Training the beam of her light around, she searched for anything else she could use. A flash of red caught her eye.
Please, please, please.
Her heart pounding, she knelt to shove cardboard boxes aside. And there was her backpack, tucked into the corner beside an ornate carved wooden box.
Her hands shook as she unbuckled it and scrambled through the contents. Her wallet was there plus her thermos of water, a pack of beef jerky and her space blanket folded into a small square.
“No matter how short your journey, in the winter in Minnesota always prepare for emergencies,” her dad always said.
If he were there, Kate would kiss him.
But where was her laptop? Her cell phone? She searched all the pockets of the backpack for her phone but came up empty. Had she taken it out when she called her mom? Left it on the front seat?
She thought not. Her phone was programmed with the hands-free system in her car. She never took it out when she was driving.
That cretin, Jonathan, had taken it. It had to be him. Kate unzipped her wallet and trained the small flashlight inside. Her cash was there and her credit cards. But, wait. Where was her driver’s license? Why in the world would the jerk want her license?
She shivered. The possibilities were limitless, and all of them horrible.
“Just go,” she whispered. “Take the backpack and go!”
But the carved box more than stirred her curiosity; it seemed to be exerting some strange pull on her. Ornate and even a bit feminine, it was totally out of place in a backyard shed.
Kate opened the lid. Inside was one gold earring in the shape of a unicorn and a charm bracelet with one bangle, a turquoise and silver dream catcher. She’d seen the bracelet before. Or one like it. Had it been in one of those gift shops that sprouted up like mushrooms in Minnesota’s tourist spots?
As Kate dug beneath the jewelry, her flashlight glinted off something shiny. Plastic, maybe. She trained her light closer. It was a driver’s license for Jennifer Olsen, blond, blue eyes, 5’3”, Duluth, Minnesota. She was nineteen years old.
A chill ran through Kate. She remembered the bracelet now. Jennifer Olsen had been wearing it in the Missing Girl posters she’d seen in gas stations all over Minnesota.
The second license was for Linda Stephenson, blond, blue eyes, 5’ 6”, Fargo, North Dakota. Twenty years old. She’d gone missing a year after Jen.
Behind that was a third. Kate Carter, blond, blue eyes, 5’9”, Grand Marsais. She’d turned nineteen in November.
Terror seized her. Jen’s and Linda’s bodies had been found in the snow, located by the SAR team of Maggie Carter and Jefferson.
There was something else, too, something so unspeakable Kate felt the bile rise to her throat.
When she’d searched her prison/room she’d discovered two doors. The first one led into a windowless bathroom with a small prefabricated shower, a toilet and a wall-hung sink with two toothbrushes in a holder on the porcelain lip. Two bathrobes hung on hooks behind the door, one pink, practically new and a larger blue one, well-worn.
The other door had led to a closet. Inside was only one garment, a wedding dress with tags still on it. Size six. Kate’s size.
Both Jen’s and Linda’s bodies has been posed in the snow with a single arrow through the heart and a wedding veil on their heads. Whoever murdered them had a sick notion that they were brides.
And Kate was supposed to be next.
“Not while I have breath.”
She grabbed her driver’s license, slammed the box shut then bolted through the window with her backpack. Outside, she gathered up her stolen gear and sprinted toward the woods.
Without breaking her stride she found the trail then ran as if the hounds of Hell were after her. That’s what being around Jonathan had felt like, facing a whole pack of raving mad dogs bent on devouring her.
Pace yourself. Run smart. Coach Keith Lucas’s voice brought her to a halt.
It played through her head as clearly as if she were back on the high school track training with her teammates.
Speed is not everything, Coach said. When Keith Lucas gave one of his famous pep talks, he paced along the side of the track, fists slightly balled, shoulders relaxed and arms loose and swinging as if he were running a marathon. You’ve got to be mentally tough. A fearless mind is your biggest ally.
Kate centered herself with some deep breaths.
“First things first,” she said. The sound of her own voice was reassuring in the silence of the woods.
She strapped on the running snowshoes then mentally ran down the list of things she needed to do in order to run smart and strong.
If she didn’t properly strap the ice ax to her backpack she was liable to have a mishap and cut herself so deeply she wouldn’t have to worry about Jonathan. She’d bleed out before he ever found her.
Next she trained her stolen flashlight into the woods, checking out her surroundings, searching for her captor, peering through the gloom, listening for a single sound that didn’t belong in the deep wilderness.
Except for the stirring of air from hawks on the wing and a flash of fur from a fox on the run, the woods were strangely silent. This close to Wayne’s Trading Post signs of human life should be evident, tracks in the snow from other snowshoes and snowmobiles, a distant hum from air stirred by motors and human voices, radios turned too loud and the electronic dinging of the gas pumps, doors opening and shutting, the whine of traffic on a nearby highway.
Kate tamped down her rising panic.
Focus, Coach said.
In the darkness, the trail was discernable only because the gap in the trees allowed more light.
“I’ve got this,” Kate said, and she felt the confidence pouring through her. She was a superb athlete, and her mom and dad would surely come looking for her. Were they searching already?
She broke the branch of a sapling beside the trail just enough to leave it hanging. For good measure she jerked off her ski cap and ran her gloved hands roughly through her hair, imagining her hair and skin flaking off in such quantity Jefferson would alert to the strong scent trail.
“There now.” She got back on the trail and readied herself for a race that meant life or death.
Stay steady. Coach Keith Lucas cheered her on. Finish strong.
Kate relaxed her shoulders, slightly balled her fists and took off running, focusing on what lay ahead. Running in snowshoes was entirely different from running in track shoes. She had to widen her stance to accommodate the shoes and lift her knees higher.
“I’m tough. I’ve got this.”
Visibility was not good, but she could make out a sharp curve just ahead.
Don’t follow the curves, Kate. Coach’s advice played like a record in her head. It increases the distance. Run the tangents.
She stayed in the center of the trail, taking the straight line through the curve and the next two that followed.
Soon she was in a rhythm, running with ease, imagining her destination as the finish line.
But where was Wayne’s Trading Post? She paused to listen for sounds of human habitation and got nothing except deep woods silence. Logic told her that this close to the holidays and with a blizzard coming, folks wouldn’t be gadding about the general store. They’d be securing doors and windows, laying in a supply of wood for their fireplaces, checking their backup generators to make sure they had enough fuel to get through the power outages, checking their food supplies.