say the man was about Harper’s age—young, early twenties probably, and very sheltered, though obviously toughened too. Mark stared at the frozen landscape, the mountainous terrain blocking the last of the dying sun. You’d have to be tough, living out here. And maybe “tough” didn’t even begin to cover it.
He wondered how Lucas factored into this whole thing—or if he did at all. He’d made it sound as if his relationship with Driscoll was extremely limited, and that he only saw him a few times a year, if that. The quiet, watchful man was difficult to read, but Mark sensed he was holding something back.
Harper seemed troubled as she started up the truck and turned the heat up to high. The snow flurries had died down, but it was still below freezing according to the temperature gauge that had been hanging on the house next to what had been Isaac Driscoll’s door. Why the hell would anyone want to live out here? This sort of cold was miserable. Biting and painful.
Mark swiped his phone, relieved to see he had service. He pulled up his email and was glad that the message he’d been expecting was in his inbox. He clicked on the attached PDF and a scan of the “map” that had been in Isaac Driscoll’s bedside table filled the small screen. He handed it to Harper, and she stared at it for a minute before looking at Mark questioningly. “Is it a map?”
“Seems to be. Only I don’t know what it’s of. And what these”—he used his index finger to point to two red boxes containing X’s and an empty black box—“might indicate, if anything.”
Harper turned the phone so it was horizontal, enlarging the picture and zooming in on the X’s and then back out again. She studied it for another few minutes, her brow furrowed in concentration. “This squiggly line might indicate water? There’s a river in that direction.” She pointed off behind Driscoll’s cabin. “Or maybe it’s a trail?” She shrugged. “But there are a hundred trails in this wilderness. There’s really nothing here that speaks of any landmark I’d recognize.”
“I figured. What about when the snow melts?”
She thought about it. “If we used his house as a starting point, we could hike out around the area, look for something that might provide some information about what he was marking.” She gestured her head toward the phone. “It looks old though with all those creases, and the ink faded the way it is. He might have been marking the location of water or something he found necessary when he first moved out here? Maybe even a location where he was observing the animals you mentioned.”
She looked back to the phone. “Obedient?” she read, the one word printed at the bottom of the piece of paper. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Harper looked at it for another moment and then handed the phone back.
Mark put it in his pocket and Harper backed out of the turn-in, heading onto the snow-covered back road they’d used to get to the cabin. She was right, of course. The “map” was most likely related to whatever animal observation he was doing here in the boondocks. But something in his gut told him he needed to locate those X’s and find out exactly why Isaac Driscoll had considered them important. Looking at how aged the piece of paper was, it seemed he’d kept it beside his bed for many years. But why?
CHAPTER TEN
The snow crunched softly under Pup’s paws as he ran to Jak and dropped the stick at his feet. Jak knelt down and took the stick, running his hand along Pup’s thick fur, warm from the early winter sunshine. “Good boy,” he said. “But there’s no time for fetch today.” He looked at the gray sky, squinting against the brightness for a minute before looking back at Pup. “We need to get ready for winter.” His chest got achy at the thought of what was soon to come.
Cold.
Hunger.
Misery.
Jak hadn’t expected the snow yet. He’d tried to keep track of the months as they’d passed, tried to remember the order they went in and how many days were in each one since the helicopters had disappeared, but he didn’t know if he had it right. Either that, or the snow had come early this year. He’d traveled to the place where he thought the helicopters had flown, but it had taken him almost eight days to get there in the snow