Free Stranded by Alice Sharpe Page B

going to be sick of me if this keeps up.”
    She put down her fork as he sliced a bite of melon. “Alex, how did you catch the fish you ate? How did you cook them?”
    “I found fishing gear in the emergency kit I salvaged,” he said after swallowing. “Of course, it was touch and go for a few days when I was too sick to fish, but eventually I cooked on spits or flat rocks. The stuff I walked out with, I dried and smoked.”
    “I wish I had been with you,” she mused aloud. “Not because it was a picnic, mind you, just because I could have helped.”
    “I thanked God every single day that you weren’t on that plane,” he said seriously.
    “How did you keep from getting lost?”
    “There was a compass in the emergency bag. The trail between the lake and the camp was marked with a forked tree at the lake side, so it wasn’t too hard. What with my leg and everything, I didn’t exactly wander far afield.”
    She chewed silently for a moment before adding, “We haven’t really talked about what Agent Struthers told us yesterday. About the call from Shatterhorn to someone here in Blunt Falls.”
    “I don’t know what we can do about any of it until they figure out who the call was made to. We just have to be extra careful.” He paused before adding, “Would you consider flying to Kansas City to stay with your sister for a few weeks until this is over?”
    “No,” she said.
    “But—”
    “But nothing. I just got you back, I’m not leaving.” She didn’t add that if she left, she might have nothing to come back to. The threat from some nameless, faceless person coupled with the threat of losing her marriage made leaving impossible for her. “We’re in this together, as a family,” she said.
    He nodded and she was shocked he didn’t pursue it. Pleased, but shocked. “Okay,” she continued. “Let’s move from looming disaster to more mundane things. How about helping me change the batteries in all the smoke alarms today? You weren’t here on the first day of spring when we usually do it and I didn’t want to ask Billy.”
    “Sure. But now that you’ve brought up Billy, I was just thinking that he never came around our house before I crashed the Cessna.”
    “I know. I hadn’t seen him since high school, but like I told you, two or three days after the crash, he showed up and asked if I needed help shoveling snow. Once I gave in and agreed, I tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take any money. How he rode from his place to our house in the snow on that old red bike is a mystery, but he did.”
    They left the café holding hands. The wind had come up and cut through the fog, made the parking lot a cold, damp, nasty place. Once they got to the car, he turned her to face him. “Do you need to go anywhere else before we head home?”
    “Nope.” She noticed that he scanned the parking lot every few moments, looking for bad guys, she supposed. She looked around, too. What people were visible through the mist seemed in a hurry to get out of the weather. No one seemed to have a good tan like the man in the photograph.
    “Let’s just go home and do chores like normal people,” he said at last as he turned his gaze to her. His hazel eyes seemed to glow and she realized that each day he was back seemed to erase a week of the time he’d been gone. He was growing familiar again, closer, like before the Labor Day mall shooting and even way before that.
    He kissed her forehead and she smiled. “Watch what you say,” she warned him, touching his forehead where a pink welt was all that remained of the cut she knew he’d received when the plane landed and he was hit by broken glass. “I happen to have accumulated a long list.”
    “Great,” he said. “Just make sure there’s time in there for us to take a nap in the hammock if it ever warms up, okay?”
    “And to talk to Billy when he comes by,” she added.
    “If he comes by.”
    * * *
    F OR THE SECOND morning in a row, Alex awoke to the sound of