Chapter Eleven
He had rented the mountain cabin ahead of time. Knowing what would likely transpire, what to expect, was only one of his gifts, but in this case it had been less an application of that talent and more simple common sense—thinking through the plan—that had been responsible. He had known he’d be taking the girl away from her house. He would need a place to keep her. It would need to be secluded, private.
So, he had spent a couple of days driving through Arizona’s high country. He had settled on the Mogollon Rim area, where a natural escarpment two hundred miles long marked the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. From the rim, he could look down two thousand feet onto rolling, pine-covered mountains that slanted toward the deserts of southern Arizona, somewhere out of sight. In the other direction, to the north, the plateau gave away to the ruddy arid land of the Four Corners region, the red-rock deserts of Utah.
The cabin he’d found was a quarter mile from the rim’s edge, screened by Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, and aspen. Bare dirt, partially carpeted by pine needles, surrounded it. A long driveway led in from the Rim Road, passing only two other cabins on the way. The one nearest the road belonged to the owner of the property, a woman named Peggy Olsson.
Driving the Rim Road, he had opened his senses, listened to his pulse—another of his talents—and it had told him when to turn. He had pulled his truck to a stop outside Peggy Olsson’s cabin and braved a fierce wind to knock on her door. A minute passed; then a woman pulled it open with a tentative, awkward motion. She was in her early fifties, he guessed, slender, with red hair showing strands of silver, glacial blue eyes, a hard mouth. “Can I help you?” she asked, her voice smooth as strained honey. She did a better job than many at masking her distaste for his appearance.
“I’d like to rent a cabin,” he told her. “I understand you might have something available.”
She gave a surprised, nervous laugh and forced a smile. The fingers of her right hand pinched a few strands of her coppery hair and fed them into the corner of her mouth. “Where’d you hear that?” she asked. “I usually rent them out in the summer but close up after Labor Day.”
“So you do have an empty cabin?” He already knew she did, of course, and that she would agree to rent it to him. But he had to go through the motions. Knowing the outcome didn’t allow one to skip the steps required to reach it.
“Well, yes …”
“I’d be happy to pay whatever your summer rate is, a little more, maybe, for the inconvenience. You won’t even know I’m there. I’m working on a project, see, and I’m looking for a private place where I won’t be disturbed for a few weeks.”
“Not much chance of that,” Peggy said. “It gets quiet up here after the season. Sometimes the road isn’t even open. You okay with that?”
He ticked his head over his shoulder toward the four-wheel-drive truck parked there, an old green full-sized Ford pickup with a tan Gem camper shell bleached almost white by the sun. Faded gold curtains covered every window. “Sure. That thing’ll go just about anywhere.”
“I can’t handle laundry or meals or anything like that. You’ll be on your own. There’s a Laundromat and a grocery store over in Show Low, and more choices down in Payson, of course.”
“On my own’s the way I like it,” he said.
She gazed out toward a big pine, its branches swaying in the wind. “Okay, then,” she said. “I guess I could use the money, so if you’re okay with the terms, I guess we have a deal.”
“That’s great,” he said, favoring her with his best approximation of a smile. Sometimes that soured an agreement, but Peggy Olsson was studiously avoiding looking at his face.
A week later, he returned and unloaded his cargo into the cabin, replacing the rope that bound the girl with shackles that he chained to metal rings he had installed in the second bedroom. He had moved all the furniture out of the room, leaving only a mattress on the floor, a steel bucket, and a roll of toilet paper. He would bring meals to her on a plastic tray and take it away when she was done. The whole ordeal wouldn’t have to last long, he hoped. Just until she told him what he needed to know. Or until he had the girl—the one he really wanted, the precious one—in his hands.
He should already have known which it would be. But he couldn’t see the outcome of all this, didn’t know which way it would go.
And that failure, that lack of clarity, troubled him more than anything else.