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FORTY ONE

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Five minutes later, I was deeper in the woods and feeling hopelessly lost.

Mack had called me, over and over, but I’d refused to pick up. The ringer was on silent but the phone vibrated in my pocket, and I tried to squelch the guilt I was feeling over hanging up on him.

He had deserved it, I reminded myself. He’d basically told me he didn’t think I was able to handle things by myself.

Looking around at the looming forest and the darkening sky, a tiny voice in my head whispered that he might have been right.

I brushed it aside. Or at least I tried to.

All I was doing was looking for Tim. I wasn’t going to apprehend him and I wasn’t going to question him.

I just wanted to find him.

A squirrel darted out in front of me, scampering up the side of a tree, and I startled, my heart leaping inside my chest. Light from the sinking afternoon sun filtered through the canopy of firs and bare-branch trees, casting eerie shadows on the snow. My senses were alight, tuned into every sight and every sound.

And every smell.

I sniffed, frowning.

I sniffed again, more deliberately this time.

I knew what I was smelling.

Nothing in the world smelled quite like it. There was no mistaking it.

It was the smell of bacon cooking.

Why was I smelling bacon in the middle of the woods? I took a tentative step, turning in a slow circle as I tried to figure out where it was coming from. There were no buildings visible, no homes at the edge of the forest. I thought about what Margaret had said, something about the Fuhrmans. Maybe I was close to their home and just didn’t know it.

I kept walking, letting my nose lead the way. The smell became more pungent and my stomach growled. I should have eaten more than a banana for breakfast, a meal that felt like it had been consumed hours ago.

I scanned the woods for signs of life, for any indication that I was nearing civilization, but there were none. I was still surrounded by trees and brush, the snow fresh and unmarred by prints of any kind. It looked like no one had stepped foot here in weeks, if not months. There weren’t even any animal tracks, which sort of gave me the creeps. I was surrounded by the smell of bacon in a section of a forest that looked completely abandoned.

There was something definitely creepy about that.

I reached into my pocket, my fingers closing around my phone. I knew reassurance was the push of a button away. I could call Mack and tell him what was happening, keep talking to him until he found me.

And I was sorely tempted to do just that.

But something stopped me, the same thing that had caused me to hang up on him in the first place.

“You are fine,” I whispered to myself as I plodded my way deeper into the woods. “So you smell bacon. So what?”

I kept my eyes on the ground, scanning my surroundings for obstacles in my path and keeping my eyes peeled for any signs of prints. There were none.

The smell continued to grow stronger, to the point that it felt as though I were mere feet away from an open kitchen window.

I frowned. Where on earth was the smell coming from?

I took another step forward, and my foot hit something slick. A patch of ice, I thought, desperately trying to right myself as my leg slid out from underneath me.

I landed on my rear with a loud thunk.

“What the...” I winced as I shifted my body. My tailbone was smarting, and my leg was still bent at an unnatural angle. I’d have some sore and tender muscles for sure tomorrow.

But that wasn’t what was concerning me. I stared at the pine needles littering the snow and immediately brushed at them with my hands. I wasn’t sitting on the ground. My rear end hadn’t landed on the ground.

No. I was sprawled out on something large. Something metal.

I swept away more of the pine needles and dead leaves, and then gasped when I realized just exactly what it was I had landed on.

Somehow, some way, I’d discovered something buried in the woods. A very large something.

A shipping container.

A shipping container that smelled an awful lot like cooked bacon.