Page 17 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“I don’t really see we have a choice,” Jack said reluctantly. “Under these circumstances, with the threat as immediate as it is and a pretty good chance of rescue, it’s worth taking the risk. And we don’t have anything to build a still or catch rainwater, so this is pretty much it.”

They took turns cupping their hands and drinking. Casey thought it was the best water she’d ever tasted, clear and fresh and slightly mineral-flavored. If it was going to make them ill, there was no way to tell from the taste.

She was starting to shiver now, though. It had been easy enough to stay warm with exertion, but with her feet in the cold water and more of it in her belly, she could tell that her body temperature was falling dangerously.

“Ready to go?” Jack asked her. There were goosebumps prickling his arms, too. It was nice to know it wasn’t just her. And he didn’t have the option of turning into a lynx for a little while to warm up.

She nodded.

Once they were moving again—hand linked to hand—she worked up her courage and finally spoke.

“Jack,” she said. It was easier to talk to him when she wasn’t looking at him. “There’s something I need to tell you about me, too.”

“All right,” he said easily.

“About two years ago, my roommate Wendy went missing.”

She darted a look at Jack under the edge of her eyelids. He gave her a supportive smile, as if he was interviewing a slightly nervous witness.

“Did she work for Fallon too?” he asked.

“Yes. She did. At that point, I didn’t. We shared an apartment. She wrote software for the company.”

She groped for what to say next.

“Before she disappeared, she told me she thought there was something going on at Fallon’s company that wasn’t right. She wouldn’t tell me what. She said if she was wrong, she’d be slandering innocent people. And that was the last conversation I ever had with her.”

“What happened?” Jack asked quietly.

“She didn’t come home that night. I was working night shifts at my shitty waitress job, so I wasn’t entirely sure until the next day. I called Lion’s Share Software and asked to speak to her. After getting shuffled around between different departments, because I wasn’t exactly sure where she worked, I finally got a person who said she’d quit.

“That made no sense to me. She hadn’t said anything at all about quitting her job. And why wouldn’t she come home? I couldn’t reach her on her phone; it just went to voice mail. She didn’t answer her emails. I waited to see if maybe she’d show up that night, but she wasn’t there in the morning when I came home from work, so I called the police.”

“What did they say?”

“They said they’d look into it. I kept checking back, made a real nuisance of myself I guess, and a few days later they told me Wendy had moved to Colorado Springs and was just fine, so I needed to stop worrying about her. And you know the really crazy part?”

“What’s that?”

“I went on Wendy’s Facebook, and sure enough, it was updated with pictures from her trip to Colorado. I went around for a while feeling like I was going crazy, ‘til I got to thinking, why would she leave without taking anything at all? I mean, neither of us had a whole lot of stuff. We were both orphans, we’d both moved around a lot when we were kids, and neither of us had a lot of keepsakes. But you’d think she’d come back and get her books and things. She didn’t even take her shampoo!”

“Besides,” Jack said, “she didn’t have a fight with you or anything, did she? Why wouldn’t she tell you where she was going?”

“Right!” A smile broke out across her face. “You believe me! No one believed me. Everyone thought I was making a big deal out of nothing.”

Jack raised his uncuffed hand to indicate the woods around them. “I have some pretty good evidence here to vindicate you. So what happened then?”

“I got on a bus to Colorado Springs. Stupid, huh? I didn’t even have an address. The police said they’d talked to her, but they wouldn’t give me her contact information. I think they thought I was stalking her. Then I came up with what I thought was a pretty clever way of getting her address.”

“How?” Jack asked.

“I called the utility company in Colorado Springs. See, when she disappeared, I went to the library and got a bunch of books on skip tracing. I couldn’t afford to hire a private detective; they cost too much. So I figured I could learn how to do what they did from books. I looked up the number for the Colorado Springs electric utility online, and I called them and pretended to be Wendy. I told them my bills were going to the wrong address and I needed to verify where they were sending them. I figured I would ask for some kind of identity verification, but I still had all her old mail in the apartment, so I had her social security number and driver’s license number and everything.”

“That’s smart,” Jack said. “Did it work?”

“Yes!” She still remembered her amazement that her plan had actually succeeded. “Well, kind of. They wanted the last four digits of my social—I mean, hers—and then they looked her up in the computer and found an address, but she wasn’t the current customer. Someone else had moved in a month ago. I said thanks and hung up.”

“Did you go anyway?”

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