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Lenna crunches through the dirt until she reaches the same big Suburban that Rhiannon had driven to retrieve her. Rhiannon isn’t there yet. She checks her watch. The minute hand edges up on eleven thirty. She pictures the cab at the turnoff point. How long will it wait?
She dials Rhiannon’s number and lets it ring once, then hangs up because the ring seems soloud.She watches for a light to snap on, but nothing happens.
Come on, Rhiannon. Let’s get this over with.
Another minute passes. Something shuffles in the distance, and Lenna swings around again. It’s foolish being out here alone.
She looks at her phone again. Dials the same number. This time, she lets it ring. She doesn’t hear it ringing inside the house.It rings so many times that it eventually goes to voice mail. It isn’t Rhiannon’s voice on the automated message but a computerized woman, rattling off the digits.
“Whereareyou?” Lenna whispers into the phone after the beep. She can’t control the blame in her voice. And then something hits her. Everything Lenna told her friend might have stewed in Rhiannon’s mind all day, crystallizing into a grudge. She’d confessed to wrecking Rhiannon’s life. She’d accused Rhiannon of being a terrible friend. The guile of Lenna, Rhiannon might be thinking, to surmise that Rhiannon had brought her to this sacred space, this hallowed community, for any motive other than love.
Maybe Lenna should have held her tongue.
She holds the phone between her palms, feeling her pulse in her fingertips. The fence surrounding the property gleams under moonlight. Lenna walks toward it and looks at the security panel at the gate. Just waving her fingers over it makes the keypad glow. Did Rhiannon punch in four numbers, or six? She hesitates before guessing something, worried that if she gets it wrong—which she surely will—an alarm will sound.
She walks to the gate itself. Pulls at the latch. It doesn’t give. She loops her hand through the wire and tugs. The metal clangs noisily. She steps back, her heart pounding. There has to be another way out.
There’s asnapbehind her, and she freezes. The wind shifts. The moon has gone behind a cloud, and the sky is so much darker. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a flicker of something. Someone.
“Hello?” she cries, whipping around. “Rhiannon?”
Footsteps crunch. Someone walks toward her, but it’s too dark to see who it is.
“Hello?” Lenna calls again. “Rhiannon?”
“Nope,” says a voice.
A shadow appears on the other side of the picnic table as though by magic. She’s tall and slight, and her eyes gleam in the darkness. As she steps into the light, a chill zooms through Lenna’s veins.
“So itisyou,” she says.
“Oh,” Lenna whispers, backing up.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” Sadie—Sarah—says. And then she walks straight up to Lenna and the baby, her face twisted with fury, her fingers wrapped around something silver and sharp.
A knife.
PART
TWO
16
Sarah
July
Two years before
The first time Dr. Sarah “Sadie” Wasserman heard that Gillian had made a new friend, she was crouched on the rug in Mrs. Rosen’s living room. Mrs. Rosen was her patient. She had a stethoscope pressed to the old woman’s chest.
“Breathe in,” Sadie instructed. “Now out. Good.”
The woman smelled like baby powder. Two Limoges teacups sat on a heavy wooden side table. A matching teapot was next to them. Mrs. Rosen always insisted on using the good tea set, and she always insisted on pouring, no matter how badly her hands shook.
“What do you hear?” Mrs. Rosen asked. “Is it okay?”
“Nottoobad.”
