Chapter 12 Louise
LOUISE
After the fruitless meeting at Astor Stone’s, I drove straight to the police station to ask about Kara’s autopsy—not that I expected straight answers. Word was, the chief had requested a rush on it, but no one had seen the medical examiner all day.
By the time I stepped back outside, dusk had begun to bleed into the mountains, and the snow was picking up fast—thick, wet flakes blowing sideways across the windshield. The town had already started to panic.
Lines wrapped around the gas station, headlights cutting through the flurries as people filled tanks and jugs like they were prepping for the apocalypse.
At the grocery store, the parking lot was chaos.
People rushed out with carts piled high—milk, bread, booze, firewood—while store employees tried to shovel paths through the slush that was quickly icing over. The storm wasn’t coming. It was here.
I went back to the gas station where Kara was last seen on camera, tried to pry more out of the clerk for the third time, but his nerves were as frayed as mine.
Then it was a quick lunch with the crew—no one said much—followed by one last drive out to the campground to poke around before the roads became impassable.
By then, the sky was dark and the wind was howling.
I climbed into Ansel, punched the resort address into my GPS, cracked open a fruit punch,
What should have been a forty-five minute drive dragged past two hours.
The higher I climbed into the mountains, the more the weather turned feral.
First sleet. Then ice. Then a blinding curtain of snow.
I crept forward at ten miles an hour, white knuckled and squinting through a half-frozen windshield.
Somewhere around mile marker god-knows-what, my phone went dark. No bars. No maps. Just me and the mountains, growing darker with each passing minute.
Finally a crooked metal sign half-buried in snow came into view: County Road 2355.
Relief flooded me and I hit the gas—and immediately lost traction.
The SUV fishtailed hard. My body lurched forward, chest slamming against the seatbelt as a sickening crack split the air—the front bumper smashing into a tree.
Metal crunched. The steering wheel jerked sideways in my hands.
Then—stillness.
Everything went quiet.
Except the wind.
Once my heart dislodged from my throat, I climbed out to assess the damage. The hood was dented from the tree, but considering there was no smoke or liquid leaking out, I assumed the engine was in good shape.
The tire was another story. Flat as a pancake. That didn’t bother me as much as the fact that my only working headlight had been busted out.
I stared at the wreckage, feeling panic begin to swell.
This was not good.
The cold seeped through my jacket, biting down to the bone. I yanked open the back and started digging for the spare tire, only to find a jack and nothing else.
I climbed back into the car and went over my options.
1. I couldn’t call Miles, Austin, Margie, or 911 because I didn’t have reception.
2. I couldn’t drive because my tire was destroyed. I had no way forward, no way back. And even if I did, I had no headlight to guide me.
3. Basically, I was screwed.
Thirty minutes passed. I sat motionless in the driver’s seat, backpack clutched in my lap, fingers twitching with every creak and snap outside the car.
The woods beyond the windshield were pitch-black—an oppressive, suffocating kind of dark that swallowed the trees whole.
My headlamp sat unused in my bag, but even that wouldn’t cut far in a place like this.
The heater rattled, blowing weak streams of lukewarm air across my frozen knuckles. I didn’t have enough gas to last the night—and I knew it.
Every sound outside felt amplified—the groan of shifting limbs, the dry snap of ice-coated branches, the distant, hollow moan of wind slicing through the trees.
I tried to breathe, tried to calm myself. And then I did the only thing I could: I twisted open the bottle of wine in my duffel bag and took a long, burning swallow.
By the time I was halfway through the bottle, paranoia had started whispering in my ears.
What if I froze to death?
What if someone found me and kidnapped me?
What if I was already being watched?
I couldn’t stay there. The resort couldn’t be that far. It was my only option.
I capped the bottle, shoved it into my pack, and got out.