Heneeded rest, she meant, though she wouldn’t say that flat-out. She peered at his body and grimaced at his bloodstained clothes. Man, they could use a bath. A laundromat. A bed.
She pictured him, stretched out in rumpled white sheets, his already messy mop of hair standing up from bedhead, a sleepy smile on his wide mouth.
What the hell am I doing? He may not be the killer the entire world thinks he is, but he’s still a complete stranger.
She cleared her throat and asked the first question that came to mind. “So, how’d you end up here?”
He gave her a narrow-eyed look over his shoulder, then went back to hammering spikes into the ground.
“Not herewith me.” For some inexplicable reason, her face grew hot at those words. The next ones came out louder. “In Alaska. How’d you go from West Virginia to here?”
“Family lived here.”
“Papers never mentioned that.”
“My dad got a job managing a mine in West Virginia when I was in high school. I graduated down there, went to college there. Far as anyone knew, we’d cut all ties with Alaska.”
“Except Amka.”
“Not just her. I mean, she’s my godmother, but the whole town’s like family.” He sniffed. “We never lived in Schink’s Station, but I spent every summer there. They’re the kind of relationships that don’t make it into your background file, you know? And it’s not like I ever called her or visited.”
“So, what? You picked up the phone and told her you were coming?”
“Hell no.”
“You just showed up? Hoping for the best?”
He grunted.
“What if she’d thrown you out? Or turned you in?”
His next grunt edged into snort territory.
“Okay.” Getting a response from him was like pulling teeth. “So you hopped a flight and—”
“Hiked.”
“You hiked from West Virginia to Alaska?” Now it was her turn to snort. “You’re serious?”
“Figured I’d blend in best on the Appalachian Trail, so I took that north. Geared up and started off in West Virginia, got myself a trail name, grew a beard.” He ran his fingers over his facial hair, as if remembering life before becoming a yeti. “Far from the most direct route, but most through-hikers have no idea what’s happening in the outside world. Nobody recognized me. That got me up to Maine. Crossed into Canada on foot.”
“How long did it take you?”
“With some hitchhiking in Canada and some pretty intense wilderness crossings, took me close to a year.”
She stayed still for a few long beats, trying to put herself in his shoes, imagining that slow, cold journey overland, with a destination that might be welcoming or—if he’d grossly miscalculated—not. She felt like hell after two days of this shit and he’d done it for months. She’d just opened her mouth to ask what it had been like when he spoke again.
“You shoulda seen her face when I knocked on her door. I was rough, tired, filthy. Like something the cat had maybe thrown up a few times before dragging it in.”
A wide grin split Leo’s face. “Gross.”
His answering grin made him look a decade younger and crushingly handsome. It left her breathless.
“She saw right past the beard, though. Knew who I was in a heartbeat. Everybody said I was dead, but she knew. No fooling Amka. Ever.” His smile was bright in the fading light. “Looked me up and down, totally expressionless, and saidBet you’re hungry, then waddled into her kitchen, like she’d been expecting me. Like she…” He swallowed hard, closed his mouth tight, and breathed audibly. Waiting for the emotion to pass, she guessed. Not surprising given how much his story was affecting her. She could only imagine what these memories dredged up.
The wind whipped around them, chilling her now that they’d stopped.
“What time do you think it is?”
