The Reckoning by Jana DeLeon Page A

reached back to offer her his hand getting out of the boat. As soon as both her feet hit ground, he headed down the trail that they’d taken before to the cabin.
    They moved slower than he would have liked to, but moving faster made it harder to listen for other creatures, especially the careful, bipedal kind. The path showed no sign of recent passage, but any footprints left the night before would have been washed away in the storm. And whoever shot at them might have taken a completely different route to the dock. There was no telling how many paths and trails were carved through the island. The old woman and her ancestors had occupied the island for over a hundred years. Plenty of time to create multiple paths, both for hunting and being hunted.
    As they closed in on the cabin’s clearing, he stopped and peered out of the foliage, looking for any sign of life in the tiny structure. The swamp was eerily quiet, as if every living creature were holding its breath, just waiting for his next move. Finally, he motioned to Alex to stay put and crept out of the brush to the side of the cabin. Once safely pressed against the structure, he waved at Alex to join him, then eased along the side of the cabin and around the corner to the front door.
    The door was still unlocked as he’d left it. He peered around the corner, but the cabin was empty. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet as he stepped inside. He studied the cabin for a minute, then looked over at Alex, who was standing silently beside him.
    “Doesn’t look like anything’s been moved,” he said.
    “No. You’d think if she’d been back here, she would have at least cleaned up the glass in the doorway.”
    “You’d think,” Holt agreed.
    Alex bit her lower lip. “So what now?”
    Holt blew out a breath. “I guess we start poking through the brush like we did yesterday. There’s no rain in the forecast today, so at least we have that on our side.”
    “How big is this island?”
    “About ten square miles, give or take for erosion.”
    Alex shook her head. “There’s no way we can cover that in a day—not every inch. And if the woman has Erika, she can easily move her away from whatever area we’re searching. She’s got the advantage here. In a big way.”
    “Yeah,” Holt agreed. “But we don’t have another option. The trail we were on the other day didn’t seem to be well used. Let’s try around behind the cabin and see if we can find another entry point there.”
    Holt pulled the copy of the warrant from his wallet and pushed it over a nail in the center of the front door on their way out. A fairly defined trail started behind the cabin, almost in the center of the clearing, so they started down it.
    “No footprints,” Holt noted. “No one’s passed here since the storm.”
    “Do you think she could have another cabin on the island?”
    “Could be multiple cabins. Even if she did minimal maintenance, they would offer her places to escape the storm or different starting locations for hunting and fishing.”
    “And herb gathering. Most of those jars in the cabin had roots and dried plants in them.”
    “Yeah,” he acknowledged, but didn’t say more. He still didn’t know what to think about the woman and her glass jar collection. He knew people still believed and practiced the old ways, and Mathilde Tregre would be a prime candidate given her family history on the island and reclusive tendencies. But he deliberately kept that line of thinking from his investigation because he didn’t want to think about the other side of it—did it work?
    They progressed slowly through the swamp for about an hour before reaching the shore on the opposite side. Holt looked across the channel into the swamp, but there was no sign of life anywhere near. The trail hadn’t contained any forks along the way, so clearly it was intended to reach this bank.
    “Maybe she uses it to reach this side for fishing,” Holt suggested.
    “The distance across the