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He shook his head. "They didn't ask that question, and I - I was feeling uneasy at being questioned by the police. It made me confused, and I did not remember to tell them that. It was such a small, quick incident. Only now, when you asked, did it come back to me."
Gabe nodded. "Okay. Thank you. I appreciate what you've told me." He hesitated. "You can get back to work now. If I need to know anything else, I'll come back."
He turned and headed out of the barn, feeling thoughtful and preoccupied by what he'd learned.
As he left the barn, he glimpsed something to his right - a dark, furtive shadow. But instead of moving away, it was lunging toward Gabe.
The dull light gleamed on something he caught out of the corner of his eye as he twisted desperately away from it, knowing he was too slow, too late.
The blade of an ax was whistling down toward his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY
What was that noise? Was that Gabe? Anxiety clenched inside Cora painfully as she rushed out of the farmhouse kitchen, bursting into the grassy yard beyond. Something had gone wrong. She knew it.
“Gabe!” she yelled.
And then she saw him. He was heading away from one of the outbuildings and running toward the edge of the forest. At the sound of her voice, he stopped, turned, glanced at her, and Cora's heart stopped as she saw her own horror reflected in his face. His hand and sleeve were wet with blood, streaking the white knit fabric dark crimson.
"Gabe!" Was her linebacker injured? She raced toward him, and he slowed, jogging toward her and away from the forest. "What the hell happened? Is it bad? Are you okay?"
Gabe lowered his arms slowly, taking deep breaths, seemingly to calm himself. He looked at the blood on his hand and winced. "It's just a scratch," he said, trying to reassure Cora. "I think I managed to dodge most of it."
Cora let out a sigh of relief, but she could still feel her heart thudding in her chest, and now the unanswered questions were clamoring. "Most of what?" she asked, looking around. "Did someone attack you?"
Gabe nodded. "A man was hiding behind the shed, and when I walked out, he came at me with an ax. I managed to avoid it, but he grazed my hand. I ducked down, kicked out at him, he shoved me back, but before I could do a thing, he ran. I was going to try and chase him down, but I guess he had the jump on me. I lost him."
"What the hell's going on?" Cora muttered. This was the killer. She knew it. And he'd seen there were people searching for him and had attacked Gabe in his desperation to get away.
"We need to go into that forest, hunt him down," Gabe said, but Cora shook her head firmly. Right now, she was going to have the deciding vote on what they did, and she was going to make damned sure he was okay.
"Your hand," she said.
"It's literally just a graze." He was clenching it tightly.
“Open it!” She heard the whiplash tone in her own voice, fear giving it an edge.
It wasn't just a graze. It was more than a graze, but it wasn't as deep as she'd dreaded. The corner of the ax had pierced his skin, and it was bleeding hard.
"We need to bandage that," she muttered.
"There's no time," he said. "I'll wrap my sweater sleeve around it."
"You need to see to it first," Cora insisted. She'd had things go bad with a partner before. So bad that she never wanted to think about it again. Gabe was her partner now. Never, ever, would she leave him injured.
But she’d reckoned without his level of stubbornness in this regard.
"No,” he said. “We go into the forest now. We need to catch this guy! I’m not going to bleed to death. Bleeding is probably good. Get the dirt out. I’ll see to it just now.”
Cora sighed heavily. Then she nodded, admitting temporary defeat, and they started into the forest. Moving as fast as they dared, Gabe was in the lead, with Cora right behind. She tried to adapt as quickly as she could to her surroundings, peering into the gloom for any signs of the attacker—footprints, broken branches, anything that might clue them into his location.
But the paths in the forest were well trodden, and there were many of them, winding through the trees, crisscrossing each other. She guessed that the members often took trips in here to get firewood or pine needles or any other essentials to keep the great machine of the foundation churning forward.
"There has to be something. He ran in a hurry," she muttered. And Gabe, though temporarily stunned, would have seen and heard which way he'd gone. She was sure they were on the right track. But they were finding nothing.
Or were they?
It was only as she passed a pile of fallen leaves, blown by the wind to pile up against a bent tree root that she saw something gleaming there.
