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“Do you think it’s possible to get close to someone for a dark reason, but then fall in love anyway? And wish you could go back and start again?”
She felt tears well to her eyes. “What are you saying, Joshua?”
His gaze drifted behind her, and she turned to see another form standing on the deck, tall, hooded. Not Hannah. Not anyone she knew. A cold dump of fear hit her belly. The person at the edge of the lake.
“What’s happening?” she asked, not liking how girlish, how afraid her voice sounded. “Who is that?”
When she turned back to Joshua, he was standing right beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder, a finger to her lips.
He was a stranger suddenly, someone powerful and threatening.
The form outside knocked insistently on the glass.
“What’s happening?” she asked again. Everything wassonot what she thought, what she expected, that it was the only thing she could think to say.
“Shh,” he said. “Just stay quiet, okay? Don’t scream. Don’t make a scene. And we’ll get through this.”
His words made no sense. Get through what? Who was this guy? How had she never seen the darkness in him, the coldness? It was all he was now, like a switch had flipped. A frightening stranger. She tried to remember the man who’d made love to her in the car just hours ago. He seemed like a fantasy.
His grip on her shoulder was hard, painful. She tried to wrest away from him, but he wouldn’t let her and he was impossibly strong, bringing his hand to her other arm. He pulled her closer to him, hard.
She wanted to plead with him to bring the Joshua she knew back. The one who made her smile and feel safe. What happened to him?
She’d been right, hadn’t she?
She had known in her deepest heart that he was too good to be true.
“Just do what I say now and no one else is going to get hurt. Okay, Cricket?”
“Why would anyone get hurt?” Confusion wrapped around fear, muddled her thinking. “What do you mean no oneelse?”
Josh reached past her and unlocked the door, letting the worsening weather and the other stranger inside.
32
Bracken
The rain beat on the roof of his truck as he powered down the dark, winding roads. The storm had come on harder and sooner than he’d expected.
Bracken had been on his way to Overlook when he’d gotten the call from the angry guests. Angry or scared? Hard to tell the difference sometimes. When people were afraid, sometimes it made them rude, or unthinking, or both.
Power out.
Someone missing.
Someone hurt.
No electricity meant that the cameras weren’t working, couldn’t send their signal through the router. There was no way for him to visually check in on the group. He was cut off from them and he didn’t like it.
And what had happened to the generator? He’d just inspected it himself. It had been in perfect working order earlier in the week. Was there someone else up there?
He had a strange sense that darkness had come to Overlook. Again.
His big truck made light work of the swamped roads. There were some smaller trees down and branches littered the blacktop, but the pickup rolled over those as if they were twigs. Gusts of wind buffeted the sides of the truck.
When he got closer to Overlook, up ahead he saw the tree down. A young oak, charred and splintered, twisted across both lanes, lay in the beam of his headlights as he approached. He brought the truck to a stop, wheels whispering in the water.
Bracken had placed a couple of calls to guys he knew were game to come out in any weather to deal with problems. You needed a rough-and-ready team when you ran rentals in an isolated area. But his calls had all gone to voicemail, which might mean that people were hunkered down or that cell signals were bad tonight.
