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Lillibeth was knotting her fingers. “But she might knooowww. She might knoowww.”
“Maybe Aunt Catherine took the car,” Ophelia suggested.
“No.” Ravinia shook her head. They were grasping at straws. Yes, Catherine would drive the car, an ancient Buick, from time to time, but not in this weather, not this late, not without telling them.
“Get Cassandra!” Lillibeth’s voice was rising, and it wouldn’t be long before Cassandra heard them, anyway, so Ophelia turned back to the stairs, pressing her lips together and lifting her skirts once more as she headed to the second level.
All this fret and worry was getting them nowhere fast. “I’m going to the gate,” Ravinia said, charging toward the front door.
“Where’s your cloak?” Isadora asked automatically.
Cloak. Jesus. Ravinia almost missed a step. Why couldn’t they just have coats like everyone else? “It’s by the back door.” Ravinia pulled open the heavy front door and swung it inward. A swirl of snow and wind and cold swept inside. She pulled the door shut behind her, and instantly realized she should have waited for the cloak.
Head down, she plunged into the frigid night, trudging along the buried flagstone path toward the gate. Six steps from the house she saw the large, irregular mound of snow. A body? Oh, Jesus! Catherine!
“No!” Heart racing, she ran forward, trampling awkwardly, shot with fear as her aunt’s body became more and more defined in her vision. Catherine lay on the ground, nearly covered with white powder, her eyes closed, her mouth half open, and only because her face was turned sideways did air enter her trachea. Ravinia scraped snow away frantically, pressed her ear to Catherine’s chest. Her aunt was breathing. Barely. Her heart beating.
“Help!” she screamed.
They needed 9-1-1.
“I found her! Isadora! Ophelia! Help!”
They needed a phone.
“This is the problem, you stubborn old woman!” Ravinia yelled at her aunt. She glanced over to the old shed that was used as a garage. The Buick was inside, but she knew it would be undrivable in these conditions. She didn’t know how to drive, anyway, and it was all such a clusterfuck.
The door to the lodge flew open. Yellow light spilled out, and Isadora stood in the aperture.
“She’s here!” Ravinia screamed at the top of her lungs. “We need help! Get blankets. Your goddamn cloak. For the love of God, get help!”
Hale was driving ten miles an hour, and the snow just kept building and building on the road. Ten miles an hour. Too damned slow. His forty-minute estimate was for shit. He was already an hour in, and he had a ways to go.
I’m coming, Savannah. His mind raced to images of her in her car, her Ford, laboring alone in the dark . . . in the freezing night. I’m coming.
He was counting the seconds, feeling precious time passing. He stepped on the accelerator, and his rig immediately slid a bit, so he eased off. He would be of no help if he didn’t make it to her side. God. Was it going to take forever?
His thoughts kept touching back on Kristina, too, but as soon as they did, they quickly jumped back to the situation at hand. He needed to get to Savvy. Soon. At least he could help her. There was nothing more he could do for his wife but pray.
Rounding a corner, he nearly ran into the back of a tow truck, which was winching up the rear end of a badly smashed Toyota wagon. Silhouetted in the truck’s headlights, a man was standing in five inches of snow, staring around himself blankly. Blood was dripping from the end of his hand to the frozen ground.
Hale rolled down his window and eased to a stop. “You need help?” he asked, when all he wanted to do was keep going.
“Nah.” The man lifted the arm. “I scraped it, s’all.”
“Looks like more than a scrape.”
“Isaac’ll take me where I need to go,” he answered, nodding toward the tow truck driver. Hale could just make out ISAAC’S TOWING stenciled on the side of the snow-crusted truck. “You’re going the wrong way, man,” the injured man added, pointing with his good arm in the direction Hale was heading. “There’s nothing there for miles but a ton of snow. I’m the last one through.”
“Gotta find somebody.”
“Let the sheriff’s department do it,” he advised, but Hale just sketched a good-bye with his hand. He couldn’t count on the sheriff’s department, because he didn’t have much faith that Savvy’s plight was, despite her connections, next up on the 9-1-1 rotation.
He squinted through the falling snow. If the injured man was the last one through, then his vehicle had crossed all lanes to land in the ditch on the far side of the road.
Clamping down hard on his fears, determined to find her, to help his newborn son, he touched a toe to the accelerator.
Ravinia was over the wall. One moment her gloved hand was scrambling for a handhold; the next she was hauling herself up the last couple of feet and throwing herself to the other side. Normally, this maneuver was a careful climb over the top and a controlled drop to the fir needle carpet outside the walls of Siren Song, but tonight she simply hurled herself into the snow.
