Chapter 9 Daniel
A woman screamed.
The sound ripped through the woods on the far side of the lake and echoed like a shock wave over the water to where Daniel stood on the dock, winding a spool of fishing line in the cool, twilight air.
His hand stilled, and the crawling sensation of goose bumps ran the length of his spine as he scanned the dense forest from where the piercing, guttural sound had come.
The last echoes of the cry fell away into the forest behind him, and Daniel stared at the southern shore, his nostrils flaring with each shallow breath.
Every hair on his neck and arms was standing at attention, every sense alert, but the sound did not come again.
A hiker?
No. Not this time of day. Not in such a remote patch of forest with less than half an hour of light left.
He waited, watching the woods for movement, for whoever had screamed to come sprinting through the trees, waving their arms and shouting for help—but there was only the violet calm of dusk and the shadowy firs across the water, tall and still.
He set the half-wound spool of fishing line on the dock and turned for the door.
He should call Jake. Get him up here with his badge and take the boat across the water.
If there was trouble, the last thing he needed was to be caught out there alone, with no one to prove that he wasn’t the cause of it.
Daniel had one hand on the doorknob when the sound came again, longer this time, drawn out. It was terror personified. A death scream, the sound of a woman in the peak agony of torture, and he yanked open the door and ran for the phone.
He lifted the receiver from the wall, fingers poised to dial, when the small white card pinched behind the phone stopped him short.
He had memorized the number on that card even before the taillights of Annie’s Jeep vanished into the trees, and he hesitated now, his finger hovering over the buttons.
If you see any tracks or if you hear him, and believe me, you’ll know if you do, give me a call.
Daniel shot a glance over his shoulder toward the open door and the lake beyond.
Was that it? He’d never heard a cougar’s scream before.
The only animal sounds that came at night were the chirping of insects, the haunting yips of coyotes, and the deep snuffling grunts of black bears who went nosing around the boathouse in search of food every once in a while.
He’d read about the eerie vixen’s cry made by the large cat that was often mistaken for a woman in peril, and there had been something otherworldly in the shrieking tenor of that scream, something both male and female that had made him want to sprint inside and lock all three dead bolts behind him.
Daniel deliberated, staring down at the buttons as the dial tone hummed softly through the earpiece.
He had one reason to call Annie Heston. Just one. But there were about a dozen reasons not to.
Daniel hung up.
If the cougar wandered closer to town, someone else would phone it in. It wasn’t worth the risk.
He paced to the window and folded his arms across his chest, eyes fixed on the lavender lake beyond the dock. Night was falling, and before long, it would be too dark to see at all.
Call me right away if you hear the cougar. Day or night.
Daniel unfolded his arms, drumming his fingertips on the sill as he turned toward the phone again.
Much to his irritation, he’d caught himself replaying his one and only conversation with Annie over and over in his mind.
Especially the moment when he looked up and their eyes met for the first time.
He hadn’t known it could be like that; that you could look at a woman and her eyes would blow right through the back of your head.
They had stunned him, those eyes. Caught him completely off guard, and ever since that night he’d been seeing them in his sleep. Deep and velvety and shrewd, a vivid shade of reddish brown, the exact hue of the eyes of the maned wolf he’d buried in the woods just before she showed up.
He had stood there at the gate, pretending to listen as she described the cougar’s prints and the things he should be looking out for, nodding along as she spoke, but for all she said, she might as well have been speaking Latin.
The words had gone in one ear and out the other as he studied her, fascinated.
She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but there was precisely a zero percent chance she had ever been called plain.
While her eyes were remarkable, the most extraordinary thing about her was the freckles.
He had never in his life seen anyone with so many.
Tiny spots spanned her face like constellations.
Like God had dipped a brush in golden paint and flicked it over her face with reckless abandon.
They didn’t confine themselves to her nose and cheeks the way they did on most people, but speckled her chin and throat and what little of her collarbone he could see as well.
They even ignored the boundaries of her mouth, dotting the corners and the bottom of her full lower lip, but he had cut his train of thought short when he started to wonder where else on her body they were gathered.
All in all, his general first impression of the woman was that if she were dropped into the Wild, Wild West with nothing but the clothes on her back and told to survive, she’d be just fine, but there was something soft about her, too.
It might have been her straight, slightly snubbed nose, or her delicately pointed chin.
It was hard to say, but something about her had given away a girlish spirit beneath the proud, womanly facade.
And yet, she was a threat, too. A serious threat, and technically a law enforcement officer, nosy and prying.
Her curious glance at the boathouse and her comment about him hiding away up here for the apocalypse had rattled him so badly that his forehead and palms had gone instantly clammy, but it was impossible.
There was no way she had recognized him.
The picture they’d used on the news, the one every television-owning resident of the Pacific Northwest had been bombarded with for weeks on end, had been a snapshot taken when he was sixteen.
A scrawny, bare-faced kid with wide, scared eyes.
That was seven years and forty pounds ago.
He had facial hair now, was five inches taller, and deeply tanned from the long days spent outdoors.
She couldn’t possibly have recognized him, but, then again, she was from Bend, less than twenty-five miles from Redmond, where coverage of the manhunt would have been the heaviest.
In the days after their conversation at the gate, she’d shown up a handful of times, parking the Jeep there and hiking around the lake, and each time Daniel had watched her from behind the windows of the boathouse, some part of him wanting to step outside and call out to her, to strike up another conversation just for the thrill of being face-to-face with her again, but his better judgment had kept him safely behind the glass.
Daniel walked to the phone, staring at it for a moment before turning away again.
He moved back to the window.
He drummed his fingertips on the sill, cleared his throat, and crossed the room again, pulling the phone from the wall and punching in the numbers on the card before the sensible half of his brain could stop him.