And I was cold. So very, very cold.
How long had it been? It seemed like forever that I’d been standing here, doing nothing but thinking in circles, but how long had it been really? Ten minutes? Could it have been fifteen? Probably not.
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my sweater . . . and found a pair of gloves. Glory hallelujah, the last time I’d worn this sweater had been during the mild thaw and I’d done the books-to-library hauling without my outer coat. A huge smile spread over my face. Sure, they were thin gloves and might not do much good, but they were far better than nothing.
It took a minute to fumble the gloves onto my hands. Once they were on, though, confidence surged through me. I could do this. I would do this. Stewart not-so-fun Funston wouldn’t be the cause of my death. He would not get off scot-free for killing Rowan. He would not win.
I stomped my feet, left, right, left, right, trying to keep the blood flowing, trying to keep frostbite out of my toes, because I liked wearing summer sandals, and if my toes fell off, none of my sandals would fit for beans.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to get going.”
All the books I’d read about surviving in the wilderness noted how easy it was to get lost, wandering about in circles for hours without a clue where you’d really been going.
That wasn’t going to happen to me, mainly because I knew that a river curved around to the east, north, and south, and the road was behind me to the west. Then again, I might freeze to death before I got anywhere.
With that not-so-comforting thought, I started walking, one foot in front of the other.
Time and distance. I didn’t want to walk far, but for at least the next fifteen minutes, I needed to keep moving or I’d turn into a Minnie-cicle. Assuming my back was to the road, if I turned to the right ninety degrees, I’d be walking parallel to the road, heading back toward Buster’s and the closest likely human contact.
“Keep going,” I said, mimicking Stewart’s voice.
Stewart. The muscles in my jaw bunched at the thought of him. He had a lot to answer for, and it was up to me to make sure that happened.
“Just go,” I told myself, and went, counting steps and using my fingers as an abacus of sorts. Every step used up roughly a second. Ten steps and I extended one finger. Another ten steps and I extended a second finger. Six fingers out and I’d walked for one minute. How far? Sixty feet maybe, since I was tramping through snow and stepping over branches and downed trees.
So not very far and not for very long.
I took a deep breath, coughed as the cold seared my lungs, and walked for sixty feet. Did it again. And again.
When I’d reached ten minutes—with my right hand now full of the twigs I’d picked up to track the time since I’d run out of fingers—I started veering back toward the road.
Or where I thought the road was. Fifty steps later I wasn’t so sure. Another fifty and I was sure I was completely lost and doomed to die a frozen death. Then, through the trees and their wind-whipped tops, came the most beautiful noise I’d ever heard, faint yet indubitably distinct.
“Mrr!”
I shifted direction immediately, turning a bit to the right, and twenty paces later I could see, ahead and high up, a lightening in the darkness. The road, a wide swatch cut out of the cedar forest, lay directly ahead of me.
“Thanks, Eddie,” I whispered.
As I edged out of the tree line, I heard another unexpected noise—the bookmobile’s engine starting up.
“No, no, no . . .” I hopped into a run.
Stewart was trying to get the bookmobile out of the ditch. He wanted to drive it somewhere else to throw the suspicion in another direction. But Eddie was in there. Alone with Stewart.
I couldn’t let it happen, couldn’t let anything happen to my cat, my fuzzy friend, my pal.
Panting, I hurtled through the blizzard, running toward the man who’d just tried to kill me, running toward the cat who’d saved me in so many ways. “Eddie . . .” I gasped out. “Hang on, bud, I’ll get you. Just hang on.”
Large taillights appeared through the snowy murk, rocking back and forth, back and forth.
Perfect.
I slowed and, with an eye on the bookmobile, jogged over to Stewart’s SUV. He’d slid it into the ditch, but it wasn’t in all that deep, and I bet he’d left his keys in the ignition. With his four-wheel drive, I’d be out of there in no time. Less than ten minutes of frantic driving and I’d be at Buster’s, where I’d break in if I had to and use his phone to summon help. Ten minutes from that point and help would arrive. Twenty minutes and Eddie would be safe. Twenty minutes were all I needed.
It was an excellent plan and I was almost smiling as I reached the SUV and took hold of the door handle.
“No . . .” I whispered, staring. “He didn’t. He couldn’t have.”
But he had. The SUV’s door was locked.
• • •
Bad words circulated in my head as I frantically tried the other doors. Rear driver’s side door, back door, both passenger side doors—all locked. What kind of person locked his vehicle before setting off to commit murder? Who did that?
I thumped the heel of my hand against the front passenger door, the door most hidden from the bookmobile—I didn’t want the gun-holding Stewart to have any inkling where I was—hoping against hope that the thing was just frozen shut, not locked, but it didn’t budge.
More bad words trickled into my brain. But saying them out loud wouldn’t help anything, so I let them go and tried to think. Was there another way in? Maybe I could smash a window . . . I knelt on the snow and scrabbled around for a rock.
The third time I grabbed an icy chunk of snow, I gave up. There were rocks down there, but I didn’t have time—Eddie didn’t have time—for me to find something suitable. Besides, if he’d locked his vehicle, he’d probably taken the keys. There had to be a different way. And if there wasn’t a different way, I had to make one.
A shiver roiled through me, from bottom to top, a shiver so strong that I almost fell to my knees. I’d been doing my best to ignore my shivering body, but I wouldn’t be able to do so much longer. Maybe Stewart had been closer than I’d thought with his half-hour estimate.
The bookmobile’s engine revved up and down as Stewart did his best to move it forward and backward. After one look at how deep the tires were ground into the snow, I could have told him it would be no use, but I wasn’t about to tell him, and even if I had, he wouldn’t have listened to me. He was that kind of guy.
I stood there, on my tiptoes to peer over the top of the SUV, trying to think through the numbness of every body part I owned. With escape in Stewart’s vehicle out of the picture, the number of possible options had been cut in half. The only thing left was to sneak aboard the bookmobile, incapacitate Stewart, and figure out some way to summon help.
Piece of cake.
“Keep going,” I said, and forced myself to smile at my own inside joke. Not that it was funny, but poking fun at Stewart made me feel a little better, and at this point, that was enough.
I hunched down low enough to be fairly sure the top of my head was out of sight of the bookmobile’s side mirror and crab-walked across the road to the bookmobile’s rear bumper. If I tried to get in the side door, the door we used ninety-nine percent of the time, odds were good that the motion of opening the door would catch Stewart’s attention, which was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do since he was bigger, stronger, and almost certainly still had that gun.
That left the door in the rear of the bookmobile, the door that provided access to the handicapped lift. Most people didn’t even know it was there, and I prayed Stewart was one of them.