Part 4
The drone held its position above Walt’s yard, its red light steady in the snow. Dean watched it through the narrow gap beside the curtain. “Thermal camera,” he said. “Maybe optical zoom. Once Pike sees the truck move, he’ll put everyone behind it.”
Far down Lost Lake Road, engines rose and fell as vehicles fought through the drifts. They were still beyond the trees, but not by much.
Walt checked June again. The color had begun to return to her face, yet her breathing remained shallow and too quick. Rook stood beside the couch favoring his dressed foreleg with a slight limp, listening toward the road.
“They named my truck in the bulletin,” Walt said.
Dean looked at him. They understood the same plan at once.
“No,” Walt said. “You won’t make the county road before they close it.”
“I’m not going to the county road. There’s an old snowmobile behind the gravel pit. I’ll let them see me take the truck down the logging spur, leave it beyond the ridge, and double back.”
“And if the drone stays here?”
“Then you need to be gone before it decides to look closer.”
The first wash of headlights moved between the spruce trees. Walt hated the plan because it depended on a man he did not yet trust. He hated it more because there was no time to invent another one.
He lifted the rug beside the pantry and opened the cellar door. It was not a secret passage but an ordinary stone room dug into the slope when Walt’s grandfather built the cabin. Steep stairs led down from the kitchen. At the far end, beyond shelves of empty mason jars and a bin of soft potatoes, a pair of low wooden doors opened directly onto the downhill side of the foundation. Anne had used them to carry in bushel baskets every fall. Snow and years had swollen them tight.
From the air, the doors were hidden beneath the porch overhang and two old lilac bushes. Beyond them, the ground dropped toward Black Spruce Creek.
“A deer trail follows the creek’s west bank under the hemlocks,” Walt said. “We stay off the channel and beneath the branches. The drone won’t see us there.”
Dean took Walt’s keys. “Seven minutes. If I’m not at the split cedar by then, keep going.”
He reached for June, perhaps intending to say goodbye. She turned her face into Rook’s neck.
Dean let his hand fall. Walt packed the trauma bag, the clinic wristband, the red mitten, and the evidence envelope holding the gold ladybug barrette. Then he wrapped June in Anne’s long down coat. It reached almost to her boots.
Outside, the pickup started with a hard metallic cough. Dean held the engine high until the exhaust rolled hot and white around the cab. The drone shifted immediately. Its buzz moved toward the driveway.
Walt guided June down the cellar stairs while Rook followed carefully, favoring his right foreleg. Through the kitchen floor came the crunch of tires, then the roar of the pickup accelerating away. One set of approaching engines changed pitch and followed. Another did not.
“Come on,” Walt said.
He forced the walkout latch. It moved a quarter inch and stopped. He struck it with a jar wrench, once, twice. On the third blow, the rust broke loose. Walt put his shoulder against the doors. Snow packed outside resisted like wet cement until one side opened enough for Rook to dig from below.
They emerged behind the lilacs into a pocket of darkness beneath the porch. No one on the road could see them. Walt eased June down the slope, placing each of her boots in the holes his own made. At the creek, he kept them on the raised bank, probing the snow ahead with a fallen branch wherever the edge disappeared.
Rook went first, nose low. June held the back of Walt’s coat. They moved along the deer trail beneath hemlock boughs so heavy with snow that the branches formed a roof above them.
Behind them, doors slammed in Walt’s yard, and a man called into the dark.
“Mercer! Come out with your hands visible.”
Walt kept walking until they reached a hollow where the creek had eaten into the bank beneath a fallen cedar. He drew June into it and covered the opening with a curtain of dead branches. Rook folded himself across her legs. Through the trees Walt could see the cabin roof and the yellow square of his kitchen window.
Men moved inside with flashlights, emptying drawers and kicking through the woodpile. The drone returned from the logging spur and circled lower.
Then a man in a white parka splashed fuel across the porch. Walt knew what would happen before the match flared. The fire climbed the cedar post and slipped beneath the eaves. In seconds it was running along the roofline. The kitchen window brightened, shattered, and breathed flame into the storm.
Anne’s house burned room by room: the table where she had rolled pie dough, the chair where she slept during her last week because lying flat hurt, her winter coat still hanging in the hall. Thirty-nine years of ordinary things disappeared in front of him, each carrying a memory no one else would know how to mourn.
June’s cold hand found his. Walt closed his fingers around it and did not make a sound.
Pike’s men watched until part of the roof folded inward. One of them spoke into a phone. “No bodies. Truck went west. We’ll call the house an accident until we find Mercer.”
They left two minutes later, following their own tire ruts toward the logging road. The drone went with them.
Only when the engines had faded did Rook raise his head. A different sound was coming from upstream—a single snowmobile moving without lights.
Dean stopped beneath the split cedar and dragged a cargo sled into the hollow. “They found the truck sooner than I hoped,” he said. “We have to move.”
His jacket smelled of exhaust and smoke. One glove was black with soot, several pale splinters stood from the seam along his thumb, and a strip of orange repair tape crossed the knuckles.
June stared at that glove. At first Walt thought the fire had frightened her. Then she drew both hands against her chest and looked from the orange tape to Dean with an expression too old for six.
Dean saw it. Whatever explanation he had prepared disappeared from his face.
“She remembers the glove,” Walt said.
Dean slowly pulled it off. “I closed the infirmary,” he said. “Pike told me they only needed one night while Graham arranged a private transfer. I put the chain through the handles. I snapped the padlock shut myself.”
Walt stepped between him and June. “She was awake,” Dean continued. His bare hand shook in the cold. “I told her I had to go home to Micah. I told her I would come back and take her out. But when I came back, Pike was there. After that I brought food, medicine, fuel. I kept promising myself the next trip would be different.”
June’s rough little voice came from behind Walt. “You said you’d come back…”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇