Finally, straight manmade lines drew themselves on the night air, and then the headlights’ glare filled a wooden porch and the cabin wall behind it with light.
Blaze stopped the car, and his exhausted sigh worried Sarah. She asked, “Were you too tired to drive?”
“We made it,” he said.
She needed to be more assertive about splitting the driving. When they’d stopped for a fast-food midnight snack and gas in Nanuet, she should’ve pressed the issue.
When Sarah opened the car door, a light on the bottom edge spread illumination on the gravel and her boots as she stepped out. She stretched her back, twisting until it cracked in the middle.
The humid smells of plants rotting into rich earth filled the air, unlike at her farm, where the soil humus was spiked with acrid chemical fertilizers that smelled like vinegar or nail polish remover, depending on the month.
Flashing sparks of fireflies wrote glowing curves in the darkness. One flashed and faded out, then another flashed, then another.
Fatigue was making her loopy.
That morning, they’d walked out of the Four Seasons Hotel in Cleveland and been shot at. That afternoon, they’d saved a foal stuck in the mud.
Yesterdaymorning, she corrected herself, because the day had flipped at midnight.
But she hadn’t slept since, so it still felt likethatmorning.
It had been a long day.
And now they were standing in front of an honest-to-goodness log cabin in the woods.
Logs,like the round trunks of trees, stacked and notched on the corners where they nestled together.
Very Laura Ingalls Wilder, although the big woods with her little house had been in Wisconsin, not just over an hour’s drive from New York City.
The air chilling her arms was a lot cooler in the mountains of Rockland County than in New York City, and the cold wafted through the knit sweatpants and tee shirt she wore and sucked the warmth from her skin.
Blaze left the car’s lights on to illuminate the cabin’s front porch while he called his friend. Through the still air hovering around the hunting cabin and the occasional rustle of the wind in the trees, Sarah heard the voice on the phone, “Will,” tell Blaze the key was hidden in a tree with a rotted-out knot just off the house’s back corner. She waited, her working boots crunching on the gravel driveway, while he fished around in the brush with his phone’s flashlight and came back, holding up the key in victory.
Blaze said, “He says the cabin is rustic, so I’m not sure what we’ll find inside.”
She wanted to shake her head in dismay at the city boy, but even that was a lot of effort for that time of night. “Blaze, sweetie, I’m a farm girl.Rusticis my middle name. When I was growing up, we had ice on the inside of the windows for months during the winter.”
He fiddled with the key and the doorknob. “Well, it’s June, so we probably won’t have to contend with ice.”
“From the lightbulb burning by the front door, I’m assuming it has electricity. I’m just hoping there’s a faucet and a hot plate to boil some water for a bucket bath. I still have Pennsylvanian mud in unmentionable places.”
His wry smirk and glance away while he retrieved their duffels from the trunk and slung them over his broad shoulders was the cutest. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“I wish my brother had waited to do a treason until after he’d let us shower at his place.”
“I wasn’t going to say it, but the showers in his apartment are fantastic.”
“Oh, way torub it in.”
He pushed open the door warily and flashed his cell phone’s flashlight inside. “Let me go first.”
Right.
Sarah checked out the woods in the spillover light from the car’s headlights just in case she needed to bolt into the darkness.
Every time the floorboards inside groaned with Blaze’s weight, Sarah’s legs twitched as she repressed the instinct to take off running into the woods.
He leaned out of the door and picked up the duffels with one hand. “Clear. I’ll turn off the car.”
