Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Camellia
The village consisted of a souvenir shop, three places to eat, one bar, a supply store with a post office inside, and a stand that sold charcoal and bundles of firewood, during seasons when fires were permitted. It also contained too many people.
Camellia had suffered some very real PTSD during and after Earl’s stalking. She’d been over it until that phone call, but since then, she’d felt it stirring inside her.
Until this place. Here, she’d been feeling safer and safer, tucked away in the wilderness, all alone with a beautiful, gentle man.
But now she was out among people again, and it felt like her security blanket had fallen away. All her old fears were nipping at her heels.
Her phone, in her pocket as always, made a sound, and she said, “A signal. What do you know?”
“That’s handy.” He pulled out his own phone, glanced at it, then looked sad.
Camellia knew his first instinct had probably been to check for messages from his mom. She gave his arm a squeeze and checked her own messages. “Oh, hey, there’s text from Detective Simms. Several texts,” she said, scrolling, reading. “She checked into Mary Jo Gallagher’s suicide.”
“Earl’s girlfriend,” he said, and she nodded.
“There’s no evidence of foul play.”
She texted back a thank you but didn’t expect a reply. It was after hours.
It was a sad kind of relief to know that Earl’s girlfriend had taken her own life, even though she suspected he might’ve driven her to it. But they were far away from him, Camellia reminded herself. She was safe here.
There was a lot of activity over by the bicycle rental kiosk, and not for the bikes. The booth was lined with maps and flyers. A book on the counter like the one where they’d signed in had one person after another flipping its pages.
“What do you think that’s about?” She looked up at Wolf as she asked it and was struck again by how handsome he was. She’d been feeling things back there at the campsite—like her whole body had been infused by the firelight.
But gosh, she’d told him in no uncertain terms she wasn’t interested. She’d look like an idiot if she went back on it, wouldn’t she?
“We can find out,” Wolf said. Then he walked over there.
She didn’t go with him. There were chills chasing each other up her spine, like eyes on her back.
It was so real that she turned to look behind her.
Someone was walking away up the path. Someone with a familiar shape and posture and gait.
She gasped and whirled right into Wolf’s chest.
His hands came to her shoulders. “Hey,” he said, and when she looked up, he met her eyes and frowned. “What happened?”
“I think I saw him. Earl, he’s—” She turned, pointing, but the road was dark and the only people on it were a group of teenagers in backpacks, heading toward them, not away.
Wolf looked from the road back to her face. “We can call the police. Are you sure it was him?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I didn’t see his face. It was too dark, he was too far away, and I could only see the back of him, but his shape, and the way he moved…” She sighed and lowered her head. “I sound like a crazy person.”
“If you say it was him, I believe you.”
She took a deep breath, replaying the whole thing in her mind. “No, I can’t even convince myself, for sure. I’m triggered, I think. It felt so safe and secluded at our site.”
He sighed heavily and looked around the place, probably in search of something that would make her feel better. He was thoughtful that way.
“What’s the deal at the kiosk?” she asked to change the subject.
“It’s just a sign-in book, like the one at every gate. There’s a large group on separate sites, trying to find each other.”
Camellia frowned and looked that way. “Anyone can just look in the book and find what site you’re on. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Looks that way. We’re not in that book, though.”
“We’re in one of them.”
“Yeah, but we’re not in our assigned site. Nobody can find us that way, Camellia.”
The way her name sounded on his lips gave her a whole different set of chills. He pronounced both Ls or something and made it sound more beautiful than it had ever sounded to her.
“We can check the books, too,” he suggested. “See if he’s registered.”
“He wouldn’t have used his real name.”
“They looked at our ID, though. He carry a fake ID around with him, to your knowledge?”
She shook her head, sighed. “I’m just jumpy. It probably wasn’t even him.”
“We don’t have to stay—”
“Yes, we do.” She nodded at one of the diners. “They close soon. Let’s get churros. Better than cocoa!”
“Sure.” They went into a sit-down Mexican restaurant and ordered churros and coffee.
Soft Spanish guitar came from speakers mounted along with the cameras in the upper corners of the small dining room.
Booths of red Formica with seats upholstered in green lined three walls.
A counter stretched across the fourth wall, and tables filled the space in between.
Camellia picked a small booth in the back corner where she could see everyone in the place.
It wasn’t logical to think she’d seen Earl. There was no evidence to support her having seen him.
There was that black Chevy Blazer on the highway.
But that was two hundred miles from here.
Okay, one scant piece of evidence, and a weak one—a car he might not even have anymore, for all she knew. It was still registered to him, though.
But no, she’d glimpsed a fellow camper with a similar build from a distance in the dark. It wasn’t enough to worry about, much less enough to distract her from Wolf’s case.
Their order came, and they dug in. There wasn’t a lot of conversation after that.
When they finished and left the establishment, Wolf veered into the souvenir shop next door, clasping her elbow and steering her right in there with him.
He walked through the place with purpose, on a mission, snatching a pair of baseball caps with the park logo on them.
He plopped one onto her head, and one onto his own.
Then he went to the spinning rack of sunglasses and gave it a slow turn before plucking a big round purple pair that would’ve made Elton John blush and slid them right onto her face.
“What are you doing?” she asked around her laughter.
He put on a pair of Aviators and blinked at the mirror, and she laughed even more.
He was soothing her nerves with his antics, if nothing else.
And she appreciated the distraction. He leaned in, putting his hand to one side of his mouth, and stage whispered, “I’m getting our disguises together.
Do you think they have any of those wax lips? ”
“I thought those had gone extinct.”
“Covid masks?” he asked, nodding toward a rack of them in floral and leafy patterns.
She removed the huge glasses and said, “If we’re wearing these at night, we need lighter lenses. Ohhh, like these.” She picked up a pair with bright yellow lenses and a dangling “Night vision that darkens by day” tag. They were aviator-shaped and too big for her face, but she liked them.
“Done.”
She took off the baseball cap and put on a fishing hat instead. “More brim means less visibility.”
“I’ll keep this one,” he said. “Flatters my jawline. Besides.” He turned around and pulled his long dark hair right through the opening in the back of the hat. “Built-in hair band.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Shop’s closing, folks,” called a man with a bushy gray beard who was running the place from behind his counter.
“Guess not,” Camellia said, and they wore their purchases to the counter, peeling off the tags as they went.
“Hey, I have an idea,” Wolf said while the cashier rang up the tags they’d removed from their getup. “Let’s not take the road back. Let’s walk along the river’s edge. There’s a trail. I saw a sign.”
“You have flashlights?” the clerk asked, pointing to a display on the wall, no longer in such a hurry to close.
“No, but we’ll take two of those big ones that look like they could double as weapons in a pinch,” Camellia said. “Are a dozen D batteries included?”
The clerk’s frown was the same as if she’d asked whether he’d ever been abducted by aliens.
“And batteries,” she added quickly.
Wolf laughed softly beside her. She looked over at him, but he was well-hidden behind his sunglasses and baseball cap.
The trail was nice, lined in red sand, without pits or holes.
It meandered with the river, only a few yards from its edge, but sometimes veering farther from the banks to go around trees or rock formations.
The ground sloped downward toward the water, all earth and stone and scraggly grasses.
They kept their flashlight beams aimed toward the water, and she knew he was looking for spots where his mother might’ve found him.
She couldn’t stop envisioning him, a little baby lying in the water, cold and alone and in so much danger, after surviving who knew what hell?
Just as she thought it, her flashlight beam picked out a small brown face with water lapping over it.
She gulped back a shriek and ran down the slope and right into the cold water, through floating debris.
She fell, submerged entirely, then got upright again and kept sloshing toward the face beneath the waves.
Wolf came splashing up behind her as she reached for the drowned baby and picked it up out of the water.