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 washerbar 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 heknow?
“Hey, Baz, is that you?” someone called down the street, a woman’s voice. Maybe the same from earlier, maybe different. How many people wereinthis 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 wasdefinitelynot 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.
BAZ
Baz had leftthe soap at the cabin that both sight and scent told him was being lived in: trampled grass around the door, the slight smell of bug spray and deodorant. He hadn’t mentioned their mystery guest to Lexie. Whoever was staying here might be from the wild shifter clans, or perhaps it was a camper nervous of being caught somewhere they shouldn’t be. In either case, he meant them no harm, and hoped to have a friendly chat with them later.
Despite the evidence of occupation, the cabin had felt distinctly empty when he left the soap there, but the mysterious bather had been at the pool not too long before. His bear was as intrigued as Baz, stirring lazily from its usual calm to perk up with ursine curiosity.
He looked forward to having a little mystery to investigate.
By the time he returned from wandering the town’s back streets, he’d long since lost track of Lexie, who he had last seen muttering about water treatment and piping systems at the creek. He found all three of the others sitting at the pile of gear with an open cooler, several demolished paper plates of sandwiches and pie, and a large, nearly empty jug of lemonade.
“You’re lucky you came back when you did, cuz,” Lexie called. “I saved the last quarter of Aunt Saffron’s pecan pie for you.”
“She means she didn’t have room to eat it all,” Fern put in.
Declan didn’t add anything, but even his cranky attitude seemed to have relaxed a little with the food. Baz dug himself out a large chicken salad sandwich. One thing of the many things their families could always be counted on for was good food.
“Did everyone find places to stay?” he asked, adding some chips to his lunch. Embarrassingly, he had forgotten that one of his reasons for exploring was looking for somewhere to den up for the night. He had found himself wandering from one part of the town to another, as if driven by some instinct he couldn’t explain, looking for something he hadn’t been able to find.
“It feels so weird,” Lexie said, forking up leftover fragments of pie from her plate. “Just moving into someone else’s house like this.”
“You’re not, though, any more than buying a house through a real estate agent would be,” Baz pointed out between bites of his sandwich. “Every property in this place was bought up by a real estate developer back in the sixties or seventies, and it’s all ours now. So you can pick whatever house you want.”
“I found mine,” Fern said cheerfully. She pointed across the street. “You can’t see it from here, it’s behind some trees, but it’s an adorable little cottage. I think with some paint, it’ll be so cute I could die. There’s even an overgrown orchard with fruit trees. Baz, did you see any bunnies?”
“What? No. You mean wild rabbits? Did you see one?”
