Page 1 of Guarded By the Lumberjack
Chapter One
Penny
The security system was my breaking point.
Living on a rural road outside the city limits, the biggest threat I ever expected to face was maybe a raccoon in the garbage bin when I took trash out at night.
I never expected to install a high-tech security system in the home I'd spent the last three years slowly making mine. Only mine.
If my husband had come home from his last deployment, maybe I wouldn't have needed to.
But when the twenty-four hour surveillance team failed to notice the intruder that had clearly been inside, I finally admitted that I was in bigger trouble than I wanted to believe.
I'm nobody.
Just another military wife, widowed too young, trying to find my way back from the path I thought my life was going to take and onto whatever new one I'm supposed to follow now.
The rain starts while I'm pumping gas.
I have to run back inside to get my change, and by the time I'm back in the car, I'm soaked.
Rain is different in the mountains. I'm not just wet, I'm cold. And I still have nearly three hours of driving ahead of me. If I even have the right man.
The foothill town of Keller's Ferry moves past my windows slowly. There was a four-way stop where I turned off one state highway to another. The long, flat valley with the ranches and alfalfa fields where I'd followed a wide, slow-moving river on one side of the road and a set of lonely rail road tracks on the other had begun to climb into low hills and rocky outcroppings, then the road forked. The winding US highway continued north to the town of Slow River Valley with a few roadside bill boards promising lodging, and food.
Keller's Ferry looks like it only exists through the sheer tenacity of the people who live here. Orchards roll over the hills, homes dotting the landscape in various states of age and repair. Fruit stands seem to adorn every driveway. Some are closed. Some are on-your-honor set ups with fruit in bags or crates beside boxes where you can leave your money.
There was a gas station at the four way flasher, one that was relatively new, well-lit, with a small market attached. That's where I stopped for gas.
Everything else along this stretch of road looks closed-- either because it's after six p.m. or permanently. It's hard to tell.
I cross a bridge that spans a creek and suddenly the town, is behind me as I start climbing a narrow, two lane highway that takes me high into the mountains.
If Calvin Murdock ever called me back, I didn't get his message. My phone is at the bottom of a canyon somewhere outside of Winnemucca, Nevada.
I haven't used my bank card since I took cash out at an ATM in the same area.
The messages had started up again. Innocent-sounding questions about my travels, suggestions of what to do in the next town coming up.
But they were coming from the same unknown accounts that had been contacting me every time I blocked a previous one for the last few months. Even worse, they were messages to my phone. Not comments on my content or DMs on my social accounts.
Whoever I was dealing with had gotten my private number.
Or, who knows? Maybe they'd always had it and just picked now to let me know.
Law enforcement back home said there was nothing they could do. I contact the FBI and, while the person who'd been tasked with listening to my story was professionally polite, I'm pretty sure I heard her roll her eyes as she told me my case didn't warrant an investigation. I didn't have a case.
Everywhere I turned, I got told I was over-reacting. Just block and delete. Ignore it, it'll go away. I didn't fit the profile for the kind of women who get targeted for this sort of harassment; too old, too curvy, not nearly famous enough. It wasn't an ex. It wasn't an obsessed fan. No threats had been made.
I was just being overly cautious. Paranoid. Silly.
My heart kicks into panic mode as I take a hair pin curve too fast, correcting just in time to avoid the guardrail.
This road is nothing like the mountain passes I navigated to get here. I don't understand how it can even be called a "highway." It's just two narrow lanes of curves and cliffs clinging to the side of the mountain it winds around.
The sun sets somewhere behind me, with the mountains rising to stand between me its waning light.
Two deer stand in the forest to the side of the road, watching me drive by, reminding me to pay more attention to my driving than to the thoughts crowding my head.
