Storm Warning. Linda Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ the side of his thin nose with the end of a pencil. He was staring at Steve.

      Steve shook his head. He was not pleased that Joe and Chase kept guns. Steve used to own guns. He didn’t anymore.

      Joe said, “That work you’re talking about, that’s up at them cottages, right? Them ghost cottages.”

      Ghost cottages. Steve put his credit card back into his wallet and said, “They aren’t ghost cottages.”

      He wished Joe and Chase would get back into the church—all the kids for that matter. Many of them had this idea that Trail’s End was cursed, inhabited by ghosts, and that serial killers roamed the forest behind the lodge and cabins. There was nothing that he or the pastor in their church could do to shake that. And it all went back to two years ago when a girl, one of their group, had disappeared from that very place. Or so it was thought.

      “How was it out there? What’s that lady like in real life?” Joe asked.

      Steve tried for a deadpan. “Yes, Joe, I’m here to report that I was out there. She was howling at the moon. Already all the cottages are burning, and sacrifices are being offered.”

      At this, Joe’s reptilian eyes went as wide as Steve had ever seen them. He rubbed at a spot beside his nose. “You kidding me, right?”

      “No, I’m not kidding. It really happened. Of course I’m kidding.”

      Steve signed the credit card slip, slapped the countertop with his hand and said, “Just let Chase know I’m looking for him, will ya?”

      Back in his truck, Steve tore open some candy and withdrew a few pieces of licorice. “Hey, Chester, whaddya think? You think everyone around here is nuts?”

      His dog, who’d been sitting on the front seat, wagged his tail and came over for an ear scratch.

      “Back,” Steve ordered.

      Chester immediately obeyed and jumped into the backseat.

      Steve had a couple more stops to make before home, where he and Chester would go for a long run along the lake. On the way out to find Connolly, another recent high school graduate who had worked for Steve in the past, he thought about the cottages. He knew they weren’t haunted, but he also knew that “something” had happened out there, something that so terrified the kids in the town that many of them wanted nothing to do with Trail’s End. The mere mention of Trail’s End around Selena or Chase made them clam up and turn away. And Nori had bought the place with no knowledge of any of this, as far as he could tell.

      He thought about her. He had noticed her wedding ring right away Where was her husband? Her eyes had seemed so sad when she talked about her daughters and their “father.”

      She hadn’t said “my husband,” she had said, “their father.” Obviously, she and her husband were estranged. Maybe this was a trial separation. Perhaps they were trying to work things out. And then another thought—maybe her husband was, even now, in Iraq or Afghanistan. He knew from experience that some military wives didn’t like to talk about deployments. Maybe this accounted for the sadness in her eyes.

      God, he prayed. Help me to be her friend.

      And then there was the matter of her faith. Her daughters went to church. She didn’t. She had lost her faith, she said. Did that have to do with the estrangement?

      For someone to have found the faith and then deliberately move away from it was something Steve couldn’t understand. When he found God it was like a whole new place opened up in his life, a place he had walled off and protected for so many years. Years lived emotionally distant from his wife and son.

      But by the time he found God, it was too late. His wife had left him and taken their son and gone to Florida.

      He used to blame his former job for wrecking his marriage. Steve had been a part of an elite corps of the military. It wasn’t until finding his way to faith in God that he realized it was him, and not his job.

      He remembered pleading with his ex-wife, Julie, not to leave and take their son to Florida with her. “How can you leave? How can you take Jeffrey so far from me?” he had demanded, crying. It was the first time he had actually wept real tears in a decade. He had seen so much in the military. He had walled off so much of his life. It was like all of his emotions up to that point had been cauterized.

      Julie had flipped her blond hair behind her ears and retorted, “And that matters to you all of a sudden? You’re never here anyway. You haven’t been here for any of Jeffrey’s moments. Not Jeffrey’s soccer games, not Jeffrey’s school plays, not the first time Jeffrey rode a two-wheeler, not Jeffrey’s music recitals—do you even know what instrument Jeffrey plays? You’ve been too busy out saving the world from terrorists.”

      After Julie had announced that she was also in love with somebody else, Steve had taken the ferry across to Vinalhaven, Maine. Halfway across, he’d removed his wedding ring from his finger and thrown it as far as he could into the choppy ocean. That was three years ago.

      He still felt he would never be the kind of man any woman could love. He had so much to learn, so far to go.

      It was quite ironic. Two months after Julie left, he did just what she wanted. He separated from the military, escaped to Whisper Lake Crossing and went back to the quiet pursuit of cabinetmaking. He loved it. Whenever Alec, the local sheriff who also happened to be his friend, would offer him full-time police work he always had the same response; “Full time? Not interested.” Occasionally, Steve helped with something that really caught his fancy—like the disappearance of the girl from church and her boyfriend.

      That was the last time Steve had been out to Trail’s End. They had been out there looking for any sign of two teenagers. They had to satisfy their curiosity by just walking the grounds. Earl refused to let them search the place, and because the evidence was so flimsy, Alec had never been able to get a search warrant.

      He quickly found the small house where Connolly lived with his parents and four siblings. When he told Connolly’s mother the nature of the work, she pushed her glasses up on her nose, shook her head and said, “No. I don’t think he’ll want to work out there.”

      “Come on, Rita, tell him about the job at least. I took the job out there and she needs help.”

      “I’ll tell him. That’s all I can promise. If he doesn’t want to go, I won’t be forcing him. You know those kids are still traumatized.”

      Steve got back into his truck and drove down the driveway to Flower Cottage, where his friend Bette and her son Ralph lived. The white house with the flower baskets under each window came into view. As always, the place looked pristine. It reminded Steve of a quaint little English country cottage. Not that he would know what a quaint little English country cottage looked like.

      Bette and her thirty-year-old son, Ralph, had emigrated from England forty years ago and Bette had brought with her, her English accent and her country garden ways. Ralph was a bit slow and simple, yet capable of a good day’s work. Rumor had it that when Ralph was about five, Bette’s husband went back to England. He just couldn’t take the responsibility of a mentally disabled son. No one had heard from him since and Bette never talked about him.

      Steve parked his truck next to Bette’s Volvo and as he and Chester got out, Boris, their springer spaniel, ran over, tail wagging and tongue flapping. Steve had a certain affection СКАЧАТЬ