Part 20 (1/2)

Maddy thought about it for a minute. ”Maybe. I can get back in a canoe or kayak if I fall out, and shoot a bow and arrow pretty well. I think if a deer stands absolutely still exactly twenty-five feet away from me and wears a bull's-eye, I can put some food on the table.”

”None of us have any business being out here, from what I can tell,” Tommy said. ”I don't even know what we're supposed to be doing with ourselves. All I've done since we got here today is wander around and stare at things.”

”h.e.l.l, Tommy. It's just the first day. We'll get things sorted out. I know one thing we'll be doing and that's splitting a s.h.i.+t load of logs. Every d.a.m.n building here is heated with wood, and it's already cold out,” Kristi said.

They all stared at the fire, their winter coats on. Maddy kept poking away with a stick. She hadn't seen David since dinner when he disappeared down in the storage room and shut the door behind him. He'd been holed up in there most of the day since their arrival.

”What was David like in high school?” Maddy asked.

”He was exactly like he is today,” Kristi said. ”Smarter than what's good for him and always in charge. We got up to a bunch of s.h.i.+t back then, didn't we, Tommy?”

”Yeah. David came up with a lot of ideas, and he wanted to try everything, even if he knew it was stupid.”

”How about if you thought his ideas were stupid? Would you go along with David?” Maddy asked.

Kristi was quiet for a moment. Tommy just looked at the fire. ”I guess I didn't ever think his ideas were stupid.”

”Me neither,” Tommy said.

”I just hope someone knows what they're doing. We are totally on our own here,” Maddy said.

”But that's what you wanted, isn't it?” Kristi said.

”Well, yeah. But I don't want to die out here, either.”

Maddy s.h.i.+fted around on her rock, poking at the fire. She felt nervous, a little afraid of the dark and the woods. It made her cranky. Kristi moved over and put her arm around her.

”Don't worry, Maddy. I won't let anything happen to you. It's going to be great. We have this beautiful place all to ourselves. We'll figure out what to do.”

Maddy saw another flashlight pierce the darkness. She wanted to call out to see who it was, but she didn't want to seem scared in front of the others. Diane came up to the fire ring and turned her flashlight off.

”Hey, what's up?” she said. She was cheery, as she usually was. She had taken charge in the kitchen and gotten a meal put together from goods in the storeroom, then dove right in to do the dishes after they were done eating. She was on task. Maddy envied her.

”Not much,” Tommy said. ”Just killing time. What's going on back there?”

”We've got some visitors.”

”What?” said Maddy. How could they have visitors? ”Who are they?”

”Friends of David's. Or really, friends of Drecker and those guys. There's four or five of them and they all went into the storeroom with David.”

Maddy thought of the pages she'd seen in David's box of files with information and photos of some Idaho militia members. She supposed that's who was in the storeroom with him.

”Did they act like they were having a secret meeting or something?” Maddy asked.

”They didn't ask me to join them. I don't know if it was secret. Do you have a problem with something?” Diane sounded a little suspicious.

”It's probably the guys Drecker wanted to connect with here once we got the ranch. That's one of the reasons they bought it,” Tommy said.

Now Maddy's head was spinning. ”Wait a second. What do you mean 'they bought it'? I thought we bought the ranch.”

Tommy looked a little confused. Kristi looked like she felt a little guilty. Diane looked contemptuous.

”You thought that we, the six of us, bought this property?”

”Well, yeah. I thought that's what David said. It's why I gave him the twenty thousand.”

”Oh, honey. You are young, aren't you? That money you gave us is what we needed for a down payment. Drecker and a few others took out the loan for the property. We're just the full-time staff here.”

Kristi put her arm back around Maddy's shoulder, but she shrugged it off and stood up.

”I am n.o.body's full-time staff,” she said. She headed back to the house, fis.h.i.+ng her flashlight out of her pocket as she stumbled over the rocks scattered all around the area.

She heard Diane say, ”Let her go,” and she thought Kristi probably was trying to come after her. The h.e.l.l with her and all the rest of them. They had left her out, tricked her, made her look foolish. She was going to let David know what she thought about that.

The entrance to the underground house was perfectly dark. The whole clearing that held the ranch's buildings was dark, but some cloud cover had parted and the moon was starting to rise. She saw a huge pickup truck parked behind Ed's old one. She opened the door to the underground house and headed down the stairs, relieved to see the artificial light streaming up from below. The quiet matched the quiet outside; there was no one in the main room of the house, no one in the kitchen. As she moved down the hall toward the storeroom, she strained to hear anything at all, but it was still dead quiet.

She took a deep breath and opened the door to the storeroom. David sat at the table with four men and they turned their heads toward her as she entered the room. Ed and Warren were in chairs set against a wall. The men were all big. They made David look like a boy sitting next to them. His limbs were so slender and his hair was long and very deliberately messy. The other men had military haircuts and wore camouflage. David did not look in charge.

He leaped up from the table and came to the door, taking Maddy by the elbow and steering her out, then closing it behind him.

”What the h.e.l.l is going on?” Maddy said.

He kept hold of her elbow and took her down the hall to the main room.

”Maddy, you can't just barge in like that. We were having a meeting.”

”But who are those guys?”

He looked confused, as if he couldn't figure out why she was asking the question. ”What do you mean, who are they? They're the guys we'll be working with out here, with the co-owners.”

”What co-owners? I thought this place was just ours.” She felt a little frantic. ”I don't understand this.”

David was steering her to the stairs. ”I can't explain it to you now, Maddy. You'll just have to wait. I have to get back in there.” He flashed her his smile, which looked fake to her now, like the car salesman's did when she first walked into the CarMax. ”Go on back out. We'll talk later.”

”But it's cold out there.”

”I'm afraid you're just going to have to get used to that. Go on.”

He pushed her gently up the first stair and she glared at him before stomping up the steps. She didn't know what to do with herself. Going back to the fire seemed impossible. She hardly felt a part of them anymore. She waited for a few minutes and then crept back down the stairs into the house and into her bedroom. She had a right to be in the bedroom. Her $20,000 should have bought her that at least.

She dug under the bunk bed for her bag and dragged it out. She had brought a few electronic gadgets with her to Idaho, but she hadn't really expected to use her secret spy recording pen. She'd bought it online the year before to bug her parents' bedroom. She wanted to see if they were as horrible in private as they were in front of her and Justin. Were they always that mean to each other? Did they ever talk about her when they were alone? The experiment lasted a week or so, when Maddy finally got bored listening in. It turned out that they were just as horrible to each other as she saw them be every day, and they never talked about anything but themselves. And they didn't have s.e.x, which was a relief.

But now the pen might help her find out what was in store for her at the ranch. She didn't trust these other men, the ones in Michigan or the ones sitting with David in the storeroom. She didn't think they were intent on building something small and special and uniquely their own, a place for them to grow in ways that weren't defined by others. She guessed, based on her reading, that they were intent on bringing down something large, and she didn't want to be a part of that. She didn't know if Kristi and the others knew about any of this and had been deliberately holding information back from her. She didn't know why she'd even come out here. But now that she was here, she'd find out what was going on and get out if she had to.

All she had to do was place the pen somewhere in the storeroom; it was powerful enough to pick up voices from almost any point in the room, and there were plenty of places to hide it in there. Then she just needed some private time to listen to what was recorded, which might be the trickier part. She stuffed the pen into her pocket as she heard the door to the storeroom open and the men walk down the hall past her room. A few minutes later, she heard someone walk back down the hall and the door to the storeroom closed again. She went into the main room a short while later and she could hear Diane and Tommy banging around in the kitchen. It wasn't going to be easy to get the bug planted.