And I scream.
“Shh!” Jack hisses at me. “Keep it down!”
“But…” I lift my eyes again and see the blood all over his chest. Oh God. “He’s dead!”
“Right.” Jack heaves a sigh. “I found him like this. I think he’s got a stab wound on his chest.”
Before this week, I’d never been anywhere near a dead person before, and now this is the second one after Lindsay. A wave of nausea comes over me, and this time I’ve got food in my belly. I have to fight to keep it down. I hold onto the side of the truck, my legs jello beneath me.
“Claire,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“No!” Tears spring to my eyes. How did this become my life? A week ago, I was enjoying a nice evening with my family in my comfortable home. Now I’m out in the middle of nowhere, staring at a dead body. I’m never going to make it back home—I know it. “No, I’m not okay! How did…”
Jack’s expression is grim. “The blood on his chest is dry,” he says. “This didn’t just happen.”
I frown at him. “Wait, were you inside the truck?”
“I had to go inside. I wanted to see if the keys were in there.”
“And?”
He shakes his head. “Couldn’t find them anywhere. Even looked in the guy’s pockets.”
I’m impressed he had the nerve. You couldn’t get me in a truck with a dead guy if you paid me a million bucks.
“But it hasn’t been that long since he was killed.” He glances back in the direction of the cabin. “That sandwich on the table wasn’t rotting or anything.”
The wheels are turning in my head. The man has a stab wound in his chest. That means the animal that made the claw marks didn’t kill him. Whoever killed him had opposable thumbs capable of holding a knife.
He was killed by a human being.
“Do you think…” I take a deep breath, barely even able to get out the words. “Do you think whoever killed him will be back?”
“Well,” Jack says thoughtfully, “it depends why they killed him, doesn’t it?”
I take a step away from the truck. “We’ve got to tell Noah about this.”
“No!” Jack’s tone is sharp. “I don’t think we should tell Noah what we know.”
“Why on earth not?”
He shuffles between his feet, looking down into the dirt. “It’s all kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Coincidence?”
“Your minivan,” he says. “That van is practically new. Why would it just suddenly break down?”
I blink at him. “The battery died.”
“I don’t know a lot about cars, but I know a little something.” He lifts his eyes to look straight into mine. “The battery in your car looked older than all the other stuff under the hood.”
I snort. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” He raises an eyebrow. “I told you how my compass was giving me wrong directions. I thought it was Warner throwing it off, but I checked the compass again after he disappeared. It was still wrong.”
“So?”
“So don’t you see?” He lowers his voice. “It had to have been Noah.”
“What are you saying?” I blurt out. “You’re saying Noah engineered this entire thing? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“That first night when we were about to go to sleep, we all drank some water,” Jack says. “Except Noah was a ‘gentleman’ and he passed most of it to you, right?”
I do remember how touched I was when he barely drank any water, even though I assumed he was thirsty as I was. I didn’t realize Jack had noticed. “Right…”
He chews on his lip. “I thought at the time the water had a strange, chalky taste. And now I’m sure of it. Someone put something in that water.”
It did have a strange taste. But still. “That’s crazy.”
“Really? How else did we all sleep so soundly through the night?”
That’s a good point. I was surprised at how deeply I slept that night considering I was lying in a bed of leaves. But Jack was the one who went off with Michelle that night, not Noah.
Of course, it was Noah who told me that…
“Maybe it’s all a game he’s playing,” Jack says. “He’s torturing us as he gets rid of us one by one.”
I stare at Jack. I don’t care what he says, Noah would never do something like that. This man is my husband. “That’s crazy. Why would he do something like that?”