"Too long and he'll start to enjoy it." Would he? I had never lived at an elevation that high before but neither had Cameron. The snowfall here had been light so far, but up there, it wouldn’t be. I still knew next to nothing about the guy, but I did know that he was no survivalist. Nobody enjoyed frozen pipes and sub-zero temperatures. If we gave him enough time to suffer up there, I was betting he’d come back down by himself.
"If it doesn't drive him crazy first," I pointed out. "Friday. A week. Enough time so he feels like he's been left alone but not enough to get too comfortable."
Brett shrugged. "Since you're the one making the trip I don't suppose I can make you go earlier than that." No, he couldn't. His boy Cameron wasn't the only one who didn't like being part of this plan. If I had to come up with something to make him come back, I needed time too.
Chapter Eleven
Cameron
I opened the door and walked out onto the porch. The air was cold, numbing my face. There was a small group of deer weaving through the trees along the perimeter of the property, close to the road. The sun had come up a few hours earlier, and everything was silent. I had gotten so used to the sounds of the city that I never heard them anymore, but this was the real deal. I looked down into my cup of coffee and tipped it out, melting the snow on the ground.
It was burned. I walked back inside and did the same with the rest of the liquid that was still in the percolator, putting it down the sink. It tasted like kerosene. I hadn't really gotten the hang of the stove-top Pyrex percolator yet. I had gone with it instead of getting a coffee maker, but now I was struggling to remember why. I rinsed the cup out then washed the rest of the dishes I had used for breakfast.
The cabin could have been a lot more stripped down, but it was still an adjustment. When you walked in through the front door, you walked into the open kitchen and living area. The bedroom was lofted above the kitchen. All I had up there were my bed and clothes. Furniture was sparse, just a couch and armchair in the living area, with a coffee table that I pushed out of the way often to be closer to the fire anyway. The bathroom had a toilet and shower, no tub. A door near the kitchen opened out to the deck, which was a little smaller than the porch and had stairs leading down to the ground. The cabin had been built on a high point of the property. Behind the house, the ground sloped down into a gorge.
The first time I lit a fire in the fireplace’s wood stove, I set off the smoke alarm. I hadn't lit a fire for anything other than a joint before that in my life. I had started it with split wood pieces and cardboard from a cereal box, and it had lasted exactly twenty minutes. Last night, I had to get up three times to keep the fire going; I was exhausted. I could have used some of that coffee, but I couldn't fucking make that either.
I filled a pan full of water and put it on the stove to heat up. Instant coffee would just have to do the job, again. I hadn't just packed up and left. Alright, I had, but it hadn't been a spur of the moment decision, and before I had, I had taken a couple steps to prepare for what I was getting myself into. Not enough preparation though, it seemed. I looked over at the coffee table by the couch. It was stacked with books I had gotten about wilderness living. Outdoor survival, off-grid living, heating, cooking, tracking and hiking, all that stuff. Even some national park and forest books.
It was all interesting stuff, but now I wasn't just the guy Googling how to keep wood dry through winter. I didn't have my phone anymore, which was liberating but inconvenient when I actually wanted to look something up, and none of it was a fantasy anymore. I was the guy trying to figure out how to keep his wood dry through winter. It was real. It was my world now. I got up, and there was nobody around for miles. Trees and snow as far as the eye could see. If I didn’t feel like freezing my ass off, I had to light a fire, and that meant getting firewood. If I wanted to be able to use my car at all, it meant shoveling snow.
I could admit that I hadn't been ready, but I had also realized how self-reliant I could be. There were things that made life in the city comfortable, convenient, like trash pick-up and gas stations. As much of a challenge the last few days had been, I was happy to take it on. Didn’t kidnapping victims end up loving their kidnappers? It was like that but with the snow and ice in the middle of nowhere. Up here, I had something to focus my energy on. Something that took me out, literally of the life I had been living and put me in one where survival was active, not passive. It was good feeling useful. I hated feeling helpless after hearing the news about my parents. I had something now, even though it was kicking my ass. I was getting up each day for a reason and was doing things on my terms.
My water bubbled, and I turned it off. Pouring it in a mug, I dumped a spoonful of instant coffee into it and choked the liquid down. Saturday afternoon, the day after I had gotten out here, I drove out to the last little town I had passed before coming onto the mountain trail. I needed some supplies, food mostly, and things that I'd forgotten, like additional tools, extra gloves, and some kitchen stuff. The cabin had a small refrigeration unit built into the counter that ran on gas, so that was handy, and the water was piped in from a spring.
I hadn't been expecting a fucking resort coming up here, so it worked. It was enough, but I was still only a few days in. Plenty of time to bail, I thought absently. Brett and the rest of them were probably just waiting for that. Waiting for me to crack and go running back to them. Waiting ‘til I went stir crazy or decided it was too hard living without cable TV and Uber.
I finished my coffee and cleaned up, getting ready to head out again.
The temperature dropped below freezing out here. What did you do about that? Obviously, just stay inside. That was a no-brainer, right? But all the insulation in the world wouldn’t keep you warm in a cabin that wasn't heated. I had looked at ga
s heating options but had decided to keep what I had. The fire was usually enough, once I got it big enough and it lasted longer than half an hour. I needed wood though.
I had not been prepared for what a nightmare getting to harvest wood was going to be. Friday evening after settling in a couple hours, I had driven out on my truck and found a couple dead, fallen trees, which I ended up collecting. It had taken me ‘til nightfall to get them, and the next day heading into the town, I had learned my lesson and gotten myself a chainsaw. The road past my cabin was steep and even narrower than it was leading up to it, but the property wasn't going to give me all the wood I needed, so I had to deal with it.
Several times a day, something happened that reminded me my timing could not have been worse. That trip to town, I had gotten some tarps, one for my car and another to cover the woodpile because the snow was only going to get heavier. Everything was easier without snow, but easy didn't matter. I wasn't complaining. If I was concentrating on getting out alive, I wasn't concentrating on the disaster of the past couple weeks. I stored my wood in stacks on the porch under a tarp, away from the snow. I had been going out in my truck to build my stockpile every day; once the snow started coming down in feet instead of inches, that would be impossible.
It would come in time, I thought, throwing the tarp off my car and shaking the snow off of it. Time, but that was something I didn't have a lot of. I got the engine warming up then went back to the cabin, bringing back the chainsaw in case I got a big log. Most people used the warmer months to stockpile for winter, and all I had was the next couple weeks if I was lucky. It was going to be a long winter, and I was up here alone. I started the engine and pulled out onto the road.
Chapter Twelve
Natalie
"Sorry for making you wait." I looked up from my phone hearing Kasey. She had her purse over her shoulder and was coming up to me. The client she had been working on was finally done.
"Oh no. Don't worry about it," I said easily, standing. It had only been about ten minutes, and I had been able to keep myself busy in her salon's waiting area. Since Brett had told me where Cameron was, I had been paranoid. I had been checking every day to see whether the secret of his location had come out. Was it a secret? Brett knew, and I knew, but I didn't know whether that was the end of that list. Either it was, or whoever also knew just didn't care to spill the beans.
"Ugh, the lady I had was impossible," Kasey complained. We walked out of the salon into the street. Just a block down was a sandwich place that she and a lot of the other stylists would order from daily. Today had been the only day so far this week that she had had an opening at the same time as I had a break. Being the last day, I'd get to talk to her before I had to make the drive out to find Grayson's son and try to talk some sense into him. I wanted to get her opinion on the whole thing.
"She came in wanting a color and cut. She set her appointment asking for cut and color. The girl's hair is black, and she thought the best time to tell me the color she wanted was platinum was when she was already in my chair."
I laughed a little. "How'd she take the news when you broke it to her?"
"She insisted that she had brunette friends who had gone blonde in one sitting. I'm not a miracle worker; I'm a fucking stylist. And she totally lied when I asked her whether the black was box dye or not. I wasn't about to spend the next six hours stripping that shit out of her hair, and when I told her that, she acted like I was the one who had done something wrong not telling her beforehand. How the hell was I supposed to know that that would be walking in when all she had asked for setting her appointment had been a cut and color?"
I let Kasey rant. I had never been a stylist, but I had hung around her enough to know a thing or two, and I had heard all her hair client horror stories. She was also my stylist, so I knew firsthand what she could do. Someone sitting in her chair and acting like she didn't know what she was talking about was simply insulting. With my job, I almost always had more knowledge of the law than the people I was dealing with, so nobody got all know-it-all with me. People had, however, been perming, dying, curling, cutting, and straightening their own hair for years at home and sometimes got an attitude when a pro told them they were doing it wrong. Even if I never moved back to Salt Lake, I'd lay down and die before finding another stylist.
We got to the place, got our food, and sat. She asked me how work was I sighed, thinking about the trip I had to make into the mountains the next day. Fucking cabin in the mountains. Could he have been any more dramatic? He was at least thirty already; who did he think he was? My opinion of him changed when I had spoken to him a couple times, but then, he went and pulled a stunt like this. I couldn’t hate him, but I was close. I did resent him. I resented him for doing it, and I resented being the one who had to go collect him before everyone he left behind lost their minds.