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Alice looked around the group. “Why would she have ‘walked off’? Why leave her cabin without telling anyone? If she left sometime after the sound bath last night, it was already snowing pretty heavily.”
The room fell silent. Josie could hear the wind whistling through the trees outside, but the generator was silent. For the first time, she noticed how cold it was inside the building. Without Cooper, no one had started the generator or lit the wood-burner.
Nicola said, “Everyone here is fucked up. Who knows why she left?”
“Nicola, please,” Sandrine admonished.
“Come on, Sandrine,” Nicola shot back. “It’s true.”
“Well,” Taryn huffed. “I take issue with that. You might be…messed up but I’m not.”
Nicola laughed. “You’re at a retreat for trauma, Taryn.”
Taryn folded her arms across her chest. “We’re all here for the same reason. To try to get better. I went through some things, just like all of you, but I’m dealing with it. I’m fine.”
Nicola smirked at her. “Sure you are.”
Sandrine put both palms up. “Please. That’s enough. Let’s keep the focus on Meg. She’s not in her cabin. There is a great deal of snow outside and it doesn’t seem to be stopping. We need to find her.”
Josie said, “Did anyone see Meg after the…” she couldn’t believe the words were coming out of her mouth as the practice had seemed so odd to her when she first heard of it but was actually very soothing, “sound bath?”
Heads shaking all around.
Alice waved a gloved hand at the windows. “Shouldn’t we just follow her tracks in the snow?”
Brian said, “How could we even tell what tracks are hers? We’ve all just trampled anything that might be out there.”
Josie said, “Sandrine, did you notice any tracks coming from Meg’s cabin when you came out of the main house?”
Sandrine shook her head. “No. None. I was looking because I hoped Cooper had come back and maybe he was rattling around somewhere, but there was nothing.”
“Cooper didn’t come back from checking on the weather?” said Nicola. “That’s suspicious.”
Taryn rubbed two fingers against the hollow of her throat. “Why is that suspicious?”
“’Cause how long does it take to check on the weather? He could have gotten back up here before the snow got bad, which means he chose not to come back.” She stabbed Brian’s ribs with her elbow. “It’s weird, right?”
“I, uh, don’t know.”
Taryn adjusted the hat on her head, pulling it down more firmly over her ears. “Maybe something happened to him! He could have been hurt or something. We should be looking for him, too.”
Josie had had the same thought but there had not been much time to examine it. Cooper seemed to handle himself quite well in the woods and, as caretaker of the remote property, he knew the area better than anyone. Josie thought it was more likely that he either hadn’t been physically able to get back to the cabins in the dark or he had seen an opportunity to get away from them for a night and taken it. Either way, she hoped he was in a nearby town, in a position to get them some help.
“Sandrine,” Josie said. “Do you have a phone? Is there a landline here in the main house?”
Sandrine slowly shook her head.
“What about a SAT phone? Surely, Cooper had one on the property for emergencies.”
Sandrine grimaced. Her voice was almost a whisper. “He took it with him.”
“What?” Brian blurted. “Are you kidding me? Why?”
Sandrine held her hands out, palms up. “In case something happened to him in the snow and he needed help.”
“And you let him take it?” Alice said.
“We’re fine here,” Sandrine said. “We’ve got heat and food and shelter. Cooper was navigating in the snow. If he had an accident, he would need it more than us.”
