Chapter 18

Remus trudged along the small dirt road, absently pulling his thin cloak closer. It had taken him three days to figure out where she was. Remus corrected himself with a grunt of self-disgust; that was not strictly true, he had wasted four days drinking himself into a fog, so it had actually been a whole week since she left before he found her.

When, after three days of dead ends Sirius had asked Remus if Edwina's godmother, Edwina Nevin, was likely to offer her a home, Remus realised that this was the answer. Remus thought that the elderly witch, who three decades earlier had been a formidable force within the Ministry working against miscegenation with half-humans, would have been immeasurably relieved that Edwina wanted to leave him. Remus' wand hand twitched as he remembered the scathingly vicious character sketch of him that Edwina Nevin had written to him shortly after the marriage. Oddly enough she had seemed to hate him not for his lycanthropy, but because he had doomed her favourite great-niece to a lifetime of drudgery and poverty.

Sirius had impatiently told Remus to retrieve his wife, even if by force, and be done with the drama. Remus, who knew that Sirius' dislike of Remus' marriage stemmed just as much from selfishness born of loneliness as from his opinion that Edwina was silly and boring, merely disregarded his friend's advice. Remus was trying very hard to remember that Edwina was still very young. He did not know what had been said to her by the healer or what fears lurked in her mind. Even as he made every possible excuse for Edwina, Remus knew that he had every right to be angry.

Remus leaned against the brick wall bordering the grounds of the Nevin estate and pulled out his hip flask. After several large gulps of water he looked across the grounds at the house. Despite the fact that Nevin House was unplottable and that someone had apparently helped Edwina to cast herself untraceable, Remus had found the house remarkably easily - either Edwina had not taken off her ring or hadn't removed it until inside her great-aunt's house. Remus held his wand up and forcefully spoke two words aloud. The tug on his wand directed his attention to the far right of the house.

Remus thought angrily that much of the situation was his own fault. Long experience with rejection and disappointment ought to have prepared him to better handle the situation. Remus had been through hell more times than he cared to count, so there was no excuse for having lost all of his control. It was really his own damned fault. What was he expecting her reaction to have been? He had done nothing but repeatedly tell her that he had nothing to offer her; he hadn't shown her how good things could be.

Remus pulled out the letter from his pocket and touched the end of an unusually sharp-ended, black wand to the seal of the parchment. He spoke the words that would invoke the binding charm on her ring, touched the wand to his own ring, and then gestured with his wand towards the house. The letter in his hand shot across the lawn with a soft whoosh and hit an upper storey window with a thwack that Remus could hear from where he stood. He watched as the window to the house slid open allowing the letter to enter. When the window had slammed shut, Remus slumped against the wall. He wondered if this skulking about were worthwhile just to reassure himself that she was truly safe with family, as well as that she was not with her lover. Now he knew she was safe and that knowledge gave him little peace. It was time for him to return south. He had to begin work at 10 and it was almost 9 already.

Remus walked through one of the narrow aisles on the warehouse floor as he tried to keep himself awake. There was only one more hour before he could leave and it would be unwise to cast a third Wake-me charm, so he would have to resort to muggle means. The shelves of the dank, dark warehouse were only partially filled with what were labelled as large boxes of Hoover bags. Remus knew, of course, that whatever was inside was unlikely to ever find its way inside any decent suburban home. No one would pay so well to have something that mundane so heavily guarded. But he didn't want to actually know what business was being run from the warehouse, so Remus did not ask and did not look for any answers.

Now that she was no longer there to distract his thoughts, Remus had begun to force himself to analyse the circumstances surrounding her attack. His instincts had initially led him to suspect Edwina's father, Wolfred Leighton. Remus had no proof and as yet no reasonable motive for Wolfred to have attacked his own daughter. Despite the fact that Wolfred was an unpleasant, bigoted, ruthless wizard whose magic had always bordered on the dark arts, Remus knew that Wolfred had actually loved his daughter and treated her with great affection.

The fact that Edwina's family had seemed uninterested in any of the details surrounding her attack had caught the attention of more than just Remus. Even woolly-minded, vague Daedalus Diggle had mentioned that even Edwina's cousin Aldebaran Shipley with whom she had been close despite his hatred of Remus, had seemed remarkably unconcerned, which did not make sense. Also, since the attack Wilfred Leighton, who had continued to take his niece to dinner fortnightly even after her marriage and was the only member of her family to give her a wedding present, had not sent Edwina his usual Tuesday letter nor taken the opportunity to visit her in St. Mungo's.

Remus resignedly looked at the old white plastic clock hanging on the wall by the front entrance to the warehouse. He saw with some relief that he only had 20 more minutes until he could leave. He had been working at the job for only two weeks, but it felt more like two months. In fact, the intellectual boredom was overwhelming him. Remus decided to walk along the far end of the warehouse where there was a row of windows that he should check. As he manually checked each of the window locks Remus considered whether he could stomach another night of the lamb stew that Molly had brought them two days before. Molly's cooking was generally excellent, but Remus had never liked lamb and he never would. Yet years of having to eat anything that was offered had inured Remus to the vagarities of local diets, so he told himself that he could easily stand to eat lamb for one more night. He allowed himself to return to his thoughts about Edwina's family as he began his final pass through the warehouse aisles.