AllFreeNovel
Share Us
MISTY
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.” Misty slid another long, bendy, sectioned rod through a set of the dome tent’s sewn-in pockets. They had both done so until they had what looked like a flattened spider on the ground in front of them. The rods, or whatever, stuck out way past the tent fabric. “There’s no way this is gonna work.”
“Tell me you’ve never pitched a tent without telling me you’ve never pitched a tent,” Zig said. Then, with a nod, “Grab that end.”
Misty took the end of the pole. Zig took its opposite end across the fabric from her. “Now, tuck it into that little pocket in the tent fabric. You see it?”
She looked down, she saw it, and slid end of the rod into the pocket, but she had to slide it way in to do so, so it was sticking out even further on Zig’s side. “Now what?”
“They bend for a reason, Misty. Didn’t your parents ever take you camping?”
“Sure, but they never made me pitch the tent.”
“Well they should’ve.” She gripped the pole thingy and pulled its end toward the pocket, making the entire thing bow outward and sliding the fabric pockets lower, as she snapped the end into its pocket. “Next pole,” she said.
In two minutes, they had a dome-shaped tent set up. Its green and brown camouflage pattern was not reassuring. They didn’t look anything like the pines around them. She unzipped the tent, took her backpack inside, and opened it up.
It smelled good in the woods. They’d parked a ways off, hiked about a mile through state forest to get to the cabin where Eva Quaid had lived with her husband, Paul.
Zig had scoped out the spot ahead of time, a small clearing, tucked in among dense pines, on a steep ridge with an excellent view of the cabin. A little brook tumbled along beside it. The place was pretty rustic, nice. Its red-brown logs matched the tree trunks in the woods all around it. The roof was green, and so were the shutters, and so were the surrounding pines. Its “lawn” was scattered plants in a substrate entirely made of pine needles. It smelled like Christmas on steroids out there.
“This place is amazing,” she said, taking a big deep breath of it. “No wonder the guy hardly ever leaves it. Who’d want to?”
Zig was unrolling her sleeping bag inside the tent. “Are you kidding me right now? Middle of nowhere, off the grid? There’s a pic of this place in the dictionary definition of ‘serial killer’s lair.’”
“Not off the grid.” Misty pointed at power lines, and then the satellite dish on the roof.
“Middle of nowhere still applies.” Zig placed her sleeping bag to the left of center in the circular space inside the tent, pulled a mini pillow out of her bag and tucked it into place.
“Don’t get so comfortable,” Misty said. She didn’t unroll her own bag. “We won’t have to spend the night. He’ll leave soon.”
“I don’t know,” Zig said. “When I go on a road trip, I leave in the morning. He hasn’t budged all day.”
With their gear inside, they returned to the log right at the edge of their site. Beyond the log, the ground dropped down sharply, its face gnarly roots and red earth. At the bottom, twenty feet down, the stream burbled happily past. Misty imagined it absorbing any noise they made up here. Past the stream, in the middle of a clearing, was the Quaid cabin.
It was like a storybook painting. Or one of those by that Kincaid guy her mom liked. She handed Zig the binoculars and got up to stretch her legs.
They’d been watching the place for hours. As the day waned and Paul Quaid still showed no sign of leaving, they’d finally decided to pitch their tent.
Misty was itching to get a closer look, but the man was still there. He’d wandered in and out a few times, moving between the house and the little slab-sided outbuilding she presumed was his workshop. He’d spent hours in there, pounding on things and welding. At several points the workshop’s windows had blazed with white-light, and his hammering rang through the woods for what must have been miles.
Eventually he returned to the house again, and the smells of food cooking wafted up to tease their senses as the sun vanished behind the trees.
Dark came earlier in the woods. Misty was glad they’d pitched the tent while it was still light enough to see what they were doing.
“He worked on his art all day,” she said. “He must be going to the show. He hasn’t missed one in fifteen years, according to our research. Maybe he just wasn’t ready yet. But he’s definitely going.”
“Yeah. In the morning.” Even as Zig said the words, they came true; the lights in the cabin went out, first in that little room in the front, and then in the back. Zig sighed and lowered the spyglasses.
Misty said, “You’re right. He’s gone to bed.”
“It’s not even nine yet.” Zig rolled her eyes. “Old people.”
“Christy will have already performed,” Misty said softly. She pictured her badass sister playing a mermaid and couldn’t quite make the vision appear. She hoped someone got video. “I can’t even text and ask how it went.”
“If we had our phones, and anything went wrong, they could prove we were here. You know this.” Zig sighed. “He’ll leave in the morning. I’m betting on it. But I think it’s safe to assume he’s not going anywhere tonight.”
“He was working in that room with the little windows for a long time this morning,” Misty said. Zig would know which room she meant. Front, far left. “And he was messing around in there again when he went in at lunch time.”
