Page 40 of Mountain Refuge

My bedroom furniture was mismatched pieces he’d had in storage that were already completed but hadn’t been brought down the mountain yet. The dresser, bed frame, and nightstand were well-crafted pieces, and I felt bad that my taking them meant Corbin wouldn’t get any compensation for them. He assured me it was fine, but I had to wonder.

Lucas’s crib was in my room. Belle slept in Gertie’s room. They both had twin beds, again ones that Corbin had made. Corbin had added a small dresser for Belle. Once we were able to get off the mountain, I wanted to get a bedside lamp for her. Corbin was already working on building her a bookshelf. That man was going to spoil my daughter rotten.

After lunch, we would generally go outside. Belle called this playtime, and it was for the most part, but it was also the time when Corbin was showing me his equipment and explaining how his cabin functioned.

Changing our names had been weird. I was grateful for thetime secluded in the cabin for us to get used to calling each other the different names. Corbin was the worst. I would hear “Adam!” shouted from across the cabin, followed by “Fudge! I mean, Elijah!” His messing up always made Belle laugh, and a part of me wondered if he did it on purpose just to get a rise out of my daughter.

Belle loved her name. She thought that Annabelle was pretty, but Belle was better because it made her a princess. My little angel was adapting to mountain life wonderfully. Lucas was too young to register the change in his name. He definitely had a slower reaction time to ‘Lucas’ in the beginning, but now responded immediately when someone said his name.

My nickname for Belle had not changed nor had her referring to me as ‘Daddy’. Corbinlovedthat she called him ‘Uncle’. Gertie had become ‘Grammy’.

After the kids were asleep for the night and adult conversations took place, Gertie, Corbin, and I figured out contingency plans for if we were found. Some nights Corbin would set up his radio so we could also speak with Jack. I had yet to meet the man who had helped save us. Belle had a pile of colored pictures to give him as a thank you. She’d overheard Corbin refer to him as a superhero and now called him ‘Super Jack’.

Jack was positive no one from New York knew where we were. He said that if his contacts heard anything, he would let us know immediately. I also learned that Trenton had survived the shootout. I was beyond relieved to hear that. His possible death had been weighing heavily on me. He’d sacrificed himself so I had time to get away. I owed him everything for that.

The worst bit of news was that there was a warrant out for my arrest for kidnapping and murder. Gunther had followed through on his threat to release the gun to the police with my fingerprints on it. I didn’t recognize the name of my supposed victim when Jack said it, but I felt sorry for the man, whoever hewas. According to Jack, Gunther hadn’t reported the children missing for almost a month after we’d left. I had to wonder if that was because he’d been injured too and wanted to play the grieving father without a bullet wound, or perhaps that they had to hide the bodies from the shootout and didn’t want to draw police attention to the mansion until they had staged everything to look like it had never happened.

Jack said that there were private investigators and bounty hunters looking for me. I asked him to look in on my parents and sisters. The police had talked with them, but phone records and social media posts proved that I hadn’t been in contact with them since before I’d kidnapped the children. Jack told me my parents denied the charges and refused to believe I was guilty. I hoped like hell no one casually mentioned Corbin, which would point the police in our direction. As far as they knew, I hadn’t spoken to or of Corbin in eighteen years. My family shouldn’t be mentioning him to anyone.

My car, the one I’d driven away from the mansion in and left at the train station Jack had instructed me to go to, had been found within days of the reported kidnapping. Per Jack, they had not yet found the security footage of me walking the kids through the station to get to the locker where we found the supplies Jack had left for us. He believed it was because no one was looking that far back, due to Gunther’s delayed report.

Gunther wasn’t counting on the police finding us, though. That was just smoke and mirrors. He had issued a million-dollar bounty on me, dead or alive, and for the safe return of Lydia Gunther. Jack said there was no mention of a reward for Henry Gunther’s return. The man couldn’t even care about his own infant son. What if I was a real kidnapper who meant to do harm to his children? The man didn’t even care. It was disgusting.

I didn’t ask where or how Jack got us new identities. Oncethe snow cleared enough where we could come down off the mountain, Jack said he had all the documents I needed to claim my new persona. Including a backlog of data that indicated my children and I had been living in Whitefish our entire lives. There was even a death certificate for my ‘wife’ and the children’s mother.

I didn’t know how I felt about leaving the safety of the cabin and Corbin’s land. Corbin had said he would get the documentation from Jack if I didn’t go down with him for his first trip into town since the snowfall. While I appreciated Jack’s efforts to cover our tracks, there still were ways to prove we weren’t who we claimed to be. DNA, for one. Also we still looked the same. My face was on hundreds of thousands of wanted posters around the country. Surely, someone would recognize me and turn me in.

I hadn’t shaved my beard for that reason. It was now past my chin. Belle was looking forward to the day it was long enough to braid, like she did with Corbin’s. The man usually walked around with glittery barrettes or ribbon bows in his hair and/or beard.

Gertie suggested I dye my hair. Corbin argued that my sandy brown hair would match the town’s populace better and suggested I keep it. He had some extra ball caps around too and offered them to me to wear when I went out in public.

We cut Belle’s hair. She cried for an hour after we made the suggestion. She loved her beautiful blonde hair—so did I—but cutting it meant less maintenance during the winter months. In exchange for allowing us to cut it, I promised she was allowed to dye her hair whatever color she wanted come springtime.

Pink hair dye was now on Corbin’s shopping list for when he finally got to town. We probably should have seen that one coming.

When the snow started to melt and the air became noticeablywarmer, my old fears and stress returned. The snow kept us in and barricaded from the world.

It also meant there were no more excuses as to why I couldn’t bring Belle down the mountain to visit her friend Brooke.

Every time I thought of Brooke, it was like a punch to the solar plexus. Any time her name was mentioned, especially when I wasn’t expecting it, I couldn’t breathe for several seconds. To this day, months later, I could still feel the imprint of her fingers in mine. At night I would dream about holding her, kissing her, making love with her. The best dreams, though, were of a family, a mother for my children.

I was a wanted man. I could never be with her. She deserved better. The nights when Jack would get on the radio to give us updates about the manhunt for my children and me, it always hammered that fact home. I was living on borrowed time, and I refused to bring her down with me when the axe fell.

Because it would. Living up here in the mountains was a sanctuary. I didn’t know how long it would last, but one day, maybe not one day soon, but one day we would be found out. Brooke could not be standing next to me when that day arrived.

The times when the mountain men—and one strikingly beautiful woman I was trying my damndest not to think about—would do their check-ins after a storm or a brutally cold night, it was both heartbreaking and soothing to hear her voice. When she came across the radio, I would wonder if she was thinking about me, maybe hoping that I was there listening. She never asked about me or the children, and I had yet to determine if that was good or bad.

With my permission, Jack had informed the mountain men of the additions to Corbin’s cabin. While he didn’t give details, he made it clear that there were to be no strangers on the mountain. He implored all of them to be on the lookout for signs ofothers on the mountain and to send up a signal if found. They all agreed, though one was just a series of clicks that Jack said was an agreement. I had no idea what that meant. Corbin didn’t say anything about it, so I remained quiet. One, I think his name was Dalton, even offered to babysit. According to Corbin, while the men who lived on the mountain were formidable and not ones you wanted to cross, they were extremely protective of their land and each other. The fact that Corbin now had children living on the mountain with him meant extra protection.

Belle finally landed safely on the ground next to me. She automatically reached for Lucas’s hand. I had his other. We slowly walked back towards the cabin at Lucas’s wobbly pace. My son was getting so big. His eagerness to follow his sister everywhere had driven him to start walking sooner than I’d expected. He was even talking. Mind, his vocabulary extended to “mik” (which was milk), “Da”, “Bee-Bee” (which was Belle), and, my personal favorite, a short and precise “yeah”. He was very good at pointing to get what he wanted too. When Corbin was around, that was usually a silent “up” command.

Gertie was waiting for us at the cabin’s door. As a child, I always compared Mrs. Mullaney to an old lady. She’d had a rundown, gaunt look about her. Her shoulders were always hunched and her hair prematurely gray. Now, the woman looked beautiful. She stood tall, had some meat on her. Her hair was still gray but now looked healthy and washed. The biggest difference to eighteen years ago, she lookedhappy.

Belle let go of Lucas’s hand and ran towards her. “Is it ready?”

Gertie smiled down at my daughter and nodded. “Darling, it is a masterpiece beyond measure. Even I surprised myself.”

Belle cheered before rushing into the house. I picked Lucas up so I could pick up my pace. “Did you really make her a spaghetti birthday cake?”

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