Aimee’s Tahoe.
How had she known where I was?
The answer smacked me against the side of the head. She had found the topographical map I had left on my kitchen table, I realized. I’d mentioned that I was heading to a remote camp in the woods. She had deciphered the marks I’d made on the map and known exactly where to find me.
The Tahoe was blocking me from driving past.
I pulled my hood over my head and reached behind the seat for a Maglite. In my pocket I always carried a small SureFire, but it was time to bring out the heavy artillery. Made of machined aluminum, the Maglite was as long as my forearm. With six D-cell batteries inside, it weighed three pounds. Those big flashlights used to be standard police issue before the LED revolution. Who needed a baton when you could club a hooligan into submission with your handheld torch?
I ducked under the metal arm of the gate and started up the road following the light. Where there had been potholes, there were now ankle-deep ponds. My Bean boots kept my feet dry, but they offered terrible traction on the slick rocks and skinned tree roots.
Whatever footprints the Cronks had made in the mud had been washed away by the downpour.
I smelled woodsmoke even before I saw the glow from the cabin windows. My heart was pounding beyond the physical exertion of navigating the muddy trail. My anxiety came from not knowing what I would find—whom I would find—when I opened the door.
I switched off my flashlight and mounted the steps to the rebuilt porch. Hopefully Aimee would be expecting me and not have a firearm pointed at the door. Then again, they were running for their lives.
Better to announce myself than to barge in. I rapped on the new door. “It’s me, guys! It’s Mike!”
The next thing I knew the door had swung open, and Aimee Cronk had her arms around me, her face pressed against my damp coat.
“Thank God!”
Over her head I saw the five Cronklets: two peeking out from a bedroom, two sprawled by the stove, the girl hanging on to the back of her mom’s thick leg.
I whispered into Aimee’s ear. “Is Billy here?”
She raised her wet face. “We don’t know where he is. He said it would be safer that way.”
“Safer from whom?”
“Come inside and get warm, and I’ll explain.” She invited me into the cabin as if she’d built it with her own hands.
Ethan took my coat and hung it on a clothesline over the stove. Little Emma was charged with unlacing my boots and placing them beside the stove to dry. Aimee had water boiling for tea and cocoa.
We all sat around the picnic table with our steaming mugs while she began her account of the past two days.
The manager of the Happy Clam Motel had watched them check out. He seemed to suspect that they might abscond with a stack of towels, ice buckets, the television remotes, whatever wasn’t nailed down.
From there they’d stopped at the grocery store because Aimee would be damned if she didn’t pay for her family’s food. Plus, she wasn’t sure I had the healthiest diet as a bachelor game warden.
But my house in the woods had raised her low-down spirits. Right as they pulled up, Logan had spotted a fox and her kits in the backyard. He was even more thrilled when he found three bloody squirrel tails under the platform bird feeder. Two came from gray squirrels and one came from a red squirrel, declared the ten-year-old aspiring biologist.
The day was pleasant enough. She spoke with their lawyer, who was tracking the pardon and commutation warrants as they made their way from the governor’s office to the secretary of state. Once they were certified, the attorney said, Billy would be a free man. He could walk out the front door of the Bolduc Correctional Facility as if the past four years had been a bad dream.
But when Billy called and she passed along this information, he received the news with a strange subdued silence.
“How soon can I get out of here?” he’d asked.
“Maybe today!”
“Who else knows where you are?” He was being vague because all calls made by inmates in Maine prisons are recorded.
“Nobody.”
“Not your sister?”
“No.”
“And you’re sure you weren’t followed there?”
“What’s going on with you, Billy? Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Billy.”
“I’m antsy over getting out. I’ll believe it when I see it, you know?”
“That doesn’t explain who you think might be following us.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
The conversation had pricked Aimee’s balloon, so to speak. She considered leaving the kids in the care of the oldest and driving back to the prison farm to hear the real reason her husband was acting paranoid. But the last time she’d left Logan in charge, she’d returned home to the final flag of a demolition derby. And it would be foolish to show herself in public if Billy was worried about some unnamed but evidently dangerous person stalking them.
She resolved to get through the afternoon by watching the birds come to the feeder—including the first red-winged blackbird of the season—and waiting for the lawyer to call back with confirmation.
Then Aiden came running inside to tell her that a creepy car had snuck up the driveway. It backed out wicked fast when the bad man behind the wheel saw him there.
“How do you know he was bad?” she asked.
“’Cause he backed out wicked fast.”
“Can you describe the car, honey?”
“White with spots.”
“Rust spots?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it big or small?”
“Real small. Like the smallest car I’ve ever seen. Well, not as small as a go-cart.”
The boy hadn’t gotten a look at the driver, other than to notice he was wearing dark glasses, but the appearance of the unidentified man after Billy’s warning made Aimee nervous. She told the kids to repack their backpacks and sleeping bags in case she decided they needed to leave in a hurry.
Emma interrupted us. “I gotta go poo-poo.”
“Brady, take your sister to the outhouse.”
“Mom!”
“And
