“Aunt Gert’s, I think.” He drew a breath and let it out slowly. “You do a lot more for it than she did.” His eyes scaled down all the way to her bare feet, and he kept his head down for a time, rubbing his forehead.
Beth held her breath.
When he raised his head, he hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “You’ll have fresh clothes. I brought your suitcase. Purse. I guess your phone is in it?”
“Yes. Thanks.” She glanced toward the window. “It’s pouring.”
“Like a son of a… gun.”
“You went in the boat? The way we came? In this rain?”
“Nothing I haven’t done dozens of times. I had a tarp to cover up your stuff.” He turned away, but only long enough to pick up her suitcase and purse where he’d left them just outside her line of sight.
He carried them over to the bed. “Mutt.” The dog looked at him with imploring eyes, then over at Beth as though begging her to intercede on his behalf, but John snapped his fingers and Mutt hopped off the bed. John set her roll-aboard and purse on it.
She said, “I look forward to being in fresh clothes.”
“Yeah. I need to change, too. I’m still dripping rainwater.” He went over to the door. With one hand on the jamb, he turned back. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Um—”
“Because I wasn’t expecting to be here last night, so there’s nothing fresh in the fridge. I could thaw out a loaf of bread and toast it.”
“Oh, don’t go to the trouble. I can do without.”
He bobbed his chin. “When you’re ready, we’ll go. Just tell me where to drop you.”
Her heart plummeted. The floor seemed to undulate beneath her like the first tremors of an earthquake. So this was how it was going to be: He wasn’t going for it. How naïve of her to think that he might have slept on it and changed his mind. All along, he, and Max, had warned her what his decision would be.
She swallowed her disappointment and managed to say, “I suppose I’ll go back to the hotel I checked out of yesterday.”
He nodded and turned to leave.
She said, “We can’t get there by boat.”
“I keep a car here.” He pointed through the window. “That way. A two- or three-minute walk.” He glanced toward the suitcase on the bed. “Do you have a rain jacket with you?”
She gave him a smile that was supposed to look prideful and undaunted, but felt wobbly. “I’m a New Yorker.”
By the time they set out for their walk through the woods, the rain had slackened to a drizzle. It had just as well have been raining in earnest. Every leaf on every tree they walked beneath dripped large splats of rainwater, each seeming to find its way down the back of her neck and into her jacket, which had been dishonestly advertised as weatherproof.
Her footwear was also inadequate. Her shoes hadn’t completely dried overnight, and soon became even soggier and more uncomfortable. She was miserable in every way possible.
Fortunately, within the short time frame John had estimated, they reached their destination, which was a prefab metal storage building situated in a clearing carved out of the surrounding woods. It was nearly indiscernible because of its camouflage paint job.
“It blends right in,” she remarked.
“My friend Mitch and I painted it ourselves. He’s a vet. We copied the pattern off a pair of his fatigues.”
The garage door had a padlock on each side. John unlocked them and raised the door. Inside was a compact car, facing out. As soon as John opened the passenger door, Mutt jumped in and settled on a blanket in the back seat. She climbed in. John drove the car out. After it cleared the garage door, he went back to secure the building.
The road that led away from the building barely qualified as such. It amounted to parallel, rutted furrows, worn into the forest floor by car tires. Eventually it spilled them onto a narrow state highway. They went five miles before reaching the first vestiges of civilization. It was disconcerting to realize just how remote the fishing camp was.
“Do you want to stop and grab something? Coffee? Donut?” John nodded toward a diner.
“No thank you.”
They said nothing more until Beth saw that they were nearing their destination. “The next exit,” she said.
“I see the sign. Is it nice?”
“Your standard cookie-cutter hotel.”
He took the exit and pulled into a parking space near the entrance, cut the engine, and then sat staring through the windshield.
Beth endured the taut silence for almost half a minute before reaching for the door handle. “Thank you for the lift.”
“Beth—”
“And for your hospitality last night. It was—”
“Will you wait a minute?”
She looked at him expectantly. “What?”
“What are you going to do?”