“Sure,” he nodded. “They’re a little highly strung. I’ll give you that. But they aren’t bad people. And it would have been awesome to grow up in these woods. Can you imagine a game of hide and seek back here? Or the tree forts we would have built? The moonshine we would have run off with?”
“Oh, God,” Poppy laughed. “That would have been a recipe for disaster. The two of you as kids and teenagers running amok in these woods? Y’all would have burned the place down, no doubt about it.”
“Yeah,” I grunted, smiling in spite of myself. “We would have probably ended up in jail. Or worse.”
We were lucky we’d made it as far as we had after the trouble we’d caused growing up. Never anything too serious or too illegal, but plenty of stupid shit that should have probably gotten us hurt or killed.
Or arrested, if only for our own protection.
“Jasmine turned out fine, though,” Cooper continued. “So it isn’t like her folks have been that bad. They do things a little differently out here, is all.”
I started to wonder if my buddy had suffered some form of amnesia recently. Where had those long-term memories gone? Maybe he’d been so traumatized at the time that he’d blocked it out of his mind completely. I was pretty sure that sometimes happened.
Only someone who didn’t remember having their life threatened in the most graphic, creative ways I’d ever imagined would return and try to pass it off as a big misunderstanding.
And honestly, I didn’t have anything against Jasmine’s family. I really didn’t. They could do their thing out in the woods and keep to themselves forever, as far as I was concerned. They could’ve been like urban legends for people dumb enough to hike or camp in those woods.
But just because I didn’t have anything against them didn’t mean I wanted to visit ever again.
If I hadn’t been worried about Jasmine—and worried for Poppy and Muriel after they’d decided to come out here—I would have parked my ass at home and sat this little road trip out.
We were all in it together, though, for better or worse.
And we were about to find out which it would be—better or worse—really soon.
“See what I mean?” Muriel nudged me while jerking her thumb toward the window. “Doesn’t it seem even creepier now that we’re here?”
I understood exactly what she meant. I wasn’t scared to go into the woods or anything. Still, there was no way to deny that it was darker and quieter and just, yeah, creepier now that we’d turned off the main road onto what was nothing more than a dirt and gravel path that led further and further away from civilization.
“The woods in the evening are always gonna look a little spooky at first,” I said, hoping to calm her nerves even if the thought didn’t sound too comforting, even to my ears. “We’ll get used to it in a minute. Or a few minutes.”
Or never.
Probably never.
I didn’t even want to get used to the spooked sensation because I didn’t want to ever go back there. And if there was anything worse than trying to navigate the way back to the Bailey homestead, it was trying to do it at twilight.
Again, not that I was scared—though it didn’t help that Muriel kept jumping halfway into my seat at every stray branch and pebble that hit the side of the truck—but I preferred life when I could actually see the people who wanted to shoot at me.
And preferably before they’d started shooting.
At least Cooper and Poppy didn’t seem to be having any trouble finding their way in the dark. Then again, it wasn’t like there were too many places to branch off from the main road, and the visible paths wouldn’t have accommodated Cooper’s big-ass pickup.
“You two sound like a couple of scared old ladies back there,” Cooper laughed. “We’re gonna be fine. Don’t you think so, Poppy?”
She shrugged. “I mean, I don’t like the woods, either. But yeah, we’re going to be okay.”
Muriel huffed. “I might not be an old lady yet, but I still have a right to be scared. Every horror movie I’ve ever seen says we should all be pretty damn scared right about now.”
“No shit,” I nodded. “And the word is cautious, not scared. It’s smart to be cautious in a situation like this, Coop. But you just keep running your mouth until some hillbilly jumps out of these trees and turns you into Swiss cheese.”
He shook his head. “You keep saying that, but I don’t think it’ll be so bad. We were kids the last time we came here. Her folks and her relatives are all old now. Half of them are probably dead.”
Cooper might have been right about that. Partially right, at least. We had been a lot younger and more reckless the last time we’d been through those woods. We’d probably—no, almost definitely—been driving too fast.