Carla Neggers - Abandon

“Nah. Too much granite up there. He’ll toss me in the Potomac instead.”

“In pieces, Rook. Lots of little pieces.”

Mackenzie set a new flashlight and a package of batteries on the old wooden counter at Smitty’s, a well-known outfitter in her hometown of Cold Ridge. Its owner, Gus Winter, had never had much patience with her, but she smiled at him. “I’m not taking any chances if we lose power up at the lake.”

Gus looked at the price tag on the flashlight. He was a tall, lean man in his late fifties, widely respected for his knowledge of the White Mountains, and for the duty and courage he’d shown first as a soldier in Vietnam, then as the young uncle who’d raised his nephew and two nieces after they were orphaned on Cold Ridge, which loomed over their town and gave it its name.

He pulled a gnarled ballpoint from a mug. “Doesn’t Beanie have flashlights?”

“From 1952.”

“She’s always been tight with a dollar.” He grabbed a pad of generic sales slips – no scanners and computers at Smitty’s – and jotted down the prices of her purchases. “You and Carine will have good weather for the weekend. Beanie’ll be up here at the end of the week and stay through Labor Day, like always.” He grunted. “At least this year she won’t have that greedy jackass husband of hers with her.”

Mackenzie smiled. “I guess you’re not neutral about Cal.”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. Matters what Beanie thinks.” He looked up from his sales pad. “Is this all you need? Anything else? You can pay me later.”

His gruffness was more pointed than usual, and Mackenzie stood back and frowned at him. “Gus, is something wrong?”

“Didn’t mean to bite your head off.” He tore off his copy of the sales slip and set it aside, then tucked hers into a bag with her batteries and flashlight. “We’ve got a missing hiker up in the hills above the lake.”

“Are search teams -”

“I’m meeting my team as soon as I finish ringing you up.” An expert in mountain rescue, Gus knew the peaks around Cold Ridge better than most. “With any luck, this woman will be back by the time we get our gear together. She’s in her midtwenties, in good condition. Her friends say they spent the night in a shelter, but she took off on her own early this morning. They can’t raise her on her cell phone or pick up her trail.”

“Anything I can do?”

He shook his head. “Not right now. Carine’s gone up to Beanie’s already. Maybe this woman worked her way down to the lake, who knows. Let me grab my stuff and I’ll give you a ride up there.”

The original plan was for Mackenzie to meet Carine, a nature photographer, at her studio, and hang out there until Gus finished work and could take the baby. They would then head up to the lake. But Mackenzie didn’t mind going early. She waited for Gus outside, where the bright afternoon sun was baking the quiet village street of Cold Ridge, which was tucked in a bowl-shaped valley among the White Mountains.

Compared to Washington, the weather was warm and pleasant, but by northern New England standards, it was a hot afternoon. Mackenzie felt strange not having a car, but she’d flown into Manchester and caught a ride to Cold Ridge with another deputy marshal out of the New Hampshire district office. Driving from Washington would have eaten up too much of her weekend, and renting a car when she was saving up for a place of her own was out of the question. But not having her own transportation underscored her new role as a nonresident – an outsider.

Gus joined her, and they climbed into his truck and headed out of town, turning off onto a dirt road and finally pulling into the sloping driveway that led to Bernadette Peacham’s classic New Hampshire lake house. It was built close to the water, amid tall pines, oaks and sugar maples. Across the small, isolated lake, Mackenzie could see her parents’ house. She checked in with them once a week at their Irish cottage and had met the couple they’d swapped with a few times. She had no idea if Bernadette had met them, or if they’d seen Cal with his young brunette girlfriend. There were few houses on the lake. Bernadette owned much of the wooded shoreline, with no plans to develop any of it.

“Need a hand with anything?” Gus asked, coming to a stop behind Carine’s truck.

“No, thanks. I packed light.”

“You’re missed around here.” He gave her a grudging smile and added, “Deputy.”

She grinned at him. Of all the people who hadn’t believed she’d get through the vigorous training to become a federal agent, Gus Winter was at the top of the list. “Never going to get used to saying that, are you?”

He laughed. “Not a chance. So long as you’re happy -”

“I am,” she said, quickly grabbing her backpack from behind her seat. “Good luck finding your hiker. Did you want to talk to Carine?”

“No – she’d call if she ran into the hiker. I plan to be back in time to pick up the baby. You two just relax and have a good time.” He scrutinized Mackenzie for a moment. “You look stressed. When you were a college professor, you never looked stressed.”

“I did. You just never noticed.”

“Maybe because you weren’t carrying a gun.”

As soon as she climbed out of his truck, Gus took off. Mackenzie carried her backpack along a stone walk to the front of the house, its cedar shingles in need of a fresh coat of dark brown stain. Its shutters, a deep evergreen, were so nicked and scarred they probably should be replaced altogether. As with almost everything else in Bernadette Peacham’s life, money wasn’t the issue. She had ample funds to do whatever she wanted. Time, inclination and a tendency to overcommit were another matter.

The lake sparkled in the bright afternoon sun, and Mackenzie welcomed the cooler air, the familiar sights and sounds. She headed to the screen porch. A drop-leaf table she knew Bernadette meant to paint was there, in the same condition as when she’d brought it home from a yard sale two years ago. She often said that her life was so filled with deadlines, she appreciated having a project with no firm end date. She’d get to the table when she got to it.

The door into the kitchen was unlocked. Feeling herself begin to relax, Mackenzie found a note from Carine indicating she was off for a quick walk with Harry, her eight-month-old.

Which meant, as Gus had predicted, she was looking for any sign of the missing hiker.

Carine had left paper bags stuffed with groceries on the table, enough to feed two women for a week, never mind twenty-four hours. Mackenzie ripped open a package of marshmallows and popped one into her mouth as she headed down a short hall to a linen closet. In her haste to get out of Washington, she hadn’t packed a swimsuit, but the closet, overflowing with a mishmash of towels, facecloths, sheets and extra blankets, yielded a fuchsia two-piece tankini and a beach towel – pink dolphins against a turquoise background – from her pre-law-enforcement days.

She ducked into the bathroom, which, like the rest of the house, had changed little over the years. Bernadette fixed things at the lake as needed. She didn’t renovate.

Once she’d changed into the swimsuit, Mackenzie locked her 9 mm Browning in a small safe in the pantry. Then she headed back out to the porch and down to the water. She passed the shed her father had built for Bernadette, where the bloody accident that had almost killed him had occurred, and walked out onto the wooden dock. He’d been cutting wood for the new dock that day.

But she pushed the images back and stood at the end of the dock. Even in August, the lake would be cold.

With an ease that surprised her, Mackenzie dived in without hesitation, trusting herself to remember that the water off the dock was deep enough. She wouldn’t risk smashing her head on a rock or scraping a knee on the rough bottom of the lake.