ALMOST AS SOON AS they parked the truck in the clearing, Finn felt that something wasn’t right. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
“What?” Isabelle said, catching a glimpse of Finn’s unblinking gaze.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s take the weapons, just in case.”
He took the rifle. She grabbed the pistol. “What about hand cart?”
“Leave it for now. We’ll come back for it. But switch your safety off, Isabelle. Just in case.”
“It’s off,” she said. “It’s first thing I do when I pick up any weapon. I switch safety off.”
Quietly, they made their way through the woods, single file, Isabelle in the rear. Finn got a strong sense memory of Travis being behind him in battle. Viscerally he heard the gunshots as if the battle were raging at that very moment. “Isabelle, get in front of me,” he whispered. They stopped to listen. The woods were quiet. It was cold. The forest had remnants of old snow covering the underbrush. He turned off the flashlight, and they stood close together. All he could hear was her shallow breath, and his own.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
They kept walking. Why did it feel to Finn that they had parked in the wrong place and instead of forty yards, they were trudging three thousand yards in the blacked-out snow?
The cabin was dark. Putting the flashlight between his teeth, he raised his rifle. Before they moved forward, they listened for anything that might warn them of trouble ahead.
“What is that sound?”
“Thumping?” she said. “That’s my heart.”
“It’s too loud.”
“Okay, Finn,” she said. “I’ll try to have my heart beat less loud.”
The half-moon in the sky floated behind clouds. It allowed only the shapes and shadows of objects to be caught by the eye. Finn didn’t want to open the door to the cabin.
“If someone is there, they would hear us by now,” Isabelle said. “They would see our light.” She moved to the right.
He caught her arm. “Where you going?”
“Turn off your flashlight,” she said. “I’m going to peek through window.”
“If someone is there, they’ll take your head off.”
“I said peek, not put my head in window for target practice,” she said. He had his rifle pointed at the door, ready to fire, as she stepped toward the glass. Isabelle was so stealthy, you couldn’t hear a footstep from her. She glanced in, yanked her head away, waited, glanced in again, this time a second longer before pulling back behind the window frame. The third time she continued staring inside the cabin and didn’t pull back.
“Finn,” she said, and she wasn’t whispering, “it’s one-room cabin, right? No secret rooms?”
“Shh. Yes. Why?”
“Come here.”
“I’m manning the door.”
“I know. But put rifle down and come here.”
Moving much more loudly than she had, Finn crunched in the pine needles and twigs to the small front window just outside the porch and glanced in. “I can’t see anything,” he said.
“Finn,” she said, “you can’t see nothing, because nothing is there. Give me flashlight.” She shone the light inside the window.
The cabin was empty. The remaining 250 cases of whisky, which had covered the floor, were gone.