It’s a truck. A big green pick-up truck, badly rusted in the back, with a big dent in the left fender.
“I knew there had to be a vehicle around here somewhere.” He nods in the direction of the truck. “It didn’t take me long to find it.”
“Why is it parked out here?”
“Come on.” Jack takes my arm again. “I’ll show you.”
I don’t know if I want to know anymore, but I dutifully follow Jack to the truck. Maybe this is a way out of here. If we’ve got a vehicle, we can make it to the main road, hopefully.
As we get closer to the truck, it becomes obvious it’s about as beat up as everything else in the cabin. Clearly, the big guy with the Bible gun is the owner. But why did he abandon the truck in the middle of the forest?
“Look at the driver’s window,” Jack says.
I creep closer, holding onto the side of the truck so I don’t lose my balance. Before I even get to the window, I realize the truck isn’t empty. There’s a man in the driver’s seat. A big man with a thick, matted beard and a tangle of graying hair. I take another step closer and I see the vacant look in the large man’s dark eyes.
And I scream.
“Shh!” Jack hisses at me. “Keep it down!”
“But…” I lift my eyes again and see the blood all over his chest. Oh God. “He’s dead!”
“Right.” Jack heaves a sigh. “I found him like this. I think he’s got a stab wound on his chest.”
Before this week, I’d never been anywhere near a dead person before, and now this is the second one after Lindsay. A wave of nausea comes over me, and this time I’ve got food in my belly. I have to fight to keep it down. I hold onto the side of the truck, my legs jello beneath me.
“Claire,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“No!” Tears spring to my eyes. How did this become my life? A week ago, I was enjoying a nice evening with my family in my comfortable home. Now I’m out in the middle of nowhere, staring at a dead body. I’m never going to make it back home—I know it. “No, I’m not okay! How did…”
Jack’s expression is grim. “The blood on his chest is dry,” he says. “This didn’t just happen.”
I frown at him. “Wait, were you inside the truck?”
“I had to go inside. I wanted to see if the keys were in there.” “And?”
He shakes his head. “Couldn’t find them anywhere. Even looked in the guy’s pockets.”
I’m impressed he had the nerve. You couldn’t get me in a truck with a dead guy if you paid me a million bucks.
“But it hasn’t been that long since he was killed.” He glances back in the direction of the cabin. “That sandwich on the table wasn’t rotting or anything.”
The wheels are turning in my head. The man has a stab wound in his chest. That means the animal that made the claw marks didn’t kill him. Whoever killed him had opposable thumbs capable of holding a knife.
He was killed by a human being.
“Do you think…” I take a deep breath, barely even able to get out the words. “Do you think whoever killed him will be back?”
“Well,” Jack says thoughtfully, “it depends why they killed him, doesn’t it?”
I take a step away from the truck. “We’ve got to tell Noah about this.” “No!” Jack’s tone is sharp. “I don’t think we should tell Noah what we
know.”
“Why on earth not?”
He shuffles between his feet, looking down into the dirt. “It’s all kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Coincidence?”
“Your minivan,” he says. “That van is practically new. Why would it just suddenly break down?”
I blink at him. “The battery died.”
“I don’t know a lot about cars, but I know a little something.” He lifts his eyes to look straight into mine. “The battery in your car looked older than all the other stuff under the hood.”
I snort. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” He raises an eyebrow. “I told you how my compass was giving me wrong directions. I thought it was Warner throwing it off, but I checked the compass again after he disappeared. It was still wrong.”
“So?”
“So don’t you see?” He lowers his voice. “It had to have been Noah.” “What are you saying?” I blurt out. “You’re saying Noah engineered
this entire thing? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“That first night when we were about to go to sleep, we all drank some water,” Jack says. “Except Noah was a ‘gentleman’ and he passed most of it to you, right?”
I do remember how touched I was when he barely drank any water, even though I assumed he was thirsty as I was. I didn’t realize Jack had noticed. “Right…”
He chews on his lip. “I thought at the time the water had a strange, chalky taste. And now I’m sure of it. Someone put something in that water.”
It did have a strange taste. But still. “That’s crazy.”
“Really? How else did we all sleep so soundly through the night?”
That’s a good point. I was surprised at how deeply I slept that night considering I was lying in a bed of leaves. But Jack was the one who went off with Michelle that night, not Noah.
Of course, it was Noah who told me that…
“Maybe it’s all a game he’s playing,” Jack says. “He’s torturing us as he gets rid of us one by one.”
I stare at Jack. I don’t care what he says, Noah would never do something like that. This man is my husband. “That’s crazy. Why would he do something like that?”
Jack lowers his voice. “Because of us. Because he knows what’s been going on between the two of us.”
“He doesn’t know…” “I think he does.”
I start to protest, but then I remember Lindsay said the same thing. She was certain he knew Jack and I were having an affair. “Even so, he
wouldn’t do this. He just wouldn’t!”
“I know Noah longer than you do, Claire.” He folds his arms across his chest. “And I think he absolutely would do something like this under the right circumstances.”
“Bullshit.”
Jack looks at me for a moment, as if debating something in his head. “Our freshman year of college, Noah’s father died. They were really close, and he was a mess.”
“I know.”
“You know the story,” he says, “but you don’t know what happened. He was walking around like a zombie for months. Anytime I asked him a question, he would bite my head off. I borrowed some water he was keeping in our mini-fridge, and he walked up to me and punched me in the mouth.”
I gnaw on my thumbnail. “He punched you?”
“I’m telling you, he was a mess.” Jack shakes his head. “And that’s how he was acting at the beginning of this trip. Claire, I don’t know what he’s capable of right now. I’d like to think he couldn’t do something like this, but I know I didn’t do it, and I know it wasn’t you, so…”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” That sick feeling is almost overwhelming. I need to sit down. “Jack, Noah is not a murderer. I know that for sure.… I just… I can’t have this conversation with you anymore. I… I have to go…”
I turn on my heels and run back in the direction of the cabin before Jack can say another word. It turns out that I might’ve been right about us being hunted. But it wasn’t an animal hunting us.
