“Crime scene?” I asked, reading the words.
“You want anyone fucking with your truck?” she asked, resting her hands on her gun belt.
I shook my head.
“Well, then. For the time being. It’s a crime scene.” She winked. “You got a name or do I just call you lost girl?”
“Sawyer,” I offered.
“I’m Deputy Hugo, but the only people who call me that are…well, no one calls me that. You can just call me Josh.”
“Josh?” I asked, curiously, following her to her truck. It took a moment to hike up my skirt and lift myself inside.
“It’s short for Joshwanda,” she deadpanned, shutting her own door. “It’s tribal. From the motherland.”
“That’s…unique.”
Josh broke out in a smile and slapped herself on the knee. “I’m just kidding, but you should have seen your face. Motherland? Girl, I’m from Georgia, but Outskirts has been my home since before I hit puberty. My real name is Brittany, but back in high school, it was suggested by my friends that Brittany was too feminine for me so they started calling me Josh. It stuck. Now that’s what everyone calls me. Including my own parents.”
Josh looked behind her seat and backed up the truck to my camper with expert precision. She waved me off when I tried to get out and help her hook it to the hitch and was back in less than two minutes.
Josh pulled out onto the highway going the opposite direction of where I was heading. I glanced in the side mirror and hoped that Rusty would be okay out there all by himself for the night.
“No worries. I’ll come back for him in a bit. Gary has a shop in town. He’ll come out and tell you what’s wrong with it.” She looked in her rearview. “Although that thing might need a bit of Jesus to get it running again.”
“Or a whole lot of money,” I replied.
“Yeah, that too,” she agreed. “So, what brings you to our neck of the woods? We don’t get too many newcomers in these parts.”
“Honestly?” I laughed at the absurdity of my situation. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. I think I’m just going to figure things out as I go.”
“What sort of things need figuring out?”
I looked out the window up to the sky and the now bright full moon. “All of the things.”
The ride became a comfortable silence as we turned off the highway onto a dirt road behind the ramp I’d seen earlier that had been barricaded off.
“Thank you,” I said, breaking the silence. “If you hadn’t come along I don’t know how long I would have been waiting there.”
“You don’t have to thank me. You just happened to be in my favorite nap spot. This is the most excitement I’ve seen in weeks. Shit, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
We passed through a space between brush just a couple of car lengths wide. Behind it was an oval shaped clearing with trees on all sides.
A rectangular farmhouse in need of as much repair as Rusty, appeared on the far side. The front porch appeared rickety and so did the roof that seemed to dip in the middle. Shrubs and banyan trees with dripping Spanish moss surrounded the house on both sides, curving over the roof like a hand about to smack it into the ground.
Parked sideways in the dirt in front of the porch steps was a dark Ford.
A dark Bronco.
“That’s the truck!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah.” Josh sighed, not seeming the least bit surprised. She twisted her lips and flashed me a sad smile. “That’s kind of what I figured.”
“Do you know him?” I asked.
She nodded. “Finn Hollis. And yes, I know him. Well, I USED to know him.”
“Not anymore though?”
She shook her head. “Not for a looonng time.”
A light shone from behind thin curtains with no detection of movement from within. It wasn’t until after I got out of the truck that I felt like I was being watched.
That feeling continued for the entire twenty minutes it took to find a spot on the land that wasn’t covered in either water, mud, or thick tangled trees and brush.
We’d finally settled on a space between two big trees where the ground was still damp, but not under water like the rest of it seemed to be. A small brown lizard scampered up the door of my trailer and Josh swatted it off.
“I’ll take another look at the land in daylight,” she said, getting in her truck and shutting the door. She rolled down the window and looked down to me. “If we can spot a dryer section then I’ll move it again for you.”
“Thanks again,” I said.
Josh glanced to the shack across the way. “If Finn gives you any trouble, you let me know.” As if angered by her own words she leaned out of her window, directing her shout toward the shack, “Because I’ll come back and shoot his hermit ass!”
She sat back down. “Shit,” she cursed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, craning my neck from the ground below.
“As much as that man needs a good yelling at on occasion, I just realized that today is not the day to be doing the yelling.”
“Why?
Josh smiled. “Don’t you worry about it. Do yourself a favor though and make sure you keep the windows and doors shut tight at night. The mosquitos out here are big enough to carry you off.”
With that, she took off, leaving me alone with my camper, the sound of the aforementioned buzzing mosquitos, the occasional deep croak of a frog, and a very mysterious, very angry new neighbor.
I opened the door to my camper and had one foot inside when I glanced up at the shack across the way. The curtains were swaying gently as there was a soft breeze blowing through. A large shadow suddenly crowded the window, blocking out the light. It turned, and stopped in front of the window, watching me through the thin curtains.
A full body shiver erupted from the base of my spine. The same kind of shiver I’d always experienced right as my father’s car pulled in the driveway.
The feeling that told me things were about to go very, very wrong.
And as always, it was right.
Chapter Seven
Sawyer
The mattress was hard. Some of the inner springs had begun to uncoil and were poking me in the back. The smell inside the camper was of mildew and mold. Musty, I would call it.
I loved it. Every tiny little inch of it.
I was in a strange town, in what appeared to be the middle of the swamp, thousands of miles away from the life I’d always known. I was alone. Terrified.
And fantastically free.
Clutching my mother’s letter to my chest, I drifted off to sleep knowing that whatever was in store for me was better than what I’d left behind.
My mother had told me to be strong. Be brave. I made a promise to myself that no matter what happened, I’d continue to do just that.
There was a loud bang in my dream. Instantly my thoughts drifted to my father. The ladder. Him falling to the ground. The snap of bone.
As I roused from slumber to consciousness, I became very aware that the noise hadn’t come from a dream. It was real. VERY real.
And coming from inside my camper.
My tiny living space swayed from side to side with each heavy footstep taken toward me.
I felt it then. The dread crawling up my spine like a slow-moving spider.
He’d found me.
I opened my eyes and standing over me was the large dark shadow of a man.
“No! Don’t!” I shouted, scrambling up the mattress. With nothing around to use as a weapon, I raised my forearms defensively over my face. “You might as well get it over with now. Beat me until your knuckles bleed. Kill me if you have to. But I’m not going back. Not now. Not ever!”
“Who do you think I am?” a deep voice questioned.
A voice that didn’t belong to my father.
Hesitantly I peered through my arms and as the last bit of sleepy haze cleared in my mind, it was Finn I saw standing at the foot of the bed. His arms were raised abov
e his head, resting against the metal header that ran across the ceiling. He was leaning forward, eyeing me suspiciously. “And what did he do to you?” he asked, a vein throbbing in his temple. His jaw tight.
“Nobody, it was nothing. Just a bad dream.” I answered, not wanting to appear weak to the man who’d almost run me off the side of the road. And although I was grateful he wasn’t my father after all, he was still a stranger, leaning over my bed, in the middle of the night.
“Bullshit,” Finn growled. His nostrils flared.
“What? What are you doing here?” I asked, the fear from earlier spiking the adrenaline through my body once again. “What do you want from me?” I held the worn blanket over my chest to cover up my nightdress.
“What is it you think I want from you?” Finn asked. I could hold the blanket over me all I wanted. The way Finn was looking at me so intensely, so deeply, it was as if he could see through both the blanket and my clothes.
“I don’t know what you want from me. But I know you need to leave. Right now,” I said, using my strongest voice.
“I didn’t come here to fuck you if that’s what you’re thinking,” Finn said, emphasizing the word FUCK.
I gasped.
“What?” He chuckled and the sound vibrated throughout the small space. I felt it all the way into my chest. “You’ve never heard anyone say the word fuck before?”
“No, I’ve heard it before,” I responded.
I’d just never FELT the word before.
The fluorescent light overhead flipped on with a sputtering buzz and suddenly Finn was in full view, no longer a looming shadow.
He wasn’t wearing his baseball cap like he was earlier, revealing messy but straight dirty blond hair that kissed his jaw line. His nose was slightly crooked. His lips were the fullest I’d ever seen on a man. Dark blue circles created half-moons under each of his eyes which were not dark, or demon-red like I half expected them to be, but bright like I’d imagined the ocean would be in the Caribbean. Above his left eye was a scar that had healed and was slightly lighter in color than his tanned skin. It was jagged and ran from the top of his eyebrow into his hairline.
It figures that out of all the people I’d met throughout my entire life—men or women—this gruff angry man, was by far the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.
If losing my mother wasn’t enough proof that life wasn’t fair, Finn looking the way he did was all the proof I needed.
My heart raced. I wasn’t used to being in such close proximity to a man with so much skin exposed.
Finn’s massive body made my already tiny living space look even tinier, the top of his head brushed the ceiling. His shoulders were so wide there was only room for him in the small walkway.
“Who are you?” Finn asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Sawyer,” I answered with as much strength as I could muster. “I’m Sawyer.”
Finn chuckled again and some of the lines on his forehead disappeared. “Finn,” he offered.
“I know your name. Josh told me when she dropped me off.”
Finn stood there like he was waiting for me to say something. “Finn and Sawyer,” he prompted, raising his eyebrows.
“Yes. Finn and Sawyer,” I confirmed. Maybe he just had a thing for names.
“Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?” he questioned. “Mark Twain?”
“Are those friends of yours?”
“You seriously don’t…” Finn paused and shook his head. His expression hardened. “Never mind. Just tell me, Sawyer, why are you really here?” His lip curled up at the end.
“I’m here because I have every right to be here. This is MY land,” I pointed to the deed on the small cutting board that served as a counter.
Finn picked up the deed and promptly set it back down. “Your land is about forty feet back into the marshlands.” He pointed behind my head. “Right now, you’re on my land and you need to move.”
“How am I supposed to do—”
He cut me off. “It doesn’t matter. You’ve got a week to move it or I’m setting this thing on fire.”
“Why?” Is all I could manage to ask.
“Because, for your sake, I’m warning you. You don’t want to be my neighbor.”
I stood from the mattress, expecting Finn to take a step back to allow me room, but he didn’t budge. I felt the heat of his breath as he stared hatred into my eyes like fire was about to spout from his nostrils. He smelled like cedar and whiskey.
“Well, you are my neighbor whether you like it or not because I’ll move my camper, but I’m not leaving MY land,” I challenged, folding my arms over my chest.
Finn’s gaze dipped down to where I knew he could see my nipples through the thin fabric of my long white cotton night dress. My skin heated.
“You’re awfully feisty for someone who dresses like a nun,” Finn said, looking at my mouth while he spoke.
I instinctively reached up to press my fingers to my lips. For a few moments, we just stood there, staring one another down.
Finn broke eye contact first and finally took a step back. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said, right before he turned and left.
The camper rocked as he stepped off the step and slammed the door behind him.
I raced over and clicked the flimsy lock as if the thin strip of plastic could prevent Finn from storming his way back in with little to no effort.
Bending at the waist with my hands on my knees I tried to calm my erratic heart and catch my breath.
I’d just gotten to Outskirts. I hadn’t even started figuring out why my mother wanted me to come here. There was no way I was going to let the likes of someone like Finn run me off.
Mother told me to steer clear of anyone who tried to make others feel as weak as they do.
Finn Hollis was one of those people.
I stood up straight and couldn’t help but to stand on my tiptoes and chance a glance out through the small window.
Finn was on his porch. He turned and scowled in my direction.
The land. The town. The people. Everything was new to me.
But angry men weren’t, and I refused to be intimidated.
Not by my own fears.
Not by the church.
Not by my father.
Not by anyone.
Not ANYMORE.
Chapter Eight
Finn