“Stevie.”

“Look,” she said. She remained there until he came up beside her to see what she was indicating.

“What?” he hissed. “There’s nothing.”

“Right. There’s nothing. There’s no car.”

Nate had nothing to say for a moment.

“What does that mean?” he finally replied.

“It means someone came here on foot.”

“But what does that mean?” he said again.

“Something,” she said. “Probably bad. Come on.”

They hurried back down the lane. Nate went ahead a bit and ducked into the trees. He emerged a moment later and stood there until Stevie reached him.

“The bikes are gone,” he said simply. “Must be the wrong spot, but . . . we put them by this sign right here. . . .”

On some level, once she had noticed there was no car in the driveway, Stevie had expected this. When things go bad, they tend to go bad all over.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him into the trees. “We’re going to walk back, but we’re going to stay off the road. We’ll go around the lake.”

She pulled out her phone as they walked and thumbed open a map. It was slow to load. The signal was poor. It finally opened the map, but it was of no use.

“It thinks we’re in the middle of the lake,” she said, shoving the phone in her pocket. “We’ll have to get to the lake somehow and follow it around. It’s got to be this way.”

“So we’re going to wander around the murder forest in the dark when there’s someone at the house we broke into.”

“Unless you have another plan,” she said.

“Just making sure I was up to speed.”

She reached for her keys. One of her keychains was a small pill container. She unscrewed this as they walked and shook out the tiny pill it held. She always had one Ativan on her, in case of a panic attack. Being lost in the murder woods was a pretty good occasion to take it. At home, it would make her sleepy. Here, in the woods, it would keep her under control in case her brain decided to spin out. She swallowed it dry, which wasn’t too hard as it was a small pill. She was putting the keys back in her bag when she noticed a small glint of light behind them. In one movement, she pushed Nate behind a tree. He nodded, indicating that he wasn’t going to speak.

A crunch of a step. Crunch, crunch.

Nothing. The person stopped moving.

There were two choices here. One, they could accept that whoever it was who had been at the house had followed them into the woods for completely sensible reasons. They had come to the house to do something, suspected someone was inside, looked around, seen two figures going into the woods, and followed. So they could simply step out from behind the tree and see whoever it was and fess up.

But this person had come with no car and had taken their bikes. This left option two.