She listened for sounds of the snowmobile behind her. Jonathan was too weak-minded and cowardly to run after her. Hearing nothing but the wind in the trees, she followed her instincts and set off on the left fork.
“Run,” she told herself. “Move. You can do this.”
When she’d been a competitive runner, she’d done interval training, running interspersed with strength and endurance training with at least one day built in for rest. Weekends had been devoted to uphill training, brutal ten-mile climbs that left her leg muscles burning. Cross-country competition runs that exceeded twenty miles often left her feet bleeding. And still she’d run. And won.
Kate kept a steady pace. If she didn’t see the store soon, she’d have to decide whether to retrace her steps and explore the other fork or keep moving forward.
There was a sharp curve ahead, barely visible in the swirling snow. Kate moved toward the center of the trail to run a tangent, and that’s when she saw it—a huge wooden monstrosity erected on two timbers that rose in the pre-dawn gloom. A billboard.
Hope surged through her. She was too far away to read the lettering, but she knew it was the trading post Betty had told her about. It had to be.
Speeding up as much as she dared, Kate pressed forward. From the beginning she’d battled against the darkness and the dangers in an unfamiliar and barely visible trail. If she let herself get overheated in freezing temperatures, she would be chilled by her own sweat.
“Come on,” she told herself. “You can do this, Kate. You can.”
She paced herself, all her senses alert for the unexpected, a rock buried under snow that could send her sprawling and break a leg, an air pocket that could bring her down and twist an ankle, even a predator in the woods looking for one last tasty meal before the storm hit.
Focus! The Coach’s yell echoed through her mind.
“I won’t think about the storm.”
She was close enough now to see the outline of the general store. Kate raced toward the gas pumps out front.
Wait!
Something was wrong. Their inner workings had been pulled out, and one of the hoses lay half buried under the snow. The pumps squatted like sawed-off robots in front of an abandoned general store.
The roof sagged and wind blew snow through an open front door. Obviously Betty didn’t know. Was she getting senile or did she simply not keep up with what was going on around her?
Though the front of store had the look of long-neglect, there was still a small possibility that somebody lived in back. Maybe it was no longer worthwhile to operate a trading post on a trail that looked seldom used, but the owners couldn’t afford to leave their adjoining apartment.
With renewed hope, Kate headed through the open door.
“Hello? Is anybody here?”
Her voice echoed in the silence. Ghostly shadows cast by empty racks and shelves crowded in on her. She pulled her flashlight out of the backpack and trained the light around. A rusted-out cash register from another era presided over the grimy wooden countertop, and a chair with a cane bottom shredded by animals sat nearby. Behind that was a wall-hung telephone.
Kate seized it and held the receiver to her ear. There was no dial tone, not a single thing to indicate she might find a connection to a life that was now so far out of reach it was nothing but a dream.
Still, she said, “Hello?” When there was no answer, she said it again, her voice breaking apart on a sob.
Stay strong, Coach urged.
“I won’t cry,” she said. “I am mentally tough.”
If she gave in to defeat now, she might as well sit down in the relative warmth of the store and wait to die. Still, the terrors of the house and the harrowing escape through the freezing forest had taken a toll.
Kate hung up the phone then shut the door against the wind and sat in an uncluttered corner of the general store to lean against the wall. Warmth began to seep through her and her head began to droop.
She jerked upright, and shook herself. If he caught her asleep, she’d die like the other two girls.
Chapter Seven
7:00 a.m.
“Jonathan! Wake up!”
He rolled over, pulling the covers over his head. Jonathan wasn’t ready to wake up. He’d been dreaming about that luscious plum waiting for him upstairs when the old hag stomped inside and interrupted him. The things he had planned for Kate today made him giddy.
She’d already discovered the wedding dress. Oh yes, she had. Yesterday when he’d come up from the basement where he’d stashed her laptop and had that argument with his mother, he’d heard Kate exploring her new home. That room--her room now, theirs later—was imprinted on his memory. He could tell by the direction of her footsteps when she’d opened the closet door and found the wedding dress. Her wedding dress.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out her perfect size. He’d been corresponding with Kate on Facebook for months. Since shortly after the last girl didn’t work out.
Frankie, he’d called himself, using the photograph of a redheaded, freckled faced farm girl wearing thick glasses. He’d found the picture in an advertisement for some low-class homemade jellies nobody ever heard of. Frankie was just the kind of nerdy, needy girl Kate gravitated toward.
Kate was a do-gooder. Privileged girls often were. Life had been easy for her and she wanted to share with the less fortunate.
“Get your lazy self out of that bed!” The wretched bag poked him with the business end of a mop. A wet mop. “We’ve got a job to do.”
He wanted to roar out of the covers like a lion king and take her down with one swipe of his big paw. He could, too.
It had been so easy to knock Kate out of her chair last night when she wouldn’t let him kiss her. She’d even had the audacity to slap him. And after all he’d done for her--talked his mother into letting him take the food, arranged ham sandwiches on the tray himself then given up his precious time watching the six o’clock news on TV so he could sit in front of that fake snow scene by the window and have supper with her.
The girl had a lot to learn about being a proper wife. And he intended to teach her before the wedding.
Betty poked him again with the mop.
He threw back the covers and leaped up, fists balled. “What do you want?”
She didn’t back up an inch. The old biddy. It was her fault he didn’t get to play with Kate. Her and her false sympathy for the girl, always sneaking around spying on him, foiling his plans.
“The girl’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“She escaped sometime last night. I told you that girl was smarter than she looked.”
Jonathan raced up the stairs without even bothering to put on his clothes. Sure enough, her door was open. The hairpin she’d used to pick the lock was lying on the floor.
He flung himself onto her bed and rooted under the covers as if he might find her wadded into a tiny ball.
“Kate! Kate!” The covers smelled like her—the citrus scent of her hair and the light floral perfume she wore on her wrists and behind her knees. He’s sniffed them all, repeatedly, while she was sleeping off the drug he’d slipped into the coffee he gave her when he rescued her.
He’d rescued them all. It had been ridiculously easy. Just plant a fake detour sign in the right weather, at the right time, rig up a plank in the road with nails protruding, then wait for the college girls to fall into his trap. So what if he occasionally caught a logger or some fool tourist family. He just helped them change tires and sent them on their way.