Free Escape by Barbara Delinsky Page A

everyone be welcomed?”
    Maybe it was my words, maybe the sound of my need. Looking chastened, he set down his fork and pulled me close. “Just a warning, kiddo. I know how Bell Valley thinks. Once burned, twice shy.” The phone rang. The arm that had held me let go to stretch past for the handset. “You’ve reached the Red Fox. May I help you? Oh. Good God. No, we need decaf, too. That was s’posed to have been an automatic delivery. We’re almost out.”
    Leaving him to business, I opened the fridge. It was stuffed in ways my own had never, ever been. For James and me, eating in was about bare essentials. I might blame that for my being a lousy cook, but I had been a lousy cook well before James and New York. My mother was a great cook. There had been no need for me to learn. I didn’t have to serve breakfast to upwards of twenty people a day, like Vicki did. Nor did I serve tea, and though I guessed that cookies and cakes would be baked fresh that afternoon, the plastic bins in the fridge said that the fruit tray would be huge.
    I didn’t want fruit now. I
lived
on fruit—no, that was wrong. I lived on
salad
. Which meant I didn’t want salad now, either. Studying my options, I realized that I craved good, old-fashioned comfort food, which made Rob’s mac and cheese too tempting to ignore. Removingthe container, I heated a small dish. Rob was still on the phone. Catching his eye with a tiny wave, I pointed to the backyard.
    With other guests likely gone to the Refuge for the day, I had my choice of seats. Not wanting to be too close to the woods, I headed for the Adirondack chair that sat at the trunk of the Norway maple I had seen from my room. Setting the dish on one of its wide arms, I sank into it, but had barely tucked up my legs when I saw a small, dark-haired figure scurry from the parking lot to the back steps. This would be Vicki’s baker, here to make those cookies and cakes. Head down, she looked like she didn’t want to be seen any more than I did.
    She disappeared inside, leaving me alone with the woods.
    The sun had shifted, shedding light on the face of the trees. I saw the broad, tri-tipped leaves of the sugar maple, the single, soft-green ones of the beech, and the paper birch, standing out not for its leaves but for its peeling white bark. At their feet were a bed of last fall’s leaves, as packed down as the winter snows had been heavy. There were spruce here, conically shaped, and more evergreens behind. I picked out the graceful arms of the hemlock, the blue-green needles of the balsam fir, and, towering above, the white pine. All would be rising from beds of moss, which I couldn’t see from here. Nor could I see the boulders that were strewn about in the forest, whether standing alone or guiding the brook.
    These woods were dense. Level for a short stretch before starting to climb, they grew increasingly rugged the higher they went, eventually giving way to a bald granite peak that was easily fifteen degrees colder than the air where I sat.
    And no, these woods weren’t for wimps. They held black bears with ferocious claws and fisher cats with ferocious screams. They held owls and the occasional eagle. And coyotes. Yes, there were those. They might not have been here lately, but I had seen one myself, first in the flesh, then in my dream.
    Lest I’ve built it up into something it’s not, let me say here that the dream isn’t earthshaking. There’s no action, simply two creatures staring at each other, one human, one not. I see gold eyes that simmer,though reflecting what in the pitch black of night, I don’t know. It’s always the same. We watch. We wait.
    In time I wake up. And that’s when the heart of the dream takes hold. In those woods, I feel haunted. I awake to a stark loneliness, and I feel a yearning.
    The feeling always fades, forgotten in the rush of my life until the dream recurs—and I do yearn for something. I don’t think it’s Jude. I love James. But Jude is