Cold River - Carla Neggers [17]
If he hadn’t had help with the work itself, he’d at least had advice.
“Maybe,” Hannah said aloud.
She could be wrong. Drew had been a Cameron, after all. Who was to say he couldn’t have managed on his own, without help or advice?
She’d learned to keep her mouth shut until she was sure she had her facts straight.
Especially when the facts involved her past.
Leaving her poles outside, she pushed open the solid wood door, wincing at the loud creak of the hinges, as if it might wake someone, or alert someone to her presence. She stepped inside, pulled the door shut and tugged off her snowshoes. She didn’t want to stop moving for too long. Once she got cold, she’d have a hard time warming back up.
The cabin was just one room with windows, a front door and back door and the woodstove, which hadn’t been hooked up yet.
She went still, certain she’d heard a sound outside.
Not a chickadee or the wind.
A deer? A moose?
She tiptoed to the front window next to the door. Kyle Rigby, hidden among the spruce trees with an assault rifle, had shot out the glass. After the police had released the cabin as a crime scene, Jo and Elijah had nailed thick, translucent plastic over the opening and cleaned up the shards.
Hannah tried to peer through the plastic but couldn’t see anything except blurry white snow and the vague outline of trees.
Again she heard a whooshing sound.
Someone on snowshoes or skis?
She held her breath and listened but heard nothing now.
Had whoever was out there paused to eye her tracks in the snow—her ski poles leaned up against the outside of the cabin?
Not waiting any longer, Hannah grabbed her backpack and snowshoes and bolted across the plywood floor for the back door. It wouldn’t be locked. There was nothing in the cabin to steal except the woodstove, and who would bother hauling it down the mountain in winter conditions?
“Hannah. It’s me—Sean Cameron.”
Before Hannah had a chance to adjust to the idea of who it was out there, she heard the creak of the front door and spun around just as it opened.
Sean lifted his sunglasses onto the brim of his wool cap and frowned at her from just outside his father’s cabin. “Hannah, what are you doing?”
“Getting ready to bolt. Sean. Damn.” She took in a sharp breath. “Scare me to death, why don’t you?”
“I’m sorry I startled you.” He nodded to the snowshoes in her arms. “Were you going to beat me over the head with one of those?”
“I was just trying to get out of here.” She hoped she sounded calm, sure of herself. “I figured I’d need snowshoes once I outran you—or whoever it was.” She smiled. “Of course, I was hoping it’d be someone I could outrun.”
“Or a friend,” he said.
“Yes. Or a friend.”
Sean stayed just outside in the snow. He didn’t look particularly winded or tired from his trek up the mountain. But he wouldn’t. Hannah had never seen him in action as a smoke jumper, a job that required him to maintain a high level of fitness.
She followed his gaze to the plastic-covered window. “I finally had to come up here and see for myself,” she said.
“Why now?”
“Initially law enforcement wouldn’t let anyone near this part of the mountain. Then we had the holidays, and I was so busy. This morning I knew it was time.”
“What made you know?”
Sean wasn’t letting her off the hook, but she had no intention of lying to him, or of giving him a full explanation. She’d been thinking about Drew’s old cellar hole for days, and seeing Bowie walk into the café with Elijah and Sean and the law there—their reaction to him—had forced her into action. Bowie was a stonemason. They shared a difficult past. He’d worked with her father and knew as much as anyone in the area about historic stonework.
“I wanted to get things settled in my own head,” she said simply.
“Did you succeed?”
“I don’t know yet.” She walked past