CHAPTER 10
Wood splintered into the cabin again. Lila tackled Hester, and then groaned as her wounded shoulder hit the floor. This time Hester heard the crack of a rifle shot. “Who the hell is that?” she said. “They’re shooting at us!”
“We’re here!” Lila shouted. She rolled onto her back and tried to open her rifle’s chamber, but her right arm didn’t seem to be working. “Hunters,” she said. “They don’t know we’re in here.” She fumbled with a box of bullets. They scattered across the floor.
“You’re bleeding,” Hester said, having her doubts whether it was a hunter.
“Thanks for the memo.” Lila winced. “Jesus, that hurts. Help me. But stay down.”
Hester wriggled across the floor. She gathered up a fistful of bullets and jammed them into her pocket.
“Open the chamber,” Lila said as another bullet cracked through the cabin.
Hester snapped the rifle open and slid a bullet in.
“The other way,” Lila said, and Hester took the bullet out and flipped it around.
“Shoot it!” Lila said. “Into the roof.”
The closest Hester had ever come to a rifle was a water gun, but she aimed the barrel toward the sky. It felt terrifying and empowering and exhilarating. She squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.
“You fucking flatlander,” Lila mumbled.
She slid the safety, and this time when Hester squeezed the trigger she felt the blast all the way down the side of her body. A hole in the roof opened up and debris rained down around them. Then she slid a second bullet into the chamber and pulled the trigger again.
Lila touched her arm. “Listen,” she said.
Hester closed her eyes and lay there for a moment. She heard herself breathe. She heard Lila breathe. Then she heard the sound of footsteps in the snow as whoever had shot at them retreated through the woods. “Are you okay?” she asked Lila.
“It’s a flesh wound,” Lila said. Hester heard her sit up. She opened her eyes to see the other woman tightening a belt around her shoulder.
“It’ll stop the bleeding till we can get out of here,” Lila said, as though she was putting a Band-Aid on a cut finger.
“Who was that?” Hester asked.
“Probably some kids, by the way they took off.” Lila held the tourniquet in her teeth and tied it off. “I told you it was the last week of deer season.”
“Do hunters usually shoot at houses with people in them?”
“Sure,” Lila said. “If the house is a wreck, and it has deer standing in front of it.”
“I didn’t see any deer,” Hester said. Her rational side told her to stay put, but the pissed-off side was too angry to listen. That hadn’t been a hunter or a teenager shooting at them. She grabbed a fistful of bullets from the floor and barely heard Lila shout after her as she ran from the cabin. She stood in the clearing. She listened, but all she heard was the cracking of ice as the lake froze. She loaded another bullet and swung the barrel toward where the shots had come from. She ran into the trees. The sound of her feet crunching into the hard snow rang through the forest. She swept branches from in front of her. She stopped. She spun around. She ran farther into the trees till she found a patch of trampled snow and three spent shell casings. A single set of footprints led in from a copse of evergreens and then straight out toward the road. She took a few steps toward the trees, and then finally paid attention to the voice telling her to get away from here. To stay safe. To remember that the first time she’d ever shot a rifle had been about two minutes earlier, and whoever had shot at her probably had years of practice.
Somewhere, off in the distance, she heard the slamming of a car door and the screech of tires on an icy dirt road.
She put the rifle down and picked up one of the casings. The heat from the blast had melted the snow, which had refrozen in a slick of ice. Lila struggled down the cabin stairs and limped across the snow toward her. “It was a hunter,” Lila said. “I know you’re not used to it, but this kind of thing happens all the time around here.”
“We should call the police.”
“And tell them what? They’ll say we shouldn’t have been out here in the first place.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Hester said. “I’m calling them even if you don’t. And we should get you to the hospital anyway. Don’t hospitals have to report gunshot wounds?”
“I’m not going to the hospital,” Lila said. “The bullet barely grazed me. The bleeding already stopped, and I don’t have the money for an emergency room visit anyway.”
Hester closed her eyes and leaned her head against the trunk of a tree. New Hampshire suddenly felt like a very different world from the one she was used to. She was cold and tired and ready to get home. But whatever Lila claimed, that hadn’t been a deer hunter shooting at them. “Cheryl Jenkins called you this morning and told you I’d come around. What else did she say?”
“Not much,” Lila said. “That you were asking about Gabe and that you’d talked to him in Boston. She wanted to know why I’d hired you.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her anything except that it was none of her business,” Lila said. “We’re not exactly on the best of terms. She hates my guts.”
Five minutes earlier, all Hester had wanted was to walk away from this whole mess and pretend she’d never met any of these people. Now she wanted to find a way to tie this whole story together and figure out who’d shot at her and why. She suspected that if she’d been out on that road a few moments earlier, she’d have seen a teal-colored hatchback skidding away, and Bobby Englewood at the wheel.