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But who?
Silently, Sandrine and Taryn began clearing the dishes. They’d been doing it after each meal almost the entire week so that now their movements were practically synchronized. They picked up dishes with their left hands and then tucked them into the crook of their right elbows before heading to the kitchen. Nicola and Brian retreated to the armchairs circled around the wood-burning stove, sitting across from one another. Nicola stared into the glass door of the stove, while Brian fiddled with his phone.
The way Josie saw it, there were three possibilities. The first, and most likely, was that Meg had followed, gone to meet, or been lured by someone on the retreat. Someone in this room. The staging of the body to make the death look like it was from hypothermia made sense if someone here had killed her. They might want it to look like a tragic accident so as not to arouse suspicion. Who here knew enough about hypothermia to stage the body correctly? There was Alice, obviously, although Josie’s gut told her Alice was not a killer. Taryn’s parents had been very outdoorsy, according to all the stories she’d told about them that week. Josie didn’t know enough about the others to make a guess as to their knowledge of death by hypothermia.
Josie heard Mett’s voice float from somewhere deep in her mind.You’re focusing too hard on the hypothermia thing.What if the killer didn’t stage her body at all? What if he sexually assaulted her and simply didn’t bother to put all her clothes back on?
“Shit,” Josie muttered.
“What?” Alice said.
“Nothing.”
Mett’s ghost voice was right though. Josie was getting tunnel vision—only seeing one thing. She didn’t really know that the killer had staged the body. In fact, the sexual assault theory was far more likely. She’d seen it before on the job. But there was no way that Josie would know whether Meg had been sexually assaulted until her body was autopsied by a medical examiner. She just had to live with the uncertainty for now.
The next question was which of the people in this room would Meg follow or go to meet late at night in the woods during a snowstorm? Josie understood why Alice immediately zeroed in on Brian. In these situations, a male always seemed like the obvious suspect but in her last several cases, she had learned never to make assumptions when it came to finding a perpetrator. Also, it was hard to imagine Meg sneaking out under such conditions to meet a man after what her stalker had put her and her sister through. While Josie hated to think it, she could not eliminate the others.
The second possibility was that Meg had run into Cooper somehow. Paradoxical undressing seemed like something he might be familiar with. Something had obviously been going on between him and Meg. The nature of it was anyone’s guess. Josie would like to think that if Cooper had been harassing Meg, or making her uncomfortable, she would have told someone at the camp, but she knew that women, in particular, were so hard-wired not to cause a stir, lest they be accused of overreacting, that they often put up with almost anything. Plus, Meg had already been so beaten down by her ordeal, she might not have had the mental energy to report any inappropriate behavior.
It was also possible that Meg had simply been complaining to Cooper about some issue with her cabin—the generator, perhaps. There was one behind each of their cabins. It was Cooper’s job to maintain the property. They’d all gone to him for help with something at various points in the week. Maybe the chats meant nothing at all.
Regardless, there was the logistical issue of how Meg ended up part of the way down the trail. Cooper had already been gone for a couple of hours when they’d had dinner, long after the last time he and Meg spoke behind her cabin. No one mentioned hearing the Gator buzz up the hill during the night. If Meg had walked all the way down to where her body was found and ran into him there, at which time he killed her, it was possible no one would have heard the Gator at that distance. He could have gone back down the mountain, and no one would have been the wiser.
The third and most remote possibility was the one that Alice had suggested in the shed: Meg’s stalker had somehow found and followed her to the retreat and attacked her. Josie couldn’t discount this theory, but it had been months since Meg had had any contact from him. Josie had no doubt that Austin Cawley was every bit as desperate as he had been when he kidnapped Meg and her sister. She was sure he’d illegally procure any means necessary to cross multiple state lines to get to Meg. If Cawley was the killer, maybe he hadn’t been trying to stage her body but instead attempting to assault her. The real question was that if he was still stalking her, how would he find her here? Josie had been to Sullivan County before. She was used to rural Pennsylvania, but even she had had difficulty finding the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain. Every single one of them had—even with directions from Sandrine’s office. Nicola and Brian had gotten lost. Then there was the issue of how he’d navigated the snow successfully.
Alone at the table, Josie leaned toward Alice and whispered, “Meg was from Texas, right?”
Alice’s eyes widened. She looked around to make sure no one was watching them. “She lives in Maryland, now. I mean, she did. She moved after her stalker disappeared. But before that, yes, it was Texas. Why? You think her stalker did this? You think he’s here?”
Josie smiled reassuringly. “No. I don’t think it’s likely.”
“Oh God, then it’s someone here. Or Cooper. Is it wrong to say I wish it was Cooper? At least he’s not here right now.”
Before Josie could answer, Sandrine and Taryn returned to the room. Sandrine carefully pushed the other chairs up to the table while Taryn took a seat near the stove with Nicola and Brian. Under the table, Alice reached over and squeezed Josie’s arm. The reassuring feel of her hand sent a wave of warmth through Josie. Immediately, her mind turned to Noah and the way his touch always seemed to calm her and settle her anxiety. What had Gretchen meant when she said he was a damn mess? Was it because he was upset about the news they’d received, or the way she had left things? As hurt as she was, she found herself wishing for him. She missed his soothing hands, his easy smile, the way his dark hair stuck up in the morning, the way nothing unnerved him.
Well, almost nothing.
Before her mind could go down that road again, Josie pushed thoughts of Noah deep into the back of her mind. She had to focus on the situation at hand. Sandrine was standing in the center of the room, addressing them. “I think we need to talk about what happened today.”
Josie and Alice stood and followed her over to the chairs, sitting beside one another while Sandrine took the centermost seat where she had a good view of each one of them. Josie was grateful for an excuse to sit near the wood-burning stove, although it wasn’t giving off as much heat as it had been after Brian first lit it this morning. After taking photos of Meg’s cabin, she’d stopped at her cabin and changed into dry clothes, but she still felt cold. Now she pulled her hands inside the sleeves of her Denton PD hoodie, trying to warm her fingers.
Nicola got up and went over to the stove, feeding more logs into it. “You mean talk about the fact that we came to this place to process our trauma and found a dead body? I’ll start. It’s really fucked up.”
Taryn’s fingers traveled to the hollow of her throat, scratching. “Nicola, please. Language.”
Nicola rolled her eyes. “It is.” She closed the door to the stove but stayed on her knees in front of it, looking around at the rest of them. Josie noticed that in spite of her usual bravado, tears glistened in her eyes. “Don’t you think so? Isn’t anyone else thinking that?”
Brian tucked his phone into his pocket and leaned all the way back in his chair, limbs sprawled. “I’ve been thinking that.”
“And Meg. Poor Meg,” Nicola added. “She was here to try to get her life back, to feel some control over things again, and she dies? It’s fucked up.”
Sandrine clasped her hands together. “While I would not have chosen those words, Nicola, you’re right. This was supposed to be a week where I hoped to provide a safe space for all of you and offer you multiple ways in which you might process some of the life trauma you’ve all endured and instead, what’s happened is that you’ve all been retraumatized and Meg lost her life. I think at this time, we should all take a few minutes to gather our thoughts and then share how we’re feeling about Meg’s death. Then I’d like you each to think about what would be the most effective way for you to begin to process Meg’s death.”
Alice crossed her arms, hugging herself. “Sandrine, that’s all well and good but I think we should be figuring out how to get off this mountain as soon as possible.”
Brian lifted a hand in the air. “I agree.”
Sandrine sighed. She looked toward the windows; Josie followed her gaze. Since they’d brought Meg back to camp, at least three more inches of snow had fallen.
