I creep across the floor to retrieve Hazel’s recorder from the counter. Then I walk back out of the bunker, leaving the door open a hair. I climb up the ladder just high enough to peer aboveground and make sure no one has ventured this way. I am still alone, cloaked in fog and night. I rewind Hazel’s tape to the very beginning, then move my thumb over the play button. This is a risk, but it is one I need to take. If I play this and Hazel—the real Hazel underground, chained to my wall—makes a sound, we will have to leave here, and I will have to trust that Ama will come back to me another way, another time. But if I play this and Hazel remains silent, then we are meant to stay, and Lady Fate will take care of the rest.
I draw a breath, hold it, and press play.
“Hazel!” Eddie’s recorded voice sails across the field, spills down the tunnel, slides through the crack I left in the door. I notch the volume louder. “Hazel! Ha-zy?”
Eddie’s voice pleads with her absence. I remember the day I recorded it, as we searched the same area where he’d caught Ama and I just now, how I hoped he wouldn’t realize I wasn’t calling out for Hazel, too.
From inside the bunker, I hear the chain knock against the metal pipe frame of the shelving unit, the scuffle of Hazel’s feet drawing under her.
“Hazel! Can you hear me? Hazel!”
I lean into the hole, ear turned and straining to detect the smallest whisper, but Hazel remains true to her vow of silence. If Eddie really was up here, treading across this field, crying out for his daughter, she wouldn’t answer.
All things for a reason.
Lady Fate was right to condition Hazel to silence. When will I stop second-guessing the process just because it isn’t happening on my schedule?
We can stay, and Ama’s time is now. All I have to do is wait for Fate to shine her light. I shake my head at myself, relief spreading through me cool and tingling, and lower myself back into the earth.
EDDIE Chapter 63 | 9:00 AM, December 6, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
EDDIE WAS NEARLY ASLEEP ON the couch when Martin swung open his door. Since they’d begun investigating the case, Eddie had taken to sleeping during the morning. He’d worked nights before and was well practiced at snatching sleep when he could, but between the sleeping arrangements and Hazel’s case on the forefront of his mind of every waking minute, sleep seemed as evasive as the criminal they were hunting. He couldn’t turn it off, and even if he tried, he’d be so overridden with guilt that he’d never be able to get comfortable enough to doze off.
After he’d gone the first two days there without a wink of sleep, he’d finally found a way to make his mind hold Hazel close and let go of consciousness at the same time. He would close his eyes and conjure the trail along Cold River in his mind. He imagined her walking behind him, where he could hear but not see her, and he counted her footsteps, one-two, one-two. At last, the office fell away and he walked through dreams with his daughter.
If only he could see her. But even in his dreams, he couldn’t turn around, couldn’t find her face or feel her breath, and when he woke, he would realize it was his own heartbeat he had been listening to. Waking up began to feel like dying anew.
Eddie sat up, alarm coursing through him. “What happened?” he asked, and in the split second it took Martin to answer, Eddie’s mind filled with the two worst possibilities: they’d found Hazel’s body, or they’d found proof that whoever had her had left Tarson.
“Absolutely nothing,” Martin said, and his face sagged. Eddie noticed how tired he looked, how gray, and he wondered if that was Martin’s worst possibility: that nothing would ever be found. “But I want to go look for something in Tarson Woods, and I’ll need your help to find it.”
Eddie practically leaped from his seat on the couch. He hadn’t been out of the station since he’d been processed, hadn’t seen the sun or breathed fresh air. He wondered if it would feel different outside the same way the confirmed possibility of Hazel still being alive changed everything inside, and he realized he felt alive again, too.
“Put this on,” Martin said, and tossed Eddie a navy blue hoodie with an emblem from the Savannah Police Department. “It’ll be too small, but this way you aren’t walking around the woods in prison scrubs. Plus it frosted overnight. You’re going to want an extra layer.”
Eddie’s heart sank, his elation with it. Hazel would be out in this cold somewhere. He doubted she was being held somewhere soft and warm. Someone who would abduct and keep another person probably wasn’t too concerned with their comfort, especially if Martin’s contact out of Savannah had ended up in the same hands as whoever had Hazel. He flinched at the thought, closed his eyes against the pictures resurfacing in his mind of Toni Hargrove’s crime scene.
“You okay? We don’t have to go anywhere,” Martin said.
“No, it’s not that. This… this whole thing gets harder, the closer it feels. Even though you think she could still be alive after a year, every minute that passes I feel like I’m running out of time,” Eddie admitted.
“I think that’s true for every case, every time. The closer I feel, the closer an inevitable collapse feels.”
“Do they usually collapse?”
Martin studied Eddie for ten seconds before answering. “There’s nothing usual about this case,” he finally said. Then he quickly turned away, leaving Eddie to wonder if there was something in his expression Martin didn’t want Eddie to see.
Eddie followed Martin through the precinct to the parking lot. He wasn’t in handcuffs, but he was still wearing his jailhouse grays under Martin’s sweatshirt. He felt freer than he had in a year, but he still didn’t feel comfortable deviating left or right without asking. When they reached Martin’s car, he waited by the back door, unsure whether he could touch it.
“What are you doing?” Martin asked, then recognition washed over his face. “Hop in the front.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Eddie looked around the empty parking lot, feeling exposed, vulnerable. What if they got separated and Eddie was found in the woods by someone who didn’t believe him?
“I need you to tell me the best way to get to that stone hutch where you found Hazel’s ring. I don’t know how to get there, and I don’t want a bunch of uniformed cops crawling all over the woods for various reasons.”
“What are you looking for?” Eddie asked.
“Toni’s ring. But that stays between you and me,” he said, and disappeared inside the car and started the engine. Eddie hesitated, mind reeling, pulse soaring, and then he slipped into the passenger seat and locked the door behind him.
They drove in silence, Eddie pointing whenever Martin needed to make a turn. They pulled off the paved road onto a gravel road, brush overgrowing the edges. Martin glanced over at him, his face a question mark.
“This goes to the old factory. The little hutch is still about a mile in, and we’re going to have to cross Cold River, but there’s a big tree that fell across in one spot, or we can just walk across where it’s about hip-deep, if you don’t mind getting wet,” Eddie explained.
“And this is the best way?” Martin raised a brow.