Trapped with the Blizzard (17 page)

“What about the smell? And all the fires,” I countered. “He could’ve easily set that fire up there and then been back here before you.”

Bryan shook his head again. “Why, though? You aren’t answering that part of it. Why would anyone ever try to hide here?”

I finally lost control of my frayed nerves. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? Why don’t you go ask him yourself?” He stopped pacing and stared at me with wide eyes. I didn’t mean to shout, but he was worried about all the wrong things. “I won’t sit back and ignore my gut instinct about someone, especially when Jack is downstairs and potentially at risk.”

“I understand,” he said in a softer tone. “We’re already in kind of a high-stress situation. Given all that you and I have been through, it makes sense we would look for trouble.”

“I’m not looking for anything,” I snapped. “I’m just telling you what I’ve learned and what I saw. If I had my way, we’d be having a peaceful Christmas Eve dinner at our house tomorrow with our freakin’ family and the only thing you’d have to worry about is if the eggnog was strong enough.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let it out in one shuddering breath. “Did you at least bring the guns?”

Bryan and Walt shared a look, and neither of them met my eye.

“Are you kidding me?” I laughed. “You give me crap about all this and you actually brought guns just in case?”

“Bryan mentioned it and I thought it might be a good idea,” Walt said gruffly. “Personally, I think it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“So do I,” I said with a pointed look at Bryan. He walked over to his desk and unlocked the top drawer. “No wonder I couldn’t get in there earlier,” I huffed.

He pulled out two handguns and set them on the desk. “I’m not naïve enough to think these are the only guns in the lodge right now, but it still doesn’t make me a hundred percent comfortable walking around with them. I vote we leave these locked, I’ll go talk to this guy, and we all decide what to do afterward, sound good?”

Before we had a chance to respond, the lights popped on in the hallway outside the office. I rushed to the wall and tested the light switch, giving a little
whoop
when the overheads flickered on.

“Well, that’s one problem solved,” I said in a fake cheerful voice. My gaze fell on Bryan. It was as if he barely noticed the power had returned. He stood hunched over the desk, his hands on either side of the two guns.

“We need to keep this quiet,” he breathed. He rocked back into his chair with a thump, like all the energy had just drained from his body. Wiping his face with his hand, he continued. “If anyone knew about this, there’d be a panic. People would try to leave or…” He focused fully on Walt for the first time. “You have to promise not to hurt this guy. If it turns out he’s the one…”

“Come on now, do you think I’m that stupid?” Walt cut in. “As much as I’d like to string the prick up by his balls, I know it’d only come back at me.”

Bryan relaxed. “All right. Let’s get Chris on board with everything. I’ll go talk to this asshole and see what I can find out.”

I cleared my throat. “While I agree we shouldn’t tell everyone, I think it might be a good idea to bring a few people into the loop.” Bryan protested, but I put my hand up. “I know what you’re going to say.”

His shoulders slumped as he walked over to me, resting a hand on either arm, forcing me to look up at him. “With everything that has been going on in the area the past couple weeks, don’t you think people are going to freak out?”

“You gotta give people some credit, son,” Walt said. “They can handle more than you think.”

I nodded, some of the anger draining from me. I wrapped my arm around his waist and gave him a quick hug. “I think if we just pull a few of the parents to the side, you know, let a couple responsible people know what might be going on, that’s about the best we can do. Strength in numbers.”

The three of us looked at each other in silence, the gravity of the situation crashing down. There was a very real chance that by declaring the town’s evacuation to Powder Mountain, we had just trapped ourselves in the same space with a prolific serial arsonist.

Before shutting the office door, Bryan jogged back inside, returning with four walkie-talkies. Tucking two into his pocket, he handed one to both Walt and me. “The Internet is already out as well as the cable. It’s only a matter of time before the cell tower at the top of the mountain gets knocked out, too. Put it to channel 6, and we’ll use that to talk. I’ll give the last one to Chris.”

Putting a hand on Bryan’s arm, I let Walt go on ahead of us. When he was out of earshot, I still whispered. “You still want to tell me this has nothing to do with us?”

“Nothing points directly to us, Liz. You gotta stop acting so paranoid. It’s the town, not us.”

“But…”

He brushed the hair from my eyes and looked at me with such love the words were wiped from my tongue. “You have every right to want to protect your family, but we are at no more or no less risk than anyone else in this building, okay?”

I sighed but couldn’t resist his annoyingly calm, logical, gorgeous face. “Fine.” But as he led me towards the top of the stairs, I stopped and waved my finger in his face. “If this
does
turn out to be about us,
you’re
never going to hear the end of it.”

“I believe you,” he laughed.

The relative peace we’d attained in the Great Hall before the power outage was replaced with near mayhem. Kids were crying, parents were shouting, every light in the place was on at full power. I saw a few calm souls trying to maintain order, but I knew it was going to be a long night. And then Dani met me at the bottom of the stairs as we came down.

“There you are,” she snarled as she held Jack out at arm’s length. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your time off, but I need a freakin’ break.”

I swear on all that is holy, I deserve a medal for not tearing into her right then and there. The lengths we were going to just to make sure she was safe, happy, feeling cared for… and she comes at me with that attitude? Bryan touched me on the small of my back. I like to think it was a gentle reminder not to kill people in front of our son.

I took him off her hands, bit my tongue, and concocted the longest trail of obscenities I’d ever strung together in one sentence. He and I shared a knowing look before breaking apart.

While appearing to organize and keep things running smoothly, Walt and I circulated around the room, carefully pulling trustworthy people to the side for a quick conversation. Of course, telling someone we’d trapped a strange homeless guy downstairs in the basement wasn’t the easiest topic to just drop into.

“Do you think this has anything to do with…” Sally asked. She was in her mid-sixties, owned a horse stable at the edge of town, and had that no-nonsense attitude you needed when taking care of animals four times your size.

I shook my head slowly and kept my voice low. “We have no proof, but it is strange. But we just wanted people to be aware that a few odd things have been happening. The more eyes we have the better.”

Sally nodded, looking around the lodge as everyone got ready for bed. “Don’t you worry. We take care of our own.” She gave me a comforting pat on the back before returning to her daughter and granddaughter.

Walt and I had these private conversations for nearly an hour, delivering the tense news, probably turning dinner into rocks in their stomachs. The worst part was that I didn’t feel any safety in numbers. Bryan called on the walkie-talkie.

“He’s not talking. I’m coming back upstairs. The guy is obviously homeless and unstable. It’s probably best we keep him locked up.”

Well, when I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to hear my husband say a sentence like that,
I thought.

There was nowhere specific I had to be. I just needed to hand over my babysitting duties to, you know, the mother for a while. I was happy to help, but I had my own life. I wasn’t about to spend the next three days locked in here doing nothing but change diapers and play with blocks. As much as I loved that kid, just… no.

Wandering through the lodge, I naturally drifted towards the rental shop. As I drew closer, I could hear voices, laughter. I turned the corner and saw Miah and Marie only ten feet ahead of me.

“Hey,” I called out. My voice was a lot more cheerful than I’d intended. Miah spun and smiled, Marie practically grimaced.

“Well, hey yourself,” he said as he waited for me to catch up. However, she couldn’t bring herself to even say hello.

Marie pushed herself up and over the counter, plucking a helmet off the wall and shoving it down on her head. Her wild head of curly hair puffed out the bottom. “You’d think being adopted I wouldn’t suffer from Jew-fro,” she complained.

“Maybe your adopted parents are actually your real parents and they don’t want you to know for some reason,” I offered. I ran my fingers along the long rows of ski boots, the scratched plastic cool to the touch.

Miah laughed when Marie froze in her tracks. “Well, that would suck. Right now I can play the Jew card, the lesbian card, the ethnic card,” she said as she counted each one off on her fingers. “The adopted card, the refugee from a war-torn country card…”

“You aren’t a lesbian and you aren’t from a war-torn country. You’ve seen more dick than a high school locker room and were born in Columbia,” Miah laughed.

“Doesn’t mean I can’t play the cards,” Marie winked. “Most people don’t even know where it is on a map. And everyone thinks I’m a dyke, so I might as well play it up.”

“Wait, you’re really adopted? I was just joking around.”

Marie nodded. “My parents kidnapped me, practically tore me from my birth mother’s arms,” she said solemnly.

“
Or
, they spent thousands of dollars in plane tickets, legal fees, and hotel rooms just to get you from an orphanage,” Miah corrected with a laugh. He pulled a snowboard from the rack and examined the bindings.

“That’s another way to look at it,” she countered.

“Where are your parents then? I mean, aren’t they coming up here?” I tried to ask Miah casually. Instead, Marie answered for him.

“You want to know why he’s staying at my house,” she grinned.

I opened my mouth to speak but just then, a couple of Marie’s friends called out from the front of the room. “Where are you guys?”

Marie held my gaze a moment longer before responding. The heat rose up my neck like a stinging sweat, but I refused to let her see she was getting to me. We had a weird dynamic. She was funny, but she obviously had a weird thing about Miah and me. Childish or not, it made me want him. The more she tried to ruffle my feathers, the more I wanted to pluck hers.

“We’re back here,” she finally called out.

They found us in the back corner of the rental area. I recognized a few from earlier and a couple from just around town. I smiled tightly and prayed none of them had gone to the Festival of Lights. As they were laughing and chatting, Miah approached.

“Thanks again for what you did for us today,” he said as he bumped my shoulder.

A wave of nerves washed over me again. It wasn’t like me to go all flighty around a guy. It felt weird. I was acting like all the other girls that I normally made fun of. Fitzy and I hung out and fooled around, sure, but I didn’t actively go chasing him or anything.

“Yeah, really, it was no problem.” We wandered further away, putting a little distance between us and the other group. “So… you live with Marie or something?”

Miah chuckled and shook his head. “Is that what she told you? You haven’t figured out that she’s a bit of a storyteller, huh?”

“Well, yeah,” I replied, feeling the heat creep up my chest and neck again.

“Storyteller is being generous. Habitual, near-constant lies. Not quite pathological, but close.”

“Good to know,” I laughed. We strolled around the edge of the room, further and further away from the others.

“My mom went to make sure my grandparents were fine. They live out in the middle of nowhere. I think she said they’re coming up here to the lodge tomorrow morning.”

I couldn’t help but feel a little relieved. “So is it just… is it you and your mom?” I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, watching his reaction.