Stranded with My Stepbrother

Chapter 27

Contrary to his orders, I held my breath as long as I could. I finally coughed and gasped, burning fumes entering my nose and mouth.

“Keep breathing, son,” Girard said.

My vision started to blacken from the outside in.

The last thing I remembered was Christian grinning at Girard. “Least it won’t be messy.”

***

I woke to the sound of lapping water. Peeling my eyes open, I saw sand, bits of wood, and broken glass. “Jacey?” I mumbled, looking around, trying to orient myself.

Then it all came crashing back, and I sat up straight. “Jacey?!”

Still in the too-big red flannel shirt, pants, and knee-high waders, Jocelyn was laying not five feet from me.

I struggled to my feet, still wearing the steel-toed boots and other clothing I’d “borrowed” from the lumberjacks. We were on a strip of beach, a sandbar, to be exact. There was water on both sides of us, stretching in either direction to swathes of deep forest.

Carefully picking my way around glass and broken boards with rusty nails sticking out, I made it to Jocelyn’s side. I shook her gently. “Jacey?”

Jocelyn groaned and was about to roll onto a particularly nasty-looking glass shard before I stopped her.

“There’s broken glass everywhere,” I explained with my hand firmly on her shoulder. “You need to be careful.”

“Broken glass?” Jocelyn echoed. She let me help her to her feet, then looked around.

When she sagged against me, I was sure we’d fallen into some bad trouble. But then she looked up at me with a smile and tears in her eyes. “Caleb, they dropped us at the old fly-in camp!”

“The old fly-in camp?” I said.

“Yes. It’s right by our camp. Almost straight across from it. We passed it when we left in the boat,” Jocelyn replied excitedly.

My knees turned to jelly, and I had to sit down. As I did so, my pocket crinkled.

I reached in and pulled out a piece of paper and a box of matches.

“What’s that?” Jocelyn asked, sitting down next to me. She plucked the paper from my unresisting hands. “‘We know what you did. Don’t rat us out, or there will be consequences. Burn this letter.’”

I sighed. “Sure, we can burn the letter, but what happens when I have to tell the authorities what happened to Bill? It’s not like the logging operation was far away.”

Jocelyn stared up at me for a long moment, then she took the matches, struck one on an old board, and set fire to the paper. “We’re not going to tell anyone about Bill.”

“What?” I said. “Jacey, I killed a man!”

“Nobody needs to know that. Nobody ever needs to know that. I’m sure Girard is taking care of it even as we speak,” Jocelyn decided. “He was a bad man. He was going to hurt me. There’s no reason you should get in trouble for what happened to him.”

“Jacey, I happened to him,” I reminded her.

Jocelyn shook her head. “No. We’re not going to tell anyone about it. It’ll be between you, me...”

“And about twenty-five illegal loggers,” I snorted.

Jocelyn took my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “We have to come up with some story. Something believable.”

“I find the truth is usually pretty believable,” I replied.

“Caleb, I forbid you to throw your future away because of that asshole,” Jocelyn snapped.

Her beautiful green eyes were shimmering with tears, pleading with me.

I wasn’t proof against that. “All right. What do you suggest?”

“We say we managed to walk to the North Lake, and some kind fishermen spotted us, gave us some clothes, and brought us to the fly-in camp. We knew we’d be found from there. That’s it. That’s all we have to say,” Jocelyn said.

“Okay,” I responded. “Okay, yeah, that’s simple and to the point.”

Jocelyn nodded. “Good.”

As soon as I’d agreed, I began to hear a buzzing in the background. We both turned to look.

There were two boats coming toward us. One had a man in forest green at the motor. The other, I could tell from his bright blue lifejacket, was being navigated by Hank.