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“Who are you?” Sam asked.
He noticed something strange. He raised the level of light. Someone had written in magic marker on the girl’s forehead.
The word was “Freak.”
Sam’s palm went dark. Slowly, careful not to scare her, he put his arm around the girl’s heaving shoulders.
“It will be okay,” he lied.
“They…they said…why…” She couldn’t finish. She collapsed against him, weeping onto his shirt.
“You’re Jill. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Jill,” she said, and nodded and cried some more. “They don’t want me to sing.”
Job one, Sam told himself: take care of Zil. Enough. Whether Astrid and the council liked it or not, it was time to take care of Zil.
Or not.
Sam stared at the hole from which he’d pulled Jill, really seeing it for the first time. A hole in the ground where none should be. Something about it…something terribly wrong.
Sam gasped, sucked air sharply. A chill ran up his spine.
The horror here was not that a little girl had fallen into a hole. The horror was the hole itself.
FIVE
62 HOURS, 6 MINUTES
SAM TOOK JILL to Mary Terrafino at the day care. Then he found Edilio, woke him up, and walked him to the town plaza. To the hole in the ground.
Edilio stared at it.
“So the girl fell in, walking around in the night,” Edilio said. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes and shook his head vigorously.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “She didn’t make the hole. She just fell in.”
“So what made the hole?” Edilio asked.
“You tell me.”
Edilio peered more closely at the hole. From the first need, Edilio had taken on the grim duty of digging the graves. He kn
ew each one, knew who was where.
“Madre de Dios,” Edilio whispered. He made the sign of the cross on his chest. His eyes were wide as he turned to Sam. “You know what this looks like, right?”
“What do you think it looks like?”
“It’s too deep for being so narrow. No way someone did this with a shovel. Man, this hole wasn’t dug down. It was dug up.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah.”
“You’re pretty calm,” Edilio said shakily.
“Not really,” Sam said. “It’s been a strange night. What…who…was buried here?”
“Brittney,” Edilio said.
