Page 77 of Glimmer in the Darkness

Even though she told herself a hundred times that thinking about what happened could wait until morning, the fuzzy memories wouldn’t let her go.

Between bouts of throwing up, she’d closed her eyes and drifted to sleep, only to be yanked awake by nightmares and images and phantom sounds. The noises they’d heard the first day. The missing food. The feeling of being watched. The terror of climbing the cliff. The empty cave.

And suddenly, it came back to her. The gunshot.

The horrifying crack, the searing pain. The way she’d fallen back, her head bouncing against the stone wall behind her. The shock of hitting the ground. All of it had been overridden by the terror in the moment, but now that she was safe, it seemed her mind needed to process it all.

A thousand times, she relived it.

Over and over, she prayed and slept and awakened with a gasp, covered in sweat, until, finally in the small hours of the new day, she’d fallen into a deep sleep.

The sound of knocking woke her. When she moved, everything hurt. Her side. Her back. Her head. Her stomach. Realizing where she was, she bolted up to find a uniformed man looking down at her, his expression hard. Groggy, she pressed the button to lower the window. But the car was off. She unlocked the door and opened it.

“Ma’am, you can’t sleep here.”

When she looked up at him, she blinked in the rising sun behind him and tried to think through the fog of sleep and the fear pounding in her chest. Did he recognize her? She should’ve donned the sunglasses. Now, she’d go to jail. Ella… Ella would die. All because she’d slept too long.

“You’ll have to move along,” the man said.

“I was waiting…” What was her story? Where was she? “A flight. A friend was supposed to… I was supposed to give someone a ride.”

The cop didn’t seem to care. At least he’d come to the clean side of the car. She’d thrown up out the opposite door. “You’ll have to wait somewhere else,” he said. “There’re plenty of hotels in Laconia.”

Wait. He wasn’t asking for ID? Pulling out handcuffs?

She read the patch on his uniform and realized… Not a cop. A security guard. He worked for the airport.

Thank God. Thank God.

“I’m sorry. I thought it would be an hour or so, but I guess… I’ll find somewhere else. Sorry about that.”

He nodded and stepped away.

She breathed through the fear pounding in her head. Fear and… pain.

She’d deal with that in a minute. She climbed into the front seat, started the car, and drove away, one eye on the security guard in her rearview mirror, who watched until she turned the corner.

Mercifully, there was a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby, where she used the restroom, cleaned up, and got a cup of coffee. Her stomach growled, but she’d bought granola bars at the grocery store. After the nausea, the last thing she needed was a donut.

Back in her car, she ate a protein bar, sipped her coffee slowly, and then followed Route 3 south, thinking it would take her back to the interstate. She’d lived in New Hampshire for the first seventeen years of her life, but she’d never owned a car and didn’t know her way around. She needed a place to rest for a minute, a place away from the rent-a-cop at the airport, who might, at any time, realize hers was the face of the woman wanted in connection with a kidnapping and murder.

Finally, she reached I-93 but stopped at an outlet mall before getting on the highway, parking between two cars and praying nobody would notice her.

Praying the airport security guard hadn’t made a note of her license plate.

Praying for guidance. What should she do now?

The day before, she’d told herself that today, she’d process what happened on the mountain, and that after processing it she’d have direction. Now, after hours of nightmares and not enough sleep, she only knew that she was forgetting something. Something very important.

She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to return to the cave and the passageway. She’d climbed out, just like she had years before, only this time, she hadn’t had to coax Hallie to join her.

She forced herself to think about, only about, the day before. She’d climbed out and dropped from the cave opening to the ground. Then, she’d called back through the passage to James, who’d said he wouldn’t fit. They’d decided to meet, and then…

She’d seen something. A flash of color on the ground. She’d bent, picked it up, called to James.

And then the boom. The pain. But the thing she’d found…

She leaned back in the driver’s seat and dug her hand in her pocket and felt something soft that didn’t belong. She pulled it out. It was a hot pink hair tie. Clean and bright and dry, as if it hadn’t been exposed to even a single night on the mountain. It wasn’t large enough to fit Cassidy’s hair. It was smaller. Made for a child.