Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 15 of 32

Chapter 15: Trailhead

The driver's door opened before we'd even climbed off the snowmobile.

Amber got out in a cream parka with fur around the hood and white boots that had never seen a trail.

She looked at the snowmobile. She looked at the dry bag clipped inside Gabe's jacket.

Then she smiled.

"Mallory. What a surprise."

"Is it?"

The second snowmobile came growling down the road behind us.

The kid had followed us down from the forest road where he'd been marking the slide for the county.

He killed the engine and sat there with his helmet in his lap.

"I come up here sometimes," Amber said. "To be near Dale. It's quiet."

"Dale died above Camp Hale," I said. "That's thirty miles north."

"Grief doesn't use a map."

"Neither does Dale, apparently."

Her smile didn't move.

"I don't know what you think you're doing up here," she said. "But that cabin is private property. There's a notice on the door."

"How do you know there's a notice on the door?"

For the first time, she hesitated.

It lasted half a second.

"The sheriff's office called me."

"Why would the sheriff's office call you about a stranger's cabin?"

She didn't answer that.

Gabe unclipped the dry bag.

He didn't open it. He just held it in his hand.

"We dug a man out of that cabin yesterday," he said. "He knew my face. He called me kid. Same as he did every day for two years."

"Gabe." Amber's voice went soft and sad. "You had a terrible head injury. Everybody knows that. I'm so sorry it still..."

"Don't."

He said it so quietly that the kid sat up straight on his snowmobile.

I took my phone out and turned the screen toward her.

The gray beard. The squinting eyes.

Amber looked at it for exactly as long as it took to blink.

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