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Louis ran back to Rachel, put the phone on speaker as he laid it aside, and began gently wiping her face. He could hear the 911 operator dispatching services, but Rachel was his total focus.
“Rachel, baby…wake up! It’s me, Louis. Can you hear me? Wake up, love. I can’t do this world without you.”
He was still wiping the cold cloth on her face and neck when he heard her groan, and then her eyelids fluttered and she opened her eyes.
There was a moment of confusion when Rachel saw Louis’s face above her, and then his frantic expression registered along with the pain in her head, and she remembered. “Louis! He broke into the house!”
Louis groaned. “Don’t move, sweetheart. You’re hurt.”
Rachel started sobbing. “He said I had something he wanted.” And then it hit her. “Is Lili okay?”
“She’s gone, Rachel. Who took her? Who broke in?”
Rachel was sobbing. “Danny Biggers. It was Danny. I fought him, but then he hit me.”
The shock of hearing that name again—after all this time.
“I thought he was still in prison,” Louis muttered, and then he began hearing sirens.
Sound carried in the mountains. It would be a bit before they got here, but at least he could hear them now. He picked up the phone. The dispatcher was still talking when he disconnected the line to 911 and called his father.
***
Marcus Glass was a big man. A strong, youthful-looking man in his midfifties. He’d been a widower going on three years now and still hadn’t gotten used to sleeping alone, which was why he was dawdling about the house and folding laundry to keep from having to go to bed.
He frowned when his cell phone began to ring. A call at this time of night was never good news, and then he noticed it was his son, Louis.
“Hello, Son. You’re up late,” Marcus said.
“Dad! Rachel was attacked and Lili is missing. She said it was Danny Biggers. I don’t know which way he went when he left with her, but we need help. The police and ambulance are on the way, but they’re not going to start searching until they’ve talked to us. Call our people. Tell everyone on the mountain to be on the lookout. I don’t know how long he’s been gone, but not long because the front door was open but the house isn’t cold inside. Rachel’s head is bleeding and there’s a big bruise on her jaw.”
Marcus was in shock. “Lili’s gone? He hurt Rachel? What the hell? I thought he was in prison!”
“So did we. Whatever Biggers’s plans are, he’ll be up to no good. And if he’s on the run, he won’t go back through Jubilee. He’ll disappear in the mountains.”
Marcus heard the panic in his son’s voice. “Hold the faith, Son. I’m calling people now. If there’s a strange car on the mountain this time of night, we’ll find it.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Louis said.
The line went dead.
***
The law came up Louis and Rachel’s driveway with sirens screaming and lights flashing and an ambulance right behind it. Officers and EMTs spilled out into their yard and came swarming into the house.
While the EMTs were treating Rachel, Rance Woodley, the county sheriff, did exactly what Louis feared he would do and wasted precious time grilling both parents, even as they kept telling himthey knew who took Lili, demanded to know why they hadn’t been notified Biggers was one of the escapees from the prison riot earlier in the day, and begged the police to go after him.
It was a nightmare of confusion, and then they caught a break.
***
John Cauley, Rachel’s uncle, lived near the peak of the mountain, and when he got the call from Marcus about what had happened, he flew out of bed, dressing in haste as his wife, Annie, scrambled to get his rifle and ammunition, handing it off to him on the way out the door.
He took off in his old Land Rover and headed for the main road. As soon as he reached the blacktop, he started down the mountain, thinking Biggers would not have had time to get up this far this fast and hoping maybe he’d meet up with him on the way. But he saw nothing, and his worry grew.
And then a few miles down he drove up on an abandoned car with two doors standing open.
John grabbed a flashlight as he got out and then looked inside the car. The first thing he saw was a Styrofoam cup with droplets of milk still in the bottom. Then a baby bottle half-full of milk on the floorboard and a pile of uneaten cookies in the passenger seat. After a quick search around the car, he saw tracks in the ditch leading into the woods and followed them, then found a scrap of blanket caught on brush and more tracks in the forest leading up the mountain. It had to be Biggers!
