Blood on Copperhead Trail. Paula Graves

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      Chapter One

      The trail shelter wasn’t built for cold weather, but the three girls occupying the small wooden shed were young, healthy and warmly tucked inside their cold-weather sleeping bags. Overnight, the mercury had dropped into the mid-thirties, which might have tempted less-determined hikers off the trail and into their warm homes in the valley below. But youth and risk were longtime bedfellows.

      He depended on it ever to be so.

      Overhead, the moon played hide-and-seek behind scudding clouds, casting deep blue shadows through the spindly bare limbs of the birch, maple and hickory trees that grew on Copperhead Ridge. The air was damp with the promise of snow.

      But not yet.

      His breath spreading a pale cloud of condensation in front of his eyes, he pulled the digital camera from his pack. A whimsical image filled his mind. Himself as a mighty, fierce dragon, huffing smoke as he stalked his winsome prey.

      The camera made a soft whirring sound as it autofocused on the sleeping beauties. He held his breath, waiting to see if the sound was enough to awaken the girls. A part of him wished it would wake them, though he’d have to move now, rather than later, cutting short his plans. But the challenge these young, fit women posed excited him to the point that his carefully laid plans seemed more an impediment than a means to increase his anticipation.

      Slow and steady wins the race, he thought. The experience would be better for having waited.

      He snapped off a series of shots from different angles, relishing each composition, imagining them in their finished state. Despite the quick flashes of light from his camera, the princesses slept on, oblivious.

      He stepped away from the shelter, punching buttons to print the shots he’d just snapped. They came out remarkably clear, he saw with surprise. He hadn’t been sure they would.

      Or maybe he’d been hoping he’d have to sneak over to the shelter again.

      A clear acrylic box, cloudy with scuff marks from exposure to the elements, stood on a rickety wooden pedestal outside the shelter. It housed a worn trail logbook similar to those found farther east on the Appalachian Trail. The latest entry was dated that day. The girls had recorded their arrival and their plans for the next day’s hike home.

      He slipped the snapshots into the journal, marking the latest entry.

      A snuffling sound from within the open-faced shelter froze him in place. He couldn’t see the girls from where he stood, so he waited, still and silent, for a repeat of the noise.

      But the only sound he heard was the cold mountain breeze shaking the trees overhead, the leafless limbs rattling like bones.

      After a few more minutes of quiet, he slipped away, a dark shape in the darker woods, where he would bide his time until daybreak.

      And the girls slept on.

      * * *

      “I’MNOTTHEENEMY.” Though Laney Hanvey was using her best СКАЧАТЬ