CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE #2
A sound came from the trees outside. I shut the flashlight off. Darkness swallowed me whole. For one second, there was only my breathing, too loud and too fast, filling the rotten little room. I held my breath, not moving.
Another sound came. It sounded like a wet drag through grass followed by a soft, dull scrape. Metal against stone.
Fuck, I felt cold.
I moved toward the wall and peered through one of the gaps in the boards. I saw nothing but black tree trunks and the soft moonlight.
Then Oliver stepped out of the woods. He emerged from the dark, sleeves rolled to his elbows and mud darkening the bottom of his trousers almost to the knee. One side of his shirt clung to him, damp with sweat or rain.
In one hand, low at his side, he carried a shovel.
The blade was black with wet soil. He walked to the edge of the gravel path and stopped.
Not looking toward the shed or cabin, he just stood there, listening.
Then he crossed the yard with the shovel hanging beside his leg.
He went up the back steps and let himself into the cabin. The door closed behind him.
I stayed frozen inside the shed, every muscle in my body locked up tight as I waited for movement inside the cabin.
A weak light came on in the kitchen, over the sink. Whatever Oliver was doing, he wasn’t coming back out. I needed to run. To go straight for the trees and push as much distance between myself and this place.
But the light drew my eyes and kept my focus fixed there. I thought of the shovel and mud. The mud. Oliver had come out of the woods looking like a man who had not just gone walking.
When Oliver’s back was to the window, I slipped out of the shed.
With the sun long gone, the grass was wet, the air cool.
I moved low, keeping close to the darker edge of the property, and made my way back toward the cabin.
Each step felt loud. Every branch sounded like a snapped bone around me.
My shoulder brushed against a branch, and I stopped, waiting for the kitchen door to open.
But it didn’t. I reached the side of the cabin and crouched beneath the kitchen window. For a moment, I couldn’t make myself look. I took a moment, drawing in calming breaths. Then I rose slowly.
Oliver stood at the sink.
The shovel lay across it.
I frowned at the sight. That alone was enough to make my stomach turn.
Who washed a shovel in a kitchen sink? There was a hose coiled neatly near the woodshed.
A bucket by the back steps. Half the fucking property was dirt and gravel and wet grass.
But there he was, inside that clean kitchen, running water over a shovel like it was a fucking dinner plate.
He washed the handle first in slow, thorough strokes, as though he were cleaning a crystal glass after an expensive meal.
Water ran over his hands and into the sink.
He turned the shovel over, wiped the handle with a dark cloth, then ran it along the blade.
Mud loosened in dark streaks. For a second, the water looked brown.
Then reddish-brown. Rust, perhaps. Clay. Hell, maybe it was old leaves?
My mind grasped for every ordinary answer it could find, but none explained why a man would wash fucking clay from a filthy shovel in his pristine kitchen.
Something pale clung near the edge of the blade. Oliver pinched it between two fingers, looked at it for a moment, then rinsed it down the drain.
My throat closed.
There could have been a reason for all this.
There was always a reason, wasn’t there?
A man with a cabin had a shovel. They were prepared and shit. A man with land had dirt, too. And a man with a property in the woods had work to do after dark, apparently, because maybe rich professors liked gardening in the middle of the fucking night.
But then my eyes moved past him.
Someone stood near the far wall.
A woman.
Small…thin.
I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t see anything clearly except the shape of her, dark against the darker room. She stood near the hallway, half in shadow, her arms hanging at her sides.
My heart stopped so violently it felt like pain.
I leaned closer to the glass.
The shape was gone.
There was only a chair and a hanging coat. I saw the black reflection of the trees behind me.
Oliver kept washing the shovel.
I blinked hard at the dots suddenly swarming my vision.
No.
No, that wasn’t real.
That was the dark. The window distorted things. My own reflection was broken across the glass. Whatever was still dirty in my blood from the water bottle still affected me. The shed had done things to my mind.
My breath fogged the glass as I peered closer.
Oliver’s hand stopped.
Slowly, his head began to turn in my direction.
I dropped beneath the window so fast my knees hit the dirt. For half a second, I stayed there like an idiot, frozen under the very place he would look first.
Then sense came back.
Move.
I crawled sideways through the wet grass, keeping low against the cabin wall. My shoulder scraped the siding. A branch clawed at my hair. I didn’t stop. I slipped behind a stack of split cedar near the corner of the porch and pressed myself into the dark gap between the woodpile and the wall.
The kitchen light went out. The darkness that followed felt loud. I didn’t move, not even as the back door suddenly opened softly.
Oliver stepped outside.
From where I crouched, I could see only part of him through the stacked wood. His sleeve. One hand lazily clutching the shovel. The pale line of his throat when he turned his head toward the window.
He stood there, listening.
He moved toward the place where I had been crouched seconds before. My stomach clenched hard as he stopped beneath the kitchen window and looked at the glass.
Was the fog of my breath still visible?
He stared for a moment, and then his gaze lowered to the mud.
I pressed myself harder into the woodpile, splinters biting through my shirt.
He knew. He fucking knew. Maybe not that it was me. But he knew someone had been there.
For a long moment, he didn’t move. Then he turned away from the cabin and looked across the yard where the shed was.
I tensed.
I hadn’t closed the shed door the whole way. The small gap of black where there should have been none might be visible to him. He’d know.
Oliver stepped off the path. I pressed myself deeper into the gap behind the woodpile. I winced as a splinter dug through my shirt and into my shoulder.
He crossed the grass.
The yard felt too open and pale under the moon. My gaze refocused on the back door he’d left open behind him. Only a few inches.
Inside, there had been a woman.
Or a coat.
Or nothing at all.
My mind had already decided it was nothing because nothing made more sense. Nothing meant I could get the fuck out of this place. Nothing meant I had not watched some thin, silent shape stand behind Oliver while he rinsed red-brown water down the sink.
But what if it wasn’t nothing?
What if someone was inside? What if she had moved the second I leaned closer? What if she had slipped into the hallway, silent and terrified, because Oliver had looked toward the window? I thought of Daisy here, locked in a room, sleeping on a stained mattress while she scribbled notes to herself.
The thought sank its teeth into me.
No.
I thought of the cuffs. The chain. The scratches in the wood. I knew what kind of place this was now. I could feel it pressing in on me from all sides.
And if I crawled away while someone stood inside that cabin waiting to be found, then what the fuck was I?
Oliver was halfway to the shed. I looked from him to the open door.
I’d take one look. That was all. One look inside. If there was no one there, I’d leave. I’d run so hard my lungs split open. I’d find the road. Find the van. Walk back to town if I had to just to get away from here.
Oliver reached the shed, and I moved. I bolted from behind the woodpile, keeping low, every muscle in my body screaming at me to stop.
I crossed the two steps to the porch and touched the back door cautiously.
I winced, waiting for the creak, but there was none.
The door opened quietly, and I slipped inside.
The kitchen was dark and cool. The smells hit me first. Soap. Wet wood. Something metallic from the sink. The cloth lay folded beside the basin, dark and wet. A brown smear marked the edge of the porcelain where the water had not quite taken everything. I stared at it, my mind reaching again.
Rust.
Clay.
Mud.
Not blood.
But my throat tightened.
I looked toward the far wall. There was a chair, and a long coat hung from a hook near the hallway, thin enough to resemble a person through the window. It could explain what I had seen.
Could.
I moved closer anyway.
My boots left wet prints across his perfect kitchen floor. I didn’t care. He knew someone was here, and he thought that someone was in his fucked-up shed. I touched the coat. It was wool and damp.
“There’s no one,” I whispered.
I turned toward the hallway. There was a sitting room off to one side, dark and perfect, all leather and books, like something out of a magazine.
I stepped into it, scanning. The moon touched the edges of the furniture.
The shelves were full of philosophy texts.
There was a fireplace with kindling stacked in a neat little pyramid.
A basket of folded throws. I tried to picture Daisy having folded them after she’d relaxed on the couch, reading one of his what-the-fuck books.
There was no woman here.
I backed out.
A closed door stood at the end of the short hall. My hand went to the knife in my pocket, my instincts on high alert. Something felt wrong. I could sense it in the air. This heavy feeling at the pit of my stomach, screaming for me to leave.
I opened the door.
It was a giant bathroom, and it was empty.