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“Presumably the wolf was there to prevent that but, yes, it would have made more sense to bring him closer. They either didn’t care or they didn’t dare. Dead or alive, he’s still a message.”
Dalton sighs. “I hoped we were done with this shit. Get away from Rockton. Get away from all the history there, all thepeoplearound there, and find ourselves an empty space. How hard can that be?”
Theoretically, itshouldn’tbe hard at all. The Yukon is as big as Texas, with forty thousand people, most of them in Whitehorse.
“The problem,” I say, “is that if we think this particular piece of land is perfect, someone else will, too. We might not have found anyone on our forays, but we both knew that didn’t mean no one was out there.”
He grumbles under his breath. It isn’t as if we’re a couple who bought a piece of property and now we’re complaining that someone else is moving in next door. Weneedthat isolation. It’s what allows us to offer sanctuary.
Someone else is out there, and we need to deal with that. Dealing with it will—I hope—mean convincing them that we come in peace. Or that will be the plan if our “neighbors” turnout to be miners or trappers or off-grid settlers. We promise that we’ll keep to ourselves and that we have no interest in minerals or furs or whatever limited resources they might be here for. We just want the privacy, and we will be ideal neighbors—so quiet and tidy that you’ll barely know we’re here.
It’s a whole lot different if the person we’re dealing with has beaten our resident into a coma.
“You think it’s the same person who killed our mystery woman?” Dalton asks.
“If it’s not, then that means more than one person out there to deal with. Imagine someone attacks our mystery woman. Kills her, realizes what they did and quickly hides the body. But then there’s Bruno. Maybe he was with her, or maybe he saw her body. The killer attacks him with plans to use him to send a message to the place he comes from.”
“Which is not the placeshecomes from.”
I sigh. “And that’s where it gets complicated, because our dead woman isn’t Penny, and we have no idea who she is. Also, she was attacked while undressed.”
“She doesn’t look like she lives out here. Maybe someone Bruno knows? I have no idea how she’d track him here—or how he’dinviteher here.”
I sigh and rub my temples. “I’m getting ahead of myself. With any luck, Bruno will wake up and fill in the blanks. In the meantime, as much as I want to be here for April, we need to get back out there searching for Penny.”
“Why don’tIget out there searching. I can take the girl with the blue hair.”
“She has a name.”
“Kendra. I know. I’m just slipping back into Sheriff Dalton mode, where I don’t give a shit about anyone’s name, because I’m an uncaring asshole.”
I roll my eyes. “Fine, Kendra knows what she’s doing out there, so if she’s free, take her. I’ll stay here in hopes that Bruno wakes up and can tell us more.”
“Also maybe get some sleep?”
“After I jot down my notes.”
He sighs and shakes his head. “Let me go rustle up some breakfast then.”
I’m alone in the clinic jotting down notes in a book I stole from my sister. I know I’m going to catch shit for that. I always did. She’d have a shelf of untouched notebooks and journals, and I’d take one, and she’d give me hell because she’d been saving that particular one for a particular purpose, even if it was the same size as ten others on that shelf. I know better than to argue now. I just take a picture of the notebook and resolve to replace it with this exact one.
During my time in Rockton, I always had a notepad at hand. I had to. There was nothing else to use for writing and organizing my thoughts. At first, I’d found it frustrating when I couldn’t cut and paste or reorganize a page of clues and theories. Before that, paper had always been nothing more than a temporary storage device between my brain and my laptop.
Now I have Dalton’s phone, and I will have a laptop… and I find myself swiping one of April’s journals instead because jotting on Dalton’s phone is driving me to distraction. I can’t see nearly enough of the page, and I can’t make margin notes or add arrows linking thoughts. My brain has changed, and this is what works, scribbling clues and theories and ideas and questions.
When the door opens, I’m so wrapped up in my note-takingthat I think it’s Dalton bringing breakfast… which he brought two hours ago, and we ate together, and my now-cold cup of coffee still sits at my elbow on April’s filing cabinet.
“Hey,” an unfamiliar male voice says.
I look up to see the guy who answered the residence door in his briefs. He’s wearing a bit more now, but it’s still not what I would consider seasonally appropriate, given that it’s ten degrees Celsius and he’s in a ripped tank top. When he notices me looking, he gives a little flex that has me struggling not to roll my eyes.
“So you’re some kind of detective, huh?” he says as he slides into the room.
“Some kind,” I murmur, and I put the pen down on the pad with a decisive thwack, drawing attention to the fact he’s interrupted my work. “May I help you?”
“The question is whether I can help you.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively.
“You have a tip about the disappearances?”
