Page 95 of Just One Little Bargain

Maddie and Daisy exchange a look so loaded it could sink a barge.

***

The second cocktail is a mistake.

I know this because the warmth has dropped below my navel and kept sinking, settling thick and heavy between my hips. Under the table, my thighs press together in a greenhouse full of candlelight, while my two best friends plan to give me an intervention.

I want the man sleeping on my couch, and the wanting is so persistent and maddening it turns my skin inside out. It has to be the drinks. The alternative is that I’ve been walking around my inn for two weeks in a state of low-grade arousal so constant it no longer registers as abnormal.

“Evie.” Maddie tips her drink in my direction. “You’re allowed to want someone without building a contingency plan first. You understand that, right?”

“He’s leaving. Whatever this is, it has an expiration date.”

“So does everything.”

I need to go home and not do anything stupid when I get there. Sitting in this chair, I already know the second half of that plan is a lie.

“Daisy.” I pivot hard. “Are you still planning to hike out to Birch Hollow on your own?”

Her face lights up. “Next month. Already mapped the whole route.”

“For what exactly?”

“A wildlife photographer came through in August. He’d been doing an overnight shoot near there, setting up motion-activated cameras along the deer trails. Normal stuff. Except when he reviewed the footage the next morning, every camera had been turned to face the ground. All six of them. Repositioned sometime between two and four a.m. without triggering the sensors.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“And the footage from the last camera before it was moved caught about nine seconds of something. He showed me on his laptop. It’s blurry, night-vision green, but there’s movement between the trees.”

“Daisy.”

“Thomas Crane disappeared out there in 2016. Solo hiker. Search teams located his campsite intact, food hanging from the bear line, journal open in the tent. The last thing he wrote was that something had been circling outside after dark for two nights. He never turned up.”

“I remember.”

“A couple went missing on the same stretch in 2019. Volunteers discovered their campsite scattered over a wide area. Sleeping bags dragged out of the tent and left open flat on the ground, side by side.” She holds my gaze. “And there’s one more. A trail runner in 2021, found unconscious near the hollow with no memory of the previous night. She was severely anemic.”

“Daisy, people have disappeared, and someone was hospitalized. This isn’t a tourism project.”

“Nobody’s treating this as a connected pattern. Each incident is treated as isolated. I want to go out there with recording equipment, map the locations, set up audio capture, and build a coherent picture of what’s happening.”

Maddie’s eyes bug out. “And you want to sleep out there? Alone?”

“I’m registering my route with the forestry service, and leaving my full itinerary with the office.”

“None of that matters at three in the morning when you’re miles from the nearest road.”

“That,” Maddie announces, “sounds like my absolute worst nightmare. Alone in the woods. No cell service. Sleeping on the ground.”

“I’m bringing proper hiking boots.” Daisy ticks off on her fingers. “Trail mix. Extra water. A portable phone charger.”

“Daisy.”

“I’ll be careful, Evie. I promise.”

She smiles at me, absolutely certain and completely unclear on what careful means, but I let it go for now.

Chapter 26