Page 38 of Killing Time

“Looks empty,” Seth whispered in my ear, and I nodded.

“That’s what I think, too,” I said in the same kind of undertone. “But we should probably stay in the trees as we move around to the back and see if anything seems different there.”

“Is there a parking area behind the cabin?”

“No. In my time, there’s a storage shed, but I honestly don’t know when it was built. We’ll just have to see.”

I gestured for him to follow me, and we threaded our way through the trees, heading to the right as we navigated around the clearing. The place looked neat and tidy, with not too many fallen leaves on the ground and the overall impression that someone had been here recently to take care of the property, but again, that didn’t seem too strange to me. Even in my time, the task of maintaining the cabin and the land it sat on was shared among the numerous families who made up the Wilcox clan, as we wanted to keep our vacation retreat as private as possible and not hire out the work to a civilian contractor.

When we came around to the back, the storage unit was in fact sitting back there, although the siding looked new and the glass fairly shone, making me believe it had been a recent addition, probably built right after the war. I had no idea whether it was empty or whether they’d already started filling it with the kind of random junk that always seemed to accumulate in a place where multiple families shared the same property — hiking staves, boxes of extra dinnerware that wouldn’t fit in the cabin’s small kitchen, kites and balls and even an old croquet set that had always seemed as if it had been kept in there for decades.

The unit blocked enough of Seth’s and my view of the cabin that I knew we’d need to emerge from the trees to get a decent look. Now we were here, though, jittery energy tingled along every nerve ending.

What if the cabin really wasn’t empty? What if Jasper Wilcox was inside, just waiting to pounce the minute we stepped out of the cover of the trees?

That was ridiculous, though. Despite the talent-blocking shield I currently had protecting Seth and me, Jasper was a powerful enough warlock that he probably would have been able to detect the arrival of interlopers on his property even if he couldn’t tell that we were witch-kind, the same as he was.

And if he’d realized we were there, he would have made his presence known, if only to tell us we were trespassing and then kick us out.

Shoving all those worries aside, I said, “Let’s go take a look.”

I stepped out of the trees and Seth did the same, although he shot a cautious glance to either side of us, as if making sure that a bunch of Wilcoxes weren’t going to suddenly leap out of the branches and tackle us to the ground.

But nothing happened.

Feeling slightly less tense, I made myself go up to one of the windows at the rear of the cabin — the one I knew belonged to the kitchen — and peered inside.

The curtains had been left open just enough that I could get a halfway decent look at what was going on inside…which, I noted with disappointment, appeared to be nothing at all. The kitchen was definitely empty, and the dish drain that occupied the green tile counter didn’t have a single plate sitting in it, telling me no one had been here for at least a couple of days, maybe longer.

Or possibly they were just being extra tidy. If Ruby was locked up in there, I could see how she might clean up after herself if she had nothing left to do.

Of course, that assumed she had the freedom to roam the cabin and wasn’t locked up in one of the bedrooms.

Or that she was even here at all.

“Let’s go around to the west side,” I told Seth, still speaking quietly. Even though it seemed as if we were the only human beings around for miles, it felt better to me not to assume anything.

A tilt of his head in acknowledgment, and then we crept quietly to the side of the cabin where I knew all the bedrooms were located. When it was first built back in the 1870s, it had only been one big central space, but soon enough, Jeremiah and his brothers had added on those rooms to provide some more privacy. I still had no idea how all of them had ever managed to squeeze in there even if they hadn’t all started having children yet, although I supposed people were more used to roughing it on the frontier.

As in the kitchen, the windows here were only partially obscured by curtains, showing me that all those bedrooms seemed to be just as empty as the rest of the house. No luggage sitting out, no unmade beds…absolutely nothing to show anyone had been here any time in the recent past.

“Nothing,” I said in disgust, pausing where Seth and I were still concealed by a corner of the cabin. Even if the place was completely empty, I didn’t want to stand where anyone coming down the drive could see us. “I don’t think Ruby was ever here.”

“It doesn’t look that way,” he said. Although disappointment flickered in his eyes, I got the impression he wasn’t going to let this current setback get to him. “Maybe they thought the cabin would be too obvious a hiding place.”

I didn’t know how “obvious” it actually was, since most people didn’t even know it existed. But rather than try to argue, I only lifted my shoulders.

“I suppose that’s possible. The question is, where do we look next?”

He let out a breath, then glanced upward, as though he hoped the half-cloudy sky above us could provide some sort of answers.But if the universe had any counsel to give, it sure seemed to me as though it wanted us to figure out this problem on our own.

“I have no idea,” he replied. “At this point, it seems as if our best bet is to go back to the assessor’s office tomorrow and see if they’ll be kind enough to give us a list of Wilcox properties.”

And if I made a big wish, I’d get a unicorn and a pony for my birthday. It was one thing for the clerk at the assessors’ office to give us the information on a couple of very specific properties and quite another to just hand over everything he had on the Wilcoxes. True, we could get more addresses from the phonebook at the hotel and try to go at this sideways, but sooner or later, someone was going to figure out what we were up to.

My expression must have been dubious, because Seth added, “Or maybe we could try going inside. Now that I’ve seen some of the rooms, I can just pop us in there and then back out again. We know the place is empty, so it’s not as if we’d be running that big a risk.”

I wanted to tell him that probably wasn’t a very good idea, not when we’d already seen enough to prove the cabin was utterly uninhabited.

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