Deadfall (46 page)

“There's not much we can do about it now,” Hutch said and continued walking. But fifteen minutes later he found a heavy bush. He and Phil crouched behind it, low. They stayed there for five minutes, listening, waiting. Hutch heard the engine Phil had mentioned. It seemed far away, but he knew not to trust his ears. The trees' foliage and hills made visual confirmation almost a necessity. The vehicle could be traveling directly outside the woods, its noises severely dampened as they traveled through the trees, or it could be miles away with the hills and open valleys magnifying its sound.

“Definitely a vehicle,” he whispered. “But I can't tell if it's near or far, coming or going.”

“Creepy,” Phil said. “It's like a ghost messing with my mind.” He punched a finger at his temple to illustrate the point.

Hutch smiled. “So now we've got ghosts too?”

Phil shrugged. “I don't believe in ghosts, but if I did, David would be watching out for us.”

“I think David's the one messing with you. Getting back at you for always calling him Pretty Boy.”

They waited a few more minutes. When no other sounds reached them, they continued toward the cabin. He believed they were almost there when he held up the branch. “What do you think?”

“What is it?”

“What is it? It's a bow.”

“I thought bows were arced.”

“It will be, when I string it.” He held a flat length of wood, six feet long and two inches wide. It was thicker in the center than at the ends. He had whittled a groove into each end to hold the bowstring. His recurve had featured an arrow rest at the handle; for this one, he would rest the arrow on his hand. He said, “It's called a longbow. It gets its firing power from its length.”

Phil said, “You got string?”

“Yep.”

“Put it on, man.”

“I have one more thing to do with it. It may not be the smartest thing to do, especially if we're being pursued, but I'm pretty sure it needs it.”

“What's that?”

“It needs to be fire-hardened.”

“You want to start a fire?”

“It won't take long. I'd like to do it before we reach the cabin. I want to have this thing ready in case they're already there; if they aren't, I don't want the smoke to lead them there.”

“Aren't we close?”

“Close isn't there.”

Hutch cleared away a patch of loam while Phil gathered twigs.

“The drier the better,” Hutch reminded him.

“I know, I know.”

Hutch made a fist-sized pile. He asked Phil to keep feeding the fire as necessary. He wanted the flame to be as small as possible. Using the matches he had taken from the mine when he had also retrieved the mouth harp, he lit his open kiln. Several inches at a time, he fed the bow into the fire, turning it slowly. When he thought the wood might ignite, he removed that section, feeding in another.When all the wood had been thoroughly heated, he stomped out the fire.

“We'd better get moving,” he said.

They walked, and Hutch withdrew the bowstring from his pocket. He stopped. He slipped a loop into the groove on one end, flipped the bow over, and wedged the stringed end against his boot. He pulled back on the riser—the center of the bow—while pushing down on the other end. He slipped the loose end of the bowstring into the groove. He had a bow.

“Yeah,” Phil said.

“We'll see.”

He nocked the arrow that he had used to whittle the bow onto the string and rested the shaft on the notch at the center. He drew back, thinking of all the things that could go wrong: one of the string grooves could crack the end of the bow, a bow arm itself could snap, the draw weight could be insufficient to propel an arrow straight or to penetrate a target.

The draw weight felt heavy: sixty, seventy pounds. Keeping his left arm slightly bent, he pulled the string but stopped before its ideal position, where his thumb could fit into the notch of his jaw, below the earlobe. Intuitively, he believed pulling back further would snap the bow. The trick with recurve bows, which did not use cams to counter the draw weights as did compound bows, was to find that fine line between drawing power and bow strength. Hutch would rather fire an arrow at slightly less than maximum power than risk losing the weapon altogether.

Phil pointed at a tree some distance off. “That one right there,” he said and described it.

“No . . . see that mushroom near it?”

“Mushroom?”

Hutch let the arrow fly. It struck the ground ten feet before its target and disappeared under a blanket of needles, peat, and moss.

“Not as strong as it felt,” Hutch commented, walking toward the mushroom. He retrieved his arrow and returned to Phil.

“Hit a tree,” Phil urged.

Nocking the arrow and drawing back on the string, Hutch said, “I don't have enough arrows. A tree might break the broadhead, or the arrow could get wedged in too deep to remove.”

This time the arrow sailed inches above the mushroom. On the fourth shot Hutch bagged himself a fungus.

Phil hooted in triumph, then caught himself. “You made yourself a pretty nice bow,” he said.

Hutch nodded, appraising the bow with appreciation. “I'm doing some compensating in the shooting, letting the arrow come off the bow a little bit, guessing the right draw length. Means I can't be precise . . . but close.”

Phil sounded concerned. “Is close good enough?”

Hutch looked at him. “Gonna have to be.” He went for the arrow.

They walked another half hour.When Hutch checked the map, he found that they were about five minutes from the cabin, give or take, considering it was based on Dillon's recollection.

He pushed the bow onto his shoulder. He hoped he wouldn't need it. But he knew he would.

65

Fifteen minutes later
they stepped out of the trees into a meadow. Hutch closed his eyes in despair.

Phil said, “You've gotta be kidding.”

Three hundred yards across the grassy meadow sat a rustic log cabin, roughly the size of a single-car garage. One of the narrow sides faced them. There was a window, dead center, and above it, near the apex of the inverted-V roofline, someone had mounted a set of moose antlers. The visible long side must have been the rear wall; it bore no doors or windows. Made sense: it meant the facade faced down the valley meadow, toward Fiddler Falls, the Fond du Lac River, and a picturesque vista of rolling trees and hills.

Beyond the cabin, the land had been scorched bare by fire for as far as Hutch could see. At one time, the cabin had been positioned on the outskirts of what was probably a lush, verdant forest. The fire had burned to within fifty feet of the cabin. The line delineating undamaged soil from a sea of black ash and burned timber formed a scalloped pattern down that far side of the meadow—coming from far north, ebbing around the cabin, and continuing down the valley.

Hadn't Dillon mentioned something about the cabin surviving the fire naturally? That was one reason his family considered it special. Hutch understood the sentiment. It seemed miraculous that this one structure had survived. He wondered if the trees had been cut back around it to form a firebreak or if someone had dumped water on it from a crop duster–type plane. He did not know enough about fires up here or how attached people were to their cabins to guess how they'd behave in such circumstances.

Clearly, the area had been beautiful before the fire. Now, however, the cabin was a lonely building in the center of . . . nothing.Worse than nothing. The blackened landscape and astringent odor of smoke and charred wood made it seem like an outpost on the periphery of hell, where even the flames only passed through occasionally.

The only living trees within sight were the ones from whose shadows Hutch and Phil had just stepped—way, way beyond his effective firing distance. Maybe he could hide on one side of the pitched roof and at the proper moment spring up and fire.Two problems with that: both sides of the roof were visible from the most likely approach to the cabin; and if Declan used the optics available to him from the satellite, Hutch would be in plain view. He had hoped the cabin was set among the trees not only to shield it from Declan, but also to provide plenty of places for him to protect it from outside and out of sight.

Had the cabin been more of what he thought it would be, they would have been able to rest out of the weather and safe from Declan, at least for the night. Now he didn't know. How could they stay there, and how could they venture away? He and Phil were injured and exhausted. Darkness was coming on, and with it a numbing cold. Fires were out of the question. He wasn't sure
he
could handle a night in the wilderness; how could Dillon?

Dillon.

The disappointment of the cabin had distracted him from the most important part of it.

“Please, God, let him be here,” he said and started for the cabin.

Phil looked overhead. “I don't like the idea of that thing being up there. I can't see it, but it can see me.When you were a kid, you ever fry ants with a magnifying glass?”

“Shhh,” Hutch said. “Come on.”

A railless porch, made of wooden planks and roughly five feet wide, ran the length of the facade. It creaked and cracked as Hutch stepped onto it. A locking door handle latched a hinged slab of wood to the entry threshold. Right away, he saw that the jamb at the latch had been splintered. Scuff marks—dried mud, the peanut butter color of the earth around the porch—marred the door between the handle and the bottom edge.

He pushed on it. The door moved a half inch and stopped. An unseen object on the inside held it shut. He pushed harder, and something heavy slid against the floor. The door opened two inches. He stuck his face into the opening. He could see the window that faced the meadow, and below it, a picnic table and two bench seats. Just enough litter was scattered on the table to make him think someone had eaten a single meal there.

“Dillon,” he called. “It's me, Hutch.”

He turned his ear to the crack. Nothing.

“Dillon?”

Hutch wondered if Declan's men could be waiting for him inside.

Maybe one of them held his hand over Dillon's mouth . . . or had they done something worse to the boy? He should have looked in the window near the door. Hesitating would not change the situation awaiting him. He hit the door with his shoulder. Whatever was holding it pushed away. He stepped in.

The room was lighted by only the two murky windows. On his left was the dining setup. An old woodburning stove sat in a corner to his right. In the opposite corner, along the back wall, was a bunk bed.The mattresses were bare. Folded blankets, linens, and a pillow were stacked at the foot of each mattress. On the same wall, near the beds and closer to the door, was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. One shelf was lined with paperback books, their broken, tattered spines evidence of long nights spent in the cabin. A deck of cards, loose poker chips, and a Sorry board game sat on another shelf. Magazines, coffee cups, a half dozen worn shoe boxes—probably the cabin's tools, first aid kit, and other necessities—occupied the remaining shelves. Two overstuffed chairs draped with heavy woolen blankets faced each other in front of the bookcase.

Someone, probably Laura, had tried to temper the cabin's inherent maleness with wilderness-themed decorations: bear salt and pepper shakers on the table, a metal moose silhouette paper towel holder, a carved wood plaque with evergreens and the words Home Sweet Cabin. On the floor between the chairs lay a round rug with the big, amiable face of a bear woven into it.

The rest of the floor—a tile puzzle of plywood sheets—was thick with dust. Most of it resembled ash. Hutch figured the charred landscape kicked up in the wind and some of it found its way inside. Guests would be dusting the stuff for years to come; it coated every surface. As though distributed for his benefit, it was proof of Dillon's having been there: handprints on the table, rump-print on the bench seat, tiny sneaker prints all over the floor, facing every which way like a dance-step diagram.

A three-foot-square box of stove-length firewood had been positioned behind the door. He could see where it had been dragged across the floor from its normal spot near the stove.

Evidence of the boy . . . but no boy himself. It made all the signs of his presence seem intentional and cruel.

“Dillon!” Hutch said again. “If you're hiding, it's okay to come out. It's me, Hutch.”

His eyes came back to the box of firewood. It had been used to hold the door closed, since the splintered jamb gave the latch nothing to cling to. The only other exits were the windows. The dust on the wood lengths that acted as sills showed only a few finger- and handprints; it did not appear that anyone had left the room through one of them. Dillon had to be inside.

Hutch scanned the room. Few hiding places.The space behind the stove and most of the area under the bed were visible. That left only a cabinet under a countertop, against the wall between the bed and the stove. Set into the right side of the countertop, nearest the stove, was a small, wet bar–style sink. He had seen fixtures like this before. The faucet handle acted as a pump, which brought water from a reservoir in the cabinet. On the left side of the countertop was a freestanding propane griddle. The space under this side of the counter would be large enough for a limber nine-year-old boy.

He knelt and opened the cupboard door. Cans of hash, dried beef, and boxes of military MREs, a staple among hunters and survivalists, were the only items inside. Hutch's heart sank.Was it possible to position the woodbox against the door and leave? He supposed a smart boy could lay a belt on the floor by the door, put the woodbox on it, slip through a partially closed door, then pull the belt under the door, sliding the woodbox against it. But why? Perhaps to trick people into believing someone was inside. He shook his head. That didn't make sense either.