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“Lenna? What the…” Rhiannon’s words are garbled and slurred. “Y-you can’t be here. Where’s Teddy?”
Teddy.“He’s back at the house. Safe. I think. Ihope.” Guiltslams into her. Not only has she lost her child, but she’s put Rhiannon’s in danger, potentially.
“We were looking for you,” she goes on.
“Bothof you?” Rhiannon sounds heartbroken. “No.No.Why?”
“Because…” Lenna’s voice breaks. She’s surprised Rhiannon doesn’t sound pleased. “How did this happen? How did she find you? She has Jacob, Rhiannon. She’s going to hurt him. We have to get to him!”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Rhiannon moans. “You were supposed to get help.”
“I didn’t understand. How did she find you?”
“You need to leave. This isn’t safe.”
“Too late forthat,” Sarah says, deadpan.
“Do you know where we are?” Lenna asks Rhiannon.
“No clue. I tried to call, but she took my phone.”
“After you sent that audio file?” Lenna asks. “You were calling for help?”
There’s a pause. “I only had service for a second. It was before she came back. It was my one shot.”
Lenna shuts her eyes.
“It’s why we were looking for you. Only…” Lenna takes a breath. “We didn’t know who to trust. And we couldn’t call 911, and we were looking for higher ground…”
“…but then she drugged us,” Sarah adds. “How did she get on the property, anyway?”
Rhiannon pauses. “What do you mean?”
“Does Marjorie know her?” Lenna whispers. “Did she let her in? How else would she know the gate code? But why haven’t we seen her before now?”
Rhiannon shifts her weight, swallows. “I don’t know what you mean. Of course we’ve seen her.”
Lenna stares into the darkness. “What are you…?” Rhiannonmust be delirious. Gillian isn’t a member of the community. That, Lenna knows for sure.
A tiny, electronicpingsounds from outside the cave. Lenna stiffens.She’s there.And Gillian has cell phone service—how?
“It’sGillian,” Lenna whispers. “Sarah and I both know her. I can explain later, but she’shere.”
Rhiannon makes a small, strange noise at the back of her throat. “Lenna.No.The person…she…it’s not Gillian.”
“Of course it is,” Lenna insists. “It has to be.”
The cell phone bleeps again. The ringtone is a curious choice, a melancholy but familiar birdcall. It takes Lenna a moment to remember what sort of bird it is. A mourning dove. That sweet, sad coo. But the tone sticks out. She heard that ringtone recently—considered using it as her own ringer, actually. She thinks of a phone ringing inside a young woman’s sweater pocket.
But…no.It must be just a coincidence.
A footstep sounds. Lenna clamps her lips shut. She glances down at her phone. It, too, suddenly has a bar of Wi-Fi. There’s one way to prove her theory. She has all of the women’s phone numbers, and they all have hers.
She pulls up the number she’d tried earlier, when she and Sarah were still on the mountain. They’d called everyone in the house, after all. No one had answered.
The call goes through. On Lenna’s end, she hears it ring once, twice. And then, from outside the cave, comes that same curious little tweeting ringtone. Lenna’s heart does a somersault. And then, at the mouth of the cave, Lenna notices a shadow of a woman in profile: a short, thin silhouette, turning toward the mouth of the cave, one hand on her hip. Weakly, Cosmo starts to whimper.
“Lenna,” Coral says as she puts the phone to her ear. Her voice is calm, easy—and Lenna hears it in two places: through the receiver, and through rock, mere feet away. “Nice to hear from you.”
