AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “It’s not me, it’s part of this long complicated story I can’t tell.”
Charlie shared a worried look with Lila, who shrugged. “Are you staying safe, Molly?”
“To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But don’t worry, Sam is a pretty good protector.”
“Sam’s a lot more caring than he appears, isn’t he?” Lila said wisely. She came over to Molly, gave her a one-armed hug and rested her head on Molly’s shoulder. “Just know that you can call on us if you need us. I took a few days off work so I can show Charlie and Ani around.”
Molly felt a pang of regret that she wasn’t going to have much time for sightseeing with her friends. But this situation with Elias had to come first.
And then there was the note in Daniel’s fuel receipts. Had someone lured him out to Ice Falls on purpose?
She’d vowed to find out who was responsible for Daniel’s death so that Lila would agree to come home. But looking at Lila now—her shining eyes, her white hair aglow from the sunlight streaming through the window—she wondered if she had it all wrong. Maybe Lila was at home in this quirky remote spot in the mountains, and she should just accept that.
Either way, she had to find out for sure what had happened to Daniel. There was no way she was going to leave her best friend somewhere with a potential murderer still on the loose.
Ani struggled to her feet, clearly favoring her left leg. She must be extra tired from the long trip. “I’m ready whenever you are, Molly. Do you want to go somewhere private?”
Molly eyed her doubtfully. Would she be able to hike the trail to Daniel’s cabin?
“I’m fine,” Ani assured her. “Lead on. A walk would do me good. When my leg cramps up, sometimes it’s the best thing. My PT says I should walk as much as possible.”
“A three-mile walk?”
“If I get tired we can just call a cab, right?”
Molly met Lila’s gaze and they both burst out laughing. “You really are just off the plane, aren’t you?”
27
Molly changed out of her sweaty running clothes and into stretch jeans and a pair of hiking shoes that Martha from the sheep farm had given her. She longed for a shower but didn’t want to take the time. As she sniffed her sweat-soaked running shirt, she grimaced. Mental note—make sure to bring a change of clothing the next time you get shot at, then hike several miles through a forest, then sleep in a dead guy’s cabin.
“I need to make a quick stop at the general store,” she told Ani.
There, she introduced Ani to Kathy and watched them instantly hit it off while she took her iPad to the WiFi corner.
WanderWorld had answered her comment. So weird how people are reading this blog two whole-ass years later! I don’t know anything more about the Chilkoots than I wrote in my post. But if you’re in Blackbear and you see Jimmy Marsh, either avoid him or tell him he’s an asshole. He’s the one who took my phone.
Jimmy Marsh. At least she had a name. But how was he connected to the Chilkoots, who generally shunned outsiders?
On the trail to Daniel’s cabin, Molly set a slow pace that would have driven her crazy if it wasn’t the best thing for Ani. She loved her friend fiercely. For one thing, Ani and her mother had helped her emancipate herself from her increasingly unstable mother. She used to spend the night at Ani’s whenever things got too chaotic at her own house.
For another, Molly had always wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t stayed after school for an extra track practice the day Ani’s left leg got shattered. If she’d walked home with Ani, as she often did, that racist asshole wouldn’t have tried to grab Ani off the street. She wouldn’t have had to fight back alone, or been run over by his rear passenger tire as he screamed racial insults.
They’d called it a hate crime afterwards, but that was just part of it. Ani had nearly been kidnapped. For months, maybe years, Ani had been afraid to walk alone down the street, any street. Her friends made sure she never had to, and then John had done the same, at least at first.
But what if Molly had been with her during that attack? That was the part that haunted Molly. She was the junkyard fighter of the group, not Ani. If she’d been there, she would have made that man regret he ever came to Indiana, regret he’d driven through their neighborhood, and especially regret that he’d picked a twelve-year old girl to attack.
As Molly, Ani and Buttercup made their way through the woods, which smelled of mud and moss and exquisitely fresh air, Ani filled her in on the situation with John.
“We were at the fertility doctor’s office. I was on the exam table, in a hospital gown, waiting for the nurse to do a baseline scan of my ovaries. She was telling me about some office gossip—I know everyone there by now. Since I’m a doctor, they treat me like I’m one of them. Anyway, I had to go to the bathroom, but the usual patient bathroom was occupied. I figured since they treat me like one of their own, they wouldn’t mind if I used the staff bathroom, right off the break room. So I ran over to that one, holding my hospital gown together, barged into the break room and crashed right into John. He was in the middle of kissing Dr. Goldman. Our fertility doctor!”
“Oh my God. He didn’t.”
“He did. He’s been having an affair with her. It’s so unethical, I don’t even know where to begin, although John tried to claim that technically, I was her patient, not him. That’s bullshit, of course.”
“I’m so sorry, Ani. That’s…I can’t even wrap my head around that level of betrayal.”
Ani focused on the trail ahead of her, picking her way through the mud. “It’s even worse than simple cheating. Dr. Goldman knows every detail about my deepest area of vulnerability. It’s like cheating…squared.”
