as the van disappeared beneath the water. Soon, I told myself, crayfish would strip the flesh from Missy’s body and silt would cover her bones. The secret would be hidden forever.
Most of the flashlight’s remaining life was used up as I tried to assure myself that, come daylight, no hint of my crime would be revealed. Only a dim glow lit my path away from the steep bank of the swampy river basin. So I walked as quickly and far as I could before the light gave out.
Then I was alone. There was no moon and no stars. And dawn was hours away.
I settled beneath a tree whose trunk was as large as a garden shed, whose height I could only guess at in the darkness. I leaned against the tree, the flashlight clutched in my hand, now useless for light and probably equally useless as protection. Gran had taken Grandfather’s gun with her. When I’d dropped her and Katie at the Cherokee Rose, she said she’d hide it somewhere safe. For a moment, I regretted not having the gun now. But I wasn’t all that sure I’d be able to use it. Not after seeing what its bullets had done to Missy.
The night wrapped around me. Not private or comforting, as I’d always found it before, but crawling with unseen terrors. Exhaustion and fear honed my hearing and dulled my ability to think rationally. Every moment that passed was potentially the moment just before Missy escaped her grave and came after me with mud-caked fingers, her bloody mouth stretched in a silent scream of revenge.
At daybreak, the forest was once again transformed into a safe and familiar place, and Gran could see well enough to drive. I hiked back to the intersection where she had promised to pick me up with Aunt Lucy’s car.
I climbed into the car, settled wearily into the passenger seat, and no doubt looked as exhausted as I felt. But the emotions I saw on my grandmother’s face—emotions that tightened her lips and narrowed her pale blue eyes—had little to do with my disheveled condition. Mostly, I suspected, her expression reflected frustration and anxiety. Her night blindness had forced her to rely on me to hide a murder that, if revealed, would expose the Underground and destroy the secret network that Gran had protected all her life.
But I knew, even then, that the Black Slough would not easily give up its dead.
“Don’t worry,” I said before she could ask. “It’s all taken care of. No one will ever find her. The Underground is safe.”
My eyes opened to the familiar darkness of my bedroom. For a moment, I lay very still, staring at the luminous numbers on my clock. Afraid, but not sure why. The memory of Missy’s murder was so familiar that it no longer produced fear. Only sadness and regret.
Three-twenty in the morning.
For another few heartbeats, I continued to wonder what had awakened me. Then the out-of-place noises registered above the hum of the window air conditioner. The scrunch of tires on the gravel driveway. The sound of an approaching car.
I rolled over, suddenly alert. The view out the bedroom window was of the side yard and woods, so I didn’t bother peering outside. Instead, I slipped my hand beneath the bed, immediately locating the locked box that held my SIG-Sauer P239. As I listened to the engine turn off and a car door slam, I twisted the key that remained in the lock unless I had company in the house and slipped my hand around the security of the compact pistol’s rubber grip.
I listened as Possum briefly woofed a greeting. A moment later, the back door opened, then closed softly. Highball didn’t raise an alert, which meant that either the noise hadn’t roused him from his deep sleep or he, too, recognized my visitor.
“It’s just me,” a familiar male voice said. The announcement was loud enough that, if someone in the house was awake, it would be heard and quiet enough that it was unlikely to awaken a sleeper.
By the time I heard Chad’s footsteps across the kitchen floor, my gun was under lock and key and my heart rate was back to nearly normal. Though I was tempted, I didn’t leave my bed.
The hallway light was switched on and, as Chad walked past my room, his shadow broke up the sliver of illumination that peeked beneath the bedroom door. A moment later, I heard the bathroom door close and the shower running.