“Oh, please.” Thistle couldn’t be guilted. “You spend all your free time rubbing yourself in bacon grease so you can play sex games with your husband.”
“You don’t really do that, do you?” asked Clove, looking horrified at the thought. “That doesn’t seem sanitary.”
“Okay, Mrs. Missionary Position,” Thistle drawled. “Don’t judge Bay. You spend all your time at the lighthouse.”
“I have a baby,” Clove replied. “It’s not as easy to run around like we used to.”
Thistle was haughty. “I think I’ll manage it.”
Something niggled in the back of my brain, and I was suddenly suspicious. “Are you pregnant?” I didn’t mean to blurt the question, but once it was out, there was no hauling it back.
“No,” Thistle snapped. “I mean someday. She uses that baby as an excuse for everything.”
Okay, there was definitely something up with Thistle. At first, I just thought she was snarkier than usual because she was agitated with Aunt Tillie. It was more than that. “Thistle?—”
“Let’s go.” She brutally cut me off when she yanked open the door and climbed in the back seat of my car. “I want my hot chocolate.”
Unlike Clove, who wanted information cajoled out of her with gentle words, Thistle was a harder nut to crack. She wouldn’t tell us what was bothering her until she had no other choice. I needed to play this hand right.
“Fine.” I forced a smile I didn’t feel. “Hot chocolate it is.” My vehicle was in front of Aunt Tillie’s truck, so I pulled onto the road first. Clove was jabbering away about Calvin, and how he was getting close to saying his first word. Clove always thought he was developmentally ahead of where he should be.
I hummed to myself as we turned a curve, then hit the brakes hard enough that Clove and Thistle grunted.
“Did you learn to drive from Aunt Tillie?” Thistle sputtered. “Good grief.”
“That really wasn’t safe, Bay,” Clove said knowingly. “You should tap the brakes.”
“That’s only when it’s icy,” Thistle said.
“If she’d tapped the brakes this time you wouldn’t have ended up with a sore neck from the seatbelt.”
“I’m going to give you a sore face when I punch you,” Thistle warned.
Their words were just noise in the back of my head as I regarded the scene in front of me.
“What are you doing?” Thistle asked. “Why are we stopped?”
I put my car in park and turned off the engine. My gaze was solely on the truck in the middle of the road. It was facing us, meaning it had been coming from the direction of the inn. Both doors were open, nobody inside.
“It’s still running,” Thistle said. “I can see the exhaust.”
I bobbed my head. “The dome light is still on, so it hasn’t been sitting out here long enough to kill the battery.”
“What do you think happened?” Clove looked like a bobblehead looking in every direction so fast. “Is it Bigfoot? Has he finally come for us?”
I ignored her and got out of the car.
“This isn’t smart.” Clove made a desperate grab for me. “Every horror movie I’ve ever seen starts this way.”
“What aboutThe Ring?” Thistle challenged. “OrGhost Ship? Or?—"
“Stop talking to me,” Clove snapped.
I left them to argue and started toward the truck. My first inclination was that perhaps a dog had escaped from an open window and run into the woods. Perhaps the owners had gone after it, thinking it would be a fast trip but it had somehow turned into a bigger thing than they envisioned.
I didn’t hear a dog barking, and when I scanned the woods, I didn’t hear people calling for an animal. Everything was eerily quiet.
“Hey.” Evan almost caused me to jolt out of my skin when he appeared beside me. “This is weird, huh?”
