Chapter Two #2
He got so involved with the chapter he was working on that he forgot to eat lunch and didn’t realize how late it had gotten until Rascal got between him and the keyboard. The little dog had such a pained look on his face that Wyatt checked to see if he was crossing his hind legs.
“I’m sorry, feller,” he said. “Let’s get your leash and take a walk.”
Rascal ran to the door and yipped several times while Wyatt saved his work.
When they were finally outside, the dog didn’t even make it to the first tree but hiked his leg on a pinecone that must have fallen the last year.
Then all the hair on his back stood straight up and the dog’s eyes fixed on a movement in the window of the cabin next door.
Wyatt followed Rascal’s line of sight and saw a big cat sitting in the window.
Wyatt had steaks marinating in the refrigerator, but he was in a hurry to get back to his story.
An author did not waste time firing up a grill when the characters were talking to him.
He planned to plow right on into the night and keep going until he couldn’t hold his eyelids up another minute, or until the characters ceased talking to him and slammed the door behind them as they left the cabin.
He quickly made a sandwich, opened a bag of chips, and twisted the top off a beer.
“I’m back, Adam. Sorry to leave you and Jolene hanging like that, but Rascal had to go water a pinecone.
Please don’t leave me now.” He took a bite of his sandwich and set the disposable plate beside the computer.
Rascal dragged his stuffed tiger into his fluffy doggy bed, grabbed it by the neck, and shook the life out of the thing.
Wyatt was glad that the critter had more lives to give and hoped it would last until he got the book written and they could get back to Dallas.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Wyatt leaned his head back on the sofa to give his eyes a rest. He woke several hours later with a crick in his neck and an ache in his back.
He dug his jogging shoes out from under the bed, fastened Rascal’s leash to the porch post, and did a few stretches before he took off in a slow run.
He stopped at the first turn to rest, and ran on to the paved road.
When he was doing a serious run, he never took Rascal with him.
He had to slow his stride even when he took the dog for a walk.
He was so deep inside his own thoughts that he didn’t see Jillian until she was only a few feet away and running in place to cool down.
“Good morning!” she said.
“Morning to you,” Wyatt said with a smile.
Her black hair was pulled up into a ponytail that swung back and forth, keeping time with her pace. Sweat dripped off her jaw. Her eyes were still guarded. But there was no doubt in his mind that she was his new muse because he had written two chapters with no music blaring.
“How long are you staying at the cabin?” he asked.
“Two weeks,” she answered. “If my inspiration continues to be as hot as it is right now, I might ask if I can extend the time.”
“In the writing world, we call that ‘being on a roll,’” Wyatt said.
“I guess it’s the same for an artist.” She started a slow jog up the road toward the cabins.
He fell in beside her, shortening his stride to match hers. “When I first ran this half mile down and back, I didn’t realize that the return was all uphill.”
Before the last turn, Jillian stopped in her tracks and bent over.
“Cramps?” Wyatt asked.
“No,” she answered, and crossed in front of him to the other side of the road. “Do you see that?”
He expected to see a raccoon, or maybe if they were lucky, a deer, but nestled back in the trees was an old automobile.
It had been black at one time, but the moisture had taken its toll leaving big rust spots and even holes in places.
Winding vines of some kind grew out of windows that had been left down when it was parked.
“What do you see?” Jillian asked.
“A 1954 Ford,” he said. “I wonder how it got back there.”
“It was probably abandoned when there was a path and now it’s all grown over,” she replied, and pulled a cellphone from the pocket of her tight-fitting jogging pants.
“What do you see?” Wyatt watched her take several pictures, and suddenly his brain kicked into overdrive. He had just found the place where the serial killer in his story hid the body that would get him caught.
“I see the past. When it was brand-new, it was beautiful. Like a newborn baby, all shiny, cared for, and loved. Then fate stepped in and little by little, life took an abrupt change.” She kept shooting pictures from one angle and another.
“That’s a weird idea for an abandoned car, but not as dark as me thinking about a decaying dead body in the trunk.”
“Let’s go see.” She stuffed her phone back into her pocket and traipsed out through the weeds and underbrush.
“I write fiction, not true crime,” Wyatt said from the edge of the road. “Don’t you know there could be snakes or things that bite out there?”
“I need a closer picture,” she answered without looking over her shoulder or even down at the ground to be sure she wasn’t about to step on a snake. “Nothing to fear there, but …”
“But what?” Curiosity took over common sense and he followed her, glad that Rascal wasn’t with him. The little guy could get tangled up or maybe even lost in all that thick underbrush.
“The past comes back to haunt us at the strangest times,” she answered, and slowly made her way around to the trunk that had been left open. “No dead bodies, but there’s a nest of baby raccoons in here. New life in the old.”
His thought pattern for his story shifted from a dead body to a live one that had been shoved into the trunk of a car.
The lady was barely hanging on by a thread.
Adam and Jolene had waded through the brush to the old car sitting right there in the deep woods.
They thought the woman who had been missing for four days was dead until she reached up with a bony hand and latched on to Jolene’s arm.
When she recovered enough to talk, Jolene and Adam would get enough information from her to catch the son of a bitch who had killed fifteen women.
“Haven’t you ever seen baby raccoons?” Jillian asked.
“What?”
“Where is your mind?”
Wyatt shook the ideas out of his head. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“Your eyes were locked on the trunk of the car like you were in a trance. I asked if you’d ever seen baby raccoons before.” She started back out to the road.
“I was thinking about my story. I’ve been struggling with an ending, and now I’ve found it. What did you find other than three little critters?”
“My next project, and an ounce of closure,” she answered.
“Closure about what?” Wyatt asked.
“I don’t know you well enough to tell you my life’s story.” When she was out of all the weeds, she took a few more pictures, but she did not take off in a jog. “You can go on ahead if you want to. I’m going to walk the rest of the way.”
“How could an old car and baby raccoons bring you closure?” He was pressuring her a little bit, but he really wanted to know more about her.
“We all have mountains in our past that we want to blow up with a bomb so that we never have to think about them again,” she answered.
“So, you find that in your art?” he asked.
“Do you find it with your books?” she fired back.
“Yes, I do.”
Wyatt’s body told him to put his legs in high gear and hurry to the cabin to put his ideas down on paper before all the details escaped his brain.
His heart said that he should spend the next twenty minutes with Jillian to be closer to his new muse.
He had run this same course every day for the past two weeks and had never seen that abandoned car before.
She saw things through an artist’s eye that not only amazed him but gave him new ideas for his storyline.
“Good for you. I have loved art since I got my first coloring book for Christmas when I was a little over three years old. But it’s only been since I got here that I’ve realized that art is my therapy.
That old car will be my next project when I finish what I’m working on now.
No, that’s not right. I’m going home right now to draw the skeleton of the picture this evening. ”
“Home?” He panicked and his chest tightened. He wasn’t ready for his new muse to leave. He needed to know much more about her, to flesh out Jolene’s character.
“Home isn’t a physical place. It’s where your heart is happy,” she told him when they reached the tiny clearing where the two cabins stood. “See you later.”
Desperate to keep her in the woods close to him, he blurted out, “I’ve got two steaks marinating in the fridge. I’m grilling them for dinner this evening. Would you like to join me?”
“I would love to. Your back porch or mine?”
“Mine, since I have a picnic table and you don’t,” Wyatt said.
“What time?”
“Seven?”
“Sounds good. See you then. I’ll bring dessert,” she said with a nod and disappeared into her cabin.