Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

heading to Doyle Mountain now.”
    T HE PHONE in the kitchen would not stop ringing.
    “Let me answer it,” said Maura.
    “We have to leave.” The boy was emptying out pantry cabinets and throwing food into his backpack. “I saw a shovel on the back porch. Get it.”
    “That’s my friend trying to reach me.”
    “The police will be coming.”
    “It’s okay, Rat. You can trust her.”
    “But you can’t trust
them.”
    The phone was ringing again. She turned to answer it, but the boy snatched the cord and wrenched it from the wall. “Do you
want
to die?” he yelled.
    Maura dropped the dead receiver and backed away. In his panic, the boy looked frightening, even dangerous. She glanced at the corddangling from his fist, a fist that was powerful enough to batter a face, to crush a trachea.
    He threw down the cord and took a breath. “If you want to come with me, we need to leave now.”
    “I’m sorry, Rat,” she said quietly. “But I’m not going with you. I’m going to wait here for my friend.”
    What she saw in his eyes wasn’t anger, but sorrow. In silence he strapped on his backpack and took her snowshoes, which she would no longer need. Without a backward look, without even a goodbye, he turned to the door. “Let’s go, Bear,” he said.
    The dog hesitated, glancing back and forth between them, as though trying to understand these crazy humans.
    “Bear.”
    “Wait,” said Maura. “Stay with me. We’ll go back to town together.”
    “I don’t belong in town, ma’am. I never did.”
    “You can’t wander alone out there.”
    “I’m not wandering. I know where I’m going.” Again, he looked at his dog, and this time Bear followed him.
    Maura watched the boy walk out the back door, the dog at his heels. Through the broken kitchen window, she saw them trudge across the snow toward the woods. The wild child and his companion, returning to the mountains. A moment later they vanished among the trees, and she wondered if they had existed at all. If, in her fear and isolation, she had conjured up imaginary saviors. But no, she could see their prints tracking through the snow. The boy was real.
    Just as real as Jane’s voice had been on the phone. The outside world had not vanished after all. Beyond those mountains, there were still cities, still people going about their normal business. People who did not skulk in the woods like hunted animals. For too long, she’d been trapped in the boy’s company, had almost started to believe, as he did, that the wilderness was the only safe place.
    It was time to go back to that real world. Her world.
    She examined the telephone and saw that the cord was too badlydamaged to reconnect, but she had no doubt that Jane would nevertheless be able to track her location. Now all I have to do is wait, she thought. Jane knows I’m alive. Someone will come for me.
    She went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The cabin was unheated, and wind blew in through the broken kitchen window, so she kept her jacket zipped. She felt guilty about that window, which Rat had smashed so they could get into the house. Then there was the ruined phone cord and the ransacked pantry, all damage that she would pay for, of course. She’d mail a check with a sincere apology. Sitting in this stranger’s house, a house in which she was trespassing, she stared at the photos on the bookshelves. She saw pictures of three young children in various settings, and a gray-haired woman, proudly holding up an impressive trout. The books in the library were summer entertainment fare. Mary Higgins Clark and Danielle Steel, the collection of a woman with traditional tastes, who liked romance novels and ceramic kittens. A woman she would probably never meet face-to-face, but to whom she’d always be grateful.
Your telephone saved my life
.
    Someone pounded on the front door.
    She jolted to her feet. She had not heard the vehicle pull up to the house, but through the living room window, she saw a Sublette County Sheriff’s Department SUV. At last my nightmare is over, she thought as she opened the front door. I’m going home.
    A young deputy with the name tag MARTINEAU stood on the porch. He had close-cropped hair and the stern bearing of a man who took his job seriously. “Ma’am?” he said. “Are you the one who made the phone call?”
    “Yes! Yes, yes,
yes.”
Maura wanted to throw her arms around him, but he did not look like a cop who welcomed hugs. “You have no idea