Blood on Copperhead Trail by Paula Graves

said, “is actually interesting. There’s an urban legend in these parts about hikers who spend the night in a trail shelter and, upon reaching the next shelter on the trail, find Polaroid photos of themselves asleep in the previous shelter. The legend is, if they don’t turn around and go home, they disappear altogether, never to be seen again.”
    “How old a legend is that?” Doyle asked.
    “It’s got to go back years. At least the ’70s, maybe earlier than that.”
    He fell silent for a while, and Laney found herself growing sleepy as the earlier adrenaline rush seeped away, leaving her drained. She tried to fight it, not sure they were actually safe in the cabin, given the disturbance they’d heard outside, but the long hike and the stress of her sister’s attack conspired against her.
    With the moan of the wind in her ears and Doyle’s warm, solid body cradling her own, she drifted to sleep.
    * * *
    H E WAS IN a jungle, thick with mosquitoes and suffocating humidity. Rain battered the thatch roof of his shelter, drenching the world outside. But he remained dry, huddled with the mission workers who had gathered in the rickety supply hut to wait out the afternoon rainstorm.
    The coastal country of Sanselmo didn’t suffer the same heavy monsoon season as the Amazonian rain forests, but there was a definite wet season, and it was happening right now. August fifteenth. Several hundred miles to the south, on the other side of the equator, it was the heart of winter. But there was no winter in Sanselmo, only endless summer.
    He didn’t know the two girls sheltering with him. Only the man. Tall, lean, with gentle green eyes that reminded Doyle of his father. The green-eyed man was his brother, David, who’d broken the family tradition of working in law enforcement and had chosen, instead, to help people in a different way.
    “The rain will end soon,” David told him with a reassuring smile. “And then the steam bath begins.”
    No, Doyle thought. When the rain ends, the bloodbath begins.
    He closed his eyes, willing the rain to keep falling. But nature had her own agenda, and soon—too soon—the patter of rainfall gave way to the soft hiss of steam rising from the jungle floor as the sun began to peek between breaks in the cloud cover and angle through the thick canopy of trees.
    Already, he heard the sound of truck motors humming in the distance. They would arrive soon, and no one in this hut would survive.
    No one but him.
    Doyle jerked awake, his ears still ringing with the hissing sound of steam. It took a moment to reorient himself to reality, to replace the jungle of his imagination with the snowbound mountain cabin of his present dilemma.
    “Good morning.”
    Laney’s voice drew his gaze toward the table nearby. She was setting the table with stoneware mugs, he saw. The smell of hot coffee filled the cabin’s one small room, coming from an old steel coffeepot sitting on the woodstove, fragrant steam rising from its mouth. More wood had gone into the stove’s belly at some point overnight; it burned warm and bright in the gray morning light.
    “Good morning,” he replied, stretching his aching limbs. “I must have slept like a log once I drifted off. Where did you find coffee?”
    “I always keep some in my backpack.”
    “The coffeepot, too?”
    She flashed an adorably sleepy grin. “No. That came with the cabin. I melted some snow, washed it out with soap—”
    “That you also carry in your backpack?”
    “You never know when you’ll need a good washup.”
    “Just how big is the inside of that backpack?”
    Making a face, she crossed to the stove and poured coffee into one of the stoneware mugs. “Sorry, I don’t have sugar or creamer.”
    “Slacker.”
    That comment earned him another grin. He was going to have to ration his quips, because a smiling Laney Hanvey was turning out to be quite the temptation. Their current camaraderie, built up by their forced togetherness and a common