And then the wind stopped.
It was a lull, or a change in direction, or something. But the sudden silence was somehow even worse. I stopped moving—it was an animal reaction, instinctive.
Behind me, a twig snapped.
The sound hadn’t been natural. The animal part of my brain knew it immediately. Something—someone—had stepped on a twig, and it had cracked.
“Keme?” I called.
The silence became a whirlpool, and I realized, in an instant, I’d made a terrible mistake.
Footsteps pounded toward me out of the dark, and I turned and plunged into the brush.
I ran blindly and prayed I wouldn’t smack headfirst into a tree. The wind picked up again, howling, and branches creaked loudly enough to drown out my panicked footfalls. My world shrank down to snapshots: ferns appeared out of the darkness, slashing at my arms; old logs seemed to pop up in front of me at the last moment; the ground, covered in its thick pine duff, revealed itself yard by yard.
And then it dropped away completely.
I scrambled into a turn, and Bobby’s sneakers slid across the packed duff, threatening to send me falling. One foot slid outover the drop. I thought I felt the spray thrown up by the waves crashing against the cliff. Lightning flashed, and the world was lit up like a photo negative: the stark white boles of the trees, the black scribble of the edge of the cliff, a blackberry bush that looked like it was hanging in the air, like some vast net waiting to catch me.
The wind dropped again, and another of those strange, momentary lulls descended. Over the crash of the waves below me, I could make out clearly the sound of someone struggling through the brush.
I made the decision in an instant: I sprinted toward the blackberry bush. When I reached it, I dropped onto my belly and slid under the canes. Thorns scratched my ear, the back of my neck, my arms, my hands. But I barely felt them—they were more like little, stinging tugs of resistance than anything else. I got as deep as I could, drew my legs in against my body, and tried to take slow, quiet breaths. Stars flashed in front of my eyes, and I shook as I lay there. The musty smell of dead leaves suffocated me.
Once again, the wind began to scream, and it devoured every other noise. So, I had no warning when a shape burst out of the tree line. I tried to get a sense of it—male, female, young, old—but the darkness was too deep. Maybe if they had moved against the horizon, where I could have picked out their silhouette. But my pursuer stayed close to the trees, and I got only impressions of movement.
Movement, I realized, that was coming toward my hiding place.
I tensed. My body’s automatic reaction was to draw even tighter in on itself, to make myself as small as possible. I realized too late the stupidity of my plan: I had trapped myself. I couldn’t get myself free of the blackberry bush in any reasonableamount of time. If this person, whoever they were, spotted me, I wouldn’t be able to get away.
As my pursuer moved closer, the sounds of their passage finally became loud enough for me to hear over the ambient noise: ferns whispering as they dragged on clothing; the scuff of needles underfoot. I wanted to close my eyes, like this was one of those movies Keme sometimes made me watch even though he knew they’d give me nightmares. (LikeAnnabelle: Creation—I didn’t sleep for a week.) But I forced myself to watch.
When they drew even with the blackberry bush, the figure stopped. They were nothing but a deeper darkness against the night. And then they turned, and something glowed in the darkness. If this person hadn’t been standing almost on top of me, I never would have seen it—it was designed not to be seen. But I recognized it, and because my dad was who he was, I knew what those tiny pinpricks of green meant.
They were tritium night sights.
And they meant this person had a gun.
A small eternity passed before my pursuer moved off again. Brush rustled. Ferns hissed. And then the sound of their movement dissolved into the roar of the wind and the waves, and I was alone.
Chapter 12
It was a long, cold, miserable night. Not least because the storm broke as I was still wriggling out from underneath the blackberry bush.
By the time I got home, I was soaking wet, scratched to, um, heck, and shivering uncontrollably.
To say Bobby was unhappy when I woke him up would have been to put it mildly. He locked me in the bathroom, and then—with nothing but a pair of sleep shorts and his gun—he secured the house. He called the sheriff’s station. And then he came back and did one of the things he does better than anyone else in the entire world: he took care of me.
He got me in a hot bath. And once my core temperature was above freezing again, he cleaned up my scratches as best he could. He bundled me into fleece pajamas and put me in bed with a mug of instant hot chocolate.
And then the inquisition began.
I told him all of it, starting with when I heard Keme sneak out of the house, and I’d barely finished by the time his phone buzzed. Bobby went downstairs, with firm orders for me not to get out of bed.
I didn’t. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. I was exhausted, and in spite of the bath, I was still shivering. Some of that, a part of me acknowledged, was doubtless the adrenaline finally working its way out of my system. And part of it was the lingering fear. I felt strangely lucid, and it felt like I was seeing everything that had happened earlier that evening through the wrong end of a telescope. There’s nothing like being chasedthrough a darkened forest by a maniac with a gun to put things in perspective.
Eventually, a cruiser arrived—and because it was just my luck, Tripple was driving it.
Bobby stayed with me while Tripple searched the grounds. And even though Bobby went downstairs to talk to Tripple after he finished, I heard enough to know that Tripple hadn’t found anything and that he thought this was another cry for attention. You’d think, after solving how many murders, I’d get a little credit, but apparently for Deputy Tripple, I was such a glutton for the spotlight that there were no depths to which I wouldn’t sink.
