Free Blood on Copperhead Trail by Paula Graves Page B

looked up at the tree limbs trembling above them and then looked back at her. “Okay. Back to the cabin.”
    He made her wait just outside the door while he went inside and checked to make sure they hadn’t received any unwanted visitors while they were out in the woods. But the cabin was empty except for their backpacks and the makeshift bed they’d made for themselves in front of the woodstove.
    Doyle let her into the cabin and closed the door behind them. The door lock was true to the period, a wooden bar that fit into a latch to keep intruders from easily breaching the doorway. It wouldn’t hold against a determined intruder, but it would give them time to react, at least.
    Laney tucked her pistol into the holster in her backpack and shed her jacket and boots again, shivering as she settled on the floor by the fire. Doyle joined her there, wrapping one arm around her shoulders to pull her into the shelter of his body. “This okay?”
    She’d be stupid to protest, given the situation. “Fine.” She snuggled a little closer, and he brought his other arm up to enclose her in a warm hug.
    “Who could be out there?” he asked, his breath warm against her temple.
    “I don’t know. The closest search-party group should be at least a mile south of here, if they’re even still on the mountain in the middle of all this.”
    “Maybe they’re looking for us?”
    She shook her head. “That’s not protocol. Each group had a seasoned hiker in it who’d know how to hunker down against the cold until morning light. So they’ll wait until morning and better conditions to come looking for us.”
    Doyle fell silent for a little while, edging them both a little closer to the heat of the stove. After a few minutes, he murmured, “Maybe we were wrong about that print belonging to a human.”
    “It looked a lot like a boot to me.”
    “We didn’t get a great look at it.”
    “True,” she conceded. Her heart had been pounding and her body shaking from the cold too much for her to have been sure about anything they’d seen out there in the snow.
    “Could that scream we heard have been a mountain lion?” Doyle asked.
    “No mountain lions in these parts anymore.”
    He slanted a look at her. “Are you sure?”
    “So says the park service, and they’d probably know.”
    “Maybe it was a ghost, then.” He gave her arm a squeeze. “Maybe one of those Cherokee haints from the boneyard.”
    He was trying to ease the tension that had built during their outdoor trek. Even though her teeth were still chattering a little, she forced a grin. “That’s probably it. Haints.”
    “Do you know all the stories about these mountains?” he asked a few minutes later, after her shivering.
    “I don’t know if I know all of them. I know a lot of them. My mother comes from a strong oral tradition. Her mother and her mother’s mother before kept all the family stories and traditions, passing them down every generation. I could tell you about Jeremiah Duffy, my ancestor several generations back who was one of the first settlers in Ridge County.”
    “I was thinking of a little more modern history than that,” he said.
    She looked up at him. “You have something particular in mind?”
    “What do you know about previous murders in these parts?”
    “Going how far back?”
    He shrugged, the movement tugging her a little closer to him. “Twenty or thirty years, maybe.”
    “Well, there have been murders along the Appalachian Trail for years, though statistically speaking, they’re pretty rare. There was one guy who killed some hikers on the AT back in the early ’80s, went to jail, got paroled about halfway through his sentence and ten years later tried to kill a couple of hikers he ran into in the same area.”
    “Our justice system at work.”
    “It’s certainly not perfect,” she conceded.
    “What about the photograph we found with your sister yesterday—have you ever come across anything like that?”
    “That,” she