Devil's Oven by Laura Benedict

his voice. Sometimes she pushed him too far. He turned sarcastic. “Thought you cared about all of them.”
    “Get out,” she said, shoving him away. “Out!”
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t fair.”
    “Get away from me or I’ll go out to the road and flag down the first trooper I see and tell him there’s a psychopath who won’t get the hell out of my truck.”
    He wanted to tell her that she had a good chance of making it all the way down to Alta before she would see more than two cars of any kind. He wanted to grab her and hold her and make her understand that she needed to trust him. Only him.
    Before he could say anything more, she had the door open and was out of the truck, her purse bouncing against the doorframe as she hoisted it onto her shoulder. She slammed the door.
    “Lila, wait!” He tried to climb over the console separating the two front seats and fell, jamming his chest against the steering wheel. As he righted himself, he accidentally hit the horn, sending its cheerful blast into the surrounding woods. By the time he was able to get out, she was a good way down the road.
    “Listen to me, please.”
    She turned around, walking backward for a few steps.
    “You think you know every damn thing,” she shouted back at him. “We all knew you were the one who snitched about us having the answers to the chemistry final. You always were a loser! I don’t know why I ever let you come near me.”
    Every step was another hammer pound on his headache. Why wouldn’t she listen? He’d just wanted to see her, to comfort her. But he’d ended up sounding like a needy idiot. What was she saying? She was running now, unsteady in the heels she wore with her snug-fitting jeans.
    Tripp began to run, too.
    “Damn it,” he said. The sun glinting through the trees was pure and white as moonlight.
    She took a sudden right into the woods. If they had been farther up the mountain where the fallen pine needles swallowed every footstep, her detour would have been silent and he might have lost her. But down here, he could hear her rustling progress through last fall’s sodden leaves.
    “Stop,” he called. She was headed for the trail, but he knew she could easily lose her way. The trees weren’t crowded here, but as he ran, the sunlight faded so that he couldn’t see more than twenty feet ahead. The day seemed to be moving backward, the two of them running toward the early dawn.
    Tripp stopped, listening. Knowing how the first hundred yards of the trail paralleled the service road, he took a hard left, almost colliding with a boulder that rose up without warning in the dimming light.
    When he could no longer hear her, he guessed she might have reached the trail. He thought of the wolf he had seen near his cabin. Worse, he thought of whoever had killed Claude Dixon. Where was he/it hiding?
    “Lila!” His voice sounded hollow in the silent woods. No birdsong. No quarreling squirrels.
    He jogged a little farther and the trees thinned even more. The bright blue bench that sat just a few hundred feet from the trail’s head broke out of the gloom. He slowed, breathing hard. His footsteps were silent on the trail’s hard-packed dirt.
    Why couldn’t he see? For a moment he wondered if it wasn’t his eyesight. Maybe the headache had burst some blood vessels in his eyes.
    He called her name again. By now she might even be back at the SUV.
    Rounding a hard curve around a blistered oak tree, his foot caught on something and he nearly fell.
    A woman lay in the middle of the trail. The pure, waxing moonlight spread over her alabaster skin. A lock of thick black hair curled against her cheek, and her eyes were closed. She hugged her knees to her chest as though for comfort.
    “Jolene,” he whispered, wanting to wake her, but knowing at the same time that he shouldn’t.
    She opened her eyes, which were as black as her hair, and turned her head just that much so she could look up at him. She smiled the smile