looked back to make sure Walt was paying attention. She actually looked proud of him as she found him coming up behind her and she tore excitedly to the edge of the meadow, looked back once more, and dropped out of sight. For a moment Walt lost his equilibrium: when he’d last seen her, she’d been nose to the ground, aimed back down the hill toward the Engleton estate.
51
Fiona had taken more than the five minutes allotted to her for the A recording of the remains of Guillermo Menquez. So she was surprised to hear the ambulance engine start, and the vehicle drive away when she’d been expecting a reprimand.
“Hello?” she called down through the hole left by the open trapdoor. “Hello? Are you there?”
In truth there wasn’t anything more to photograph. She’d taken a dozen pictures of the deceased and another dozen of the tree house interior, overcome by chills most of the time, both to be alone in the presence of a dead body, and to realize someone had been living up here. It looked like it; it smelled like it. There was little doubt that the structure had been used as a hideaway, and the thought that it was but a matter of yards from her cottage and the main house made her sick to her stomach.
As she came out of the tree house and back down its ladder, she looked over her shoulder to see a tiny light up the hill, winking at her as it descended steadily through the forest.
She clung there to the ladder and reached for her phone to call Walt, to confirm this was him headed toward her, but didn’t have it on her. She’d left it in her bedroom, along with the handgun. Suddenly the cottage and the main house looked different to her, given the evidence of someone living in the tree house, given the dead body up there. She considered the safe room where Kira had hidden herself, but couldn’t bring herself to enter either the home or her own cottage. The flashlight was heading through the forest at a run, heading down the hill, heading toward her.
Now she heard her ringtone from within the cottage. She took two steps in that direction but stopped, picturing someone hiding in there waiting for her. The phone’s dull ringing continued through three more cycles and went silent. The phone . . . The gun . . . The flashlight, no longer seen.
No way she was going in there.
She looked up. Maybe the safest place was in the tree house, standing on the trapdoor to keep it from opening, but not if it was the killer’s lair, not if she had to hole up with a dead body. Hadn’t Walt once said the best place to hide was out in the open? She spotted the stack of split firewood, and beyond, another stack of the unsplit rounds. A trail led up into the woods from just beyond the pond. Where would she feel safer: wandering an empty house the size of a hotel, or tucked away in the woods with her back against a tree? The flashlight had to be Walt. He couldn’t be more than ten minutes away.
She left her camera bag at the foot of the ladder and hurried to the stack of logs, jumpy and agitated and feeling like someone was constantly a few feet behind her. Glancing over her shoulder nervously. Scared of her own shadow.
She reached the stack of rounds and there was a baseball bat stacked among the logs. Kira’s missing baseball bat, probably placed there by one of the gardeners. Or maybe it was the bat from outside her own cottage. She wrapped her hand around it and squeezed tightly.
It felt right.
52
Walt followed Beatrice down the hill at a jog, their routine familiar to both: she would go out ahead of him, locked on the scent, then return to within a few yards of him to make sure he was still with her. As he broke out onto a defined path, Walt switched off the flashlight and fitted it back into its loop on his gun belt. It was dark in the woods, but the path revealed itself as a pale ribbon and Walt followed it effortlessly, slowing only occasionally as it turned or twisted around a rock outcropping or became darkened with a tangle of exposed roots.
As much as he appreciated being on the scent, as much as he understood a killer’s bizarre need