She put the pack down, turned back the way she came. Whatever Hank was doing out in the woods, he was on his own.
That’s when she heard voices. She kept walking, back toward the car. It was the other sound that stopped her cold. The sound of metal on flesh, a cry of pain, the hard slamming of doors. Then arguing.
But she wasn’t just a mother, and a wife. She was a journalist, a writer, a person with more questions than answers, with a complicated past. Maybe even with the latent desire to self-destruct, to race toward danger. She paused, listening.
Footsteps coming her way, urgent, swift.
She slipped off the path and into the trees, crouched down. More arguing voices—heated, the tingle of panic. A man and a woman, voices swelling and deflating as they approached, then passed her.
“There’s someone else out here.”
“There’s no one else.”
“I saw someone.”
They walked right past the pack, which was just another shadow in a field of shadows. She waited, trying to control her breath, her shoulders hiked with tension, the night closing in around her.
And when they were gone, she grabbed the pack and ran back in the direction from which they’d come, away from Greg and Lily, toward—she had no idea what.
FORTY-ONE
How long did she jog along that path? Finally, she came to a clearing, the moon casting the open area in silver, an icy sheen clinging to the grass. Her breath came in clouds as she stood listening. Nothing. Silence.
Then.
An odd, arrhythmic thumping drew Rain’s attention toward the edge of the clearing, the pack heavy on her back. Then it was quiet again, except for the sad calling of an owl. Who looks for you? Who looks for you? Rain kept looking back, around her. The trees seemed to have eyes; she felt watched, afraid.
The sound again, another hard thump. He was out here; she could feel him. Hank.
What binds you two together? Greg wanted to know. Why can’t you give him up?
Of course, he knew the answer. They both did.
There was a final thump, resonant and loud, echoing off the trees—and then nothing. She kept moving, searching for the origin of the sound. She nearly tripped over the doors in the earth, some kind of cellar. Oh, god. Her heart lurched; there were voices within. Doors locked with a thick, heavy padlock. What good could come of a locked cellar in the middle of nowhere?
She dug through the bag and found a large hammer, a small sledge actually, heavy and hard. Using all her strength and both hands, she brought it down over and over again on the lock. The lock itself never broke, but the latch holding the doors together fell apart with her last blow, wood splintering. She sat, breathless a moment, then swung the doors open. She was nearly knocked over with the stench, swallowing back a roil of nausea.
Oh, god. What was down here?
She took out the flashlight and shone it down into the dark hole.
What she saw—it revealed itself in flashes. Three children, thin and filthy, two curled and cowering in the corners of makeshift cells. One looking up into the light, his face white, cheekbones pushing against flesh, bony shoulders.
And Hank.
It took her back to the woods with Tess, to the hollow of that tree, where she sat frozen inside. Though it was the dead of summer, she’d turned to ice. She wanted to go back there, to that empty place where the world just stopped and turned to frost.
The Winter girl safely encased in ice, a princess under glass like Kreskey’s Snow White.
But no. She wasn’t that girl anymore. She needed to help her friend and the other children down there. For Tess, for the kids that she and Hank were once, for the daughter she had waiting for her at home.
“Lara.” Hank’s voice was soft with surprise. “It’s you.”
There was a moment when she remembered everything about who he was—how he giggled like a girl, picked the pepperoni off his pizza—even though he insisted they order it on. How Batman was his favorite superhero, because he was a real, flawed man who built himself into something better. How he tried to kiss her when they were ten and she laughed at him, and he laughed, too. How he gave her a red crystal heart for her birthday, but that she’d lost it. Or thought she had. How she always believed that he and Tess would wind up together.