The cleaning is much less interesting to me. It’s less about technique and more about elbow grease. My mind wanders while I scrub the bathtub and I find myself thinking a lot about a girl who works at the bookstore on campus. She is always so friendly, smiling broadly whenever she sees me. Is she flirting? Does she want me to ask her out for coffee? That’s what people do, right? She has short, wavy blond hair and a cute, pixie face. She’s almost too cute, I would think after every exchange, unsure how I felt about the pixie girl. I recognize that she is attractive and her attention is flattering but it’s the other kinds of girls that make me weak in the knees. It’s impossible to lie to myself through avoidance when I have this much free time to process and wool-gather. I’ve never admitted it to anyone, not even Louise, not even myself…I’m attracted to tough girls. “Butch” I guess the term is. I never liked that word, though. I always picture grainy, black and white photographs of bull-daggers from the 1970s. I prefer to think of the women I’m drawn to as, fundamentally, women who happen to be handy, capable, and strong.
Simone
One morning, while fixing a loose stove knob in the kitchen, I hear a hard thump at the backdoor. Knowing that the sound couldn’t be an animal, I put down the screw driver to go investigate. Peering out of the small window, I scan the tree line behind the cabin and see nothing noteworthy. Carefully, I open the backdoor and stare in horror at the dark, slumped body of my professor from Rutgers, Ryan Ross. He is clearly dead with a knife sticking out of the back of his neck and a ghastly expression on his pale face. There is a note pinned to his coat; it says, “dead before the storm’s end.” My heart is pounding in my chest. I’ve never even seen a dead body before. The shock of it and the evidence of violence towards this man I cared about and worked with every day makes me feel sick. I peer out into the trees again, trying to see some clue as to how he got here and who did this to him, but only the trees stare back and a low, dark grey sky pulling in a dangerous snow storm.
I close the backdoor and lock it, as though to keep the dead man out, and rush upstairs to my room to retrieve a hunting rifle that John Graves had pressed on me before he left. I had not wanted it in the cabin, but John had insisted, reminding me that there are bears up here and no help for miles in any direction. I despise firearms, but I am shamelessly grateful to have the rifle now. Gingerly carrying the rifle, I descend the stairs and pad through the kitchen to the backdoor, hardly breathing I’m so scared. Tensed for unexpected horror, I crack open the backdoor again and am shocked to see nothing. Nothing at all where, 5 minutes ago, there had been a dead body. Dr. Ross’s body is gone. Craning my neck, I see that my first impression was wrong. There is something there still. The knife remains, now pinning the note to the backdoor. “Dead before the storm’s end” …It can only mean one thing, right? Dr. Ross is already dead; the note is clearly a warning and a threat intended for me. And there’s no chance that this gruesome message was intended for somebody else because I know this man and the odds of the murder and ominous note being unrelated to my presence here in a rural cabin in Alberta are impossibly small.
Slamming and locking the back door again, I run through the kitchen to slide the bolt on the front door too, before running for the phone. Picking up the receiver, I hold it to my ear and hear nothing. Someone must have cut the phone line. And my cell phone is useless; no reception out here in the sticks. Running upstairs to my room, I barricade the door with every heavy piece of furniture that isn’t bolted to the floor or wall and sit on the edge of my bed feeling like I have a giant X painted on my forehead. Sitting there, I can’t help but think of the innocuous road leading to the cabin: Deer Run Road. Now I am the deer, it’s hunting season, and I don’t know where to run.
The storm comes during the night, dropping a foot of snow on the lodge and surrounding woods. Insulated by the snow on its roof, the lodge is like a snug little gingerbread house and, just like in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, it is also a prison. I pace the floor of my barricaded bedroom all night and finally fall into a light, anxious sleep near daybreak. I dream of bounding through the woods at night while a man in an ATV floods the woods with light and runs me down. My limbs are shaking with weariness as he closes in on me. I drop my head in defeat and…
I wake to the sound of thumping and jump out of bed, immediately fearing the worst. I listen intently, heart pounding, trying to gather my scattered wits. It sounds like somebody is kicking the front door repetitively. Cautiously shoving the dresser aside, as well as the other furniture I piled in front of the bedroom door last yesterday, I open the door and ease out of the room, carrying the hunting rifle in my left hand. I think I know how to use it. Now I wish that I had just asked John Graves for a basic lesson before he left. Making my way to the top of the stairs with the hunting rifle held at the ready, I gaze down the barrel of the gun and see a woman stomping snow off her boots and closing the front door behind her.
It seems unlikely that a brutal killer would be fastidious enough to avoid tracking snow in the house but I can’t afford to take chances. I call out for the woman to “freeze” in what I hope is a confident voice. She looks up, startled, and stops moving. She has high cheekbones and full, sensuous lips but her expression does not invite attention. Hurrying down the stairs, still holding the rifle up, I trip and fall, sending the rifle flying from my hands and landing at the stranger’s feet.
Casually bending down and picking up the rifle, the stranger shakes her head and reaches down a hand to help me up. I’m a bundle of nerves and I’ve bruised and scraped my knees and elbows in the fall but fear and pain both take a backseat to embarrassment now. My face is burning as I let the woman haul me to my feet. I find myself feeling grateful for my swarthy complexion which does not reveal my red face as nakedly as the pale, red tones of many of my friends and colleagues. Poor Louise, every time she is embarrassed, she practically glows in the dark! The stranger has no difficulty pulling me upright with one strong arm, which she seems to enjoy doing. Am I imagining things, or she smiling faintly at my discomfort?
“Sorry to frighten you. The lodge is usually empty during the Winter.”
“Um, who are you?” I ask, trying to pull myself together and gather my scattered dignity.
“Leigh Milton,” she offers her hand and I shake it hesitantly. Her grip is firm, her hand warm and callused.
“I’ve been tracking a Grizzly but this storm came up and I need shelter,” Leigh explains matter-of-factly, dumping her hunting equipment at her feet.
Glancing out of the window into the white world beyond the lodge, I am startled by how intense the storm is. I was distracted by other thoughts last night and just woke up this morning with no chance to get my bearings before falling in a heap at the feet of this golden goddess woman. I had no idea we were in the middle of a blizzard. I look at Leigh and weigh her story. I can’t picture anyone out tracking Grizzly bears in late Autumn. That said, I can’t picture anybody seriously trying to run into a bear for any reason at any time. But if anybody could handle meeting a Grizzly bear alone in the woods, it’s the woman standing in front of me now.
My gut tells me that Leigh is telling the truth. An odd and unexpected person, but not a killer. Plus, she could have easily finished the job when I was sprawled on the floor with my gun at her feet. I relax a little bit and tell her who I am and what I’m doing at the lodge. Leigh pulls off her hood, revealing close cropped dark blond hair. It occurs to me that I probably look as frazzled and sleep deprived as I am and I’m embarrassed all over again. What must she think of me, this clumsy kid hiding out in the middle of the wilderness? She seems impressed when I tell her that I’m a chemist and have been included in the biopharmaceutical team at school, even though I am still a student. I try not to sound like I’m bragging but realize that she can probably tell that that is exactly what I’m doing. And, once again, I fear that I am coming across like a child in an adult world.
Leigh
Simone McKinney offers to cook breakfast a
nd I follow her into the kitchen. She’s wearing thick wool socks and she scuffs her feet as she walks, just like a little kid. Her kinky dark hair is sticking up on one side and I suppress the urge to smooth it with my hand. Maybe I’ve just been in the woods too long, but Simone’s lost little lamb vibe is triggering all of my protector instincts. She’s some kind of scientist, she said, probably too smart for most people I imagine. Something about her extreme intelligence coupled with her complete lack of worldly understanding is very enticing to me. I’m a sucker for the absent-minded professor types, especially when they’re shy and as beautiful as this girl-woman is.
I feel guilty for scaring her earlier when I broke into the cabin but also alarmed at the thought of her being out hear all by herself. There are other trackers and hunters who come through these woods; for most of them, it isn’t their protector instincts that Simone McKinney would trigger. I can take care of myself, and do so, but I worry about young beautiful girls in this world. When I ask her what she’s been doing in the cabin for the past week, how she keeps herself occupied, she tells me about cleaning and fixing things. When she talks about disassembling the kitchen sink, her hazel eyes light up and I can’t help smiling, smitten by her enthusiasm.
I carry her hunting rifle with me from the bottom of the stairs into the kitchen and carefully put it down on the kitchen counter. Simone skirts around it as she cracks eggs into a bowl and puts 2 slices of bread in the toaster. She avoids the gun as if it were independently dangerous. I smile to myself. She is very intelligent and undeniably cute but soft, innocent. A city girl, she probably couldn’t protect herself from a squirrel if caught alone at night. The scrambled eggs are good and fluffy, though, and the coffee is strong. There’s nothing as comforting as a hot breakfast on a cold, snowy morning. Simone seems nervous of more than just the gun in the house. Her fear seems deeper than that. I don’t think it’s just having a stranger show up unexpectedly. We chat over breakfast and she seems at ease with me personally, if not with my style of breaking and entering, but I wonder what else is going on.
I’m usually discreet about my attractions, but maybe she saw me looking at her and became nervous that I’d press myself on her. She is younger and smaller than I am and she’s out here all alone. That would make sense except that I saw her response when I pulled back my hood. She definitely plays for my team. And, unless I am reading the signals all wrong, she is attracted to me. Her eyes follow my face even when her back is turned, like they’re glued to my mouth. She buttered the toast with her body facing the window and her face cast down and sideways, glancing up every few seconds through those dark, thick lashes, tracking me. And then I understand...I can put two and two together; Simone is a sweet, brainy, shy lab rat. She must be a virgin. I smile to myself, pleased that I untangled the mystery.
I tell Simone that the Grizzly I had been tracking yesterday was not far from here and seemed to be headed this way. Standing up and stretching, I decide to go out and look around in case the bear decided to wander up to the lodge. Pulling on my boots and heavy coat, I step out onto the porch and look out at the whiteness of the afternoon. Everything looks white. Even the trunks of trees are wearing white snow coats, a result of the driving wind from last night. Squinting my eyes against the wind driven snow pellets and scouting the perimeter, I notice an odd slant to the snow in a particular spot and, wondering what might be underneath, I scrape the snow off to reveal a rough wooden door. Clearing off the rest of the snow, I muscle the door open to find an old fruit cellar. This could be the perfect place to set a trap; the bear might try to use this hollowed out spot as a cave to hide in during the storm. I climb down, set the trap, and really look around for the first time. That’s when I notice the dead body.
My initial shock at finding a dead man in the cellar recedes quickly to a grim sort of understanding. It’s always the ones you least suspect. No wonder Simone, the soft city kid, the intellectual out in the sticks, was so jumpy. The part I don’t understand is why and how she killed a man. Was her clumsiness on the stairs merely an act? But this is not a mystery for me to figure out. In the face of this appalling discovery, any attraction I have towards Simone is now irrelevant.
I return to the lodge to find Simone sitting at the kitchen table holding the rifle, staring at the back door. Fortunately, I am a hunter and my own rifle is loaded and ready to fire. She doesn’t hear me approach at first. When she finally hears me and turns around, she sees my gun pointed right at her and her eyes get very large. I order her to stand up. Alarmed, she scoots her chair back with a loud scraping noise and stands, raising her arms.
“What’s going on?” she asks timidly, hazel eyes darting this way and that.
I tell her about the dead body in the fruit cellar and she looks like she’s about to be sick. I can’t tell if her reaction is from nerves, fear, guilt, aversion to violence, or some combination of these. I can’t take the risk, though. I tie her hands behind her back, taking her delicate brown wrists in my fingers to wind the rope securely, but not too tightly. I don’t want to hurt her and I don’t really know the truth of what happened between her and the man in the cellar.
I feel like a villain, tying a pretty girl’s hands behind her back while she stammers her innocence. Which she does, of course. She tells me that she found the body at the backdoor yesterday but when she returned with the hunting rifle, the body was gone. She didn’t know where it was or what to do. She tried calling for help but the phone was dead. For all I know, Simone is telling the truth. Her account of things would also explain her jumpiness. But her account also seems more farfetched than the obvious explanation: she killed a man and didn’t want anyone to know. I’m a practical woman; obvious is usually true. Shaking my head to forestall any more pleading or explaining, I lay out my intentions.
“When the storm lets up, you and I will be taking a very long walk to the nearest town to find a sheriff. In the meantime, we’re going to stay nice and cozy and you’re not going to try anything desperate or stupid because I think we both know that, whether or not you killed the man in the cellar, I’m still a better hunter than you are.”
Simone keeps perfectly still and quiet while I say what I need to say. I can’t read her expression very well because her face is pointed downward, but she has the air of a person who has lost credibility and knows it. She also strikes me as the kind of person who hasn’t experienced this very often in her life and is completely brought up short by the experience. I march her upstairs and lock her in her bedroom. Amazingly, there is a lock on the bedroom door and it’s on the outside of the room, a fact that is as disturbing as it is convenient. It’s like the cabin was built to be a jail.
Heading back downstairs, I try to discredit her story by checking the phoneline but, when I lift the receiver, I find that she was correct. The line is dead. Of course, in a storm like this, it would be surprising if phone lines were not down. Alternatively, she could have cut the lines herself to corroborate her story. Still, it is possible that she was telling the truth.
I hear a desperate knock at the front door and woman’s voice yelling out. Only a few hours ago, I barged into the cabin looking for shelter from the storm. I assume that the urgent entreaty from outside heralds another traveler such as myself, hoping for a warm and dry bed for the night. Carefully opening the front door and peering through the narrow gap, I see a middle-aged woman with strawberry blond hair. She looks tired and cold and holds a suitcase in one hand.
“Hello there, I hope I’m not disturbing you. My name is Veronica. I’m a housekeeper. I stay at the lodge during the Winter months and see to the cleaning and whatnot.” She simpers reassuringly and I open the door the rest of the way.
Introducing myself and explaining that I’m just there to ride out the storm, I glance up the stairs, debating about how much to tell the woman. Veronica chatters on, assuring me that she does not think that the owners will mind my staying at the lodge as long as I pay for the damage done to the front door when I
kicked it in this morning. I feel uneasy about letting an innocent bystander into the house with a suspected killer waiting upstairs. I decide to tell Veronica the whole truth about the situation and let her make her own choices. I tell her about the body I found and the young woman locked in her room upstairs. With no one else in the vicinity, it seems unlikely that somebody else snuck in, killed a man, and dumped his body in the root cellar. Why trek all the way out here in a snow storm to do that?
Veronica is understandably alarmed by this information. Pondering the situation, she seems to come to a decision. Taking a deep breath, she tells me that she has a truck parked about half a mile down the road that I could use to drive to down. If I think I can make it in the snow storm, I can use her truck to alert the police and bring someone back here to deal with the captive. This sounds better to me than staying holed up with a potential murderer for an indefinite period of time. Veronica hands me the keys and I hand over the hunting rifle.
Cabin In The Woods Page 2
