"You don't suppose your uncle was kidding?" Baxter wondered, peering through the gray and empty wood suspiciously. If there was a house there, he couldn't see it. Neither could she, but she had followed these directions precisely. She was not used to making mistakes.
"He's not the kind of man to kid around," Shari said. "Based on what I've read in the papers." She glanced down uncertainly at the slip in her hand. "But the fellow back at the gas station confirmed it was back here."
"Yes, but on which road exactly?" Baxter said. "There are plenty of roads here; the area was once heavily logged, you can still see the hundred-year-old stumps. We could have taken a wrong turn almost right at the highway. No way of knowing without GPS coordinates." He leaned back against the rented Toyota and crossed his arms, his eyes slowly doing a circuit of their surroundings.
Shari studied him. She knew that under his long overcoat, his arms were more thickly muscled than any plain old engineer had a right to -- that kind of muscle was reserved for lumberjacks and wrestlers. He joked that it was a result of his Nordic genes, but Shari suspected that he either trained hard in a gym for three hours a day, or that his work somehow generated that physique. They knew so little about each other, after all; it made perfect sense to her that he was keeping secrets from her.
They had met a couple of years ago, at a grief counselling group, after their spouses were erased from their lives by the banality of simple, violent, car crashes. All she really knew about him was that he was a perfectionist; that he kept himself scrupulously clean; that he liked chicken, and beef -- but not steak; that he liked to be in control, but that he had learned over the years that there were some things that people needed to be involved in, even if they were not in charge.
Her position at the hospital demanded a certain amount of committment, so their acquaintance had only grown slowly. They would meet for dinner and drinks somewhere, always near the medical center, whenever he was in town. Sometimes it was six weeks between visits. She flirted with him, and he was perfectly charming and devilishly cute, but then afterward ... nothing. One time about three months ago -- after they had both gotten more than a little buzzed over dinner -- she had paraded around in front of him in her underwear, claiming it was too hot in his hotel room. She would have been delighted -- no, excited -- if he had tried to get a peek into her g-string, but not a hint of it.
Shari wasn't self-conscious enough anymore to worry about her physical beauty. That adolescent habit was long gone. But she was aware that she had managed by exercising and eating right to keep a figure that had once allowed her to think seriously about becoming an exotic dancer. That one summer she spent at the Balmoral had paid for her first year in medical school, after all. She knew she was attractive enough to turn on any particular male, as long as he was awake.
Baxter did laugh and throw a pillow at her, so she knew her little game was doing something to him.
It might take a while to get him to feel something again, and in the meantime she found him utterly fascinating. So much so that he had been the first and only person she called when her uncle Ernie -- who happened to be billionaire philanthropist Ernest Vayle -- contacted her through his legal representatives; by way of some byzantine tax law she was to be the new owner of some odd property in these thickly wooded hills. It would never cost her anything, not in taxes or upkeep. All that seemed to matter to Vayle was that it was off his books officially.
But now they were here in the hills, and had presumably gotten lost. Suddenly Baxter's head snapped over to one side. "Do you hear that?" he said. "There's a vehicle in the woods over there, not far from here. I bet you at that last fork in the road we should have turned right instead of left."
They got back into the rental and drove back about a kilometer. The bottoms of the clouds above them were darkening, threatening an early evening downpour. Shadows stretched long about them, the autumn light already fading as the sun dropped below the surrounding hills. Soon their little rental was bouncing along in an ever increasing cloud of dust. "Probably a truck ahead of us," Baxter explained. "But they'll know about the place, for sure."
Suddenly Shari wrinkled her nose and opened the window to get a better whiff. "Someone's smoking a lot of dope," she smiled, the scent calling up fond memories of her earliest college days. How many years since she had grown out of that habit as well?
The Toyota lurched as Baxter applied the brakes heavily. They skidded a couple of feet in the gravel, but still stopped quickly enough to avoid the folk that were walking the road ahead of them. Shari's mouth hung open in amazement and awe.
Immediately in the road ahead of them a ragtag group of folk, maybe three dozen, walked, following slowly in the dusty wake of a semi-tractor pulling a flatbed trailer with some sort of structure on it. "I'm seeing, but I'm not believing," Baxter said quietly. Shari nodded mutely, utterly fascinated. The group appeared to be following what was more cage than trailer that had been loaded onto the flatbed. The top half of the trailer was completely open to the elements other than a roof and sturdy steel bars that had been inserted between it and the solid bottom half every six inches or so.
