Now that Lucy had found the potential meeting site, she could see the obvious path back to the house.
This time when Lucy walked, she cleared each quadrant before moving forward. She kept the line controlled, no more than an arm span and a half, and treated it like a real search.
As she neared the house, she came upon a dried-up creek. She’d crossed it without much thought on the way out to the fence, but just as she went to jump the small distance, something shimmered.
Sun on metal.
She stopped, her thighs still bunched, the energy from the aborted leap twisting deep in her muscles, then releasing all at once. Kneeling down, Lucy brushed aside the grass, the dirt.
There, mostly out of sight, was a phone, its screen cracked in a thin, vicious spiderweb of lines.
It could belong to someone other than Molly. The phone was dead, so it offered no hint as to who its owner was.
But something told Lucy that their runaway had just become a missing girl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MOLLY THOMAS
Two weeks earlier
The box hadn’t been a coffin.
Molly only truly convinced herself of that once she was taken out of it.
She didn’t remember when that had happened. One moment her hands had been bound behind her back, the wood tight against her sides, her breathing shallow. The next she’d found herself on the floor.
The darkness was the same. Deep. Overwhelming.
But she was sitting up now, her hands tied in front of her. There was room to move.
A basement. Not the normal kind. There were no windows. But she was underground. She could feel it in the pressure of the air. So maybe a bunker? Like the ones built by that old Armageddon prepper Crazy Gus. The ones she and Eliza had explored in the woods near the cemetery.
Those had been stocked full of tin cans and ammo, though. Those were big enough for a person to live, had spared a thought toward comfort.
This one was a slightly bigger coffin.
This one hadn’t been built for survival. This one had been built for death.
Molly’s breathing stuttered, her blood rushing past her eardrums.
No. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
It’s not a coffin. It’s not a coffin.
She scrambled back until her spine touched the cool cement wall.
Blink. Open, closed.
Molly breathed in. The air smelled of her. Her fear, her body, her urine. Nothing else.
With awkward hands, she felt on the floor beside her hip. The ground was smooth, just like the wall. Bunker. She was almost certain now. Tears threatened to spill over then, any hope of being found stamped out with ruthless precision.
Her nearly numb fingers knocked into something, and she skittered away from it, a wild animal braced for a snakebite.
When no fangs sank into vulnerable flesh, Molly inched forward again. The space wasn’t big enough for her to have gone very far in her panic. Slowly, so slowly, she crawled with her fingers over the floor once more until they bumped into . . . plastic.
A water bottle. A plastic water bottle.
Something like a laugh or a sob or a mix of both ruptured the unnatural quiet, and it was quickly absorbed by the hungry cement walls.
Water.
Why would they give her water?
Drugged. Maybe.
At this point she didn’t care. There were three bottles, tipped over on the floor, their labels peeled off, so she could feel the grooves and divots.
She opened one, drank half of it down before she realized her mistake. Her stomach heaved, startled after having been deprived for so long.
The water came back up, along with bile that burned behind it.
Now her coffin smelled of her vomit.
The next attempt was slower, more careful. Rationing out the only thing that seemed to hint at the possibility of survival.
She cried as she put the lid back on with three-fourths of the bottle gone. The tears and snot dripped off her face, crawled along her neck, pooled against the collar of her shirt. She cried until her throat hurt and her muscles ached and her eyes had become sandpaper and there was nothing, nothing, nothing left. No fear. No pain. Not even exhaustion. Nothing.
Only then did Molly let her head fall back until it rested against the wall. Only then did she wonder if this was where Alessandra had been kept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
LUCY THORNE
Saturday, 1:00 p.m.
Hicks was waiting for Lucy, hands on his hips, gaze on the mountains in the distance.
Cowboy hat, cowboy stance, Lucy thought again. Her first impression of him. The ghost of Zoey Grant’s unspoken accusations whispered along oversensitized nerve endings rubbed tender from too many unanswered questions, and Lucy shook it off.
This wasn’t the right time for that speculation.
“You found something,” Hicks said. It wasn’t a question.
“Phone.” Lucy held it up. Hicks’s neutral expression didn’t so much as quiver. His eyes just lingered on the phone while he reached into his pocket to pull out an evidence bag.
Lucy dropped it in and then shoved the latex glove she’d been using to carry it back in her jacket. “Wonder if the DA will think you’re so crazy now.”
“Might be nothing,” Hicks said, sealing off the plastic.
“Might be Molly’s,” Lucy countered. “Let’s show it to Frank.” She shouldn’t be watching Hicks so closely. But the doubts had snuck in right behind the memory of Zoey’s wide eyes.
When Frank Thomas saw the phone, he fell to the floor, his knees striking the boards without mercy, the crack of bone against wood loud in the quiet living room. Zoey Grant looked on from the sofa behind him.
“What does this mean? What does this mean?” Frank’s hands came up to his ears, as if he didn’t want to hear the answer to the question he’d just asked, as if he already knew what it meant. His body curled in on itself, rocking gently in time with his breathing, which was tipping precariously close to shallow. If this was an act, it was an elaborate one.
His eyes flew to hers, the whites of them lined with red, his lashes damp. Desperation flooded the space between them. “What does this mean?”
Lucy debated with herself before dropping into a crouch. “Mr. Thomas, I take it you can confirm that’s Molly’s phone.”
“Yes.” His attention was locked on her face like she was salvation. He must not realize yet that she had nothing to give him, no hope to throw out that wasn’t vague equivocations.
“She may have left it behind, Mr. Thomas.” Only when she said his name again, slow and deliberate, did she hear Eliza’s voice. You keep saying my name like that, you know. “She might have thought it could be tracked. We don’t know what it means yet.” She paused. “Mr. Thomas. Frank.”
Everyone needed a reminder that they were human.
Frank nodded, an almost mindless agreement, latching on to the idea, his cupped hands coming to rest above his heart as if holding the suggestion there, the weak hope, cradling it close to keep it safe. “She might have left it here.”
Lucy glanced up to find Zoey watching Hicks instead of her and Frank.
“Mr. Thomas, is there someone we can call to come stay with you?” Lucy asked, shifting her attention back to the broken man on the floor.
“My wife, she was . . . She’s coming home,” Frank muttered, now not looking at any of them, still rocking, his arms folded up against his chest. “She’ll be here. She’s coming home.”