Page 52 of The Ruse

“Of course,” I said. “I was just testing you to see if you really were a scavenger hunt expert.”

“Sure you were.” She gave me a knowing smile.

I scanned the area to decide which way I thought might give us the best results. “Wanna head that way?” I pointed to the woods west of the cabin, which was on a bit of a slope down from the cabin. We’d have to hike up a little on our way back, which is why it kept most people from going that way in previous years, but I’d had a lot of luck going that route with my partner last year so I figured it would probably produce similar results.

Elyse looked to where I was pointing. With a shrug of her shoulders, she said, “Sounds good to me.”

And so we headed off down the hill in the direction of where the sun would be setting later tonight.

“Areyou sure this is the right way?” Elyse asked me.

It was a few hours after we’d started our scavenger hunt. Elyse and I had found the last item on our list over an hour ago, but it turned out that finding the cabin again was the hardest task of the day.

“I think so,” I said. “I think I recognize that tree with the crooked trunk.” I pointed to the tree about twenty feet away.

“I think you recognize it because we’ve already passed it three times,” Elyse said, her voice showing signs of how tired she was.

Stomping around in the snow for three and a half hours was no joke.

“It has to be close,” I said, knowing that giving up was not an option.

The sky had been sunny and blue, with just a few puffy white clouds when we’d started our afternoon adventure. But as the sun dipped lower in the sky, the clouds became darker and grayer and more like the kind you’d see right before a really big storm would hit.

The fact that the sun was also about to set was worrisome as well. I’d accidentally left my phone on my charger this morning and Elyse’s phone was running low on battery life, so we’d only be able to use it as a flashlight for a short amount of time.

We’d already tried calling Miss Crawley, but the service was so spotty out here that it was hard to send a call through from anywhere besides the cabin.

“What time is it, anyway?” Elyse put a hand on her side as she stopped to catch her breath. “It seems like they should have sent someone to look for us by now.”

You’d think so.

But then again, that would just put other people at risk of getting caught in a possible blizzard.

I checked the time on my watch. “It’s four ten.”

We were only an hour and a half late getting back, so they’d probably hold off on calling search and rescue for at least a little while.

“Hasn’t the sun been setting at like four-thirty recently?” Elyse asked.

I nodded, a foreboding feeling washing over me. “But I really do think the cabin is at the top of this hill.”

As long as I pretended like I had a handle on things and that the cabin was just behind the next hill, then it might keep Elyse from panicking or giving up.

Elyse narrowed her gaze at the hill we were going to climb, and I worried for a moment that she might tell me that it was too high to be the right one. But she drew in a deep breath and said, “Okay. Hopefully, this is the one.”

We trudged up the hill, but instead of being greeted with a big cabin, with lights and people visible from the windows, we found more trees and snow.

Elyse looked like she might cry.

Please don’t cry,I pleaded in my head. I never knew what to do when someone was crying.

“It’s probably just a little farther south,” I said. “We walked along that stream for a long time. Let’s just go that way for a little while and see what we find.”

“Okay,” she said, quietly wiping at her eyes that glistened with tears. “L-let’s go.”

Her voice trembled, as if she was doing all she could to keep from sobbing. I wasn’t sure if she was the type of person who liked to be hugged or left alone while she cried, so I just took her arm and looped it through mine.

“Let’s just try going this way for a few minutes. If we don’t see it before the sun goes down, then we can stop and make a game plan for what to do next.”

---