She nodded. “I knew she’d leave something behind. She was so clever. So smart.” She held up the scorecards in her lap. “Thisproveswhat he did. This. Plus the diaries.”
“Do you know where the diaries are now?” Kiersten asked.
“I stole them. From Chip.” She patted her black purse. “They’re righthere.”
Kiersten didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had the diaries. They had Dottie’s final clue. But they were locked in an underground bunker with no way to escape.
Except she had something Dottie didn’t have back in 1965.
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out her cell phone. Bile rose in her throat as she squinted at the screen.
No signal.
She dashed around the tiny room with her phone raised in the air, willing the little bars that indicated a strong, or even a weak, signal to appear in the right-hand corner of her screen.
But a nuclear-fallout shelter built to block out radiation could also block a cell phone signal.
She lowered her arm and tossed her useless phone onto the cot.
Despite over half a century of technology and progress, she’d ended up in exactly the same position Dottie had been in sixty years ago.
Right before Dickie killed her.
Gently, she pulled the yellow scorecards from Peggy’s hand and began to read Dottie’s last entry.
Chapter Ninety-Eight
Dottie
October 8, 1965
I climb the shelf. It’s tippy. Precarious. But I manage to stuff a rag into the tube Dickie inserts through the hole in the ceiling.
He pulls the tube back up through the hole. He plucks out the rag and shoves the tube back down.
I try a blanket.
Same thing. Dickie pulls the blanket up and through the hole. I watch, helpless, as it disappears into the garage.
I try again with another blanket. A strange tug of war ensues. He pulls the blanket from the garage above, while I tug from below.
Eventually he pulls that blanket up too. It disappears into the garage overhead.
I have nothing left. Except these words. Scribbled with a little wooden pencil on the only paper I canfind, a whole pad of scorecards from a brand-new game of Yahtzee, purchased by my father to help us while away the apocalypse.
It’s quiet for a long time. Then a voice calls to me through the hole in the ceiling, like some kind of muffled prophet.
“Are you awake?”
I jump at the sound. “I’m awake, you evil bastard.”
“No need to be bitter, Dottie.” I can’t see the eye roll, but I can hear it in his voice. “It’s not my fault you had a miscarriage. It’s not my fault you can’t give me the things I need.”
“No one can give you the things you need, Dickie.”
“That’s not true. Peggy is going to make me very happy. She’s going to be the perfect wife.”
Relief floods my body. She isn’t dead then. He didn’t shoot her.
