I hold my breath, listening with half an ear. “No, I don’t hear anything,” I say after only a few seconds, needing the truth from Chip. He’s not wiggling out of this one without giving me a straight answer. “Are you sure you don’t have any idea what’s going on with Colette? Did you talk to her when you came back inside?”
His shoulders bob. “I may have said hello or something, but I was warned not to bother her, so…”
“So?” I challenge.
His eyes flick to my face before returning to the ceiling. “So I didn’t.”
He’s lying. I can tell.
I’ve seen Chip in meetings with record executives, working them to get a better deal, and he struck me as an excellent liar. But he’s distracted right now. Or maybe he’s simply not bothering to put any effort into being convincing.
Maybe he got what he wanted from this trip—Colette out of the picture and me in the studio, writing the kind of music he thinks I should write—and he sees no reason to keep up the concerned collaborator act.
Either way, I have to find Colette. She can’t have gone far. She doesn’t have a car, and there aren’t any taxis in Little River. There was a bus stop by the post office, but surely, the buses have stopped running for the day, and she doesn’t know anyone in town other than Nancy and Jed.
I head for the back door, deciding Nancy is the best place to start looking for information.
“Where are you going?” Chip asks, sounding alarmed.
“To talk to the caretakers,” I say, adding as an afterthought, “to see if they can give us any more information about the noises in the attic.”
“Good,” Chip says, his shoulders relaxing. “I’ll stand guard here. Make sure no one tries to sneak out. I wouldn’t put it past these people to have some kind of alert system in place to warn this guy to bail when people get suspicious.”
I make a vague sound of agreement. I’m positive Chip is being paranoid, but I don’t want him to know that I’m going after Colette. He would try to stop me, I’m sure, and even though I wouldn’t let him, I’d rather not be slowed down by a pointless argument.
Outside, the evening air is cool, and the faint bluish-pink glow of dusk hangs in the air. The first stars are flickering to life overhead, and soon, the world will be dark in a way it never gets in the city. And while that’s amazing for stargazing, at the moment, it’s more scary than anything.
If Colette decided to take the trail into town, there’s no way she’ll be able to get there before night falls. And while I’m not too terribly worried about bears or wolves or the other predators prowling the hills this early in the evening, I am worried about her wandering off the trail and getting lost.
Or running into a human threat.
A group of sketchy-looking men was hanging out by the general store in town today, drinking beer in the back of a pickup truck and shooting Colette the kind of looks that made me want to whisk her away to a tower somewhere, far out of harm’s reach.
Or punch the men in the face.
This punch-happy side of me is new, but it doesn’t scare me. It’s part of how I feel about Colette. Protecting the person you love is second nature—at least for me—and I’m not going to be able to calm down until I know she’s safe.
By the time I circle the pool house and head for the light of Jed and Nancy’s cottage, I’m running full tilt through the grass. I have to find out where Colette’s gone. Nothing else matters right now—not Chip, not the music, not anything but getting to my girl and letting her know how much I need her to stay.
Hopefully forever.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Colette
My new room is unexpectedly delightful, with a kitchenette decorated with cheerful red-and-white gingham accents, a fluffy bed sporting decorative pillows that read “Her Buck” and “His Doe,” and a picture on the wall showcasing a huge pair of antlers with lettering underneath that insists, “Size Matters.”
A white desk by the window overlooks the lodge’s back lawn, granting a view of the squirrels having a final frolic through the trees as the sun goes down.
After I drop my suitcase in the closet, I sit and watch them, wondering why I’ve never noticed how insane squirrels were before.
One of them spends a solid ten minutes dragging itself on its belly across a wooden picnic table, which must give it dreadfully uncomfortable splinters in private squirrel places. Another grooms its tail maniacally between lifting tiny paws to its face and inhaling deeply of its own, apparently intoxicating, squirrel scent.
Their antics keep me entertained for nearly an hour, but as soon as the last of the twilight glow fades, the critters head to their nests for the night, and I’m left staring at my own reflection in the glass.