by Paula Graves
She grimaced. “Ugh. Opossum meat is greasy and, depending on their diet, can taste pretty horrible. With the park so close, they scavenge a lot of their food from trash cans, so, no.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or appalled that you know so much about possum meat.”
She seemed to be torn between amusement and consternation. He supposed it wasn’t fair to her to treat her like an interesting woman he’d met on vacation when she was a hard-nosed professional who’d been assigned to investigate his new department. But she was just so damned cute, it was hard to think of her as an opponent, no matter how worthy.
He let his gaze linger on her soft features, enjoying the way she looked in lamplight. The golden glow was forgiving, although Laney Hanvey wasn’t a woman who required much forgiveness when it came to beauty. She had delicate features that, taken one by one, might not conform to some classical standard of beauty, but the combination could be damned near breathtaking if a man was to glance at her unprepared.
She had big, wide eyes, as blue as a clear summer sky. Unlike some blonds, her brows and lashes were brown, framing her eyes like a painting. Her nose was slender and small, a little too small for her face if one were inclined to be critical. Doyle was not so inclined. He liked the slight upward tilt and the way her nostrils flared with anger and laughter alike.
And that mouth. Wide and generous, prone to spreading in a grin that was instantly infectious. Right now, it was pursed as she gazed at him with suspicion.
He had trouble holding back a grin.
But as her mouth softened, her lips parting to speak, an unholy shriek ripped through the snowy silence outside the cabin, sending adrenaline racing through Doyle’s nervous system.
Chapter Six
Despite the growing stiffness in his bruised and aching muscles, Doyle was on his feet in a second, reaching for his pistol. Laney jumped to her feet, as well, her nerves on high alert.
“Was that an animal?” Doyle asked.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, dismayed to hear her voice shaking. She cleared her throat and straightened her spine, even though her nerves were still rattling. “We don’t have a lot of big predators on the mountains except bears. Maybe bobcats. But I’ve never heard either sound anything like that.”
A gust of wind howled past the cabin, rattling the door and sending a blast of cold air shooting through the narrow spaces between the logs where time had worn away the cement holding them together. Laney shivered, moving closer to the wall of warmth that Doyle’s body afforded.
They listened in breathless silence for another long minute, waiting for the scream to recur. But there was nothing but the sound of the wind and the whisper of snow falling steadily on the roof of the cabin.
“Whatever it was, I think it’s gone,” he said finally, turning to look at her. His eyes widened at how close she was standing, and she made herself take a couple of steps backward, even though it robbed her of his solid heat.
“You don’t think it could have been—”
“Joy Adderly?” he finished for her. “I hope not.”
She rubbed her arms, where goose bumps had scattered across the flesh beneath her sweater. “Should we go out and look?”
His brow furrowed, betraying the conflicts battling it out in his mind. She knew conditions outside were dangerous, and without knowing for certain what they’d heard, they’d probably be foolish to venture out into the snowy night.
But if that scream had belonged to a person...
“I’ll go take a look around,” Doyle said finally. “You stay here.”
She shook her head. “No. If one of us goes out there, we both go.”
“There’s no point in us both getting cold and wet again.”
“You could get lost very easily in the snow. I know this place. You don’t.”
His lips tightened, and she could tell that he wanted to argue. But he had to know she was right. “Okay. We’ll both go. But if we don’t see anything right around the cabin, we’re coming back inside. Agreed?”
She nodded, already on the move to grab her coat and boots.
The snow had tapered off to a soft flutter of flakes from the glassy sky. Snow already blanketed the ground, hiding much of the underbrush around the cabin. Laney angled her flashlight around, looking for disturbances in the snow.
Next to her, Doyle uttered a low profanity as the flashlight beam settled on a churned-up path in the snow about ten yards east of the cabin, near the tree line. “Do you have a weapon?” he asked quietly.
“In my pack.”
“Get it.”
She hurried back to the cabin and pulled her compact SIG Sauer P227 from the built-in holster in her backpack. She checked to make sure the magazine was full and returned to the porch, where Doyle was waiting, his gaze scanning the trees beyond the cabin.
“Could you tell where the sound came from?” he asked her quietly.
“East,” she answered, nodding toward the path in the snow. “That way.”
Doyle walked down the shallow steps of the cabin porch, his boots tamping down the snow beneath his feet. At least five inches had accumulated on the ground—not a huge snowfall for the area, but thick enough to be a problem hiking in the woods.
They stopped first near the disturbed snow, Doyle borrowing her flashlight to scan the perimeters of the path. The beam settled for a moment on a shallow depression at the edge of the snow. “What does that look like to you?” he asked.
“A boot print,” she answered, her pulse pounding in her head. She tightened her grip on the P227, her gaze scanning the dark woods surrounding them. They seemed utterly still, save for the rustle of wind in the trees and the light snowfall.
Doyle moved forward, staying within the path in the snow. Laney stayed right behind him, more afraid of being left alone than of heading forward after whatever—whoever—had made the sound they’d heard.
The trail in the snow grew harder to follow once they were in the woods, as the cover of evergreen trees sheltered much of the undergrowth from snow cover. Only scabrous patches of snow lay in some parts of the woods, and if human feet had moved through in the past few minutes, Laney could see no evidence of it.
They faltered to a stop about fifty yards from the cabin. Here, the tree growth was thick, blocking almost all the snowfall. The limbs above sagged from the weight of the accumulated snow; Laney heard a limb crack and fall about twenty yards away, close enough that it made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle to attention.
“These trees are packed with snow.” She grabbed Doyle’s jacket as he showed signs of moving forward. “We can’t even tell which way to go at this point, and the longer we stay out here, the more danger we’re in of being hit by falling limbs.”
Doyle looked up at the tree limbs trembling above them and then looked back at her. “Okay. Back to the cabin.”
He made her wait just outside the door while he went inside and checked to make sure they hadn’t received any unwanted visitors while they were out in the woods. But the cabin was empty except for their backpacks and the makeshift bed they’d made for themselves in front of the woodstove.
Doyle let her into the cabin and closed the door behind them. The door lock was true to the period, a wooden bar that fit into a latch to keep intruders from easily breaching the doorway. It wouldn’t hold against a determined intruder, but it would give them time to react, at least.
Laney tucked her pistol into the holster in her backpack and shed her jacket and boots again, shivering as she settled on the floor by the fire. Doyle joined her there, wrapping one arm around her shoulders to pull her into the shelter of his body. “This okay?”
She’d be stupid to protest, given the situation. “Fine.” She snuggled a little closer, and he brought his other arm up to enclose h
er in a warm hug.
“Who could be out there?” he asked, his breath warm against her temple.
“I don’t know. The closest search-party group should be at least a mile south of here, if they’re even still on the mountain in the middle of all this.”
“Maybe they’re looking for us?”
She shook her head. “That’s not protocol. Each group had a seasoned hiker in it who’d know how to hunker down against the cold until morning light. So they’ll wait until morning and better conditions to come looking for us.”
Doyle fell silent for a little while, edging them both a little closer to the heat of the stove. After a few minutes, he murmured, “Maybe we were wrong about that print belonging to a human.”
“It looked a lot like a boot to me.”
“We didn’t get a great look at it.”
“True,” she conceded. Her heart had been pounding and her body shaking from the cold too much for her to have been sure about anything they’d seen out there in the snow.
“Could that scream we heard have been a mountain lion?” Doyle asked.
“No mountain lions in these parts anymore.”
He slanted a look at her. “Are you sure?”
“So says the park service, and they’d probably know.”
“Maybe it was a ghost, then.” He gave her arm a squeeze. “Maybe one of those Cherokee haints from the boneyard.”
He was trying to ease the tension that had built during their outdoor trek. Even though her teeth were still chattering a little, she forced a grin. “That’s probably it. Haints.”
“Do you know all the stories about these mountains?” he asked a few minutes later, after her shivering.
“I don’t know if I know all of them. I know a lot of them. My mother comes from a strong oral tradition. Her mother and her mother’s mother before kept all the family stories and traditions, passing them down every generation. I could tell you about Jeremiah Duffy, my ancestor several generations back who was one of the first settlers in Ridge County.”
“I was thinking of a little more modern history than that,” he said.
She looked up at him. “You have something particular in mind?”
“What do you know about previous murders in these parts?”
“Going how far back?”
He shrugged, the movement tugging her a little closer to him. “Twenty or thirty years, maybe.”
“Well, there have been murders along the Appalachian Trail for years, though statistically speaking, they’re pretty rare. There was one guy who killed some hikers on the AT back in the early ’80s, went to jail, got paroled about halfway through his sentence and ten years later tried to kill a couple of hikers he ran into in the same area.”
“Our justice system at work.”
“It’s certainly not perfect,” she conceded.
“What about the photograph we found with your sister yesterday—have you ever come across anything like that?”
“That,” she said, “is actually interesting. There’s an urban legend in these parts about hikers who spend the night in a trail shelter and, upon reaching the next shelter on the trail, find Polaroid photos of themselves asleep in the previous shelter. The legend is, if they don’t turn around and go home, they disappear altogether, never to be seen again.”
“How old a legend is that?” Doyle asked.
“It’s got to go back years. At least the ’70s, maybe earlier than that.”
He fell silent for a while, and Laney found herself growing sleepy as the earlier adrenaline rush seeped away, leaving her drained. She tried to fight it, not sure they were actually safe in the cabin, given the disturbance they’d heard outside, but the long hike and the stress of her sister’s attack conspired against her.
With the moan of the wind in her ears and Doyle’s warm, solid body cradling her own, she drifted to sleep.
* * *
HE WAS IN a jungle, thick with mosquitoes and suffocating humidity. Rain battered the thatch roof of his shelter, drenching the world outside. But he remained dry, huddled with the mission workers who had gathered in the rickety supply hut to wait out the afternoon rainstorm.
The coastal country of Sanselmo didn’t suffer the same heavy monsoon season as the Amazonian rain forests, but there was a definite wet season, and it was happening right now. August fifteenth. Several hundred miles to the south, on the other side of the equator, it was the heart of winter. But there was no winter in Sanselmo, only endless summer.
He didn’t know the two girls sheltering with him. Only the man. Tall, lean, with gentle green eyes that reminded Doyle of his father. The green-eyed man was his brother, David, who’d broken the family tradition of working in law enforcement and had chosen, instead, to help people in a different way.
“The rain will end soon,” David told him with a reassuring smile. “And then the steam bath begins.”
No, Doyle thought. When the rain ends, the bloodbath begins.
He closed his eyes, willing the rain to keep falling. But nature had her own agenda, and soon—too soon—the patter of rainfall gave way to the soft hiss of steam rising from the jungle floor as the sun began to peek between breaks in the cloud cover and angle through the thick canopy of trees.
Already, he heard the sound of truck motors humming in the distance. They would arrive soon, and no one in this hut would survive.
No one but him.
Doyle jerked awake, his ears still ringing with the hissing sound of steam. It took a moment to reorient himself to reality, to replace the jungle of his imagination with the snowbound mountain cabin of his present dilemma.
“Good morning.”
Laney’s voice drew his gaze toward the table nearby. She was setting the table with stoneware mugs, he saw. The smell of hot coffee filled the cabin’s one small room, coming from an old steel coffeepot sitting on the woodstove, fragrant steam rising from its mouth. More wood had gone into the stove’s belly at some point overnight; it burned warm and bright in the gray morning light.
“Good morning,” he replied, stretching his aching limbs. “I must have slept like a log once I drifted off. Where did you find coffee?”
“I always keep some in my backpack.”
“The coffeepot, too?”
She flashed an adorably sleepy grin. “No. That came with the cabin. I melted some snow, washed it out with soap—”
“That you also carry in your backpack?”
“You never know when you’ll need a good washup.”
“Just how big is the inside of that backpack?”
Making a face, she crossed to the stove and poured coffee into one of the stoneware mugs. “Sorry, I don’t have sugar or creamer.”
“Slacker.”
That comment earned him another grin. He was going to have to ration his quips, because a smiling Laney Hanvey was turning out to be quite the temptation. Their current camaraderie, built up by their forced togetherness and a common goal, wasn’t likely to last beyond a return to civilization. She was still the public integrity officer Ridge County had sent to frisk his new department.
They didn’t have to be enemies, of course, since they both wanted to see the Bitterwood Police Department function on the up-and-up. But as she represented people who wanted to disband the department altogether and bring the town under the county sheriff’s jurisdiction, they were unlikely to be friends, either. Or anything more than friends.
No matter how tempting she was all sleep mussed and smiling.
She handed him the cup of coffee. “Chief—”
“Doyle,” he corrected, even though he knew keeping a semblance of professional distance would have been a much safer plan.
“Doyle,” she corrected, dimpling a little and making his insides twist pleasantly again. �
�Is Janelle still in danger?”
“Not as long as she’s in the hospital,” he answered. “I didn’t mention this earlier, but yesterday morning I asked one of my officers to go to the hospital after work to keep an eye on things, now that the news of her survival is out in the press.” He tried a sip of coffee. It was hot and strong, the way he liked it.
“Are you sure he can be trusted?”
“I’m sure she can. I assigned Delilah Hammond. I asked some people I know about her, and they all vouch for her integrity and also her skill as a bodyguard.”
“I know Dee.” Relief trembled in Laney’s voice. “But I’d still like to get back to Jannie as soon as we can. Just to reassure myself.”
He pushed to his feet, testing his muscles. A little achy in places from the long trek up the mountain the day before, not to mention the tumble off the trail. But nothing that should keep him from getting back down the mountain, as long as the weather allowed. “Snow melting yet?”
“Not yet. It’s early. But the weather forecasters all agreed that even up here on the mountain, the temperatures should be above freezing by midmorning.”
He looked through the grimy window next to the woodstove. Snow glistened diamond bright in the morning sunlight. “Sun will help, too.”
She dug in her backpack and pulled out a protein bar. Breaking it in half, she handed a piece to him. “So you up for trying to get back down the mountain?”
“If you think it’s safe enough now.”
“The visibility should be tons better. You won’t be as likely to wander off the trail.” She shot him a look of amusement.
“I didn’t wander off. I slid off. Big difference.”
She just chewed her piece of protein bar and stifled another grin.
She was right about the visibility, Doyle had to admit an hour later, when they started back through the woods to the trail. The neon-orange trail markers Laney had left along the way glowed like beacons, returning them easily to the place where they’d left the beaten path behind. She stuffed the retrieved markers back in her pack, trading them for a pair of binoculars, which she lifted to her eyes.
