the man with the dog at the rest area, and she hadn’t been afraid because he’d been wearing his khaki uniform. He’d looked official and respectable and worked for the city of Amber Lake. Why would she have any reason at all to fear him?
She’d made it so incredibly easy for him, bending over to pet the cute little terrier she now remembered seeing in the animal pound. She also realized that when she’d been in the pound and had needed to get out, had felt as if she was suffocating, it had been because on some deep level she’d recognized the scent that had clung to Steven...a scent of dog and heat and feces.
When she’d gone with Seth, Linda and Samantha to the animal pound to pick out Scooter, it hadn’t been her first visit. She’d spent a night and half a day locked in a cage in a back room next to a caged German Shepherd that looked like he’d like nothing better than to tear out her throat.
Each time she’d started to come around, to get the feeling back in her body, Steven would appear to give her another shot, rendering her helpless all over again.
The next afternoon when he’d taken her out of the cage and moved her to the trunk of his car, he’d muttered to her as if she were somebody else...as if she were his mother.
“Just like an ostrich,” he’d said. “Bury your head in the sand, that’s all that you did when he beat me to within an inch of my life. Mothers are supposed to protect their kids, but you just hid your head in the sand and now I’m going to hide your head for you.”
She’d wanted to scream at him, to tell him that she wasn’t his mother, that she’d never done anything to harm him, but she couldn’t speak. Her lips wouldn’t move, her mouth refused to form a single word. She was trapped in her own body with only her brain working overtime.
Along with the memories of what had happened to her immediately following Steven grabbing her came others, as well. Her unhappy marriage to Jason, the final straw that had broken their marriage and finally the reason she’d dreaded going home, the reason for the core of grief inside her.
The casket had been white and barely bigger than a shoebox. The baby had been a little girl, born too early and never having drawn a breath of life.
Grief tore through her and it was impossible to blink away the tears that filled her eyes. It had been that sorrow, along with an abiding loneliness that had filled her apartment in Amarillo, which had made her reluctant to go home.
It had been Seth who had filled up that loneliness, eased any pain that might have been left behind and made her want a future with him, a future filled with all the things that had been absent in her life.
And now it was too late. It was all too late.
The Sandman was going to put her to sleep forever. Her heart beat a slow rhythm despite the fear that filled her as she thought of the scrape of a shovel against the sand, as she thought of the weight of that sand falling first on her feet and legs, then on her midsection and finally covering her face, smothering her to death.
She wished she’d told Seth she loved him. She wished she’d said the actual words to him. Even if he didn’t love her back, she wished she had given him the gift of knowing that he was deeply loved.
Too late. Now it was all too late. She hoped it wouldn’t be him who found her. She hoped he wouldn’t frantically dig in the sand to find her, to try to save her when it was evident she was gone. She didn’t want his last image of her to be her dead body.
She forced her thoughts away from Seth and to her current situation. Steven was driving relatively slow, an occasional bump shifting her body. The last bump had shifted her into a position where something sharp poked her in the back, but there was no way for her to move into a more comfortable position.
Was this what it had been like for Rebecca Cook and Vicki Smith? What had been their final thoughts as they’d been driven to their deaths? Had they entertained regrets? Clung to happy memories? Or simply wished for another bump to allow