Page 9 of A Bear's Secret

Chapter Three

Sloane

“You can have the recliner, Miss,”Detective Tripp said.

They were in a hospital room with two beds, a chair, and a vinyl-covered recliner. It squeaked as Sloane lowered herself into it tentatively.

This is vinyl-covered because people get their fluids all over it, she couldn’t help but think. Blood. Pee. Worse. This way they can just hose it down.

She made extra-sure that none of her exposed skin was touching the recliner.

Detective Tripp sat in a folding chair and put a mini recorder on the hospital bed’s fold-out tray.

“All right,” he said, clapping his hands down on his knees. “Why don’t you just start from the beginning?”

“You mean finding the guy in the woods?” Sloane asked. “Or before that?”

“Wherever you think makes sense.”

Sloane thought for a moment, trying to collect herself, trying to make the story fit into a few simple sentences that she could wrangle.

“I’m through-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” she started.

“Alone?”

“Yeah, alone. I just finished a long stretch through the southern end of the Cascades, so when I was planning this, I booked two nights at the Double Moon Ranch, to shower and rest and eat and stuff.”

“It’s a hostel?”

“Sort of, I guess. They house backpackers on the PCT for a couple of nights, that kind of thing. I found them on a backpacking forum, I don’t know how much they advertise, but other people do it,” she said.

He doesn’t need this much information, she thought. Stop rambling.

“Anyway, there’s a mile-long spur trail from the PCT to the ranch, and I was about halfway down it when I saw this flash of blue from the corner of my eye, off in the woods,” she went on. “So I stopped, and when I got a closer look, this guy was there. I totally thought he was dead at first, but then I saw him breathe and I saw the syringe, and I ran back to the trail and started running for the ranch and shouting for help. After a few minutes of that, Austin showed up, and then I showed him where the unconscious guy was, and he carried him to the ranch for me.”

The detective nodded.

“When you first saw the blue scrap, what exactly did you see?” he asked.

Sloane closed her eyes and tried to remember it, but the image kept slipping through her grasp. She’d seen something, she was totally sure of it, but she couldn’t pull up the exact image.

“I don’t have a photographic memory or anything,” she said. “But it was this dot, maybe, of like electric blue? I think it was his elbow, sticking up above the fallen tree that he was behind.”

“And that seemed suspicious.”

“It did,” Sloane said slowly. Something in the detective’s manner was making her start to feel nervous, though she couldn’t exactly say what it was. “I don’t really know why, but it seemed out of place, fifty feet into the woods?”

“You didn’t just think that someone was taking a nap or having a snack?”

Sloane shook her head.

“It was too still, maybe,” she said. “There was just something off about it.”

“Did you see any of his effects around?”

Sloane blinked. She’d never even thought about it before.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing anything, but I wasn’t really looking, I guess?”

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