I’m suddenly more sure than ever that I don’t want to open this can of worms with Caitlin. After double-checking that I’ve signed out of my e-mail account, I switch off the laptop, then return to the guest room, take hold of her upper arm, and gently shake her.
She makes no sound.
I shake her again. This time she groans like a teenager who doesn’t want to get out of bed on a school day.
“Caitlin?” I say sharply. “Wake up.”
“Nooooo,” she moans. “I feel like hell.”
“I know. But we’ve got to get moving.”
She raises her head and brushes black hair out of her eyes. “Did you even finish? I don’t remember.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She smiles lazily. “For half a second there I felt guilty.”
With a deep sigh she rolls over and sits up on the edge of the bed. The ladder of her spine shows through her skin. “This sucks,” she says.
“Yep.”
“I’m freezing.” She flips back her hair and searches the covers for her panties. I try not to laugh while I watch this familiar ritual. At last she finds them, tangled in the sheet near the foot of the bed. As she pulls then on, she says, “Do you realize if all this hadn’t happened, we would be getting married in nine days?”
“I do.”
“I guess we’ll get there eventually.”
“We will.” While I pull on my own pants, it strikes me that once I’ve moved Annie and my mother out of Edelweiss, I could take Caitlin over there and show her what would have been her wedding present.
“You know what?” I stand beside the bed. “If we can find half an hour later on, I could show you a real surprise.”
She pauses with her bra halfway on and stares at me with narrowed eyes. “What kind of surprise?”
I realize I’m grinning stupidly at her. “A one-of-a-kind surprise.”
She looks suspicious for several seconds, but then she seems to intuit that I won’t reveal my secret no matter how hard she presses me. “I’ll see what I can do. Call me after eight or so?”
“Before sundown would be better.”
She draws back her head, once again mistrustful. “What did you do?”
“You’ll see.”
“Before sunset is tough. There’s too much going on, and too much competition in town. Plus, we already stayed here too long—my fault, I know. Are you sure it can’t be later than that?”
“I guess later’s okay. But it won’t be as good.”
She sighs and snaps her bra, then begins hunting her shoes. “Later will have to do. Story of our lives, right?”
Right.
CHAPTER 29
WALT GARRITY PAUSED behind a large oak tree and stared up a hill at the Valhalla hunting lodge. He’d been working his way through the forest of Lusahatcha County for nearly ninety minutes, and he was winded. He’d cut through the game fence a mile south of the main gate, then taken a circuitous path through the hunting camp to avoid the wildlife cameras he saw mounted on pine trees at regular intervals. He could still see the gate in his mind, an enormous wrought-iron thing set between stone pillars. A brass sign on one of the pillars read:
VALHALLA EXOTIC HUNTING RESERVE
Absolutely No Trespassing
Nailed to a tree to the right of the gate was a smaller wooden sign with letters burned into it. Those letters read: FORT KNOX. Beyond the gate, an asphalt road led deep into the forest. Walt had given the road a wide berth, but during his hike into the hunting camp, he’d crossed several logging roads that led nowhere, food plots for game, and always the cameras, affixed to trees with plastic flex-cuffs.
When the lodge appeared through the trees, he approached it with extreme caution. Though the GPS tracker in Drew’s truck had told him Forrest was back at state police headquarters in Baton Rouge, there might be anything from a gang of Double Eagles to a full complement of visiting hunters staying at the camp. As Walt neared the big building, the hum of a central heating unit reached his ears. He paused behind a large thornbush and watched for another five minutes, then made a careful circuit of the house.
Its rustic appearance was merely an illusion. The rough-hewn timber building was served by both power lines and a massive backup generator, while the telephone wires, satellite dishes, and various antennas made it look more like an army outpost than a hunting camp. Walt saw no vehicles, which encouraged him. Then, to his amazement, he saw that a sliding glass door on a deck at the side of the lodge was standing partly open. Taking a Browning 9 mm from the holster at the small of his back, he moved quickly up to the door and scanned the interior.
The great room of Valhalla looked as he’d expected: dozens of stuffed animal heads adorned the walls, many of them of African origin. Some appeared to be threatened or endangered species; a fully grown mountain gorilla stood in one corner as though pondering a charge toward the center of the room. A staircase led up to a broad landing on the second floor. Following his instincts, Walt slipped inside, bypassed the stairs, and moved along one wall to a cypress door at the far end of the room.