9. Cabin in the Woods
9
CABIN IN THE WOODS
I wished I could be as cheerful as Seth seemed to be. He wanted to sit down at once and start figuring out possible locations where Ruby was being hidden, while something about the sight of that ritual table and the altar just behind it had chilled me to the bone.
Even though I’d told him about what had happened with Damon and Angela, I wasn’t sure Seth completely understood how truly awful the situation had been. Yes, it had worked out in the end, but only because Connor had turned out to be Angela’s soul mate, and although Damon had been angry and disappointed, he’d clutched some kind of victory from the jaws of defeat, thinking at least Angela would still be bound to the Wilcox clan, even if not exactly in the way he’d planned.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a Connor Wilcox to ride to our rescue this time. No, it was just the two of us, neither of whom possessed the kind of talents that would be much good against a warlock like Jasper.
On the other hand, allowing myself to fall into a doom spiral didn’t seem like a very good use of our resources, either. Like Seth had said, at least we both knew Ruby wasn’t at Jasper’s house, even though it sure seemed as if he planned to bring her there early on the morning of the twelfth so he could carry out his horrible plan.
If the worst happened…if we weren’t able to stop him…would his scheme even be effective? Could dark magic and sheer force of will make Ruby his consort and break the curse?
I didn’t know. How could I? In my timeline, she’d been saved by a group of other McAllisters who’d answered her call for help, and Jasper had been forced to slink back to Flagstaff with his tail between his legs.
“Are you all right, Devynn?” Seth asked. He’d gone to the window to look down at the street below, possibly to make sure no Wilcoxes had showed up to lurk outside the hotel, but it seemed the coast was clear because he’d turned back toward me, expression now full of concern.
“Sure,” I said, and smiled wanly. “I suppose seeing all that ritual stuff in Jasper’s basement just made me realize this isn’t a game, that he really plans to do whatever he can to make Ruby his consort.”
Seth slipped an arm around my waist and bent to press a soft kiss on my cheek. “I’ll admit it was a little unnerving. But we can do this. Just think of everything we’ve accomplished so far.”
In my eyes, that didn’t seem like so very much. All right, we’d been jumping around in time, which wasn’t the sort of thing even your garden-variety witch or warlock could manage, but still, coming to 1947 had been an utter fluke and definitely not anything I’d planned to do. I’d panicked and gotten us away from 1884, that was all.
Maybe if I’d had more time to keep working with Jeremiah…maybe if he’d been able to guide me toward additional methods that would allow me to keep my time-travel gift more tightly controlled…then I would feel as if I’d actually accomplished something, rather than appear where we weren’t supposed to and screw everything up.
Seth’s clear blue eyes gazed down into mine, worried and warm at the same time, as though he was doing his best to let me know he believed in me and thought far more of my talents than I did. It was possible I was being too hard on myself.
After all, my gift had allowed us to escape detection by Jasper Wilcox, and that was no small thing.
However, it was going to take a lot more than simply flying under the radar to get Ruby out of Jasper Wilcox’s clutches.
“Okay,” I said, and sat down on the foot of the bed. At any other time, I might have done so to send a signal to Seth that I was ready to lose myself in his arms for an hour or two. Right now, though, I knew I was far too worried and keyed up to enjoy myself. “Do you have any ideas?”
Possibly, a flicker of disappointment crossed his face. However, he seemed cheerful enough as he sat down next to me and took my hand in his. Even though he’d been away from the mines for several weeks now, his fingers still had calluses that would probably take months to go away.
If they ever did.
That was all right by me, though. Those rough edges told me he’d worked with his hands, hadn’t been afraid to go out there and earn a living and do the hard things. He wasn’t some sheltered warlock who’d had everything handed to him on a platter.
No wonder I’d been waiting for someone like him to come along.
“I wish I did,” he said in answer to my question. “But I don’t know anything about the Wilcoxes of this era, obviously, other than the few details we’ve picked up since we got here. Maybe you should tell me what you know, and then we can talk it over and see if there’s something we might be able to work with.”
While I’d admit that I probably knew more about my clan than a lot of other Wilcoxes of my generation, it wasn’t as if I’d sat down and written a master’s thesis on them or anything. Most of it was stuff my mother had told me or I’d heard from Marie Begonie and other people who were sort of the old-timers of the family. I certainly hadn’t studied Jasper Wilcox in any great depth, mostly because — other than the kidnapping attempt — there hadn’t been a huge amount to distinguish him from the other primuses in the twentieth century. His wife had died young, as they always did, and he had one son, again, as they always did. If you looked at the chronology, then you’d probably see that he hadn’t lived to any great old age, despite having wealth and the best care the clan healers could provide.
No, the Wilcox clan leaders never seemed to want to stick around for very long, as though they knew their sons were just waiting for them to die so another generation could go through the same awful motions.
But I didn’t want to say any of that to Seth, mostly because it all sounded so damn depressing.
“By this point, they’ve been in Flagstaff for a little over seventy years,” I told him. “I honestly don’t know how many of them there are right now, but, based on all those names in the phonebook, I’m guessing it has to be a couple of hundred. Smaller groups of Wilcoxes also lived in Williams and Winslow and had ranches spread out along I-40 — in this time, Route 66, or close enough.”
Seth’s brows drew together. “So that means they could be hiding Ruby in one of those smaller towns, or even on a ranch somewhere.”
“It’s possible,” I replied. “You’d think Jasper would want to keep her closer than that, but it’s a lot easier to get around now than it would have been in the 1880s or even in your time. No, Route 66 isn’t as fast as a real freeway. Still, it’s probably only an hour drive or so to get to Winslow and even less time than that to reach Williams.”
“But if she’s on a ranch or something, she’s going to be really hard to track down.”
I definitely liked that possibility the least. Although I knew the Wilcox clan owned plenty of land in this part of the state, I had absolutely no idea how many individual ranches had existed in the 1940s or how reachable any of them might be. Also, Seth and I would be totally conspicuous trying to make a rescue attempt in a place like that, whereas even in a small town, we’d have a bit more cover.
“That’s the problem,” I said. “Even if we were somehow able to get a complete list of all the various Wilcox holdings — and I don’t see that happening, despite how helpful the people at City Hall have been so far — we’d have a hell of a time trying to investigate all of them in the next eight days.”
Technically, it was nine days until the dark of the moon, but since it was going to happen in the middle of the night, we didn’t have as much time to work with as we would have liked.
“Let’s think about this logically,” Seth said. His fingers were still wrapped around mine, comforting and real, but all the hand-holding in the world wasn’t going to fix our current predicament. “It has to be someplace private. It has to be a place where they won’t have to worry about neighbors or passersby noticing that a young woman is being kept there. Ideally, it would be a spot that no one else knows about.”
As soon as he spoke that last sentence, I wanted to smack myself in the head.
How could I have been so stupid?
Now that it had surfaced in my brain, the answer seemed almost painfully obvious.
“I know where,” I said, and immediately Seth straightened, his grasp on my hand tightening just a little.
“Where?”
“The cabin in the woods outside town,” I said. “The one where Samuel Wilcox shot my father.”
Although Seth seemed cheered by my theory, I could tell he didn’t want to jump straight into a rescue attempt without analyzing the situation further.
“They still own the place in the 1940s?”
“We still own it in my time, remember?” I replied. Back in 1884, I’d explained to him that my mother had gone to the cabin for some peace and quiet, and that was where she’d seen my father’s ghost…and come up with the plan to go back in time and save him. “No one lives there — it’s just a place we use as a sort of vacation getaway. From what I’ve been able to tell, I get the feeling it’s been used that way for decades and decades. After all, the Wilcoxes would much rather have their fancy houses in town for daily living. But it sure seems like the perfect spot to hide Ruby.”
For the first time, a small crease appeared between Seth’s brows. “But wouldn’t she try to get away?”
“I’m sure Jasper has plenty of people watching her,” I said. “And I’m also sure he’s got the cabin warded up the wazoo.”
Seth’s frown only deepened at my comment, but, as with so many other more modern idioms I’d used over the past few weeks, he seemed to decide it was better to let it go.
“Then how will we get close?”
“Well, they won’t know we’re witch-kind, for one thing,” I replied. “And I know the land around there pretty well.”
His gaze grew speculative. “Wouldn’t it be better to teleport right into the cabin, grab Ruby, and go?”
That would be the easiest thing to do. But….
“Even with the amulet’s help, that could be hard, considering you’d have to go in without me to get her and I’d have to meet you later,” I pointed out. Although neither of us had had the time to really test the limits of what Seth could and couldn’t do with his talent when it was enhanced by the amulet’s powers, I didn’t know for sure he’d be able to blink out of the cabin while holding on to two full-grown women in addition to transporting himself. “Also, getting inside might not be as simple as you think.”
“Why not? You’ve been there, so you can just draw me a sketch of the cabin and I can take us there right away.”
Again, not as easy as he wanted to make it sound. “The problem is, the cabin’s been added on to and remodeled a lot over the years. I have no way of knowing whether the place I’m familiar with is anything close to the way it looks right now in 1947. But,” I went on, doing my best to forestall any worried comments on Seth’s part, “I’ve hiked there a lot, and I know the woods around there couldn’t have changed much because a lot of that area is on Forest Service land and no one can develop it. I think it would be better to teleport to a spot in the woods and then reconnoiter from there.”
His lips pressed together, and I could tell he wasn’t hugely thrilled with this alternate plan, thinking it would be better to blink in and blink out and be done with it. But since neither of us knew whether he was even capable of such a thing, it just made sense to be cautious.
One thing was for sure, though — the skirt and hose and black pumps with their cute ankle straps I currently had on were not the sort of thing I wanted to wear while tromping around in the woods.
Did they even have outdoor shops in Flagstaff in 1947?
I supposed we’d find out soon enough.
While downtown wasn’t exactly dotted with stores catering to outdoorsy types, Seth and I did find one place up on Beaver Street that sold hiking boots and jeans and flannel shirts. Happily, something called “Lady Levi’s” was among the offerings, so I was able to get a pair that fit my shape a little better. A lot of my friends swore by 501s, but my waist and hips weren’t fans of the more straight-cut jeans.
After purchasing the necessary pieces, we went back to the hotel to change and get ready for our foray into the woods. I had to admit this was the first time after being sent back into the past that I felt almost like myself again, although obviously, these jeans didn’t have any Lycra in them and were a lot looser in fit than I was used to.
Still, they were denim, and the plain flannel shirt I’d bought was warm and comfy and loose-fitting as well. I pulled my careful curls back with one of the scarves I’d been using, tied on the hiking boots, and thought I was about as ready as I’d ever be.
Similarly attired, Seth also seemed a bit more comfortable than he’d been in the jackets and vests and dress pants he’d been sporting since we arrived in Flagstaff, probably because in his old life, he wouldn’t have worn stuff like that unless he was going to a wedding or a funeral. As he was fastening his boots, I sat down with a pen and piece of paper I found in the desk and made a quick sketch of the clearing that had once held my father’s grave…before my mother traveled back in time to ensure he’d never be buried in that isolated spot.
Seth came over just as I was finishing it up and peered over my shoulder.
“Is that where we’re going?”
A few more quick lines to indicate the rocks scattered across the little clearing, and then I handed the paper over to him.
“Yes. It’s about a ten-minute hike to the cabin from there. I doubt anyone will be anywhere around when we make our appearance, and there are a lot of trees all along the path, so we’ll have plenty of cover right up until the last minute.”
“Good.” He stared down at my sketch for a long moment, as though memorizing every single detail.
Was it accurate enough? Had I put in trees that weren’t there in 1947, or excluded ones that might have been cut down in the meantime?
I had no way of knowing, but I guessed I could drive myself plenty crazy if I didn’t let it alone and allow Seth to work his magic.
“Are you ready?” he asked, then folded up the piece of paper and stuck it in his jeans pocket.
Outwardly, I supposed I was. But despite the comfy clothes and the hiking boots and the rest, I couldn’t help fretting that we were making a huge mistake, that we’d materialize right in the middle of a bunch of Wilcox warlocks. If that happened, all the talent-blocking magic in the world wouldn’t convince them that Seth and I weren’t witch-kind.
Borrowing trouble wasn’t helping, so I shoved those nightmarish images to the far back of my mind and got up from the chair where I’d been sitting.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said in reply.
He sent me an encouraging smile and put his arms around me, holding me close. I really wished we could be doing this somewhere romantic, like dancing in a big ballroom out of an old black-and-white movie, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. We’d had a date to go dancing in 1926, but the bootleggers had interfered with those plans.
Oh, well. What I didn’t know about old ballroom dancing moves could fit in the Smithsonian.
A tightening of his arms told me we were about to jump. At once, the hotel room disappeared, and immediately afterward, we stood in the clearing, with cool, pale late autumn sunlight streaming down from overhead.
My fears that I might have gotten some fundamental details wrong about our surroundings seemed to have been completely unfounded. The little open space in the woods looked much the same as it always had, with the sturdy poles of ponderosa pines making up most of the trees and an oak or sycamore or maple — almost all of them now bare — to break things up a bit.
Directly opposite us was the big sycamore at whose base my father’s grave had supposedly once lain. Nothing there now except a few rocks and some fallen leaves, and I allowed myself an inner sigh of relief. Maybe our being here in 1947 — or back in 1884 — might have changed a few minor details here and there, but it seemed as if my father was still safe and sound in the future.
I hoped.
“Where now?” Seth asked after he took a quick look around the glade.
“Down that path,” I said, pointing toward a faint trail that wandered away southward from the clearing. If I hadn’t known where it was supposed to be, I might have overlooked it altogether, since it was much less defined than it had been in my time.
That had to be a good sign, right? If the trail had almost disappeared, its near absence seemed to signal that no one had come this way in a long while.
Since I knew where we were going, I took the lead, although Seth was close on my heels, moving carefully so no snapped twig or carelessly crushed leaf would give away our position. All around, the trees were thick enough that I doubted anyone could easily see us, especially since we’d both been careful to choose plaids in muted mixes of green and brown and tan, not the sort of thing that would signal where we were from a mile off.
Every once in a while, I would pause and hold myself absolutely still so I could listen to the sounds of the forest. No, I wasn’t some kind of uber-Girl Scout, but I’d spent enough time in these woods to know what was normal and what wasn’t, and I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, only the calling of birds and a faint rustle of dead leaves on the forest floor that might have been from a rabbit or even a fox.
The path became a little wider, and I signaled Seth to move to one side so we could hug the trees and do our best to hide ourselves, since I knew we were now getting close to the cabin. Tree by tree, we inched nearer until we got to the section where our cover was going to disappear altogether.
Sitting in the middle of the cleared area was the cabin, looking much the same as it always had. By the 1940s, pretty much all the additions appeared to have been completed, and any other changes would be interior and cosmetic in nature. The small lane leading onto the property was now dirt rather than gravel, and the curtains I could just barely see through the windows seemed to be ticking or some other kind of striped fabric, but otherwise, it didn’t look too different from the cabin I remembered.
No signs of life, either — no vehicles parked anywhere around, no smoke emerging from the stone chimney. All right, it wasn’t quite cold enough today for a fire to be strictly necessary, but sometimes we lit them more for atmosphere than anything else.
When you were a witch, it was a lot easier to do that sort of thing.
“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.
Then again….
We’d only gotten small peeks through the curtains, nothing detailed. What if Ruby really had been in the cabin and had left behind some small piece of evidence to prove Jasper had hidden her there before moving her somewhere else, like a hair ribbon or a handkerchief or a tube of lipstick? Maybe that scenario didn’t seem terribly plausible, but at the same time, I’d feel awful if we found out later that she really had been there and we’d taken off before finding proof the cabin had been her prison, if only for a short while.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.”