“Ms. Fulkerson?” he said again.
The trance she was in seemed to break. She slumped and could barely hold herself up. He went to grab her, and she was ice cold.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.
Stride coaxed her arm around his shoulder and helped her toward the forest trail with an arm around her waist. Her trembling turned into out-and-out shivering. Her knees were weak, and she stumbled as they inched through the snow. He bent her down when the branches were low. She didn’t say a word. When they finally broke from the trees near the river, he took her to his Expedition and guided her into the passenger seat. He got in and made the truck’s heater roar. He grabbed blankets from the rear seat and draped them over her shoulders and lap.
“Let’s get you to the hospital,” he said.
“No.”
“You may have hypothermia.”
“I’m just cold. I wasn’t out there long.”
Stride didn’t like it, but he left the truck in park. He noted that the heat had begun to revive her. Her voice was stronger and clearer. She stretched out her fingers. Color came back to her face.
“Do you have any water?” she asked.
He didn’t comment on his sense of déjà vu. He found a plastic bottle of water that was mostly frozen and unscrewed the cap. He made sure she dribbled only a little between her lips.
“What were you doing out here?” he asked.
“I come out here sometimes. This place draws me back.”
He slipped a hand inside the pocket of her coat and found the revolver and made sure it was secure. Without asking her permission, he unloaded the bullets and put them away in his jacket. “Why the gun?”
“Protection. You meet strange people out here.”
Stride didn’t doubt that was true, but he wondered if the gun was really for protection or was for something else. He wondered how many times she’d brought it with her. He wondered how many times she’d stared into the barrel with her finger on the trigger. The past didn’t give up its grip easily. Horror had a way of coming back like a virus.
She looked at him unhappily and then looked away, as if she could see what he was thinking.
“How are things going for you, Lori?” he asked pointedly.
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Of course. I’m just expressing my concern.”
“Well, don’t.”
Lori had never been a warm person, even after he’d rescued her. She was prickly and hard to like. He didn’t know how much of that was her natural personality and how much was a reaction to the time she’d spent in the cage. She was a loner. As far as he knew, she’d never been married. He didn’t know much about her family background.
“Are you getting help when you need it?” he asked. “I’m not asking for details; I just want to make sure you know about resources—”
“Trust me, I’ve burned through most of the shrinks in Duluth,” Lori interrupted. “My head should be the size of a walnut by now. Same with antidepressants. Nothing makes it go away.”
He didn’t say anything more, because anything he said would make things worse. He’d had to remind himself years ago that not every victim was a saint.
“So they’re making a movie about you,” Lori went on with acid in her voice. “You must be pretty impressed with that.”
“Not in the least.”
“Oh, come on. It’s got to be a big ego thing.”
“There’s nothing about what happened back then that I want to remember. Three women died. You nearly died, too.”
Lori shrugged. “Well, Art Leipold hung himself. So at least one good thing came out of it.”
Stride didn’t know how to respond to such raw pain. Eleven years had gone by, but it might as well have happened yesterday.
“The actress who’s playing me keeps calling,” Lori continued. “She wants to meet me. She says she wants to know what it felt like to be in the cage. She invited me to visit her on the set tomorrow.”
“Is that why you came back here tonight?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I need a reminder.”
“You don’t have to talk to Aimee Bowe,” Stride said. “On the other hand, maybe it would help to have someone else try to understand what you went through.”
“It’s not like some Hollywood blonde can spend ten minutes with me and get inside my head.”
“You’re right,” Stride said. “Nobody will ever know the truth except you.”
“Yeah. Me and the ones who died. Sad little club, huh?”
“You’re alive,” Stride pointed out softly.
Lori didn’t look at him like being alive was any prize. “My mother thinks I should talk to Aimee Bowe. She says it would be good for me. She says I’m still in the box and maybe it would help me get out. She told me to be brave. Like she has any idea what that’s like. At the first whiff of trouble, she runs away. Did you know my mom walked out on my father when I was ten years old?”
Stride shook his head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
“She took me away from him. Moved us across the country. I never saw my father again. When he died, she didn’t even tell me about it for six months. Six months! She got married again, and she and my stepfather pretended I had brand-new parents. Like the past was nothing, you know. Like I should just forget it. Well, that’s not me. First chance I had, I got out of there and got the hell away from them. I went to business school when I was eighteen, and when I was done with that, I moved back to Duluth. I figured I’d be happy coming home. You want to guess how well that turned out?”
The venom in her voice filled Stride with sadness. He hated to see a young life destroyed, and he hated that there was nothing he could do about it. He was a fixer, but some things couldn’t be fixed.
Lori opened the truck door. “I’m leaving now.”
“I wish you’d let me take you to the hospital, Ms. Fulkerson.”
“You can’t make me, can you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then good-bye, Lieutenant,” she retorted. She climbed down into the snow, but before she closed the door, she leaned back inside. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her voice cracked with despair. “Two hours, right?”
Stride cocked his head in puzzlement. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Two hours. The docs said I would have been dead in two hours.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“I wish you’d been late,” she said.
It was after midnight by the time Stride made it back to the matchbox cottage on Park Point where he lived with Serena and Cat. The house was on the other side of the sand dunes from Lake Superior, and the lake was oddly quiet. Most of the year he heard the thunder of waves twenty-four hours a day, but sometimes the long cold of January built enough ice beyond the beach to dull the noise.
He let himself into the dark house. The first thing he did was check on Cat, who was asleep in the corner bedroom facing the street. She didn’t wake up. Her breathing was soft and regular. He stared down at her pretty face, which was lost in a tangle of chestnut hair. It was hard to be mad at her even when she did foolish things. He closed the door softly and let her sleep.
Stride took a shower and then tried to get into bed without disturbing Serena. It was impossible, because the old timbers in the floor always groaned. She murmured a drowsy greeting at him. He slipped into bed behind her, slid an arm around her waist, and kissed her neck. Those were the moments that reminded him how good it was to be married again.