The cabin looks empty.
It’s dead silent, first of all. There’s a beat-up sofa in the middle of what appears to be the living room, with rips in it and stuffing coming out of one of the pillows. There’s a small fireplace that’s covered in a layer of soot, a half-size bookcase with a few hardcovers and paperbacks inside, and a kitchen alcove with a sink and gray-tinged, rusty refrigerator.
Oh my God. A sink!
All three of us run for the sink. Jack gets there first and hits one of the faucets. I almost cry with happiness when water comes out of the tap. Water! Clean water that’s slightly tinged with brown but at least doesn’t have flecks of mud in it. And we don’t have to ration it. We can drink as much as we want!
There are glasses in the cabinet above the sink, and Jack passes them around. The glasses look grimy and smudged, but it doesn’t matter. We each fill up our glasses and drink until we have finished the contents, then we go back for seconds. The water has a metallic aftertaste, but I could not care less. It tastes like fine wine after what we’ve been drinking the last two days.
“Hey,” Noah says after we have all downed two heaping glasses of water, “look at this.”
He’s pointing at the rickety circular kitchen table. There’s a plastic chair set up in front of the table. But the really strange thing is there’s a plate on the table. With a sandwich on it. Two bites have been taken out of the sandwich. And there’s also a half-full glass of water.
“So there is somebody here!” I say, probably too loud.
Jack narrows his eyes at the food on the table. He lifts his rifle and points in the direction of what seems to be the bedroom. The door is closed tightly.
“Knock on the door,” Noah says. “If there’s somebody in there, we’ll just explain our situation. Hopefully, they’ll understand.”
Jack quietly and slowly makes his way over to the bedroom door.
Noah steps in front of me and whispers, “Get ready to duck down.”
Jack hesitates at the door. He lifts his hand, then knocks gently. No answer.
“Hello?” he calls.
No response.
“We’re, uh…” He clears his throat. “We’ve been lost in the woods and…”
Still no response.
Jack glances back at us. “I’m going to open the door.”
Noah nods. I clutch Noah’s arm so tightly, I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t say anything.
Just like at the front, Jack reaches for the knob and it turns easily. He clutches his rifle in both hands and kicks the door open gently with his foot. Nobody comes out shooting, so I count that as a win. I hold my breath as he kicks the door the rest of the way open and steps into the bedroom.
“Empty!” he calls. What the…?
Jack looks in the bathroom too, and that’s also empty. My elation at not having to crouch down in a bush anymore to pee is tempered by my uneasiness about this entire situation. Even though we haven’t found anyone in this cabin, somebody is living here. I mean, there’s a half-eaten sandwich on the table. Nobody goes home from their vacation cabin and leaves half-eaten food on the table. Well, most people wouldn’t.
I go over to the bedroom and look inside. There’s a small twin mattress in the center of the room on a rusted metal bed frame. Some covers are lying in a pile in the center of the bed. I’m not saying whoever lives here was obligated to make their bed, but it seems like a place where somebody has slept recently. Very recently.
“There’s got to be somebody living here,” I say.
Jack shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nobody here. And I don’t see a car. How would somebody get here without a car?”
“Has anyone seen a phone?” Noah asks.
That’s a great question. I take my cell phone out of my purse, hoping the battery has suddenly come back to life. No such luck. Noah is in the same boat. Jack was smart enough to turn off his phone early on, but when he turns it on now, he still has no reception.
But this place may have a landline. We start to search.
As I walk around the dilapidated cabin, I still can’t shake the feeling that someone was living here very, very recently. That sandwich. Somebody was eating that sandwich. It doesn’t look like it’s been sitting on the table for months. It looks fresh.
I check out the contents of the refrigerator. It’s not packed to the brim, but it’s well-stocked. There are bread and lunch meat. And a container of milk. I pull out the carton of milk and look at the expiration date. It’s three days from today.
“A phone jack!” Noah calls out.
I run over to where he’s pointing. There’s a jack in the wall of the cabin for the phone to be plugged in. Except there’s nothing plugged into it. No phone.
“Well, that’s not helpful,” Jack grumbles.
Why wouldn’t the person living here have a phone? Or are they some sort of recluse? The cabin doesn’t seem to have electricity either. Jack says the refrigerator is running on gas power, so that’s fine. I don’t need electricity. I’m just happy about the running water and food.
Since the search for a phone has not come up with anything, we decide to eat some lunch and figure out our next move. Noah makes us all sandwiches, and it takes all my willpower not to scarf mine down in three bites.
“I think we should stay put,” Noah says. “We’ve got food and running water. Claire’s sister probably knows something is wrong by now because we haven’t checked on the kids. I’m sure somebody has started searching for us.”
“I agree,” Jack says.
“Yes…” I agree with them in theory. I don’t want to leave this cabin and go back out there. But at the same time, something about this place is making me very uncomfortable. “But what if the person living here comes back?”
“That would be good,” Jack says. “They probably have a car and might be able to drive us to the inn.”
“Yeah…” I look around the cabin, which is reeking with the presence of another person who was here very recently. “But what happened to the person who is living here? I mean, who leaves their home with a half-eaten sandwich on the table?”
Jack raises his hand. “I’ve done that.” “You have?”
He shrugged. “Sure. You make yourself a sandwich. Then you forget about it when you get a phone call. And then you leave the house with the sandwich still on the table.”
I don’t entirely buy it. I look over at Noah, who has the same uneasy expression on his face that I do. Someone is living here. Someone left this house in a great hurry. And I would like to know what happened to them.
