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 onher 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 façade.
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.
Chapter 10ANNIE
The phone on the nightstand rang shrilly, and Annie twitched on the bed, startling herself awake. She sat up, dazed, and wiped a string of drool from her mouth, blinking at the window where faint light was tinting the sky beyond the fir boughs.
Was it dawn or dusk?
Dusk. The headache throbbing behind her eyes was proof that she hadn’t slept nearly long enough. The lamp was on, and an open novel lay splayed across the bedspread where it had fallen from her hand. She hadn’t meant to drift off, only to read for a little while before dinner, to try to distract her mind from the thing it kept spinning back around to again and again: the woman on the rocks.
Yesterday afternoon, a few hours after they found her, Jake had called with the update that the recovery team had decided to wait until the storm blew through before retrieving the dead woman from the cliffside, and Annie had lain awake all night as it poured, thinking of the poor girl out there alone, her body cold and lifeless and soaked by the rain.
The phone rang again, and Annie reached across the pillow for it.
“Hello?”
There was a pause, and then, “Ms. Heston?”
“Speaking.”
Another pause—longer this time.
“I think I just heard the cougar. South side of the lake.”
It took a moment for Annie’s cobwebbed brain to catch up, to fill in the blanks.
“Is this Daniel?”
“Yeah.”
She glanced at the cluttered corner of the room where her gear was heaped in a pile. “Are you sure it was a cougar?”
