the area.
“The hike into Robbers Cave is pretty this time of year. They’ll bring clean linens to your cabin, so leave whatever you want picked up out on the stoop, and they’ll trade you clean for dirty,” she added.
Charlie wasn’t planning hikes, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. He took the map and the key and left.
A short while later, he pulled up in front of the old rock cabin and parked. It took a couple of trips to carry in his bags and the groceries, but once he was inside, he began putting things away, then poked around the one-bedroom cabin, noting the television, the kitchen and the wood-burning fireplace, before checking his phone. He already knew there was no available Wi-Fi and that service was going to be spotty here, but he didn’t care. He turned up the thermostat to warm the place up, gave the bathroom a quick look, and then he went into the bedroom, kicked off his boots and stretched out on top of the spread.
The room smelled of pine and lemon oil, and a faint odor of ashes. He heard a scratching sound near the window and wondered if there was a mouse in the cabin, but when he looked, he saw it was just branches from the bushes outside.
The silence lulled him into a sense of well-being. Within moments, he had closed his eyes. In the distance, he could hear the faint sound of children laughing. It was a good sound, and it felt good to stretch out his legs, even if his feet hung off the end of the bed.
The thick walls muffled all but the loudest sounds, and when the heater kicked on, it added a low hum within the room. Charlie was finally asleep.
* * *
It was midday when Wyrick received Wanda Carrollton’s information. It was enough to get started, and she needed to stay busy. Getting that text from Charlie had been disconcerting, but not surprising. Charlie Dodge was a grown-ass man who’d gotten himself back from Afghanistan in one piece. If he felt the need to disappear for a while, she understood it.
She went upstairs once to check on Merlin, and found him in the kitchen, having soup.
“Hello, Jade! Are you hungry? There’s more noodle soup.”
“No, but thanks. I’m working a case and just wanted to check on you. Do you need anything?”
“Crackers. I forgot to get them out of the pantry.”
“Done,” Wyrick said, and opened the pantry door, then stopped and grinned. The lineup of cracker boxes was impressive.
“Saltine, pretzel, wheat or rye?”
“Old-school saltines, please,” he said.
She grabbed the box and slid it onto the table in front of him, then went back to the pantry and got a jar of peanut butter, too.
“Just in case you want dessert,” she said.
“You must be psychic,” he said.
She grinned. “I must be,” she said, and then went back down to start running a search on the info Wanda had given her.
Within an hour, she found out why the mother quit contacting Wanda all those years ago. She was dead. She had remarried, to someone named Andy Delgado, but they were both killed in a car accident when Katrina was seven. At that point, Katrina disappeared into the foster care system.
Wyrick sighed. This was bad news. Once a kid was logged into the system, the paper trails were often buried, which meant more digging. But Wyrick was a master at research and buried info, so she went back to work. Katrina would be twenty-six years old now. Wyrick knew she could find her, but there was no way to predict the outcome.
* * *
Charlie slept all afternoon, and woke up just as the sun was going down. He got up and stepped outside long enough to gauge the falling temperature and the gathering clouds, and got a whiff of burning wood and charcoal, and the scent of cooking meat. The residents in other cabins were making dinner on their grills, but he wasn’t cooking.
He went back inside, made himself a sandwich with some cold cuts, opened a bag of chips and popped the top on a longneck beer and settled down in front of the TV to eat.
There was one brief moment when he started to call Morning Light to check in, and then remembered. His vision blurred slightly as he blinked back tears, took a drink of the cold, yeasty brew, then upped the volume on the television and ate his food.
Later that night, after he’d gone