AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hope pulled away. Stared at something just past the chief’s shoulder. Plaques on the wall.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. Flipped through images. “Heather. Heather, look.”
The digital rendering of the man who had killed Joy’s husband was displayed on the screen. Hope held it up to a framed headshot, hung on display on the cafeteria’s wall by the doors so proudly.
Dr. Gregory D. Eastmanwas engraved on the tag beneath. Heather’s spine chilled.
“What is that?” the chief asked.
Heather looked across the cafeteria. To where her twin was holding Nalla and rocking quietly, talking to Norm and the older children. Heather looked back at the chief. “That’s the man who killed my sister Joy’s husband and tried to takeherthree years ago.”
“What in the hell is going on here?”
“That’s a question I won’t stop until I answer.” Heather looked at her family again. No. They had waited long enough. She was never going to just let thisgo.
127
Maybe running backinto a burning building hadn’t been her smartest move. Sydney didn’t stop to think or reconsider. Pen was inside. Zoey was inside.
That meant Sydney was getting back inside.
But she was going to use her head. Just like Melody would do. Or Zoey. She would think.
If she was a bad guy, and was burning her evil lair down behind her, the first thing she would do would be to get to a car and get away—before the police came.
Sydney’s smartwatch had been taken. That was a smart move by those buttheads. She estimated it was probably about seven now. Ninety minutes to two hours or so after she had been brought here to begin with. Nothing more than that.
Everything was happening fast.
Melody had said stuff happened like that. Gerard, too. Said that sometimes things happened too fast for you to have time to think.
You just had to act.
Cars. Escape.
If she was trying to escape, she’d head toward the garage.
Well, that was where she’d just get her ass.
And find whoever she found along the way.
For all she knew, Zoey—super-achiever that she was—had already found her baby sister and they were getting out now.
Sydney was going to meet them at the door.
She turned.
Toward the end of the house where she thought the garage was.
Just as a side door she would have missed if it hadn’t moved, it blended into the 1980s wood paneling right there, slid open.
She went down into a crouch.
Just as someone screamed.
128
Crispin Maria had runfrom him. Vaughn tried not to grieve. He understood. She had been so afraid. How could she not be? There was a fire, and she had been trapped.
