Page 56 of Leave No Trace
I stumbled back and looked wildly around the cabin. My heart, already abused beyond repair, kicked into a sprint. Every room on the main floor had at least one window and there was no basement, which left only one place to hide. Locking the front door, I ran to the stairs and was halfway up before I remembered.
‘The picture frame. The light,’ I hissed and we flew back down. I hit the light switch off in my bedroom and Lucas shoved the broken frame under a couch as the sound of a slamming door echoed in the front yard. We rushed back up the stairs that creaked and groaned with every step, dove to the loft floor, and lay side by side on the scratchy carpet littered with mouse droppings, reining in our breath, listening.
The rap on the door sent a jerk through my entire body. Silence. Then another knock. No voices. The upstairs loft was open on three sides, with only a railing gating the platform from the rafters. If we crawled to any of the edges, we could see what was happening on the first floor. But then anyone on the first floor could see us. After a long pause, one of the living room windows rattled and a beam of light glanced off the rough beams of the ceiling. They were circling the perimeter of the cabin, looking for signs of life. Signs of us.
We listened as they worked their way along the foundation, crunching leaves underfoot, shining flashlights throughout the main level and even illuminating the headboard of the loft bed, so close that we could see the dust motes spinning in the air. At one point, when the silence stretched out and it was impossible to tell where they were or what they were doing, Lucas reached over and covered my hand.
I squeezed my eyes closed and gulped back the silent convulsions in my chest. I could feel his warmth next to me, his absolute stillness save the fingers that pressed into mine, offering what he could never articulate – not even if we had the world to ourselves and all the languages in it – and I had no choice but to twist my hand into his, gripping the very thing that had shattered me.
After another minute, we heard a branch snap in the distance. Lucas rose up and crawled silently to the tiny, second floor window to peek outside.
‘There’s two of them. They’re following our tracks back to Harry’s house.’
I still couldn’t move. Lucas watched from the shadows, eyes trained on the neighboring property.
‘It doesn’t look like Harry’s answering his door. They’re walking around his house, too.’ A pause. Waiting. ‘Now they’re back in the driveway. They’re looking at the cars. One of them is wiping snow off the back of ours.’
‘They’re running the license plate.’ I covered my face, trying to steady my breath. If Butch hadn’t come home and reported his car missing yet, there wouldn’t be an immediate link. We might have a few hours, a day tops, before they put the pieces together and got a warrant. They’d find me, arrest me, and send me where I’d been heading before Congdon had stepped in all those years ago and postponed the inevitable. At least my mother would never know. She’d never have to witness what her daughter had become.
‘They’re coming back now. One of them is on the phone.’
I wiped my leaking eyes, fighting for control. Lucas, fixated on the threat outside, kept narrating the policemen’s progress in a low whisper. One was taking a photo. The other came back to a ground floor window and tried peering inside again. Turning away from the bouncing flashlight beam, I caught a glimpse of something under the bed, an object that – in one swift moment – wiped every tremor from my body and left behind a piercing calm.
The police car’s engine fired to life in the driveway on the other side of the house.
‘Go check, make sure they’re both leaving together.’
Lucas obeyed without question, creeping silently across the carpet and down the stairs. As soon as his head disappeared below the floor of the loft, I reached underneath the bed and pulled out the gun.
We hurried back to Harry’s house, this time pulling pine branches behind us to obliterate our tracks. Lucas kept a cautious distance from me. We’d spoken little since the cops left and then only logistics: when it was safe to come out, how long we’d have until they’d be back, our next steps. The magnitude of what just happened in the cabin haunted his every look, but the police hunt snapped us back to the present danger.
‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go alone,’ he said as we made our way through the trees.
‘I’m coming.’
‘But you’re still hur—’
‘I’m coming.’ Gaze forward, I felt the weight of the gun bumping my hip with every step, the missing gun from the boathouse, the one I’d desperately been searching for the day I’d come here with Derek and Rex. I finally found it. My mind raced with reasons it had been moved, and every version circled back to the same basic motivation; she’d felt scared and wanted to protect herself. A decade later, the gun lay unused under her bed and her body was rotting wherever Josiah Blackthorn had dumped it.
As we approached the house Harry appeared in the woods coming up from the lake, carrying strings of charred, brown fish. He waved them at us. ‘How’s about some smoked trout chowder?’
‘The police were here, Harry.’ I glanced down the hill, gauging the distance of his fish house to the main cabin. It was possible he hadn’t heard them, especially since they’d walked over instead of driving.
He didn’t comment on it, didn’t even seem interested that the police had been here. Instead he pulled open the cabin door and let it thwack against the siding. ‘Come on, you can chop some onions.’
The pain started getting the better of me as we helped Harry prepare dinner, so I changed the bandage and took half a pill. I didn’t want to be foggy or jeopardize the absolute clarity the gun had given me, but I also couldn’t be crumpled in pain on the couch while Lucas disappeared into the wilderness, either. He might suspect enough to never emerge again.
I peeked around the blanket hanging over the front window every ninety seconds and stopped cold whenever I heard an engine in the distance.
‘We go tonight, after Harry’s asleep,’ I murmured as we set the table, my attention deliberately focused on laying spoons one by one at each chair.
Lucas paused, holding chipped mugs of water. He wanted me to look at him, to let him in, but I couldn’t. Finally, after I took the water out of his hands and finished the place settings, he whispered. ‘I don’t know where we are, in relation to him.’
That turned out to be no problem. Harry was happy to produce a tattered old Boundary Waters map as we ate chowder, pointing out his favorite fishing spots. Lucas studied our location and let his eyes move over the terrain, jumping from lake to lake, finding our route. He nodded almost imperceptibly after handing it back, while I stirred the congealing contents of my bowl. The food was good, but I had no appetite, no interest in anything besides the comfort of metal against my ankle. The gun, which I’d transferred to my boot in the bathroom, had absorbed so much body heat that now it was warming me.
After dinner, we moved to the couch – Harry relaxing on one side while Lucas and I sat rigidly on the other. Harry flipped the TV on and we watched a reality show that I absorbed absolutely nothing from, instead watching the clock with obsessive focus, and waiting for Harry to get tired. As soon as the show ended, the local news came on.
My entire body jumped as Lucas’s face filled the screen.
