Page 13 of Unwanted

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yup. I want to ask you about something that was found here, but I can do that in the truck. The crime lab was supposed to email it to me after it was processed, so I’ll have to make sure it’s there first.”

She seemed even more eager to get out of the gloomy cabin, taking two quick steps to the door and pushing it open with perhaps more strength than necessary. It banged against the side of the porch, and she glanced back with a sheepish look on her face but didn’t slow her descent down the two rickety steps. Mark closed the door behind them and took a deep breath. The cold air filled his lungs, and it felt good—cleansing. Vital.

As they trudged to her truck, Harper glanced toward the three mountain peaks to the south and then back at him. “Agent Gallagher, what do you think about Lucas? Living out here alone on Driscoll’s property? Trading with him? It’s odd, right?”

Mark nodded. He planned to be the one to talk to Lucas if any evidence arose that involved him, and even if it didn’t, he’d make a point to return his bow and arrows and get a better feel for the man. “I’m going to look into his situation. I’m confused by it too.” Lucas hadn’t been very forthcoming at the station, and whether that was because he was hiding something or that he simply didn’t have the answers to many of the questions he and Dwayne had asked, Mark didn’t know. Hell, Lucas didn’t even seem to be certain about how old he was or his age when he’d come to live on Driscoll’s property. Fifteen winters, he’d said, the look in his eyes so bleak, Mark had cringed inside. And it’d been a damn long time since someone had said something that made him cringe. If Mark had to guess, he’d say the man was about Harper’s age—young, early twenties probably, and very sheltered, though obviously toughened too. Mark stared at the frozen landscape, the mountainous terrain blocking the last of the dying sun. You’d have to be tough, living out here. And maybe “tough” didn’t even begin to cover it.

He wondered how Lucas factored into this whole thing—or if he did at all. He’d made it sound as if his relationship with Driscoll was extremely limited and that he only saw him a few times a year, if that. The quiet, watchful man was difficult to read, but Mark sensed he was holding something back.

Harper seemed troubled as she started up the truck and turned the heat up to high. The snow flurries had died down, but it was still below zero according to the temperature gauge that had been hanging on the house next to what had been Isaac Driscoll’s door. Why the hell would anyone want to live out here? This sort of cold was miserable. Biting and painful.

Mark swiped his phone, relieved to see he had service. He pulled up his email and was glad that the message he’d been expecting was in his inbox. He clicked on the attached PDF, and a scan of the “map” that had been in Isaac Driscoll’s bedside table filled the small screen. He handed it to Harper, and she stared at it for a minute before looking at Mark questioningly. “Is it a map?”

“Seems to be. Only I don’t know what it’s of. And what these”—he used his index finger to point to two red boxes containing X’s and an empty black box—“might indicate, if anything.”

Harper turned the phone so it was horizontal, enlarging the picture and zooming in on the X’s and then back out again. She studied it for another few minutes. “This squiggly line might indicate water? There’s a river in that direction.” She pointed off behind Driscoll’s cabin. “Or maybe it’s a trail?” She shrugged. “But there are a hundred trails in this wilderness. There’s really nothing here that speaks of any landmark I’d recognize.”

“I figured. What about when the snow melts?”

She thought about it. “If we used his house as a starting point, we could hike out around the area, look for something that might provide some information about what he was marking.” She gestured her head toward the phone. “It looks old though with all those creases and the ink faded the way it is. He might have been marking the location of water or something he found necessary when he first moved out here? Maybe even a location where he was observing the animals you mentioned.”

She looked back to the phone. “Obedient?” she read, the one word printed at the bottom of the piece of paper. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Harper looked at it for another moment and then handed the phone back.

Mark put it in his pocket, and Harper backed out of the turn-in, heading onto the snow-covered back road they’d used to get to the cabin. She was right, of course. The “map” was most likely related to whatever animal observation Driscoll was doing here in the boondocks. But something in his gut told him he needed to locate those X’s and find out exactly why Isaac Driscoll had considered them important. Looking at how aged the piece of paper was, it seemed he’d kept it beside his bed for many years. But why?

Chapter Ten

The snow crunched softly under Pup’s paws as he ran to Jak and dropped the stick at his feet. Jak knelt down and took the stick, running his hand along Pup’s thick fur, warm from the early winter sunshine. “Good boy,” he said. “But there’s no time for fetch today.” He looked at the gray sky, squinting against the brightness for a minute before looking back at Pup. “We need to get ready for winter.” His chest got achy at the thought of what was soon to come.

Cold.

Hunger.

Misery.

Jak hadn’t expected the snow yet. He’d tried to keep track of the months as they’d passed, tried to remember the order they went in and how many days were in each one since the helicopters had disappeared, but he didn’t know if he had it right. Either that, or the snow had come early this year. He’d traveled to the place where he thought the helicopters had flown, but it had taken him almost eight days to get there in the snow and ice, and once he believed he was in the place where they’d flown above—it was hard to tell—there had been no sign of them at all. It was like he’d made them up. He’d found a covered place and stayed in that valley with Pup for a while, but it was rocky and cold, had barely any cover and not close to enough food. So finally, he’d traveled back to the place he’d started out—the place where there were trees and caves and rabbits that came out of their burrows to hop through the snow.

He was glad he did because the helicopters never came back.

Fear buzzed inside him, the memory of the two terrible winters before and how he’d felt sure he was going to die so many times. But he and Pup had kept each other warm enough to stay alive, and the pocketknife had given them both a way to eat. Rabbits and field mice mostly, squirrels sometimes, the meat still warm and bloody. It’d gotten easier, second nature since that first kill, the one that had made Jak vomit in the snow, hot tears running down his cheeks as he’d gagged. And then he’d found that when he washed the meat in the river, the blood would draw the fish, and he could grab them with his bare hands.

Jak thought fish were better than mice. Pup liked both the same.

Pup hunted for them most of the time now that he was big and strong and could smell things Jak could not. Sometimes Pup even brought back a deer and once a big thing he didn’t know the name for with antlers twice as wide as Jak could stretch his arms. That meat had lasted for a while, but then worms and bugs started crawling in it, so Jak left it for them to finish. He wondered if the other three boys who had gone over the cliff with him had been eaten by worms and bugs too but made himself think of something different.

Jak watched which berries the birds liked and picked those for himself, and he ate the same wild mushrooms that the rabbits and squirrels chewed on. He figured if the animals ate them, they were safe for him too. When the water was cold, he scooped handfuls of orange fish eggs from the river, the taste rich and salty.

He wanted to try to find his way out of the wilderness and back home, but each day was filled with feeding his hungry belly and making sure he had a safe place to sleep out of the wind. And he was worried that if he moved too far from where he was, his baka would never find him.

But in the last few days, he and Pup had traveled farther than they ever had before, over many smaller mountains and across a deep river that had almost swept Pup away before he’d grabbed the loose skin at the back of his neck and pulled them both up and over the bank. There was one more cliff in front of them, and he wanted to stand on top of it and see if he could spot anything other than more trees and valleys and mountain ranges and wild rivers swirling with foamy white. Maybe he’d see other people, a town, and know which direction to head in.

A few fat snowflakes landed on his face, and he stood, looking at his too-short pants. His clothes barely fit him anymore, and his toes were curled uncomfortably at the end of his broken boots. He wondered what he would do if he hadn’t found his way out of there or if his baka still hadn’t found him by the time he outgrew them all the way. Thoughts of his baka still caused a twist of sadness, but when he tried to remember exactly what she looked like, her face was fading. And he couldn’t hear her voice in his head anymore the way he had at first, when he’d sworn she was scolding him for thinking about giving up or when he needed to do something he didn’t want to do like skin a rabbit or eat its raw, warm meat. “Do it anyway,” she would have said. “You strong boy.”

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