Mountain Refuge

by Sarah Varland

  Clay would ask Noah what else he had when Summer went to bed tonight. She may not want the kind of sheltering he was trying to give her, but that wasn’t going to stop him for now, not when Noah agreed she didn’t need to know all the details.

  The truth was that this guy was vicious. From a quick conversation when Summer had gone to the bathroom, Clay had learned that the killer was worse than anyone either he or Noah had ever dealt with. The only plus side to anything they’d learned about him today was that with as bold as he was, the risks he took were going to lead law enforcement to catch up to him eventually.

  All that troubled him was whether or not that would occur before anything worse happened to Summer.

  Time moved slowly. Summer spent some time updating Kate on what had happened. After they all ate a late dinner, Clay suggested a card game to Summer to help pass the time, but the look she gave him more than answered his question about whether or not she was interested in that. Finally he gave up on trying to entertain her and just sat quietly, his mind going over and over the details of the case they knew already and wondering how they’d fill in the ones they didn’t. There had to be something more proactive they could do than sit in the lodge, but Clay hadn’t figured out what that could be yet.

  He glanced at Summer, something telling him he should ask her, but he couldn’t quite convince himself to willingly put her through the stress of thinking through the case in deeper detail.

  She caught him staring and met his gaze. “What?”

  He shook his head. Maybe tomorrow he’d talk to her about it. But he just wasn’t sure enough yet that it was a good idea.

  “I’m going to bed.” She stood. Clay glanced at the clock. Not long past ten but it had been a long day.

  “Sleep well.” He stood too and started to follow her.

  “You don’t need to follow me.”

  He let her walk upstairs alone, but when he heard the door to her room shut, he headed up too and sat down in a chair he’d positioned earlier in the hallway outside her door. He and Noah still hadn’t figured out quite what to do about nighttime. Someone needed to be watching Summer at all times, but if the two of them didn’t get sleep they wouldn’t be any good at providing daytime protection in the long run. Clay had mentioned Tyler as an option, but Noah didn’t want his brother adding anything to his plate since he was the one keeping the lodge going while the rest of them focused their energies on this. Clay suspected Noah probably hadn’t slept more than three or four hours since all this had started. The man wore a double weight—he was her brother and the police chief. Clay didn’t have that pressure…

  Instead the pressure he felt came from inside. He cared about Summer not because of anything he was to her. He was her friend, and barely that. But he still cared. He chose not to examine the reasons why.

  EIGHT

  Summer lay in bed staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, turning one way, then another. A serial killer was after her. She was being protected by a man who threatened the security of the walls she’d been building around her heart for years. Her brother had morphed from his lighthearted self into 100 percent police chief mode. Stress had always made Noah more driven, but Summer never would have guessed the intensity a threat against one of his siblings would bring out.

  For the first time, Summer felt like she understood a little more why her siblings had reacted about Christopher the way they had. She’d always seen herself as sort of the extra sibling. Noah was saving the world; Tyler had always wanted to save the lodge; Kate was strong enough to never need saving by anyone but God.

  And then there was Summer. The dreamer. The one who made mistakes and needed to be rescued.

  She was tired of playing that part. She was going to help with this case, was going to be the one to solve it even, maybe. She was determined, and had already thought of some ideas for how she could contribute to the investigation—she just needed to get Clay on her side. She’d seen in his eyes though his dislike of being on the sidelines, so she should be able to convince him.

  She exhaled, exhaustion finally creeping toward her, sleep begging her to close her eyes. She gave in, nodded off slowly and surrendered to unconsciousness.

  Her eyes stayed closed when a hand gently stroked her cheek the first time. The second time she blinked her eyes open, confusion muddling with tiredness in her mind. She should be the only one in her room…

  As her eyes focused on the black mask in front of her, the man leaning over her bed inches from her face, she almost couldn’t breathe. Her nightmare there, in her room. While she slept.

  She hadn’t even opened her mouth to scream before he put a gloved hand over it. The gloves weren’t rough, a detail her mind somehow noticed. They weren’t soft, either. They were…squishy. Almost like neoprene?

  Summer took note of the detail, even though she didn’t know what difference it made. She wasn’t trained for what to notice in situations like this and wasn’t sure she’d make it out of it anyway.

  No, that was no way to think. She refused to keep thinking like a victim, refused to be one. She’d spent too many years of her life living that way, as a self-inflicted victim of her own bad choices. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s victim now.

  She bit down hard on the hand over her mouth, causing the intruder to cry out.

  Rather than release her though, he gripped her arm with his other hand even tighter. Summer shivered, not just from his touch, and her eyes went to the window. Open.

  At least she’d figured out how he’d gotten in the room.

  The handle of her door moved.

  Another intruder? The serial killer worked alone, didn’t he? Or could the person at her door be help? She fought a wave of dizziness after thinking of the man holding her as not just “her attacker” but “the serial killer.” She had been pinned down, and was now being hauled to the window by the hands of a man who had brutally murdered seven women.

  “Are you okay in there?” Clay’s voice. He was the one at the door. She could have cried, if she could get herself to feel anything but terror in the deepest core of her being. All the other emotions seemed dormant. Yet his voice still reminded her to struggle, to make it as difficult as possible for the man trying to haul her away.

  “Stop fighting me. This is for your own good.” Her captor moved her toward the window another step.

  “I’m coming in, so if you aren’t decent, now would be a good time to grab a robe or something.” Clay’s voice was low and serious, heavy with fear that mirrored exactly how she felt. Had he heard the man when she bit him?

  “Summer. Now. We have to leave before they stop us.” The killer was insistent.

  And he knew her name. Summer shivered. It was something that made sense, but it eliminated any possibility that this could be random. And it might mean something to the investigators that he knew it, called her by it. Summer didn’t know, didn’t know much of anything anymore.

  She swallowed hard, tears finally finding their way to her eyes and threatening to spill over. She blinked them back. No, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her as anything even approaching weak.

  She shook her head and pulled against him. The pressure on her arm increased as he squeezed her. She fought back, twisted away, but he held tight.

  The door slammed open.

  “Freeze!” Clay yelled.

  Summer fell to the ground instantly as the man released her. She took a deep breath. It was almost over.

  But her attacker was through the window before Clay had even made it past the bed.

  There was a shuffling in the hallway. Before Summer could look up from where she’d crumpled on the floor, Clay addressed him.

  “Noah, he’s running.”

  Then more footsteps as her brother took off, presumably out of the house to chase whoever was responsible. It wasn’t over yet. And if he could get this close and they still couldn’t catch him… A small sob escaped.

  Clay bent down,
sat on the floor beside her. “Are you okay?”

  He asked it slowly, somehow the sound of his low voice putting her more at ease. She shook her head. Paused, then nodded. “I’m okay. Scared. But not injured. Not broken.”

  She looked up from the floor, where she’d been staring, processing, trying to get ahold of herself now that adrenaline had faded and her hands had started shaking a bit.

  “I can’t believe I just sat out there in the hallway while he was in here. That he got to you on my watch…” Clay shook his head, then took a deep breath that was long enough for Summer to tell he was having a hard time getting ahold of his emotions too. “I’m sorry, Summer.”

  Hearing his voice say her name erased some of the tension in her shoulders. He was helping the whole experience lose its power, being here with her like this. She reached a hand over to him, knowing he wouldn’t misinterpret it as a romantic gesture, but just as her needing reassurance that someone was there. That she was okay.

  He took her hand. Slowly ran his thumb across it and tightened his grip ever so slightly.

  “You did the best you could,” she offered, wanting him to stop blaming himself.

  “No. And I need to let you help.”

  Leaving her hand in the warmth of his, she looked up at him. “What?”

  “Sitting around waiting for him to attack is crazy. We have to do something.”

  He was so closely echoing her own thoughts from earlier. Summer nodded. “I have an idea.”

  Before she could tell him, Noah burst back into the room.

  “Did you get him?”

  “He’s gone.” Noah shook his head. “Vanished completely, as if he knew of some hidden trail even though I’ve lived here on this property my whole life. I looked for tracks and I’ve got Kate out there now, with one of my officers, looking in case I missed anything.”

  Summer respected the fact that her brother wasn’t embarrassed to admit that Kate was the better tracker of the two of them. She was one of the best trackers in all of Alaska, which was saying something. Summer couldn’t read signs like she could, but she could find her way around in the woods with ease, which was why her being disoriented after the attack and not recognizing where she was had cut so deep and disconcerted her so much.

  “He can’t just have disappeared.”

  Noah shook his head. “I’ll stay with Summer if you want to investigate.”

  Summer watched the two of them stare each other down. There seemed to be something going on that she wasn’t aware of, some sort of unspoken conversation happening between the two of them.

  Feeling frustrated that she was once again being left out of the loop, she tried to think of a way she could help. “Listen, I can go check myself if you want.”

  “You won’t be leaving the house until it’s time for you to go to a safe house, which is as soon as I get a place cleared and set up.” Noah’s voice didn’t leave any room for argument.

  Didn’t faze Summer.

  “I’m not going to a safe house.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  She shook her head. “No. Not unless you can be absolutely certain I’d be any safer there.” Besides, even if running and hiding did appeal to some cowardly place inside her, not only did Summer refuse to give in to that, she also needed to be here at the lodge. Her hikes were usually some of the best-rated amenities the lodge offered. It wasn’t so much that she did anything that was so different from anyone they could have hired to lead the hikes, but rather because she was something of a minor celebrity in athletic circles. If people were fascinated by her mountain running credentials and the brief note in her bio about the time she’d spent in Europe running with some of the world’s elite on some of the most stunning peaks on the globe, then that was fine with her—as long as it brought more business to the lodge. It meant she was finally doing something for her family, contributing.

  Atoning.

  “I’m not leaving.” Her voice was just as firm.

  Noah exhaled. “Fine. I’ll leave it for the moment. For now, get dressed.” He looked at Clay. “Someone else will cover your assigned tasks at the lodge for both of you today. You need to go to Anchorage to talk to some of the officers who have been working this case. I’ve communicated to them everything you’ve told me, but maybe a face-to-face will help and they’ll uncover something that will point us to our target. We need a break in this case. This guy is too good.”

  Clay was nodding. “I’d been thinking we should go up there.”

  Summer’s heartbeat quickened. She’d been planning a trip to Alaska’s largest city also, but for slightly different case-related reasons. “Alright, when do we leave?”

  Noah raised his eyebrows. Surprised by her easy acquiescence? She wasn’t sure. But she didn’t flinch, didn’t lower her shoulders.

  “As soon as you’re ready,” Clay answered.

  She glanced at the clock. It was 3:52 a.m. She wasn’t going back to sleep. “Give me five minutes.”

  *

  “We might need to stay in Anchorage through tomorrow.” Summer waited till they were well down the Seward Highway headed toward Anchorage before she started sharing the pieces of her plan with Clay. They were out of cell phone signal range right now, so she knew he couldn’t call Noah to get his thoughts on it, a detail that may or may not have factored into her decision to broach the subject right now.

  “Why is that?” Clay looked over at her, only briefly as he put his eyes right back on the road, but it was long enough for her to wonder about the thoughts behind what she saw in his eyes. He’d weathered the situation well, showing up in town right as everything in her family went crazy and jumping right in to help. She remembered Tyler talking about him from college but hadn’t realized they were that close—close enough for Clay to put himself in danger to protect Tyler’s family.

  Or maybe Clay was just like that. That wouldn’t surprise her. He seemed like the kind of classic Southern boy who would pull his friends’ trucks out of ditches in the middle of the night, no questions asked, like the kind you heard about in songs. Until now she hadn’t been sure they actually existed. Alaskans had their own code of honor, committed to taking care of their own, but it still wasn’t the same as whatever she saw in Clay.

  She wondered how much of it had to do with his faith. She’d seen him reading his Bible on more than one occasion when they’d been sitting in the lodge. Really reading, like he was paying attention too, not just holding it and staring into the distance like she’d done the last few times she’d tried it.

  Before she’d acknowledged that maybe, possibly, it was too late for her.

  She shrugged the uncomfortable thoughts away before they could settle too deeply in her mind. “Because I have a plan.”

  “Go on.”

  His voice was cautious. Hesitant, but not necessarily filled with any kind of opposition. Not yet anyway.

  “After we talk to the police, I want to talk to some of the victims’ families.”

  “The police will have handled that, Summer. And I’m not sure they’ll give us access to that—though it’s likely something Noah can get ahold of if he feels like he should.”

  “Hear me out.”

  Another glance. Some crazy part of her wanted to reach out her hand, hold his again like she had in the early hours of this morning and see if the same electricity shot through her, the heart-shaking, unsettling but so-very-welcome kind.

  Welcome?

  No. That kind of heat was dangerous. Lack of sleep and extremely close proximity to Clay were just getting to her, that was all. People had all kinds of weird emotions when they were stuck with someone in these kinds of emotional, tense situations.

  She shook her head, focusing on what she’d been saying. “I just need to talk to them myself and ask some questions I don’t think the police would have asked.”

  “The police are good at what they do. And they won’t release any additional information on the victims or their
families. I’m sorry, I’m trying to hear you out, Summer, but none of this sounds like anything I can help you with.”

  “I’ve got a list of names and addresses,” she said before he could say anything else.

  “How?”

  Summer shrugged. “I read the news articles, did some digging online, as much as I could.”

  Clay didn’t say anything for a minute. Summer looked out the window as they started gaining elevation, moving into Turnagain Pass, the last bit of isolated highway before they started edging closer toward the limits of the Municipality of Anchorage.

  “Why?”

  “Think about it, Clay. I’m being targeted. I must have something in common with these women, or he wouldn’t have gone after all of us. I’m one of them, but…not.”

  “And you won’t be if I have anything to say about it.”

  He practically growled the words, but in a protective way. She almost smiled, but Summer had more to say, so she kept going. “Are you going to listen to the rest?”

  “I’m sorry, go ahead.”

  “Thank you. I think it’s more than just a physical description connection. There must at the very least be some way he knew all of us, or had seen all of us…something that drew us to his attention. Right? Surely he didn’t just drive down to the Moose Haven area of all places and stalk the first two people he met who looked like the other women he’d killed?” Summer wasn’t sure, she could be reaching there, but she knew if she was Clay would tell her. To be honest, she wasn’t sure if her speculation had her on the right track or not, but sitting around waiting for someone to try to kill her again wasn’t working for her. She had to do something, be involved somehow, and this was the best way she could think of. Besides, it made sense to her, that maybe this could help them make progress. If there was even a chance, it was worth it to her to try.

  “It’s a reasonable question to be asking.”

  “So if he knew all of us, maybe I’ll be able to figure out a connection if I can talk personally to the families.”

  “They may not let you, you know.”

  “The police?”