She shook her head. “No.”
Wolf was worried because there’d only been a sudden flurry of motion. It could’ve been a bird taking flight, or a deer spooking. He hadn’t seen anything, and he didn’t think Camelliahad either. She looked his way, locked eyes with him briefly, then lowered her gaze.
Camellia
Camellia didn’t think Wolf believed her. There was worry in his face when he looked at her, not worry that her ex was about to murder her, no. The kind of worried look you give your parent when they repeat the same story three times in a row or put their car keys in the toaster. That look hurt.
Maybe…maybe it had just been physical between them. It had beenreallyphysical, after all. Boy, had it ever! She got a little tingle every time she thought about it, despite her thorough disappointment in him at the moment.
But she no longer doubted herself and realized she never should have. She had been feeling spiders crawling up and down her spine too frequently to doubt own senses. Earl was here. It’d probably been him following them as they’d hiked up to the shack. Had he seen their frenzied passion on the stony trail and followed them back to discover their campsite, so he could watch her day and night like he had before?
The medics loaded Ranger Dan onto a stretcher and put him onto a small trailer attached to the back of one of the ATVs. Then they drove off to meet an ambulance on the camp road as one ranger questioned Wolf. Another one was still talking to Camellia, but his words were a droning buzz. Her mind was too busy calculating her chances of survival here, in the middle ofnowhere, with a companion who didn’t believe she was even in danger.
She replied to the questions on autopilot, told the ranger about her ex-stalker and how she’d heard from him again just before this trip, and how she’d seen his Blazer and thought she’d seen him here. She told him all of it, and he didn’t take a word of it seriously. She could tell. There wasn’t a female ranger among the group. If there had been, maybe things would have been different. But as her mother had been teaching her for her entire life, men don’t have clue what it’s like to be a woman. They can’t understand or empathize. We’re like aliens to them.
“He could have fallen, hit his head on that rock there,” muttered one of the men near the spot where the old man had been lying.
“Maybe he had a stroke or a heart attack or something,” said another. “That could’ve caused him to fall.”
Camellia rolled her eyes. “Am I free to go?” she asked, still on autopilot.
“We don’t have anyone registered on this site,” said the one in charge. He was lean with gray hair and stern eyes. “Why is that?”
“We were near a cliff, and she sleepwalks,” Wolf said. “So we moved to an empty spot and planned to re-register in the morning.”
He nodded slow and said, “See to it you do that.” Then, to Camellia, “You can go.”
She headed back to the tent and felt Wolf’s eyes on her but didn’t look back. She was on a mission.
Inside the tent, it was too warm. She shut off the little heater and made a mental note to charge its battery at the first opportunity. Then she went to their stack of camping supplies. Most had been unpacked from the giant duffle and arranged inreasonable order. But the extra backpack lay on its side, looking empty.
It wasn’t.
She had a gun in that bag, a small but potent .38 caliber revolver with a trigger lock. The key was in the backpack’s side pocket.
She’d never been an advocate of guns, but when Earl had been stalking her, she’d decided there were times when a person needed extra protection—especially if that person was a woman with a batshit crazy ex. So she’d bought a gun and taken lessons at a firing range fifteen miles from home. She hadn’t even told her mom.
And she hadn’t told Wolf that she’d brought the weapon along.
She took the gun out, took off the trigger lock, but turned on the safety. Then she put a bullet into every spot in its revolving chamber. She slid the gun into a pancake holster attached to a wide elastic belt, and then stretched it around her waist under her shirt. Her oversized hoodie covered the gun’s bulge.
She was straightening the hoodie when Wolf came in, and she didn’t want to talk just then about his belief in her or lack thereof, so she took Ranger Dan’s torn sheet of paper out of her pocket and handed it to him.
He studied it. “I know you think this is related to my case, but I can’t figure out how.”
“Fine, it’s not related. We’re finished here, then. It’ll be daylight soon. Might as well pack up and head home.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait, I didn’t say it’snotrelated. Just that I don’t know how.”
She rolled her eyes, then crouched low to unzip their sleeping bags, peeling them apart and feeling the symbolism of it like a blade.
“I don’t know how either. But why else would he rip this page from a logbook and bring it to our tent in the wee hours, when he wasn’t even on duty?”
“How do you know he wasn’t on duty?”
“He told us he had to get back and punch out,” she said.
“Riiiight.” Wolf nodded. “Okay, what if this listisa clue? What would we do next?”
