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Nothing exciting.
Certainly nothing that would send me southward.
Not on a work night.
And, to be fair, not any night. I wasn’t someone who ventured very far from her comfort zone. If I were to go out after work, it would have been to a local restaurant I’d been to a dozen times before, whose menu I knew held something I would like, where I would feel almost at home.
I wouldn’t have headed south.
And I couldn’t think of a single reason – ever – for me to be in the woods.
I was a mani-pedi-Sunday-brunch kind of person, not a hiking-boots-and-pants-tucked-into-socks, adventure-seeking kind of person.
If I had been in the Pine Barrens, I had not been there willingly.
“Do you remember how you got here?” he asked, making my head shake. “Do you take drugs?”
“No!” The word came out like a shriek, making my throat set to fire. My hand shot up, the softness of the bandages pressing into my neck like I could rub the pain away.
“Okay,” he said, seeming to attempt soothingness as he raised a hand, palm out. Nothing about his voice could be considered soothing, though. And something about those enormous hands – nearly big as a dinner plate, I swear – was very unsettling. “I’m just trying to figure out how the fuck you ended up in the Barrens all sliced up.”
“You stitched me?” I asked, trying to understand the sequence of the events.
“It was dark. Takes hours to get back to civilization from here. I wasn’t sure if you’d make it if I didn’t stitch you up. I can drive you into town to get looked at by a doctor,” he added, but there was genuine hesitance, reluctance in the words.
Why? I wasn’t sure.
I mean, well, what was he doing in the Pine Barrens?
I didn’t know as much about them as I likely should have seeing as they were part of my home state, but I did know that no one lived in them. You could visit, camp, that kind of thing. But you didn’t just… live in them. I think I remembered seeing something in a book about New Jersey once about there being ghost towns there, though.
So maybe he was squatting.
But why?
Who squatted in the woods?
The homeless.
Criminals.
Well, that might make sense.
He wouldn’t want to reemerge, have to take me in, risk being seen.
Or have me tell someone about the mountain man who saved me.
If he matched some description for some bad guy somewhere, they would come looking for him.
“What time is it now?” I asked, disoriented by the windowless room. But, oddly, I was almost sure I heard the sound of a rooster crowing. “How long was I asleep?”
“It’s about seven. You were out for a good five hours.”
“On Wednesday,” I clarified, liking details, figuring it would be easier to piece this whole thing together if I had all of them.
“Thursday,” he corrected, brows drawing down. “Is Tuesday the last thing you remember?”
“Yeah. I was on my way to work. I remember…” I started, blinking a few times as I tried to drag a thought to the forefront of my slow brain. “I remember trying to figure out if I had enough time to stop and get coffee on the way.”
“Where do you work?”
“Why?” I asked, suspicious, not sure if he was someone I should be trusting when I didn’t know him from Adam. Even if he did sew me up.
“You don’t strike me as someone who gets involved with the kind of people who slice other people open. Just trying to figure out how you ended up here with someone who did that.”
“Wouldn’t that be the job of the police?” I shot back.
“If you think they have better connections than I do, then yeah.”
“Well, seeing as I have no idea who you even are…”
“Ranger,” he supplied easily, shrugging the information off.
“Ranger. And you live in the Pine Barrens with your dogs?” Maybe a bit of dubiousness slipped into my tone. But who could blame me? Someone living in the Pine Barrens was about as unlikely as you could get, right?
“Not for long, I guess,” he said, turning and walking out. As though we were at the end of a discussion instead of in the middle of one.
Doorway no longer blocked, the German Shepherd charged its way in, hackles at the very top of his shoulder blades raised as he made his way toward the side of the bed.
The snarling made a choked shriek rush out of me until I realized it was my friendly bull-like dog making the noise as he lunged toward the side of the bed, snapping at the German Shepherd in a way that – and there was almost no denying this – seemed to imply he was trying to protect me from his fellow dog friend.
“Come,” Ranger barked from the other room, making the curious, fearful dog turn on a dime and rush back out.
