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Terra moved back outside and walked around the cabin in ever widening circles.
Okay. Bigger.
A doe dashed away, startling her. She was entirely too edgy. She hadn’t known the deer was watching.
“Foraging for berries in the bushes, were you? I didn’t mean to—” A strange-shaped rock near a bush caught her attention. She stooped to look closer.
Was it stone? Wait, no. Clay. An artifact they’d missed? Terra pulled on gloves to scrape away the earth, except the corner wasn’t buried, after all, but rested on pine needles beneath the bush, as if it had broken off from a larger piece and fallen to the ground. She assumed this was related to the cache they’d found. She took a few photographs of the object and the area surrounding it, then took a wider image showing where the object rested in relation to the cabin.
Then she carefully lifted it. Roughly the size of her palm, it appeared to be the corner of a clay tablet. Turning it over, she noticed etchings unlike anything she’d ever seen—except in photographs.
Her heart rate kicked up.
Terra hadn’t heard anything back from the forest service archaeologist about the artifacts they’d secured from the cabin. This broken corner was something different altogether. Hands shaking, she carefully wrapped the piece in the gloves to protect it and placed it in a zippered pocket of her jacket.
Terra would give the cabin another look before she left. If this was missed, maybe something else had been missed too. She had the feeling that the investigation had just gotten ... bigger. But she wouldn’t jump to conclusions until she had an expert examine the object.
And, unfortunately, she knew just the expert.
Inside the cabin again, she flipped on the flashlight and shined it around. Though she didn’t believe she and Jack had missed anything, or the county evidence techs either, stranger things had happened. After all, she’d found the unusual fragment near the cabin.
She gave up the hunt, stashed her flashlight, and opened the door. Or tried to.
It was locked.
What? Terra pulled and yanked and kicked. She shined her flashlight on the knob. Was it the kind of knob that could be locked and unlocked from the outside only? No. Twisting from the inside should release the locking mechanism.
Okay. She could unscrew the entire thing. Except she didn’t have a screwdriver. She’d climb out the windows then. Oh, right. They were boarded up.
Terra moved to one of the windows. Maybe she could remove enough boards to climb out. A pungent odor tickled her nose. Alerted her senses.
Smoke.
Panic grabbed her.
Peering through the crack in the boards to see outside, Terra had the eerie sense she was trapped behind prison bars. A pop resounded. Sparks drifted across her line of sight. She shifted to peer at the woods behind the cabin and saw nothing. Then ... fire.
And a hooded figure running away.
Terra stepped back from the window, her breath catching in her throat. She turned around.
Flames licked at the far corner of the cabin. Soon it would be engulfed.
Fear ignited her whole body. She reached for her cell, her slippery fingers hindering her efforts to grab on. Come on! Of course she had no signal here.
She texted Jack, hoping at least that would go through. But she wouldn’t wait for someone to save her. She had to find a way out of this cabin before toxic fumes overcame her.
