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Cassie woke me at six. "You watch. I'm going to make coffee." She came back a few minutes later with two mugs.
"What are we going to do once it's light outside?" I asked.
"We need to check outside. Maybe we'll find prints or some indication of what we saw last night. Maybe it was just a reflection of something."
Neither of us believed that, so we decided that one of us would be on watch until we made a thorough check outside after breakfast. For now, we felt relatively safe in the cabin. It made sense to us that if someone wanted to attack us, they would have done so in the dark. I drank my coffee and checked out the windows, while Cassie took her shower and got dressed. Once I'd had my turn in the shower, Cassie stood guard while I made breakfast. We hadn't seen anything since the last appearance of the light around 2:30 AM. We felt safe enough to both sit down and eat breakfast perched on stools at the counter.
After breakfast, I stuck my knife in my boot, and checked that Glenda was loaded while Cassie got the weapons she wanted to take for our outdoor exploration. After checking out the front and back windows and putting on our coats, we moved the sofa and headed out the front door. "Keep your car keys in your hand," Cassie said, "in case we need to make a hasty get-away." There was no sign anyone had been around the front of the house. We checked around both cars but nothing looked disturbed.
With our backs against the side of the cabin, we made our way to the rear of the house and looked around. We stood there a few minutes but didn't hear or see anyone. The same scene was replayed on the cabin's other side. There were no tracks or any indication that we had visitors on the back side of the cabin either. Now that it was light out, I could see a Quonset Hut just like Harry's. This one looked newer. "I wonder if she has a cryptid lab in the Quonset like Harry did?" I asked as we walked toward the building. There were tracks around the Quonset on all sides. We listened but didn't hear anything. We positioned ourselves to each side of the door. I pulled the door open while Cassie held her rifle at the ready on the other side.
When we were satisfied we were alone, we spoke in our normal voices for the first time since last night. "If they took anything, we won't know," I said. It was much less cluttered than Harry's Quonset back in Idaho, but it was set up the same with a wall sectioning off the back part of the building. There was a small workbench on one side with a tool box, and a collection of nails and screws organized in small drawers hung on the wall. There were shelves along the other side which were mostly empty.
"If Renee used this as a garage, her vehicle must be at the airport," I said. "She was driving a rental when she had the accident."
"You should probably ask Mr. Smith about that."
Cassie found a flashlight and shone it on the shelves. "They're kind of dusty. If something was here but was taken, we should see a difference in the dust. We didn't. The door to the back section was locked with a sophisticated cyber lock. Harry's just used a regular key and lock. This was much more high-tech.
"Do you have the code?"
"I don't know. It might be in the paperwork Mr. Smith gave me."
We followed the tracks through the woods until we came to a forest service road. There were vehicle tracks in the snow. "Looks like a snowmobile was out here recently, but there's no way to know if it was last night or not," I said.
"Let's head back inside," Cassie said. "I think we need a new plan."