Chapter fifteen
Daphne
Imean,thishad seemed like a good idea at the time.
But now, as I stood in the forest, my entire body shivering as the rain continued to pour down around me, I wasn’t sure what I had been thinking.
I couldn’t survive in the woods.
In the dark.
Alone!
Turning in a circle, I tried to gather some sense of direction, but the entire world looked the same: trees.
Everywhere I looked, there were trees.
I mean, I knew it was a forest, but this was a bit ridiculous. Didn’t national parks come with signs or something? How many people died each year because there were not enough well-marked trails through New York State’s national parks and preserves?
When I got back to Manhattan, I was going to write a very strongly worded letter to the Governor.
Choosing a direction at random, I continued to pick my way through the underbrush, my sneakers squishing in the damp blanket of pine needles that covered the forest floor as the fresh cut in my behind continued to sting. At least with the weather being this bad, I hoped that would mean that the animals were all staying out of the rain, too. The last thing I needed was to come face to face with a freaking bear.
As I continued to move forward—only because the other option was staying still, and that was just not something I could do—I tried again to focus on what Silas would do in this situation, then emulate that.
First, he would probably have told me to seek shelter when the weather got bad. That made sense, but escape was my priority; pneumonia was a small price to pay for keeping my ass out of that horror movie shack Davis called a hideout.
So, with finding a dry place to hide off the table, I thought the next thing he would say would be to find help, which was what I was trying to do. Knowing that there was someone else in these woods with me prevented me from feeling the full force of my seemingly hopeless situation. I didn’t know what I would do if I really stopped to consider what was going on here, but for now, I was content to just focus on the moment.
Not having any tools or a compass or even a freaking phone, I picked my way past a fallen tree and tried to think of any movies I had ever seen with someone lost in the woods.
The first thing that came to mind was Avatar, but seeing as how there were no flying feathered dragon things and no blue skinned aliens, I put that one aside and tried again.
Return of the Jedicame next, but that was just a different type of alien.
Ewoks were pretty cute, though.
I ran through the list in my head, trying to figure out which movie would give me the most help in this situation, but when my brain latched on to The Blair Witch Project and refused to move on, I began to panic, fairly certain I was hearing the name ‘Josh’ being called from deeper in the woods.
Realizing that thinking of movies was only making things worse for my exhausted brain, my thoughts wandered back to Davis.
What the hell was he doing, kidnapping random women and hiding them in the woods?
Except—it wasn’t random, was it?
Remembering back to the warehouse in Yonkers, I could still hear the screeching voice of Spaz as she shouted about wanting the Pennington woman.
I assumed that meant it was a ransom situation. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to extort money from my family, and it likely wouldn’t be the last; that was the price you paid for being who we were. People wanted what you had, and they were often willing to do anything to get it.
But there was the fact that I still didn’t believe that it was me that they really wanted.
Especially not after Davis referred to me as Mrs. Pennington.
I was still Miss Pennington. Constance had been going by Pennington-Grover for almost a decade. And my mother had been married twice more since her split with dad.
No, at this point in time, there was only one Mrs. Pennington, and that was Penelope.
But I just couldn’t figure out why someone would go after her? She was the nicest person ever, making friends wherever she went. Coming from a simple background—her mother was a nurse and her father had been a cop—it made no sense to me that someone would want to harm her.
Which meant that in the end, this wasn’t even about Penelope at all.
It was about my brother, Stone.
And who in the hell would want to hurt him?
I was still contemplating the mystery of my abduction and the inner complexities of the criminal mind that was Davis when my next step forward brought me out of the brush and onto a narrow trail.
Too narrow to be an actual park designated path, it was none the less still better than traipsing though the woods like a lunatic with no real direction in mind.
This deep in the trees, the rain was mostly blocked by the thick canopy, but I could still hear the heavy sound of the downpour as the storm continued to roll through the hills. Shuffling slowly, my teeth chattering but my eyes now better adjusted to the dark than they had been when I first started out, I was able to follow my new path with little difficulty, finding the way easier when I wasn’t terrified of falling with every other step.
“Just keep walking, Daph,” I said softly to myself. “If you keep moving forward, then you’ll never have to say you didn’t try.”
It sounded like something you’d find on a ‘Daily Inspirations’ calendar, but what the hell? It was better than the creepy silence of the damp forest.
“Just because you’re lost in what is probably the largest forest in the known universe, that’s no reason to feel overwhelmed. I’m sure that in no time, you’ll stumble your way into a friendly camper or even a Forest Ranger.” I shivered again as a peal of thunder shook the sky. “Sure wouldn’t mind finding my way into a freaking Starbucks, though,” I muttered. “I could absolutely murder a London Fog right now.”
Realizing that I was now carrying on a full conversation with myself in the middle of the darkened woods, I stopped and threw my arms up in the air. “I am losing my mind.”
Shaking my head, I kept walking, trying to keep the one-sided conversation to a minimum.
That was when I saw it.
At first, I thought it was a mirage or something; the small light glowing ahead, standing out in the dark like a beacon of hope.
Following my little trail, I kept moving forward, not taking my eyes off of the light. When it didn’t disappear as I walked, I realized I wasn’t seeing things; it was really there, its orange light shining against the gloom.
When the light started flickering and dancing, throwing the trees around it into stark relief, I started running.
“Hey!” I shouted, my voice shaking with fear and anticipation. “Help! Please, help me!”
No longer picking my way delicately through the bushes, I started to sprint toward the light like I was in the last scene of a romance movie, ready to throw myself into the arms of whoever I found there. As I neared, I saw a person stand, their back to the fire as they looked into the woods where I was probably making enough noise to wake the dead. I couldn’t see much more than a silhouette, but it looked like it was a man, the height and shoulders alone convincing me I was right.
It felt like I ran for ages, but finally I broke free of the trees, stumbling into the clearing and landing on my hands and knees, panting and heaving for breath.
“Holy shit,” came the gruff voice above me. “Where did you come from?”
Sucking in a huge lungful of air, I raised my head. Now that I was closer, I could see that it was indeed a man, probably in his mid to late thirties. He wore jeans and hiking boots—lucky bastard—and when he squatted down in front of me, I could see he also had a thickly padded jacket and a woolen beanie pulled down low over his head, leaving his big brown beard as the only really visible thing about him.
But his eyes looked kind, showing real concern for the strange woman who had just landed at his feet in the middle of the woods.
“You have to help me,” I pleaded, using my shaking hands to claw at his legs. “Please, do you have a phone? I need the police.”
“Whoa,” he said, “slow down. What happened?” His words were clipped and low, his voice sounding like he rarely used it. Reaching down, he helped me to my feet, his hands on my arms to help steady me. “How did you get here? Are you hurt?”
“I was kidnapped,” I said bluntly, because why beat around the bush? I needed him to understand the gravity of the situation as quickly as possible. I could tell he did when his eyes widened a fraction, then his eyebrows dropped into a concerned frown. “I need to call my family. The guys who took me are going to be looking for me.” I looked around the clearing at his sparse campsite. There was a tarp strung between two trees and tied off at an angle, under which he had stashed a backpack and a sleeping bag. There was a kind of tripod thing set up over his fire holding a black hanging kettle over the flames...and not much else. “Do you have a car?”
He grunted, a frown on his face as he released me and stepped back.
“Ain’t got a car,” he said simply. “Ain’t got a phone, neither.” Reaching for the zipper on his heavy jacket, I watched as he removed the garment and held it out for me. I started to protest, but he frowned sternly. “Just put it on, girl.”
I huffed indignantly at the use of the word ‘girl’, but I was not so proud as to refuse him a second time. Sliding my arms into the coat, I sighed at the warmth that radiated from the thing, the heat of his body making the jacket feel like an actual furnace against my chilled flesh. After so long in the cold and the damp, my body had started to go numb, but now that I had stopped to think about it, I could feel the cold like needles in my skin, and I smiled gratefully at him as I did up the zipper.
He jerked his head, indicating the small fire, and I was left with no choice but to follow as he moved back over to it, scooping some dry wood out from under his tarp and adding it to the flames.
“Sit.” He used one of the logs to point at the sleeping bag under the tarp. It looked to be the only dry place in the whole campsite, so I did as I was told and settled down on the soft fabric.
I watched him, eyeing the hulking stranger as he moved around the space, his shoulders still looking broad even though I now wore his coat. He was clad in only a plaid flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled up and the white of his long-sleeved undershirt showing. He looked like every small-town hero in every Hallmark Christmas movie I had ever watched, and although I had been in his presence for under three minutes, I felt safe with him, my heart rate returning to normal as I took my first full breath in ages.