Part 2
Owen caught Cal before his face reached the snow. He lowered him against a tree and pressed his gloves over the wet place on Cal’s right thigh. Cal’s sharp grunt frightened Lucy less than his silence had.
Lucy covered Cal’s cold fingers with both mittens while Owen tied Cal’s bandanna over the gloves, keeping pressure on the wound. Flint pressed against her shoulder, leaving Owen room to work.
Owen got Cal’s arm around his shoulders and waited until his good foot was underneath him. They stood on the second try. Lucy reached for her crutches and found a scorched blue scarf beside them. Silver letters spelled ALDER CREEK POLICE.
“Is it yours?” She held it where Owen could see, hoping it might wrap around Cal’s fingers.
He looked closely enough that snow fell from his eyelashes onto her mitten. His free hand closed around the scarf without taking it away from her.
“They gave these to our winter volunteers. Some officers got them, too.”
“One of your people?” Cal asked.
“Maybe. Or somebody who could get close to them.” Owen looked back toward the road. “Keep it, Lucy. Don’t wipe anything with it.”
She tucked the scarf into her coat. She had heard adults use that careful kind of voice before, when they stopped saying everything in front of her. This time neither man asked her to go where she couldn’t hear.
Flint stopped at a place where footprints crossed the path. His nose moved along them toward a leaning pine; then he scratched at something under the powder. A dark loop rose against his paw, and he jerked away from it.
Owen halted so abruptly that Cal stumbled. He pulled Lucy back by the shoulder and studied the wire without touching it. Its other end disappeared around the base of the tree.
“We go around,” he said.
The footprints continued between the pines. Flint kept returning to their smell, nosing the places where snow had been disturbed. A little farther on he stopped at branches laid too evenly across a hollow. Cal held him back while Owen tested the edge with a fallen stick; the branches slipped into a hole beneath them.
Lucy didn’t look down into it. She watched Owen’s boots instead, putting her crutches only where he told her. When Flint balked at another brush-covered hollow, they went wide without testing it. At the next narrow gap his growl stopped Owen’s raised foot, and the man crouched until he could see the thin line stretched between two trunks.
Cal drew Lucy against his good leg. “Stay here while he looks.”
She wanted to ask whether the traps were for animals. She could see Owen looking at the height of the wire, though, and after that she didn’t want him to answer.
They left the marked track. Owen chose bare patches beneath the thickest branches, stopping whenever Cal needed to cough. The cabin where Lucy had waited was close on the other side of the road, but reaching it meant crossing the open ground above the burning truck.
“Your radio?” Cal asked.
“Gone with everything else.” Owen glanced at his empty belt. “I missed my check-in. Captain Holt knows which spur I came up. They’ll be trying to reach us.”
Lucy looked between the trees for orange rescue coats. Owen followed her glance and shook his head once. “The road was already closing when I came. We need somewhere out of this wind.”
They rested in a shallow hollow under the ridge. Cal sat on his folded jacket while Owen checked the bandage, and Lucy put the scarf across her knees. It bothered her that something with police written on it had been lying where bad things happened.
“You were supposed to lean on me,” he told Cal.
Cal moved his mouth before any sound came. “You were falling over.”
“Well, I’ve stopped. Your turn.”
Owen helped her free the snow from her crutch cuffs. “How long were you outside before you found us?”
“I don’t know.” She watched his fingers, which were scraped in the same places as Cal’s. “Flint knew the way.”
“You shouldn’t have had to come that far.”
She understood that he meant the cold. Still, she pulled the scarf closer and said, “Cal came for me.”
Owen stopped working on the cuff. She could hear Cal breathing beside them, slowly now, with long spaces between.
“My stepmom put me outside in the snow,” Lucy said. “Before I lived here. She didn’t open the door again.”
Owen kept his hands where she could see them. He waited, and Lucy found she could say the rest without looking at his face. “I was getting sleepy. Cal found me. Flint was there, too.”
Cal shifted beside her. When she looked up, he was holding out his hand again, and this time it stayed steady until she took it. She leaned against his good side, letting Flint press his head into her shoulder.
“I wasn’t going to leave you sleeping,” she told him.
Cal bowed his head over their hands. Owen looked away for a moment, then stood, testing his weight before helping Cal up. He didn’t ask Lucy why she had come again.
The afternoon light was thinning when Owen stopped at the end of the ridge and pointed through the trees. Lucy followed his hand and saw a low roof, almost hidden beneath snow. He changed direction at once.
The little forestry hut had a chimney, a door, and one dark window. Lucy watched the chimney all the way there. No smoke came out.
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