she thinks one of her boarders is well born or well connected!"

  Emily nodded, her green eyes twinkling mischievously. "Now, if I can only convince her I'm the runaway daughter of the Queen of Australia . . . !"

  Elizabeth shook her head, smiling. The story really was like a fairy tale. When Elizabeth and her twin sister, Jessica, arrived at HIS a few weeks earlier, their home for the time they'd spend as interns at a London newspaper, the housemother, Mrs. Bates, had assigned them to a room with Portia Albert and Lina Smith. Elizabeth had struck up a friendship with Lina immediately, admiring the sweet, plainspoken girl with mousy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses who was devoting her summer to helping at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen.

  From the start, though, there had been something a bit puzzling, a bit off, about Lina. "Remember when you found that fancy cocktail dress in the back of the closet?" Elizabeth asked Emily. "And Lina had such elegant nightgowns—not at all what you'd think a girl from a poor family would wear."

  "And you noticed that her glasses had clear lenses," said Emily.

  Portia tossed her glossy raven hair. "And we all noticed that she had a mad crush on David Bartholomew but for some mysterious reason wouldn't do anything about it."

  Emily grinned. "Plus, it always seemed funny to me that Lina should know more high-society gossip than me, seeing as how I've been known to spend every spare moment reading about the royals in the tabloids!"

  "When she told me who she really was, that night before we went to the opening of your play," Elizabeth said to Portia, "I almost pulled a Mrs. Bates and fainted dead away. It was the hardest secret I ever had to keep."

  "Especially with huge headlines in the paper every day," said Portia. "Her disappearance was the biggest news to hit London in ages."

  "All's well that ends well," Elizabeth concluded. "She's back with her family at Buckingham Palace, but she's determined to stay in touch with the real world and the causes she cares about. She and David fell in love and they don't care in the least that their backgrounds are so different. And finally, when David received the one-million-pound reward for finding the princess, he turned right around and donated it to the homeless shelter!"

  Portia stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea. "It's absolutely the most romantic story, like something from a play."

  "Maybe it will be a play," said Emily. "It could be your next stage role, Porsh!"

  Lina's not the only one who surprised us, thought Elizabeth, digging into her bacon and eggs. Portia wasn't the girl they'd all thought her to be, either. The daughter of the incomparable Shakespearean actor Sir Montford Albert, who directed a theater company in Edinburgh, Scotland, Portia had come to London to launch her own acting career. Right away, she'd landed a role in a new West End play . . . on the basis of her famous name rather than on her talent, her fellow HIS residents had assumed. There wasn't much incentive to give Portia the benefit of the doubt; she was arrogant and pretentious and cold as ice, disdaining to socialize the least little bit with the other teenagers at HIS.

  Then, the day of her opening night, she left complimentary tickets for us, Elizabeth remembered. Elizabeth had managed to talk Jessica, Emily, David, and Gabriello into giving Portia one last chance. At the theater, they'd been astounded to discover that Portia was performing under an alias: Penelope Abbott. Not only that, but the personality of Isabelle in A Common Man was uncannily like Portia's own personality . . . or what they'd all assumed was her personality.

  "You fooled us, too, Portia," Elizabeth said out loud. "We thought Isabelle Huntington was the real you!"

  Portia smiled ruefully. "I wanted so much to prove myself to the world . . . and to my father. The only way I knew to really excel in my art was to immerse myself one hundred percent in the role. I'm only glad you were willing to forgive me for practicing my lines on you!"

  "I almost didn't," Emily teased. "You were a real pain in the derriere, Portia Albert!"

  Portia flashed an endearing smile and patted Emily's arm. "But we're friends now, aren't we? That's why I told my father I don't want to move into the fancy flat he found for me on the other side of town."

  "What fancy flat?" asked Elizabeth.

  "After seeing the play the other night and realizing not only am I serious about becoming an actress, but I may actually be good at it, he's suddenly behind me heart and soul and pocketbook. You saw the flowers upstairs?"

  "How could I miss them?" Elizabeth laughed. "That bouquet is bigger than I am!"

  "It came with a card from my parents," Portia explained, "offering to rent me a place of my own, so I could have more privacy than here at the dorm."

  Elizabeth's face fell. The third-floor bedroom already seemed empty with Lina gone. "You're not leaving, too, are you?"

  Portia shook her head firmly. "I told them I'm happy where I am—I'm happy sharing digs with all of you. Your friendship helps keep me going, gets me up on that stage every night. No, I'm not budging." She grinned. "You're stuck with me!"

  "I'm glad," Elizabeth said. "Because—"

  Just then, the dining-room door swung open. David Bartholomew and Gabriello Moretti sprinted in, each waving a couple of newspapers. "Wait until you see these headlines," David called. "They're even bigger than the ones about the missing Princess!"

  Elizabeth's heart sank. She already knew what the headlines would say. If only I could wake up one morning and find it's all been a dream, she thought, forcing herself to look at the newspapers the boys tossed on the table. A terrible, terrible dream.

  The London Journal was uppermost, its lead story titled, "Young Lord Pembroke Suspect in Murder Case." The sensational London Daily Post used all capital letters for added drama: "WEREWOLF STALKS LONDON BY NIGHT!" A three-inch-high headline in yet another newspaper asked, "Little Lord Pembroke: Werewolf?"

  Elizabeth pushed the newspapers away, and her plate as well. Her appetite had vanished. "It's almost worse than not knowing who the killer was, to have it turn out to be him."

  Emily clucked her tongue sadly. "Your poor, poor sister."

  ''Well, the man's innocent until proven guilty, isn't he?" said David, pulling up a chair.

  "Yes," Portia agreed. "But is there really any doubt?"

  Her expression grim, Elizabeth shook her head. "I wish there was still room for doubt—I'd give anything to believe the murderer wasn't Robert Pembroke." The boy my sister's fallen in love with . . . "But the evidence all points in his direction. His own father admits as much."

  As her eye was drawn back to the newspaper headlines, Elizabeth's thoughts returned to the beginning of it all. Their very first day at the Journal, she and Jessica had taken it upon themselves to sneak over to the scene of a major crime. A prominent London physician had been brutally murdered and, spying through a window, the twins had seen his corpse. His throat had
been ripped open, as if by a wild beast.

  After that, events began to snowball. Journal editor-in-chief Henry Reeves drastically cut and altered crime editor Lucy Friday's article about Dr. Neville's murder. Lucy in turn accused Reeves of conspiring in a cover-up with the Journal's owner, Lord Robert Pembroke, and the London chief of police, and then quit her position. More bodies began to turn up, all killed in the same savage manner. And one of the victims was murdered in the very bed Jessica was supposed to be sleeping in at Pembroke Manor. . . .

  Elizabeth shuddered, remembering the previous weekend. Jessica had been invited to the Pembrokes' country estate by Lord Pembroke's son and heir, Robert, and she'd talked Elizabeth and Elizabeth's friend from work, Luke Shepherd, into going with her. For Elizabeth and Luke, it was a chance to investigate the Pembroke family—to find out if there was any truth to Lucy Friday's theory that the Pembrokes had something to hide.

  It was the night of the full moon, Elizabeth recalled. And the local constable came by the manor to tell Lord Pembroke that some sheep had been found on his property, slaughtered. Luke was sure it was a werewolf, and then she'd had that horrible dream. . . .

  She'd dreamed that Jessica was being pursued by a werewolf, and she herself could only watch helplessly. When she woke the next morning and ran to her sister's room, it looked for a minute as if the dream had become reality. A girl with blond hair lay on the bed in a pool of blood . . . dead.

  It turned out that Jessica had switched rooms with another guest—the victim was actually Joy Singleton, fiancée of London police chief Andrew Thatcher. Soon the local police were on the case, but Elizabeth had decided to do some sleuthing on her own. Returning to Pembroke Manor, she'd discovered a hidden room filled with books about werewolves—Lord Pembroke had a passionate, perhaps obsessive, interest in the subject.

  She'd also overheard a bone-chilling conversation between Lord Pembroke Senior and Thatcher. It turned out Pembroke had been hiding something—he'd been using his personal influence over Thatcher to stall the police investigation of the killings so he could gather clues and capture the werewolf himself. But with another dead body at Pembroke Manor, that of the Pembroke Manor cook, Thatcher finally persuaded Lord Pembroke to turn his evidence over to the police . . . and announce at a press conference that his own son, Robert Junior, was the number one suspect.

  "We'd better put these away in case Jessica—" Emily began.

  She didn't get a chance to finish her sentence. At that moment, Jessica herself entered the dining room.

  Before Emily and the others could shove the newspapers under the table, Jessica charged over and snatched one of them up. Two spots of angry pink blossomed in her cheeks as she scanned the headline.

  "Are you happy Liz?" Jessica demanded, flinging the paper at her sister. "Are you pleased with what you've done?"

  An awkward silence fell over the dining room. "I haven't done anything," Elizabeth said quietly.

  "Oh, no?" Jessica put her hands on her hips, her eyes shooting sparks. "You and all your snooping around at Pembroke Manor. You wouldn't rest until you'd pinned this on Robert and his family. And then you and Luke forced your absurd, demented werewolf theory on everybody!"

  "We didn't force any theory on anyone," Elizabeth protested. "The press jumped to their own conclusions, given the evidence."

  "Well, they're wrong. You're all wrong! Robert Pembroke isn't a killer, much less a werewolf. You've ruined an innocent man's life, Elizabeth," Jessica cried passionately, "and you've ruined my life, too!"

  At this, Elizabeth lost what grasp she had left on her temper. She jumped to her feet to stand face-to-face with her sister. "I've ruined your life? I'm trying to save your life, you idiot!" she shouted. "I can't believe how deluded you are!"

  "I'm deluded, says the girl who believes in werewolves. I'm deluded!"

  "Yes, you are," Elizabeth snapped. "All the evidence points to Robert. He had the opportunity to commit the murders. His cigarette case was found near Dr. Neville's body—threads from his bathrobe turned up on the door frame of your room at Pembroke Manor. And now he's skipped town, disappeared without a trace. If that doesn't prove he's guilty, nothing does, and if you weren't so blinded by his money and title, you'd see what everybody else sees."

  "He didn't do it," Jessica insisted stubbornly.

  Elizabeth's hands clenched into fists. She resisted the urge to grab her sister and shake her hard. "How can you defend him, Jess, when he tried to kill you, too, first at Pembroke Manor and then again the other day in the tube station?"

  "It wasn't Robert who attacked me!" Jessica cried. "How many times do I have to say that? You're not even listening to me. The case is closed in your opinion. Robert is your idea of the perfect villain, isn't he? You disliked him on principle from the beginning."

  "I did not," protested Elizabeth.

  "You did, too. You're the worst kind of reverse snob, Liz. Because he's rich, you just assumed Robert was selfish and shallow and utterly without morals. Well, I'll tell you something that may shock you," Jessica said, in her most bitterly sarcastic tone. "Having money doesn't make a person bad, any more than people without money are automatically saints."

  Elizabeth's eyes flashed indignantly at this disparaging allusion to Luke. "Don't even think about trying to drag Luke down to Robert's level. He's as good as they come, but then, you wouldn't know that. You've never given him the time of day because his name isn't Lord Shepherd."

  "Luke may be as good as they come, but he's also a nut, if you ask me," countered Jessica. "You're both nuts. And you're lousy reporters. You think you're hot stuff, though, don't you, Liz? Getting your byline on that front-page article about Princess Eliana. Boy, it must have been tough to crack that case, seeing as how Lina came right out and told you who she really was! You'll have to work a lot harder to prove Robert's guilty, because the evidence you keep harping on is totally inconclusive and you couldn't come up with a motive if your life depended on it."

  With that, Jessica dropped into a chair, folding her arms across her chest. Elizabeth stared down at her sister. Her mouth opened and closed—she was still seething—but she'd run out of arguments. As usual, she'd gotten nowhere fast trying to reason with Jessica.

  What's the point of wasting my breath? Elizabeth wondered, grabbing her shoulder bag. She doesn't want my help—she doesn't deserve my help.

  "See ya, Emily, Portia, David, Gabriello," said Elizabeth. Pointedly ignoring her sister, Elizabeth spun on her heel and stomped off. I'm not waiting for her, she decided. I'm not riding to work with her. In fact, I'm not speaking to her ever again!

  Jessica glared after her sister, her eyes narrowed into angry slits. This is it, she fumed silently This is really it, once and for all. I'm not speaking to that girl again for as long as I live!

  It wasn't the first time the twins had knocked heads about something. Their faces and figures might be identical, but their minds definitely were not. Over the course of sixteen action-packed years, they'd fought over toys, clothes, boys, friends, the phone, the car. We usually fight because Miss Goody Two-Shoes is too stuffy and serious and responsible to see anybody else's point of view, Jessica thought. Everything blew over eventually . . . when Elizabeth would finally lighten up and see reason. But Jessica had a feeling this fight wasn't going to blow over. It was the worst one ever.

  David and Gabriello, both summer students at London University, hoisted their backpacks and waved good-bye. Jessica watched the boys go, her anger slowly draining away. With a heavy sigh, she slumped forward, her elbows on the table and her head in her hands.

  She'd just woken up, but she felt as if she'd already run a marathon—because she knew what an uphill battle she faced. How can I prove Robert's innocent after everything that's happened? Jessica wondered bleakly. Everyone assumes his father tipped him off and he skipped town to save his skin. Where is he? Tears smarted in her eyes as she remembered Robert's sudden departure, his air of mystery as he said good-bye to her two days ago. Why didn't he tell me what was going on? Why did he leave me, alone and in the dark?

  On the other side of the table, Emily cleared her throat. "You probably won't want to hear this, Jessica," she began.