Taylor’s blue eyes honed in on Hunter intensely before darting away.
‘So how do you think you could’ve helped him?’ she asked. ‘What would you have done?’
‘Everything I could,’ Hunter replied without missing a beat. ‘I would’ve done everything I could. He was my friend.’
Twenty-Three
An hour and eight minutes after taking off, the Phenom 100 jet touched down at Western Carolina Regional Airport. The weather outside had started to change. Several large clouds were now lurking around in the sky, keeping the sun from properly shining through, and bringing the temperature down a few degrees. In spite of the lack of sunshine, Taylor put on her sunglasses as soon as they stepped out of the plane. It was basic FBI training — once in public, always hide your eyes.
Outside the airport, Hunter and Taylor met a representative from a local car-rental company she had spoken to on the phone. He delivered them a top-of-the-range, black Lincoln MKZ sedan.
‘OK,’ Taylor said, flipping open her laptop as she and Hunter got into the car. She took the driver’s seat. The car looked and smelled brand new, as if it had been purchased that morning just to accommodate them. ‘Let’s figure out where we need to go from here.’
Taylor used the laptop’s touchpad and quickly called up a satellite-view application. In a fraction of a second, she had a photographic bird’s-eye-view map of the city of Murphy on her screen.
‘Lucien said that the house was at the end of a wood’s edge,’ she continued, angling the laptop Hunter’s way.
They both studied the screen for a long moment and, as Taylor used the touch pad to drag the map from left to right and top to bottom, her demeanor changed.
‘Was he kidding?’ she finally said. Her voice was still calm, but it now had a sliver of annoyance to it. She lifted her sunglasses and placed them on her head before pinning Hunter down with a concerned stare. ‘This place is surrounded by woodland. It’s everywhere, inside and outside the city. Just look at this.’
Her gaze returned to her screen as she used the touchpad again to zoom out on the map. She wasn’t joking. The city of Murphy looked like it had been built slap-bang in the middle of a large, hilly forest. There seemed to be more woodland around than buildings.
‘What are we supposed to do? Find a house at the edge of every woodland we come across and go see if any of his keys fit?’
Hunter said nothing. He was still staring at the screen, trying to figure it all out.
‘He was fucking with us, wasn’t he?’ Taylor chuckled those words. ‘Even if this house does exist, which I now doubt, it could take us a couple of days to find it, maybe more. He sent us on a wild goose chase, Robert. He’s playing games.’ She took a moment to think about it. ‘I’m sure he’s been here before. Maybe even lived here for a while. He knows Murphy is surrounded by woodland. That’s why he sent us here with that crazy riddle. We could spend days here, and never come across this. . fantasy house.’
Hunter spent a few more seconds analyzing the map before shaking his head. ‘No, this is wrong. This isn’t what he meant.’
Taylor’s eyebrows arched. ‘What do you mean? That’s exactly what he said: “The house is at the end of a wood’s edge.” Unless you’ve got this riddle wrong, and we came to the wrong place.’
‘I didn’t,’ Hunter assured her. ‘We came to the right place.’
‘OK then, so Lucien is playing games. Just look at that map, Robert.’ She nodded at her laptop. ‘“The house is at the end of a wood’s edge,”’ she repeated. ‘Those were his words. I’ve got the recording here with me if you want to listen to it again.’
‘I don’t have to,’ Hunter replied, turning the laptop to face him. ‘Because that’s not exactly what he said.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He said that the house was at the end of the wood’s edge, not a wood’s edge. And there’s a big difference. Can you get us a searchable map of Murphy? Locations, street names, things like that?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
A few keystrokes later and the bird’s-eye-view map on the screen was substituted by an up-to-date satellite street map of the city of Murphy.
‘Here we go,’ she said, passing the laptop over to Hunter, who quickly typed something into the search feature. The map panned out, rotated left, and then zoomed in on a narrow dirt road located between two woodland hills on the south side of the city. The road’s name was — Woods Edge.
Even Hunter was a little surprised. He was expecting that perhaps one of the woodlands, or maybe even a park, carried the name “Woods Edge”, but not a road.
‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ he said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Taylor breathed out.
The road seemed to carry on for about half a mile. There was nothing on either side of it, except woodland, until the very end, where a single house stood — the house at the end of the Woods Edge.
Twenty-Four
Taylor took the wheel, and the drive from the airport to the south side of Murphy took her just under twenty-five minutes. The entire journey was punctuated by hills, fields and woodlands. As they approached the city of Murphy, a few small ranches sprang up by the side of the road, with horses and cattle moving lazily around the yard. The typical smell of farm manure coated the air, but neither Hunter nor Taylor complained. Hunter, for one, couldn’t remember ever being in a place where everywhere he looked was painted by trees and green fields. It was striking scenery, they both had to admit.
As Taylor exited Creek Road and veered right into Woods Edge, the road got bumpier by the yard, forcing Taylor to slow down to almost a snail’s crawl.
‘Jesus, there’s absolutely nothing here,’ she said, looking around. ‘Did you notice that we haven’t seen a lamppost for way over a mile?’
Hunter nodded.
‘I’m glad we still have daylight to guide us,’ Taylor commented. ‘There’s no doubt Lucien was hiding from something, or someone. Who in their sane mind would want to live down here?’
She tried her best to avoid the larger potholes and bumps, but no matter how carefully she swerved, or how slowly she drove, it still felt as if they were driving through a warzone.
‘This is like a minefield,’ she said. ‘Car companies should bring their vehicles down here for a suspension test.’
A couple of slow and very bouncy minutes later, they finally reached the house at the end of the Woods Edge.
The place looked like a single-story ranch house, but on a much smaller scale. A low wooden fence, in desperate need of repair and a new paint job, surrounded the front of the property. The grass beyond the fence looked like it hadn’t been cropped in months. Most of the cement slabs that made up the crooked pathway that led from the gates to the house were cracked, with weed growing through the cracks and all around the slabs. An old and full-of-holes Stars and Stripes fluttered from a rusty flagpole on the right. The house was once white fronted, with pale blue windows and doors, but the colors had faded drastically, and the paint was peeling off from just about everywhere. The hipped roof also looked like it could do with a few new tiles.
Hunter and Taylor stepped out of the car. A cool breeze started blowing from the west, bringing with it the smell of damp soil. Hunter looked up and saw a couple of darker clouds starting to close in.
‘He certainly didn’t take very good care of this place,’ Taylor said, closing the car door behind her. ‘Not really the best of tenants.’