“That’s fine,” Dalton says. “You’ve left a decent trail. I’ll follow that. Casey will take you back—”
“Is that safe?” Mathias says. “I am disoriented. Casey is wounded. Nicole is unconscious. And there is a killer roaming the forest, one who wishes revenge on all of us.”
I glower at Mathias. Diana’s right—he does know exactly what to say. There’s no way Dalton will leave me now. He says we’ll come back tomorrow and pick up the trail, and we head to Rockton.
*
It’s night. Nicole is resting comfortably. We’ve talked. This time I was absolutely certain she’d want to get on a plane out of Rockton at first light. But she wants to stay. Her father ran, and trouble pursued, and all the running did nothing but screw up her life. So she is determined to stay and fight, even if what she fights now is only her fears. Sometimes, that’s the greatest threat of all.
If she changes her mind, Dalton will sneak her out of Rockton and accept whatever consequences that brings. It’s what we have to do for now. Hope that no one is forced to leave, no one who might pose an exposure threat, not until we know what happens when they go.
While Dalton and Anders deal with other issues, I go to the butcher shop, where I find Mathias cutting up rabbits.
“It’ll be easier if you just tell us where he is,” I say as I walk into the rear room.
“What do you mean?” he says in French. He’s lucky he doesn’t give me his sly smile, the one that says we both know the truth. If he did, I’d be tempted to use that cleaver on him. But as Diana said, he knows people. He knows their limits. So he just takes another rabbit and begins slicing it up the belly.
“Eric has to search,” I say. “He has to keep searching, wasting his time and letting people worry that we’re not safe, that Benjamin will be back.”
“He won’t be. He is badly injured, from your shot, and has wandered off to die.”
“And fallen into a hole?”
Now he smiles, but it’s one of genuine satisfaction. “I would like to think so, wouldn’t you?”
“You left him in that hole. You took Nicole and put him in, leaving him to die.”
“That would be…” He pauses, knife raised. “I should say ‘wrong,’ but somehow, I keep thinking the word I want is ‘fitting.’ Let’s imagine that is what happened to him. That he fell into the hole where he put Nicole, and he has just enough water that he will be in there for days, suffering, praying someone will come. Sadly, no one will.”
“Eric will be able to trace your tracks.”
“He can try. I believe I may have wandered. The mental confusion. And it seems as if it is going to snow tonight.”
“Eric shouldn’t have to search—”
“But he will. Even if he suspects the same thing you do. He must search. It’s in his nature. And you will not try to talk him out of it because you like his nature. He will search, and you will accompany him, in support.”
Mathias flips over a rabbit. “To understand another person—to accept them and want them to accept themselves, without changing who they are—is a rare thing to find. You are both very lucky. I was never so fortunate. But in my case, acceptance might have been too much to ask.”
He cuts into the rabbit, his gaze fixed on it. “It is too much to ask, isn’t it, Casey? I know that.”
I don’t know if I’m supposed to say something here, to tell him I’m okay with what he’s done.
“If I knew you’d done it—” I begin.
“Then you would need to tell Eric, and he would need to act. He would have to punish me, try to force me to tell him where Benjamin is, whether he wanted to or not. I understand all that. Which is why Benjamin has simply wandered off.” He looks at me. “Yes?”
I pause. Then I look him in the eye and say, “Yes.”