“How so? I dangled over the edge and waited for you to drop me. That’s a pretty skewed version of bravery,” I chuckled.
“No,” Michael said with seriousness in his voice. “You knew that I wouldn’t drop you. You could have walked away. You could have kicked me or fought against me. But instead, you chose to give yourself to me. You chose to stay, even though you were afraid. Isn’t that what strength and bravery are? Choosing to stay and face the thing that you are afraid of?”
I thought about what he said for a moment while I looked up at the night sky.
“I don’t really think that I actually had a choice,” I said after a few moments had passed.
“Of course you did,” he said. “I wouldn’t have actually fought you if you had tried to leave.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said as I turned my head to look at him. “I didn’t have a choice even then because I couldn’t leave. You see, now that I actually look back and see all of it…I didn’t just choose you when I hinted at it in the letter that I left behind. I knew it was you, even that very first night on the rooftop. I’ve always known it was you.”
6
The next morning came early, and for some reason it felt even colder in the fresh daylight than it had the night before. I guess winter was giving us one more good kick in the teeth before relenting to the spring.
Michael, Adam, and I had all curled up together beneath the blanket in the tent and our body heat was plenty sufficient to keep us warm. But as soon as Adam unzipped the tent flap and we stepped out into the bitter air, the wind nipped at my cheeks and immediately burned my lungs with its icy bite.
“The temperature has dropped significantly,” Michael said as he pulled his coat around him tighter. “Even though we’re all pretty well prepared this time, I don’t think we can last more than another few days out here if the temperature continues to drop.”
“How close are we to the spot marked on the map?” I asked Adam as he unfolded the paper again and looked at it with a shiver that seemed to reach even the inside of his retinas.
“Well,” he said as he looked around, “if we’re where I think we are, and if the spot on the map is where I think it is, then we should only be a few more miles away. We should be able to reach it by midday.”
“And what happens if there’s nothing there when we get there?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure why I was feeling so defeated already, before we even reached our destination. I guess it was because we’d been down this path before (almost literally) and had come up empty-handed. I just didn’t want us to keep chasing our tails in circles. I wanted answers and I wanted to untangle this mess and get Rob back.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Michael said gently as he tried to reassure me, although I could tell by the lack of conviction in his voice that he had already been thinking the same thing too.
He reached over to take my hand in his (which was still frigid even with the gloves on), and then we packed up our stuff and headed in the direction leading to the mark on the map.
Even though the distance we walked today was shorter, and even though it was daytime, and the sun was peeking through the clouds and treetops, it was so cold that the trek felt as though every step took twice as much time and effort to accomplish.
“I can’t feel my toes anymore,” I said finally, after sucking it up and holding in my complaint for as long as I could.
The skin on my face was so chapped that it was also going numb, and it felt a little bit as if I didn’t even have a nose anymore. Adam and Michael looked every bit as miserable as I felt. Their faces were bright red and the stiffness with which they moved made it obvious that their muscles were fighting against the tightness of the dropping temperature.
“It’s only a little farther,” Adam said as he pushed on ahead.
I trudged behind him, admittedly leaning most of my weight against Michael’s arm as I struggled to pull my boots out of each footstep in the snow. Fortunately, Adam was right, and we reached the place that was marked on the map. But once we reached the spot, we didn’t find a “place” or a “thing” that would be a clue. Instead, we found a person.
The woman was an ex-partner of Rob’s on the police force in Charlotte, and she made quick work of telling us exactly who she was and why she was hiding out here. She had been hiding out in the small cave that was carved into the side of the mountain for days—ever since Rob hid her there.
“Please,” she said. “I know it all sounds unbelievable, but you have to at least hear me out. Come inside and I can show you everything. I have a tent inside the cavern, and it’s loads warmer in there than it is out here.”
“Then what were you doing out here?” Adam asked her.
I could see the look of suspicion rising in his eyes and lifting his brows as if they were buoys on the waves of doubt.
“I’ve been coming out here every day to wait and look for you,” she answered. “Rob assured me that you would come. Although, I do have to admit that I was beginning to get a little worried about how long it was taking. I’m starting to run out of supplies, and even inside the cave and tent it’s getting colder. Mostly I was just starting to get worried about being found.”
“But I thought you just said that you were waiting for us to find you,” I said in confusion.
I was starting to get a bit frustrated. We had made it to the spot on the map, but it seemed to be filled with even more questions instead of answers.
“I was,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you guys to find me, but not the others.”
“What others?” Michael asked.
“I really think that we should go inside the cave to finish having this conversation,” she said with slightly more urgency in her tone now than there was initially. “For many reasons.”
Michael looked around over his shoulder as if he was expecting someone to be there. He seemed to agree with her assessment that getting out of the open was a good idea, so we all followed this woman inside her hideout cave. So far, we only knew two things about her—her name was Stacy, and for some reason, Rob thought she was important enough to hide.
She was right about the inside of the cave though. It was shelter from the snapping wind, which already made it feel a few degrees warmer. Inside the cavern, she had a complete setup with a much larger tent than ours and even a small fire going in the corner of the cave. It was warm in the tent and she looked as though she had enough commodities to outlast us for days.
“How long have you been up here?” Adam asked as he looked around at all of her stuff.
His jaw dropped slightly in amazement at the set-up that Stacy had.
“It’s not important,” she said. “I don’t know how much time we have, so we should use it for me filling you in on everything.”
I had a feeling that “everything” was a term that was being used very loosely in this case. Stacy pulled some boxes from the corner of the tent over to us as we all sat around waiting for her to reveal what we hadn’t even known we were looking for. Sure enough, the boxes were a treasure trove of clues. Actually, they were a treasure trove of evidence.
“This is all of the evidence that I stole from the precinct before I left. The other cops were on to me, which is why I had to leave and why Rob helped me get out. They would have killed me once they knew that I had all of this.”
“Who would have killed you?” Michael asked as he reached to look at some of the things in the box.
