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I rise, beer bottle in hand. “Have you had the proper tour yet?”
“I have not.”
“Come on then. Let me show you around your new home.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Another long day. Another restless night. We’re sleeping on the balcony again, and this time I keep thinking I hear bear bells and wolf howls, and at one point I wake thinking I hear Penny in the forest, shouting for help. I dream of everything that has happened, all mixed up, as if my brain is trying to store the memories in its filing cabinet and keeps opening the wrong drawer.
I dream of being in the forest, with that wolf, only it’s Storm standing over the body and when I look down, it’s Dalton’s still form she’s protecting. Then I’m back in the pit, and when I dig, instead of finding a napkin, I find Penny, buried under where the mystery woman had been laid. Then I’m in the clinic, interviewing Bruno, except it’s not Bruno in the bed, it’s Gunnar.
“Yolanda was heading out?” I say in the dream.
Gunnar’s brow furrows. “No, she was coming back.”
I tap my notepad. “That’s not what Bruno said. He spotted her on the path, heading out right after they fought.”
“He couldn’t have. I told you he didn’t head out directly, right? I saw Yolanda leave. It was about a half hour before Bruno left.”
I startle awake. Then I sit up and replay it. Dream-Gunnar was right. He’d told me there’d been a decent gap between Yolanda leaving and Bruno leaving. But Bruno made it seem as if they’d both taken off at the same time. He said he saw her heading out, and she was presumably angry about their disagreement, just as he was.
But if he was angry about their disagreement, why did he take half an hour before heading into the forest?
Oh, there are explanations here. Bruno could have mistaken the direction Yolanda was going, and she was heading back to town, not away from it. He’d tried to cool down, realized he was really pissed off, andthenwent into the forest.
But if Yolandawasheading back, then she hadn’t been in the forest long, certainly not long enough to do anything to anyone. And where the hell was Penny, if Penny followed Yolanda out?
“You’ve had a thought,” Dalton drawls behind me.
I lean down to press my lips to his. “No major revelation. Just something I missed.”
“Share?”
I tell him, and as I do, his head tilts.
“I don’t like it,” he says.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” He pushes up to sit. “Three people go into the forest. Two seem to be cooling off from a fight, and they pick the same way to deal with it? Then a third person follows one of them. Why? To catch her boss going into the woods when she’s not supposed to?”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t sound like the Penny anyone has described.”
“So why did she follow Yolanda? Did she think Yolanda was up to something? Three people go into the forest. One comesout fine. One’s found after a fall. One’s still missing. And a fourth party is dead. Yet none of these have anything to do with the other.”
“They must, obviously.” I glance through the railing, my fingers tapping the floor. Then I pull my hand back. “I’ll talk to Bruno in the morning.”
“It is morning.”
I give Dalton a look. “My sister would kill me for waking up a seriously ill patient to question him at four in the morning.”
“His plane will be here at six.”
I swear under my breath.
“Yep,” Dalton says. “His plane arrives at six, and April’s going to need to get him up soon to prepare him for the flight. She won’t appreciate a fourA.M.wake-up, but she also won’t appreciate you peppering her patient with questions as she’s getting him ready to leave.”
He pauses. Then he hits me with “Also, if Bruno really is holding back, he knows the timeline. He can use it to his advantage.”
