Chapter 3
ARDEN
Wearing a towel and nothing else, a very damp and nervous Arden pressed herself to a tree and stared at the stranger less than twenty feet away from her.
If he turned his head, there was no way he could not see her. He had just picked up her soap. He looked around, and Arden ducked her head behind the tree.
She plastered herself against the tree, her cheek pressed against the rough bark.
She could feel her wet hair clinging to her face.
Silently, she started counting to distract herself from moving.
There was a stick pressing into her bare foot, and a leaf—hopefully it was just a leaf and not a bug—tickling the back of her calf.
The edge of the towel brushed her naked thigh whenever she moved. It itched.
She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that could make the stranger not see her. Still, his image was imprinted behind her closed lids.
His hair was loose and sandy brown, catching the sun.
Broad shoulders flexed under a tight gray T-shirt, the type of shoulders made for lifting boards into place at a barn-raising, or comfortably crying on—shoulders that could hold the weight of the world, or of one woman’s tears.
He had been wearing jeans, not crisp new ones, but old and worn with a few stains as if from hard work.
He was not at all the rich a-hole she’d been expecting.
A few minutes ago, Arden had surfaced from a refreshing dip in the pool to the sound of voices and vehicles.
It was her second bath in the cool water of the creek.
The first time, she had been mainly concerned with washing off dust and travel grime.
Today she’d planned a more leisurely and refreshing soak.
The water was cold at first, but the air was warm, and the pool—while not exactly comfortable—had warmed up enough in the sun that she could dip all the way under.
She had no shampoo, just a bar of soap, but she firmly told herself that shampoo was really just glorified soap; she’d luxuriated in a long scrub to get all the grease and dirt out of her hair.
She felt good today. She hadn’t had as much trouble sleeping as she had feared.
She’d found that the soft darkness, even devoid of lights, didn’t feel oppressive or scary.
The stars overhead were like nothing she had ever known, more stars than she had realized there were in the entire cosmos.
After a leisurely morning in the cabin— where even her breakfast of instant oatmeal tasted good—and a lazy swim in the pool, she had been looking forward to a quiet day to explore the town and replenish her faded energy.
And now, this.
After what seemed like an eternity standing behind the tree, with her count getting to the point where she lost track and had to start over, she heard movement receding into the distance.
She peeked out just in time to see a gray T-shirt-clad back and a tight jeans-covered ass vanish between the cabins at the edge of the meadow.
Arden let out a long breath and stepped out from behind the tree. Okay, he hadn’t seen her. But these people were definitely not gone. She could still hear voices. In fact, she could hear voices on her street.
“There you are!” A woman’s voice, calling. “Where did you get off to?”
Arden froze.
The low rumble in reply must have been Gray T-Shirt. Arden couldn’t understand his answer, but she strained her ears, discovering that something in her seemed to thrill to the calm cadence of his voice.
Also, she noticed, he had taken her soap.
The woman said something else, sounding closer.
Were they coming back this way? Arden looked around wildly.
She couldn’t go down her street with them there.
Instead, she hurried for the shelter of the nearest house she could see through the trees.
“Ouch, ouch,” she whispered, trying to pick her way through moss, long grass, and thorns.
Brush tried to snatch her towel off. There were probably rusty nails back here, too.
She managed to find a halfway decent hiding place flattened against the clapboard side of one of the buildings. But she could still hear voices. How many people were here? There had to be at least three or four, if not more.
The assumption she had immediately jumped to when she’d heard noises on Main Street was that the town’s mysterious owners had showed up. But if Gray T-Shirt could be assumed to be typical of the rest, and not a hired hand or something, they didn’t look like the kind of people who would buy a town.
Campers? she wondered. Curious urban explorers from town? Hired carpenters come to fix it up for the real owners?
Until she had a better idea of who they were and whether they were likely to throw her out, she definitely didn’t want to be caught here. Especially wearing nothing but a towel.
So she just needed to get back to her cabin and hide.
Unfortunately, if she had to go the long way to avoid everyone, it was going to involve streaking through the town.
Piece of cake.
If this was a piece of cake, it was a cake made out of rocks and thorn bushes with broken glass frosting, Arden decided.
She had tried to sneak back the way she’d come, only to be headed off by the realization that the two people she had left to avoid were still in the meadow, talking about water infrastructure from what little she had overheard of their conversation.
(Which was another mark in the plus column for these people being associated with the town’s owners, because it was hard to imagine random hikers having opinions on water pumps.
Though who could say, maybe they were vacationing engineers.)
In any case, this had sent Arden and her towel sneaking back through the middle of town, limping with both feet.
She had bruised her foot on a rock and then nicked her other heel on a bit of glass where a window had been broken out.
It didn’t seem serious and it had stopped bleeding almost immediately, but it was definitely slowing her down.
Arden slipped from building to building, keeping behind the row of buildings along Main Street. She was just congratulating herself on a job well done when she nearly ran right into two more people talking near the windmill.
“Look out for that loose cable there.”
Arden stifled a squeak of dismay and skedaddled behind the schoolhouse next to the windmill. The speaker had been a woman, not the same one from earlier; her voice was soft and shy-sounding. It took Arden a panicked instant to realize the woman was talking to someone else, not her.
“I got it. Hey, did you hear something?” Male voice this time. Unlike the deep, warm voice of the sandy-haired man, this voice was brusque, with an edge to it.
“What sort of something?” the woman asked. Arden held very still.
“I dunno. Lots of odd noises around here. It might have been the windmill.”
“Maybe a bunny.” The woman sounded happy. “There must be bunnies here. We might see one.”
Arden hoped they weren’t planning to come looking for it.
She edged along the back of the schoolhouse and around to its other side.
She was now securely hidden from the couple, even if they decided to come looking for the “bunny,” but she was in full view of Main Street if anyone happened to come by.
Maybe she could get inside the schoolhouse and leave when they left?
She took a quick look up and down Main Street.
There was a truck and a pile of stuff next to it, but no people in sight for the moment.
Arden hurried up onto the schoolhouse porch.
The sun-warmed boards felt nice under her bare feet.
The door was slightly ajar, hanging askew on crooked hinges, and Arden turned sideways so she could tiptoe inside without having to move it.
She paused to get her bearings. It was dim in here, but not dark.
There were a few wooden desks, some benches, and a stove in the corner.
Arden curled her bare toes, wondering if there were spiders.
A previously boarded-up window—now with the plywood sitting beside it on the floor—let in a flyspecked shaft of sunlight.
Arden tiptoed over and peeked out. She immediately got a good view of the two people she had just heard talking. One was a rather short woman with long red hair and a flowing skirt. The other was a dark-haired man in a leather jacket. Both were looking up at the windmill.
“—don’t know how to tell,” the dark man was saying. “It would be great if we could get it working again. I guess the place must be wired for power.”
“We can ask Baz.”
“That’s your answer for everything?” His voice was sharp.
Arden wished they’d go somewhere else. She could see her street right past them. She was almost there. If she went now, she might be able to duck into her cabin before the other two came back. Hopefully there weren’t more than four of them.
But these two seemed to be staying put. “Can’t you go easier on him?” the redhead asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Please, Declan. I know you and Baz don’t get along, but we have to work together now. It’s more important than ever.”
They finally started walking away, toward the front of the schoolhouse. Arden wondered if there was a back door. If either of them came in, they couldn’t fail to see her.
“Important how?” Declan was saying.
“The two of you being at each other’s throats could bring danger down on us.”
Arden was just ducking away from the window when she saw Declan stop in his tracks.
“What do you mean, danger?” His voice was sharp. “Fern, did you see something?”
Fern waved her hands as if to physically brush off his questions.
“No, no, no. It’s nothing. I mean, I don’t know anything.
I don’t know what I know. It’s just that we’re in the wilderness, and there are a lot of things that could go wrong.
” Fern turned away from him. “Never mind that. The main thing is that we have to work together, or it’s all going to fall apart. ”
Declan snorted and started walking again. “It’s not me you have to talk to. It’s Baz stomping all over us, acting like he’s the boss of us.”
“Well, he kind of is,” the woman argued.
They were out of sight of the window now, but it definitely sounded like they were headed for the front door.
Arden hurried to the only other exit, and found herself in a small, empty room that might be meant as a storeroom or an office for the teacher.
It was nearly dark in here. Now she really hoped there weren’t spiders.
Faintly, she could still hear Fern and Declan talking.
Boots clomped on the floorboards of the porch.
Through the gloom, Arden spotted a door directly in front of her.
There was an old-fashioned handle. It turned, but the door didn’t open.
She found a deadbolt just above it by feel, struggled with it in the near-dark, and finally got the door open just as she heard the creak of the front door’s crooked hinges.
“Okay, I definitely heard something that time.” Declan’s voice.
Arden sprang out the back door into wildflowers and grass.
The ground was rough under her feet, but there didn’t seem to be any broken glass or other hazards.
There was nowhere to hide, unless she climbed the windmill, where she would be even more trapped.
So Arden ran, holding her towel in place with one hand.
She rounded the turn to what she thought of as her street, and was vastly relieved to see that there was no one in sight.
Wherever the other two had gone, it must be somewhere else.
She sprinted as fast as it was possible to go while limping and holding up a towel.
The door of her cabin was still closed as she’d left it.
She opened it with shaking hands, and as she did so, her gaze fell on the old pile of firewood beside the door.
There was something sitting on top that hadn’t been there before.
It was a bar of soap.
It was her bar of soap.
She picked it up. It was still slightly wet.
Gray T-shirt had to have left it here, unless the town had friendly ghosts.
How did he know where to put it?
How did he know?
“Hey, Baz, is that you?” someone called down the street, a woman’s voice. Maybe the same from earlier, maybe different. How many people were in this town?
Arden didn’t know if she’d been seen or heard or if it was something else entirely, but she flung herself into the cabin and closed the door behind her.
Dropping both the soap and her towel, she fumbled with the wooden latch, a bar that functioned as a sort of deadbolt, until she figured out how to push it into place.
At least they couldn’t open the door. But they could still try to come in. Someone knew she was in here.
Arden stood very still, naked, until enough time had gone by that she was reasonably confident there was no one outside. She crept to the window and peeked outside. No sign of anyone in the street.
Her legs wobbled, and she sank down on her sleeping bag, limp with relief.
She was definitely not cut out for sneaking around.
And if there were at least four people here, she had no idea how she was going to make it out of this town without being seen.