“I’ll think about it.”
“Good.”
With a final wave, Coach K hiked her bag over her shoulder and set off for the parking lot. As her car sputtered away, I walked into the stadium, through the dugout, and onto the field. I brushed my sneaker against the plate, clearing it of dirt, then set my feet and swung an imaginary bat through center. The whoosh of air echoed back to me like an empty promise.
I hitched a ride with a local to the old high school, which was on the opposite side of town from the new one. As I climbed out and thanked my driver, he peered through the window at the ballpark’s broken chain link fence and rickety bleachers.
“Be careful, ma’am,” he rumbled, his white mustache twitching. “Looks like a great place to get tetanus.”
“I’ve had my shots.”
As he drove off, I hopped the fence to the old park. The metal railing shook beneath my weight, and when I landed on the other side, my palms were stained with rust. I dusted off the residue, but the red tint remained. I looked around. This was more like it. The old Belle Dame ballpark could hold more memories than spectators in its bleachers. Though the grass was overgrown and the scoreboard had fallen over, this field was home. Or at least it had been.
I walked the bases, pausing a moment longer on first. Crouching low, I placed one foot on the bag and the other in the dirt. The clay inched up the side of my shoe. It was a rusty red color, deeper in hue than the classic orange mixture at the new field. All of my old Belle Dame High School T-shirts sported the evidence of sliding across the dirt during practice. Autumn used to say, “If you ain’t red, you ain’t right.”
I scoured the park from one end to the other. Plenty of things provided evidence of Holly’s practice regimen. A long patch of grass in the outfield had been stamped down during her warm-up jogs. I found a bucket of new softballs tucked under the bench in the deteriorating dugout, waiting to be loaded into the decrepit pitching machine. The machine itself looked like it had seen better days, but when I plugged in the extension cord and flipped the switch, it chugged to life. Holly must have serviced it herself.
It was strange to see tangible proof of Holly’s presence in the world after communicating with her solely through postcards and blurry Skype calls. It made me feel closer and further away from her all at once. Less than a week ago, Holly stood in this very dugout. She ran through this dirt. She jumped this fence. And now she was gone.
This wasn’t how I’d planned to come back to Belle Dame. I wanted to be in a better place, so that when I reunited with Holly, she might resent me less for having left. I wanted to be traveled and wise, to give her worldly advice, to make up for the time lost. I’d put it all off. I thought I’d have more time. I never considered that Holly might not be in Belle Dame by the time I returned to it. A hot tear fell off the end of my nose and splattered in the dirt below. I sniffed and wiped my eyes, startled by the sudden rush of emotion.
“Bridget!”
I whirled on the spot as my heart took off running. It was Holly’s voice, soft and muffled as though she were speaking to me from another room, but with a note of panic and urgency.
“Holly?” I called softly.
The ballpark was silent. The last of the sun’s light faded toward the horizon, and the batting cage cast crisscrossed shadows on the field. If I lingered too long, the darkness would settle like a thick blanket, leaving no light to guide my return to the main stretch in town. My throat constricted as I waited, barely breathing, and stared into the shadows of the dugout.
“Holly,” I said again, my voice wavering. “Can you hear me?”
A sudden head rush washed over me just as it had at The Pit two nights ago. I braced myself against the batting cage, waiting for it to pass. Unfamiliar voices muttered in my head, accompanied once again by the whir of a struggling appliance.
“What the hell?” I gasped, focusing my gaze on a point in the dirt below me in an attempt to straighten out my warring realities.
“Bridget, help!”
“Holly!”
But her voice died out as quickly as it had come, and the confusion in my head dissipated until only the chirrup of crickets and the rush of a breeze through the long grass remained. I pushed myself upright, breathing hard. With the light gone, the old ballpark felt creepy and haunted. I jogged out from underneath the batting cage, across the outfield, and vaulted the fence again. As my feet thumped to the ground on the other side, something nicked the web of skin between my finger and thumb, tearing a jagged gash there.
“Shit.”
Blood welled up along the cut and dripped to the ground. I didn’t have a band-aid handy, and Autumn would kill me if I stained my new clothes, so with a wince, I squeezed the sides of the wound together. One of the links on the fence had broken away from the pattern near the railing, sending a sharp point of metal upward to pierce my skin, but something else drew my eye. I bent closer.
It was a smeared brown droplet of dried blood.
The Pit was busy for a school night. As was tradition, Belle Dame fans gathered there after every big game, win or lose. Football season was the worst, but while the fastpitch fans were tamer, they still turned out in full force. The restaurant bustled with boisterous conversation as the patrons discussed the finer points of the game. In the center of it all, the team had pushed several tables together. Coach K sat at the head, deep in discussion with the player to her right as they drew invisible diagrams of certain plays on the table. When she noticed me, she stood up and waved me toward her. I swiped a few paper napkins from a nearby table, balled them up around my bleeding hand, and headed over.
“Ladies!” Coach K’s voice cut through the noise of the room. At once, the girls gave her their full attention, setting aside condiment bottles and French fries to listen. Coach K coaxed me toward the head of the table. “This is Holly’s sister, Bridget.”
With so many pairs of eyes on me, I gulped. “Hey, everyone.” The team stared blankly back, as if waiting for me to say something else. “Uh, great game. I mean, I know it was a loss, but I can see the potential. It’s been a while—”
“I remember you,” said the girl who had been talking with Coach K. “You used to babysit us when we were kids.”
The thick layer of freckles across her tanned nose jogged my memory. “Oh, yeah. Riley, right? You puked on my shoes once.”
“Only because you let me eat as much cotton candy as I wanted at the county fair,” she replied with a grin. The happy expression faltered quickly. “Holly was the one who held my hair back.”
“Even then, she had more sense than me,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
Riley’s answering smile was half-assed. “Have you heard from her?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
Across the room, I spotted Mackenzie Hart sitting at the bar. It took me a moment to recognize her out of uniform, but even in jeans and a T-shirt, her red hair stood out amongst the other patrons.
“Riley, if you do hear from Holly, will you please let me know?” I asked the teenager.
“Sure thing.”
“Thanks.”
I moved around the team’s table and snaked across the room, trying to avoid the roving servers who balanced trays of chili dogs and hot wings on their shoulders. The barstool next to Mackenzie opened up, and I slid into it before anyone else could claim the spot.
“Oh, hey,” Mackenzie said. She lifted her glass. “Want a beer?”
“No, thanks. I’m already questioning my sanity.”
Mackenzie swiveled on the stool, angling herself toward me, and switched from casual bar patron to concerned deputy. “You wanna explain why?”
“In a second.” I lowered my voice. “Listen, did the cops sweep the old high school’s ball field when they were looking for Holly?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I was just out there,” I told her. “Coach K mentioned that Holly used to practice by herself. Mac, I found dried blood on
the railing.”
Mackenzie glanced down at the bloody napkins clenched in my fist. “Are you sure it wasn’t your own? How’d you manage that anyway?”
“The fence is busted,” I explained. “And yes, I’m sure. It wasn’t mine. It had to have been Holly’s.”
She took a slow sip from her glass before setting it down on the bar top. “I feel obligated to point out that whoever’s blood that is probably did the exact same thing that you did hopping over the fence.”
“Look, I just know—”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go check it out,” Mac cut in. She took in my surprised expression and shrugged. “Cops miss stuff too. It doesn’t hurt to double check. So why are you insane?”
I slumped on the stool, tapping the counter for the bartender’s attention. “I think I will have that beer.”
“And a basket of onion rings,” Mac added. “You look pale.”
As the bartender submitted our order, I adjusted the napkins around the cut on my hand. It had stopped bleeding, but between the rust, dirt, and dried blood, the wound looked pretty worse for wear.
“Have you ever heard things that weren’t there?” I asked Mac.
“What, like voices?”
“Yeah. Voices. Random noises. Whatever.”
“Can’t say that I have.”
I glanced furtively around, but the rest of the customers were too ensconced in their own conversations to pay attention to mine. “Lately, I’ve been getting these head rushes—like when you stand up too quickly—and when I do, I hear things.”
“You hear things.”
“Yeah.”
She studied me for a moment before tipping back the rest of her beer.
“Oh, God,” I said. “You’re not going to have me committed, are you?”
“Depends on where you’re going with this.”
I had to trust someone. Holly had been missing for nearly a week, and I didn’t want to think about what the statistics said about the chances of her returning home. The fact was that no one was doing anything to bring her back, and I couldn’t put in the effort without the information. It was like the moment at the ballfield had flipped the panic switch on in my brain. It made everything real, and for some inexplicable reason, I knew that Holly was in trouble.
“I heard Holly’s voice,” I whispered. Mac leaned in to catch the muted words. “Just now at the ballpark. And other voices that I didn’t recognize. It feels like I’m in two places at once.”
“Auditory hallucinations aren’t all that uncommon,” Mac replied. “A lot of different things could trigger them. Stress, lack of sleep, trauma. All of which I imagine you’ve had a taste of. It doesn’t automatically mean you’re insane.”
The bartender dropped off my beer and the onion rings. Parched, I chugged half the drink in a matter of seconds. Mac pushed the basket of fried onions toward me, but I shook my head. “I can’t eat. Do you know my aunt?”
She had trained in the art of patience. Anyone else would’ve called me out on the strange segue, but she said, “Annette Louis. Current resident of the Belle Dame Assisted Living Facility. What about her?”
“She’s nuts,” I told her. “And I remember how it started. She heard my mother’s voice. My dead mother’s voice. Next thing I know, she was carted off to the hospital and declared mentally unstable. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to lose my mind before I even get to thirty. And the connection? I’m hearing Holly’s voice. Does that mean she’s dead?”
“Hey.” Mac steadied my hand before I could bring the beer up to my lips again. “Holly’s not dead, okay? There’s no evidence of that. These days, the majority of missing children come home alive.”
I maneuvered the drink out from under her grasp, finished it off, and signaled the bartender for another. “Did you get a chance to look at her case?”
“Yeah, I stopped by the station this afternoon,” she said. “Scott’s not stupid though. He knows we’re not just playing cards together.”
“Did he say something?”
“Not really,” she replied, squeezing an onion ring in half to dip it into a ramekin of ketchup. “He just handed me the case information. I think he secretly feels bad that the Millers are keeping you out of this.”
“Well?” I prompted. “What did you find out?”
She dusted off her hands, once more shoving the appetizer toward me. “Stuff you most likely already know. Holly disappeared Thursday evening, estimated time around eight pm. Police found her car the next morning parked on the shoulder of Wildbrook Lane. The doors were locked, and there were no signs of a struggle. They followed a set of footprints westward through the woods, toward town, that looked like they had been made by softball cleats, by they disappeared halfway up. We think Holly probably took off her shoes at that point.”
“Why would she do that?” I asked.
Mac watched but withheld comments as I drained the second beer. “Depends on the situation. If Holly didn’t want to be followed and realized that she was leaving prints, she might’ve taken them off on her own. Alternatively, if someone persuaded her to leave her car, they could’ve forced her to take them off.”
My stomach bucked, but not in response to shotgunning the beer. I didn’t want to think about Holly being forced to do anything. “Westward from Wildbrook Lane. She was heading up toward the neighborhood then. There’s a shortcut through the woods there. I used to walk home that way.”
Mac nodded. “Right. Dogs followed her scent along that path. She crossed the creek, probably thinking she could throw off the trackers, but they picked it up again on the other side.” She fell quiet as the bartender stopped by to ask us if we needed anything. Mac shook her head and waited until she moved on to the next customer. Then she said, “Here’s where it gets weird. Water actually makes it easier to track someone because it traps dead skin cells and deposits them on the ground. From that point, it should’ve been a piece of cake to get to Holly. Instead, the dogs followed the scent all the way to the county line and then promptly lost it.”
A woozy haze washed through me as the alcohol reached my head. I finally reached for the onion rings, wishing I’d eaten them when Mac first offered. Drinking on an empty stomach hadn’t been my best idea. “What do you think happened?”
“I think it was a false trail,” Mac said. “Tracking dogs make mistakes too. They get tired and annoyed with their jobs, just like people. There are ways to pull the wool over their eyes or, you know, their noses.”
“That’s a lot of work to kidnap one all-star high school athlete.” I tipped the ramekin of ketchup on its side to wipe it clean with another onion ring. “Who would go to the trouble?”
“You’re better equipped to answer that question than I am,” she answered. “Most missing children are abducted by a family member. If Holly was taken—”
“We don’t have any family.”
“All I’m saying is—”
Before she could finish, a muscled arm encircled me from behind and squeezed. My entire body tensed. Automatically, I jabbed my elbow straight back, hoping to make contact with someone’s solar plexus. The hit never landed as the owner of the arm stepped aside to avoid it.
Emmett whistled in admiration. “Damn, Bee. What were you going to do, take me out?”
“Stop sneaking up on me.” The demand was less assertive than I’d hoped, watered down by those two beers.
“I didn’t realize a hug was sneaking up on you.” He leaned over the counter and touched the brim of his trucker hat as he flashed Mac his winning smile. “Officer Hart. Nice to see you again.”
She didn’t return the expression, instead swiveling around to face the front of the bar. “Uh-huh. Keep your hands to yourself this time.”
“Yes, ma’am. Bee, what are you drinking?”
“Regret,” I replied.
“Been there. It sucks.” He flagged down the bartender, who deposited two fresh pints in front of us. Emmett slid one toward me. “You
owe me one for blowing me off at the game earlier.”
I reached for the glass. “I don’t owe you anything, but I like free drinks.”
Mac watched as I tipped the beer back. “You sure you want to do that?”
“Officer Hart, I’m not so sure of anything right now.”
Chapter Eleven - Rash Decisions
A few hours later, Emmett had persuaded me to pull my billiards trick on a pair of his friends. We teamed up and played two against two, filling The Pit with raucous laughter and rowdy trash talk. The fastpitch crowd, including Coach K and her team, had left hours ago, allowing the late night customers to devolve into less mannered behavior. Mac stayed at the bar to keep an eye on the goings-on. Someone had spilled a beer down my shirt, and I reeked of ale, but it hadn’t dampened my ability to shoot an excellent pool game. As I lined up my next shot, Emmett pressed against me from behind. I smirked, racking my hips against his, and sank two balls at once.
“Oh, come on!” One of Emmett’s buddies, a short but stocky guy, pouted. “This isn’t fair.”
“Payback’s a bitch, Mike,” Emmett said, holding out his hand. Mike smacked a twenty dollar bill into it, which Emmett tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. He snaked his arms around my waist. “You can pay for the next round.”
The muscles of his chest rippled against my back. I turned around to face him, linking my arms around his neck. My body delivered an instinctive flush of heat in response to the close contact, and my mind was too bogged down by beer to consider the consequences of Emmett’s proximity. I ran my fingers along the swell of his shoulders, savoring the way his calloused hands made their way up the skin of my back. I tugged his head down to reach his lips.
Mike tossed the pool stick onto the table and tapped his friend on the chest. “Damn, he wins the game and gets the girl? Let’s get out of here, man.”
I hardly noticed as they left, too wrapped up with Emmett. He pushed me against the pool table, lifted me up to sit on it, and hitched my knee around his hip.
Little Girl Lost: Book 0 Page 10