Twisted (Short Stories) by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Alex turned off the highway, snapped the Pathfinder into four-wheel drive and made his way along a dirt road toward Wolf Lake, a large, deep body of water in the Adirondacks. As he progressed farther into the dense woods, Alex decided that he agreed with his daughter: The monotonous countryside needed sunlight. The March sky was gray and windy and the leafless trees were black from an early-morning rain. Fallen branches and logs filled the scruffy forest like petrified bones.

Alex felt the familiar anxiety twisting in his stomach. Tension and stress—the banes of his life. He breathed slowly, forcing himself to think comforting thoughts of his wife and his daughter.

Come on, boy, he told himself, I’m here to relax. That’s the whole point of it. Relax.

He drove another half mile through the thickening woods.

Deserted.

The temperature wasn’t cold but the threat of rain, he supposed, had scared off the weekend fishermen. The only vehicle he’d seen for miles was a beat-up pickup truck, mud-spattered and dented. Alex drove fifty yards farther on, to the point where the road vanished, and parked.

The airy smell of the water drew him forward, his tackle box and spinning rod in one hand, his lunch and thermos in the other. Through the white pine and juniper and hemlock, over small, moss-covered hummocks. He passed a tree with seven huge black crows sitting in it. They seemed to watch him as he walked beneath their skeletal perch. Then he broke from the trees and climbed down a rocky incline to the lake.

Standing on the shore of a narrow cove, Alex looked over the water. Easily a mile wide, the lake was an iridescent gray, choppy toward the middle but smoothing to a linenlike texture closer to shore. The bleakness didn’t make him feel particularly sad but it didn’t help his uneasiness either. He closed his eyes and breathed in the clean air. Rather than calming him, though, he felt a surge race through him—a fear of some sort, raw, electric—and he spun about, certain that he was being watched. He couldn’t see a soul but he wasn’t convinced that he was alone; the woods were too dense, too entangled. Someone could easily have been spying on him from a thousand different nooks.

Re-lax, he told himself, stretching the word out. The city’s behind you, the problems of work, the tensions, the stress. Forget them. You’re here to calm down.

For an hour he fished with a vengeance, casting spoons, then jigs. He switched to a surface popper and had a couple of jumps but the fish never took the hook. Once, just after he launched the green, froglike lure through the air, he heard the snap of a branch behind him. A painful chill shot down his back. He turned quickly and studied the forest. No one.

Selecting a different lure, Alex glanced down at his perfectly ordered and cleaned toolbox he used for tackle. He saw his spotless, honed fishing knife. He had a fleeting memory of his father,

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