Blood Lure Read Online Free PDF

it in the aquiline nose and the rounded prominent chin.
    She took another drink. Sat on a rock.
    The boy never loosed his pack, made none of the comfortable settling-in gestures she and Rory engaged in. When Joan had done with her sales pitch, he asked her where they were going for their traps. Obligingly Joan began showing him on the topo. Anna found herself wishing she wouldn’t. His interest was overly specific, having nothing to do with the project and all to do with where the three of them were going to be at any given time.
    “I’m Anna Pigeon,” she interrupted none too subtly. “This is Joan Rand, Rory Van Slyke.” Stepping up to him, she thrust her hand out much as Joan had done. No better way to get the feel of somebody literally as well as figuratively. Despite the afternoon’s heat, his palm was clammy. He was scared or had serious problems with circulation. A rank odor came off him. Not just the accumulation of unwashed body odors but something muskier, almost an animal smell. “What’s your name?”
    Again the flinch. “Geoffrey . . . uh . . . Mic-Mickleson.”
    “Nicholson?” Joan asked helpfully.
    “Nicholson.”
    Now Anna knew he was up to something. “Where are you from, Geoffrey?” Had she been on the Trace, in uniform, she would have had this boy out of his car, his driver’s license in her hand quicker than a swallow can change directions in flight.
    “Oh. You know. All over. I’d better be going. It’s a ways back to camp.” He smiled for the first time and Anna resisted the temptation to be charmed. Not only was it pretty—his straight, white teeth probably the cleanest part of him—but sparked with a hint of apology and an innocence that bordered on goodness. The smile was at odds with the rest of the package. Anna chose to ignore it.
    “Be seeing you around,” she said as he turned and walked back the way he had come. It sounded more like: “We’ll be keeping an eye on you.” Anna meant it to. Some people bore watching. She was sure this fellow was among them. She was just as sure they wouldn’t be seeing him. Not if he saw them first.
    Burbling notes drew her back into the present. Joan was smiling, her eyes full of altogether too much fun. “I do declare, in another minute or two you were going to frisk that boy and read him his rights. Frisking I could understand. A smile to make you lie right down and die.”
    Rory found a lump of charred wood to fix his attention on, evidently uncomfortable with women his mother’s age—or older—having impure thoughts.
    “He was so fishy I thought he was going to sprout gills and swim away,” Anna defended herself.
    “Aw, he was just shy.”
    “He was carrying a half-empty frame pack.”
    “Maybe he lost his day pack.”
    “It was too full for a day hike.”
    “Maybe he’s a photographer, carrying cameras, tripods, film.”
    “Maybe,” Anna said, but she didn’t think so. “Why the big interest in where we were going, where we were camping?”
    “Because he’s a nice young man and nice young men pretend to be interested in what their elders and betters are saying. Isn’t that right, Rory?”
    “That’s true,” Rory said with such sincerity Anna wanted to laugh but didn’t for fear of alienating him.
    “See? Proof,” Joan said.
    Anna didn’t say anything. She was getting entirely too crabby over the whole thing. “Are we almost there?” she asked plaintively.

3
    By the time they reached the vicinity of the first hair trap, too little light and too little strength remained for anything but setting up camp.
    With the departure of the sun, the mountain grew cold. The thin, dry air did not retain heat. Horseflies and deerflies took themselves off to wherever it was they went during the dark hours but the mosquitoes remained, a cloud of mindless hunger hovering over the camp.
    Despite their carnivorous attendance, Anna hauled water from a startlingly beautiful creek, a ribbon of green that cut through the burn