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Their feet sunk into the deep snow.

“We need to get near some trees for shelter.” Nathan had to raise his voice to be heard above the wind.

Merci lifted her head to look around. A flash of orange in a sea of white caught her eye. It took her a moment to process the incongruity of what was seeing. “That’s my sweater.”

“What?”

“My sweater from my suitcase.” She ran toward the orange object. The deep snow slowed her down. She stopped and stared down at the sweater with the large buttons half buried in the snow.

Nathan came up beside her. “For a moment, I thought you were so far gone you were hallucinating.”

With a little effort she yanked the sweater out of the snow. “It must mean we’re close to Lorelei’s car.” She glanced side to side but only an endless field of snow surrounded her.

“It could have gotten blown around during the storm.” Nathan turned in a half circle.

“It couldn’t blow too far, especially uphill. This is the first sign that we are close.”

Nathan pressed his lips together and continued to study the landscape. “I say we keep heading downhill. Maybe cut toward those trees.”

Merci agreed. They walked together, arms wrapped around each other. Nathan hadn’t complained about the deep knife wound, but every once in a while she saw him wince with pain. They were both in rough shape.

Though it was no longer wearable, she held on to the sweater. Glancing down at it in her hand helped her to remain positive. They had to be close. They just had to be.

They edged closer to the trees, which blocked out most of the wind.

Nathan stopped and pointed at a purple-and-orange scarf hanging off a tree branch in front of them. “Look there.”

“That’s mine.” Merci raced down the hill yelling over her shoulder. “Hurry, Nathan. We’re close. I just know we are.”

She ran so fast she tumbled and rolled in the snow. The fall did nothing to deflate her spirits. The road and the car were close. She could feel it. Merci pushed herself to her feet, scanning the field of snow for any dark object. She found a blouse half buried in the snow.

Nathan came up to her. “I know where we are at now.” He turned and pointed behind them. “That ridgeline is where I was riding the snowmobile the day I saw you and Lorelei.”

“That feels like a million years ago.” She was a different person from the naive college student who had left Montana State almost three days ago.

“Feels like that, doesn’t it?” His voice grew serious. Nathan looked up the mountain. “My guess is that we need to move west.”

They trudged forward with renewed energy, encountering a few more objects that had been in her suitcase. The car, nearly covered in snow, came into view when they rounded a curve in the road.

Merci burst forth, but Nathan grabbed her arm. “Wait just a minute. We got ambushed with that helicopter; let’s make sure they haven’t beaten us here.”

Nathan put his arm out to bar Merci from taking another step. He needed to make sure it was safe. “I’ll go first. You wait here behind these trees. Wait until I give you the all-clear.”

Nathan stepped out into the open and approached the car. He didn’t see any signs of life. The footprints around the car looked old and drifted over. The trunk was wide open and shoes, books and smaller bags were strewn up the hill.

A foot of snow covered the car, and there was no sign of it having been brushed off anywhere. When he looked behind him, Merci peeked around the trees. He waved for her to come out. She ran toward him favoring her left leg, but slowed as she drew near. Her expression changed when her gaze darted around at the items that had been dragged out of the car and strung all over. Her features clouded and her shoulders drooped.

“Are you okay?”

Her gloved hand fluttered to her chest. “This is all my stuff. They went through everything I brought with me.”

Nathan brushed away snow from the driver’s-side door and clicked the door open. “Why don’t we get in here, get warmed up, and I can have a look at your leg.”

Merci ran to pick up a book and then a knitted scarf and a pair of jeans. Nathan brushed more snow off the car so they could see out the front windshield. When he looked up, Merci had gathered an armload of possessions. Her demeanor had changed. The way she bent her head and the redness in her face suggested that she was upset.

“Merci.” He called over the hood of the car.

She stopped and dropped the items she had gathered onto the snowy ground. “These are my private things. They went through my whole suitcase, everything that matters to me.”

He circled around the car and grabbed her hands. “We don’t need to do all that. Let’s get in the car. We need to get your leg thawed out.”

She pulled free of his grasp and pointed to her suitcase. “They tore that to pieces. Why?”

“Merci, this is upsetting you. Once we’re warmed up, we can hike out to the highway. Someone will pick us up.” He brushed away the snow on the passenger side and ushered her in before getting in on the driver’s side.

Once she was settled in the passenger seat, Merci pulled her boot off and untwisted the makeshift sock. “I think the wool helped a lot. The feeling is starting to come back into my toes.”

Nathan looked down at her bare toes, which were so white it looked as if the blood had been drained out of them. “You’ve got some frostbite damage, but at least the toes aren’t blue and frozen through. They’d amputate then.”

She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “That’s one good thing, I guess.”

He grabbed a sweater from the backseat. “Pull up your pant leg a bit and wrap this around it. Do you have another pair of boots and socks around here?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice held a tone of sadness. “If the thieves didn’t scatter them up the hill, there might be a pair back there.”

After wrapping the sweater around Merci’s leg, Nathan turned his attention to the car. The keys were still in the ignition. Driving out wasn’t a possibility though with the roads still unplowed. Nathan tilted his head sideways to look at the wires underneath the dashboard. “I think I see how Lorelei made it look like the car wasn’t running. It would be nothing to disconnect this ignition wire while you weren’t looking.”

“So their plan must have been to drive me to this isolated place, rob me and then…leave me here.” Her voice held a distant quality as if she was trying to process what all of this meant.

Nathan looked into her sad green eyes. Sympathy flooded through him. She was dealing with so much all at once. He shook his head. “Remember, they said that things went wrong. The guy in the Orange Coat wasn’t supposed to pull the gun. They were probably going to take what they wanted, and you and Lorelei would go down the road not even realizing you’d been robbed.”

“And then I would never know Lorelei had set me up.” Merci turned away and stared straight ahead through the small hole he had cleared in the windshield. After a long silence, she said, “They didn’t touch Lorelei’s stuff. I guess that seals the deal that she was in on this.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over this. She was a pretty good actress.” He patted her shoulder.

She turned toward him and fell against his chest. “I can be so stupid sometimes. You know when those guys pulled up in their car, I had a bad feeling then, but I totally brushed it off thinking I was just being prejudiced because of the way they looked.” The wavering in her voice told him that she was crying.

He drew her closer and held her while she cried. His lips brushed over the top of her head. As her sobbing subsided, he said, “It’s so hard to know when to trust and when not to.”

She pulled away from him and rummaged through the glove compartment for a travel-size bag of tissues. “Lorelei offering me a ride was a setup to get me out here.” She combed her fingers through her long red hair. “They probably had something to do with my car breaking down, too. Now that I think about it, the timing was weird that she showed up right when I was checking out the
Share a Ride
board.”

Nathan glanced in the backseat searching for a pair of boots. A laptop case rested beside an overnight bag. He reached over and grabbed the case. The weight of it told him that the computer was inside. “What kind of thieves leave a laptop behind?”

“I don’t know.” Merci’s gaze was unfocused, and her voice still held a disconnected quality.

Something didn’t fit with the whole robbery. Hawthorne had done a great deal of planning and utilized a lot of manpower for what would maybe be a thousand dollars worth of possessions, and then he didn’t take the laptop. If the original plan had been for Lorelei to continue the ruse and take Merci to her aunt’s, the thieves wouldn’t have intended on taking anything that would be noticed as missing right away. Nathan nodded as a realization came to him. “I think they were looking for something in particular. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

She turned toward him, the glazed look in her eyes clearing up. “No. I can’t think of what I brought with me that would be of enough value to go to all this trouble. But it does explain why they sent Lorelei into that room to pump me for information.”

“Think about the week before you left. You said your car broke down. Did anything else weird happen?

“Someone slipped into my dorm room and stole some books.” She leaned her head against the backrest and stared at the ceiling. “The break-in was a really freaky experience. I was sleeping, and I thought I heard someone in my room. But the next morning, I thought I had just dreamed it until I couldn’t find my textbooks. I just figured it was someone selling them back to the bookstore for quick cash.”

“Had Lorelei been friendly to you before?”

Merci sat up a little straighter in her chair. “She always seemed like a nice person. She sat beside me quite a bit last year when we had that marketing class together. We said hi when we saw each other, but we didn’t do things together.”

“Did you ever see Hawthorne with Lorelei?”

“No, I would have remembered that,” she said.

“Tell me again everything that happened that week before you left or anything that was out of the ordinary even before that.”

Merci bit her lower lip. “I failed chemistry, my car wouldn’t start, I got a package from my dad and a letter saying they wouldn’t be back in the States for the holidays, I called Aunt Celeste, I went to that all-dorm garage sale and bought too many things because I was so stressed out.”

Nathan reached over and touched the earrings he had admired earlier. “Maybe these are worth more than you thought. What if Lorelei accidently put something in the garage sale she wasn’t supposed to or her roommate did? Maybe it was something that belonged to Hawthorne, that she was supposed to keep safe.”

The exuberance returned to Merci’s demeanor. “Lorelei was there at the garage sale. I remember talking to her. She came up to me and started the conversation. Maybe it was something she saw me buy and realized the value of it.”

“What exactly did you buy at that sale?”

“I went a little crazy and bought so many items. I don’t know if I can remember all of it. These buttons on this coat for instance. They’re antique buttons. I sewed them on right before I left. I can’t imagine someone going to all this trouble though to get these button or the earrings,” she said.

“What else did you buy?”

Merci let out her breath and stared at the ceiling of the car. “Some clothes. I really hadn’t sorted through everything before I left. Maybe there was a box or some kind of container that had something of value in it.”

“Maybe the thieves searched your dorm and didn’t find it. They took the books for some quick cash. Because they couldn’t find what they were looking for in the dorm, they must have thought you had it with you,” Nathan added. “The thief was just going to look through your suitcase, grab what he wanted and they would have gone on their merry way.”

“That makes sense. The guy in the leather jacket was in the backseat going through my stuff, too. Lorelei’s job was probably to make sure I stayed in the car and didn’t see what they were doing, but she got distracted by listening to music.”

She looked down at the large crystal-like buttons. “Maybe they didn’t notice I had already sown these on my coat.”

“Maybe,” Nathan said. “Can you think of what else it might have been?”

Merci shook her head. “Most of what I own is secondhand.”

Nathan perked up. “Did you hear that?”

She listened, then shook her head.

He turned around to look out the back window, but couldn’t see anything. “It sounds like an engine or something?”

Merci turned toward the side window and then twisted around to face Nathan. Her voice filled with fear. “Oh, no, they found a way to make it down here with the groomer.”

Nathan’s heart raced. “Let’s get out of the car. They’ll figure out we’re in here. Stay low. I’m not sure what direction the sound is coming from.”

FIFTEEN

N
athan crawled out of the driver’s side and crouched down. Merci joined him a moment later. She’d placed an ankle boot from the backseat on her bare foot. He peered over the top of the car expecting to see the trail groomer headed down the mountain toward them.

Merci said, “See anything?”

A distant rumble penetrated through the wind, but he still couldn’t see the source of the noise.

“There,” Merci pointed up the road. A set of headlights cut through the blowing snow. She cringed and pressed closer to him.

Nathan stood up. Was he seeing right? The vehicle coming up the road wasn’t a trail groomer. He swallowed as his heart skipped a beat. “Merci, I think that’s the snow plow.”

Merci rose up and stood beside him. She let out a joyful gasp. “Are you sure?”

They waited, paralyzed by anticipation, as the vehicle drew closer. Nathan planted his feet, but he was prepared to run and take Merci with him if he had to, if this turned out to be just another ambush. At this distance and with snow whirling around the vehicle, he couldn’t distinguish anything but the plow and the headlights. Then the machine turned slightly to push the snow that had accumulated in the bucket off the side of the road.