“There. I think I see it.”
I squinted. Off in the distance, part of the world was a darker gray than the rest of it. It could’ve been a house or a mirage, but I would’ve settled for a figment of my imagination as long as it meant we were one step closer to Holly. Carefully, I steered the cruiser through an opening in a long, low wooden fence, gunned the engine to free the tires from a patch of mud, and rolled up to the shadowy structure. It was an old farm house, gray like the clouds and the rain around it. I parked as close to the front porch as possible and unbuckled my seatbelt. Taylor stayed put.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked her.
She shook the sides of her jacket to show off the rugged shirt beneath. “I’m undercover, remember? I still have a job to do here. If you mess this up, I’m going to be in deep shit.”
“Thanks for the pep talk.”
“Sure thing.”
I made a run for the front door, slipping on the mold that coated the porch steps, and pounded out a knock. After a few minutes of silence, I knocked again.
“Mr. Roque,” I called through the chipped paint and rotting wood. “It’s the police. I have a few questions about what you saw the other day.”
The door swung open, revealing a stooped old man several feet shorter than me with a scraggly white beard that rested against his bare, tanned chest. He leaned heavily on a walking cane, the handle of which was hand-carved into the shape of a lion with its mouth open mid-roar. The pungent scent of curry emanated from the dark house, and I sincerely hoped that it was a result of a cooking meal rather than Roque’s own odor.
“What do you want?” he croaked, his voice worn out from years of tobacco usage. “I don’t like the cops out here. Only Wanda.”
“Wanda is a cop.”
“The only cop I like.”
“I’ll do my best,” I told him, taking a step away from his front door. Rain battered my back, but I preferred the wetness to the aroma of Roque’s house. “Wanda told me that you called in a sighting of Holly Dubois and Emmett Marks. Can you tell me exactly where you saw them?”
“Past the old train station.”
“Right. I got that already. Did you see them enter the train station?”
“No.”
A flash of lightning hit the ground so close by that I felt the electricity radiate through the area. The accompanying clap of thunder made me want to cover my ears. Roque, comparatively, didn’t flinch at all.
“Did you see which direction they were headed?” I asked him. This conversation should have been short and sweet, especially with the clouds darkening ever still overhead. “Any information you can give me would be helpful. Once I know where I’m going, I’ll be out of your hair.”
The prospect seemed a promising one to Roque. He pointed to his left with a toothy grimace. “Train station’s that way. They were heading northwest, into the forest. Looked like the little girl was putting up a fight. Good for her.”
Hope blossomed in my chest. If Holly was fighting, then maybe she could hold out for longer than I’d originally thought. “Northwest?”
“Toward the lucky rock,” Roque confirmed.
“I’m sorry, the what?”
“The lucky rock,” he repeated. “It’s a big ass boulder that sits under the bridge at the river. It’s been there forever. Kids go down there to rub it for good luck. Sounds like horsefeathers to me, but I was never one for superstition. You can’t miss it. It’s covered in spray paint.” He retreated to the darkness of his house, inching the door closed. “Good luck. And don’t run over my pumpkins when you drive out there.”
The smell lingered even after its source was cut off, so I stepped off the porch and hurried back to the cruiser.
“Well?” Taylor asked as I pulled the driver’s door shut.
“Northwest,” I reported, putting the car in drive. “Heading toward the lucky rock.”
“The what?”
“That’s what I said.”
I navigated through Roque’s property, narrowly avoiding the pumpkin patch, and used the compass that was suction cupped to the dashboard as a guide out to the old train station. It was a sight to see. The roof had fallen in, the wooden steps were broken, and the nearby tracks were rusted over. A decrepit sign had been hammered into the ground at an odd angle. At one point, I imagined it detailed the history of the landmark, but the paint had been washed away by the elements, and the story was lost to the earth. I yanked the compass from the dashboard and kicked my door open. My sense of direction was good in foreign cities across the ocean, not in a strange forest where every tree looked exactly the same.
“Let’s check the station just in case,” Taylor said, pulling the hood of her rain jacket tight around her face. “Or what’s left of it at least.”
But as soon as we reached the door of the old building, it was clear that hiding inside it was not an excellent option for anyone. The door fell off the old hinges, wavered, and hit the floor with a bang that the rain could not muffle.
“Way to be discreet,” I muttered as we looked around the one-room train station. Rain poured in from the hole in the roof. Debris littered the old benches and counters. Taylor and I split up, checking the perimeter of either side of the station. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. For all I knew, the train station held a thousand secrets, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to whisper them to me. I stomped on the weathered floorboards and knocked on the walls, listening closely, but there was no echo to indicate any secret hideaways or underground passages.
“Anything?” Taylor called from across the room.
“Nope.”
“Let’s move on.”
We braved the rain again and headed toward the forest, leaving the cruiser parked and locked at the station. The damp squish of my boots through the mud felt routine, as did the steady patter against the hood of my jacket. I led the way, the compass resting flat in the palm of my hand as it rotated back and forth. Once beneath the cover of the trees, the rain eased up a bit, dripping through the branches with heavy, sporadic plops.
“Look,” Taylor said, pointing at the ground.
The thick leaves protected the dirt below, so the bad weather hadn’t wiped away the path that had been worn into the ground by several pairs of teenagers’ sneakers. I checked the compass. Sure enough, the path headed northwest.
“Thank you, Wolfwater High,” I mumbled, settling into a jog. Taylor’s footfalls joined the rhythm of mine.
“Fill me in,” she puffed as we ran. “Who’s this guy your sister’s with? Emmett Marks, right? Not Fox?”
“Two different people,” I answered. “I’ve known Emmett my whole life. Never thought he had something like this in him, but I guess that’s how it works, doesn’t it?”
“Why’d he do it?”
“To get back at me,” I told her. “Apparently I broke his heart. This is his way of winning me over.”
“Solid plan.”
“Emmett was always more brawn than brains.” I leapt over a knotty tree root. “But I never expected him to go full Pennywise. Then again, Fox has that kind of effect on people. He promises them whatever they want, as long as he gets what he wants out of it.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“No. In that instance, he took what he wanted no matter what.”
The edge in my voice was sharp enough to stave off further questions from Taylor. I huffed as we jogged along, unused to the added weight of Mac’s body armor and utility belt. It felt like jogging through a swamp with bags of bricks around my waist. Through the gloom, I saw the outline of the river bridge like a black and white outline in a lazy artist’s sketchbook. We stumbled to a halt just short of it and looked into the churning water below.
“There.” I shielded my eyes from the rain and squinted at the bank beneath the bridge opposite us. “I think I can see the lucky rock.”
I jogged across the rickety bridge and scampered down the embankment toward the swirling water. I pick
ed my way carefully across the muddy ground, one hand trailing along the dirt wall for balance. One misstep and the river would whisk me away like a goldfish. Maybe that was why Taylor stayed at the top of the small ravine, but a little bit of danger never scared me.
Once underneath the bridge, the lucky rock was, as Roque has said, impossible to miss, though it was underwhelming at best. The boulder was about waist high, rubbed shiny from the teenagers’ bizarre rituals, and stained in various hues of spray paint. Each senior class from Wolfwater High seemed to come out to the lucky boulder and paint their graduation year onto the rock. I knelt down, running my fingers over the uneven surface. If I knew Holly like I thought I did, she would’ve left something for me to find here.
As I searched, a light moan reached my ears. I perked up and looked around. “Taylor?”
Her voice floated down from the top of the embankment. “Yeah?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Another moan echoed in the space beneath the bridge. Behind the boulder. I set my shoulder against it and heaved, but the giant rock wouldn’t budge.
“Taylor, get down here! I need help.”
Taylor groaned then slid on the seat of her pants down the slanted dirt wall toward the riverbank. She tried to dust the mud off her butt, but it clung to the denim. “What is it?”
“There’s someone here,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I heard them.”
As if to support my claim, another whimper sounded from behind the rock. Taylor’s eyes widened, and she joined me underneath the bridge. Together, we pushed against the rock, tendons straining to move it. With a slight pop, it disengaged from the wet ground and rolled over once, revealing a cavity the size of a cupboard that had been dug out of the clay and dirt. Inside, a blonde girl in a dirty red shirt was curled up, her head resting on her knees.
“Holly!” I cried, reaching into the space. The girl turned her face toward me, and the lump in my throat returned. It wasn’t Holly, though the girl wore the torn Belle Dame Fastpitch jersey stained with Holly’s blood from her bullet wound. My heart dropped.
“Holy shit,” Taylor breathed as she peered into the pitiful chamber.
“What?”
“That’s Melody Harver,” she said. “The girl that went missing from Wolfwater two weeks before Holly disappeared.”
Melody lifted her head at the sound of her name. She looked no better than Holly had the last time that I saw her. Her face was a sickly green color, her hair was matted with mud and dirt, and her collarbone jutted out against her skin as if she hadn’t eaten in months.
“Help me,” she whispered then she passed out, her forehead thunking against her knees.
A familiar madness stirred in the pit of my stomach, boiling up to my chest and lighting my throat on fire. This was Fox’s effect. He stole happy girls from their homes and ruined them. It didn’t matter if they eventually found their way home. They would never forget the trauma they endured during the time in Fox’s hands. I knew that from experience. I squatted down to reach into the cavity, but Taylor held me back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” I puffed, shaking her off. “I’m getting her out of here.”
“We should call an ambulance.”
“The nearest hospital is the one by Belle Dame,” I told her. “It’s over an hour away. She doesn’t have that kind of time. We need to get her somewhere warm and dry.”
“There’s a clinic across from the bar,” Taylor said. “That’s as good as it’s going to get in Wolfwater.”
I slid one arm underneath Melody’s knees and the other below her shoulders and slowly hauled her unconscious body from the hole in the ground. She didn’t weigh much, which was lucky, though it was a struggle to get her back up the embankment. At the top, I unhooked my utility belt and handed it to Taylor to hold then picked Melody up again. As we walked back to the car, she stirred in my grasp, and her eyes fluttered open.
“Hey,” I murmured. “It’s okay. I got you. You’re safe.”
Her arm tightened around my shoulders, the only indication that she had heard me. At the cruiser, Taylor hurriedly opened the door to the backseat, and I laid Melody across the black vinyl. Once we were buckled up, I squealed out of the muddy field and hauled ass out to the main road, trusting my instincts to get us there unharmed.
“Do you know what this means?” Taylor asked, gripping the bar above the window as the cruiser careened across the rain-soaked road.
“It means that my sister is still out there with Emmett somewhere,” I growled.
“I meant for the case,” Taylor explained. “She’s the first girl we’ve found. She could identify suspects, feed us information—”
I swerved around a splintered tree trunk, a victim of the strong winds. “She nearly died, Taylor. Can we make sure she gets the treatment she needs before we start pumping her for the particulars of her kidnapping?”
“Yeah, of course, but—”
“You’ve never been in a life-or-death situation, have you?”
She flushed. “No, but—”
“You want to know how I knew that?” I asked her. “Because if you had been, you never would’ve answered me with a ‘but.’”
Wolfwater’s main stretch came into view, the buildings like phantoms hiding in the shadows of the clouds. I steered toward the bar, scanning the street for the clinic entrance.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Taylor said. “And you need this information too. What if she knows something about Holly?”
“She’s wearing my sister’s shirt,” I told her. “Covered in my sister’s blood. She obviously knows something about Holly, but she might not be in any state to talk about it when she wakes up. I know trauma, Taylor. Don’t push her. We’ll ask what we need to ask and nothing more.”
The sign for the clinic appeared out of nowhere, and I squealed to a stop outside the front doors, not bothering to park in a designated space. As I checked on Melody in the backseat, Taylor got out of the cruiser and jogged into the clinic. When she returned, it was with a doctor and a nurse, both of whom looked incredibly concerned at the sight of Melody’s current state.
The doctor glanced at my name tag. “Let’s get her inside, Officer Hart.”
They gave me the space to pull Melody out of the car on my own. I felt oddly protective of her, as if helping Melody would elicit a karmic response from the universe to rescue Holly as well. I carried Melody through the doors of the clinic, down the hallway, and into an empty examination room, where I laid her down on the clean linens of the exam table. The doctor immediately got to work, checking Melody’s airways and vitals.
“I should go,” I said as the nurse nudged me away from the exam table to do her own work. “I’ll be in the waiting room. Let me know how she is.”
But as I turned to leave, Melody’s eyes flew open, and she grabbed my hand to pull me back toward the table.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered hoarsely, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “Please. Please don’t leave me.”
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m not leaving.”
4
The Good Fight
I couldn’t stay by Melody’s side for as long as I wanted. Once she lost consciousness again, I sidled out of the room to let the doctor and nurse do what they could for her. From the garbled conversation that I caught between the medical professionals, Melody was malnourished and dehydrated, much like Holly had been while she was being held in the basement of Emmett’s old house. I considered the extent of Fox’s reach here in North Carolina. All this time, I thought that Holly’s kidnapping was at the center of this problem, but with the revelation that Fox was still alive, a whole new issue was brought to light. Fox wasn’t just toying with my sister’s life to get to me. He was rebuilding his empire, starting with the pretty high schoolers in and around Belle Dame. The thought
made me sick. Every time it crossed my mind that Holly could end up as one of Fox’s new girls, bile rose at the back of my throat. The worst part was that I thought my involvement with human trafficking was over and done with. I had escaped the hotel in Paris. I had freed nearly eighty girls from Fox’s influence. I had put a bullet in Fox and assumed him dead, and I had been on the run ever since.
Taylor wasted no time. As soon as I emerged from the exam room, she bombarded me with questions regarding Melody’s capture, how I thought it might have occurred and why it was linked to Holly’s disappearance. I sank into one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room, acutely aware of the weight of my drenched clothes as the air conditioning blew an unyielding wind at me from the vent above. Taylor yammered on, but her words blended in with the buzz of fluorescent lights. I slunk down, tipped my head back to rest on the chair, and closed my eyes. One missing girl had been found, but my sister was still out there, alone and scared, and the only lead I had was lying unconscious in a doctor’s office.
Hold on, Holly, I said silently, hoping that the telepathic connection that had been forged between us would pick up my thoughts and send them to my little sister. I’m doing my best. I just need you to hold on for a little bit longer.
“Bridget,” Taylor said, prodding my shoulder. “Hey, Bridget.”
“What?”
“The local cops are heading over.” She pointed through the front window of the clinic. Sure enough, a few deputies, including Officer Martin, were on their way over from the department across the street, sheltered from the rain beneath a brigade of black umbrellas. “You have to talk to them.”
“Me?” I said. “Why me? You’re the CIA agent that’s actually been assigned to this case.”
“Yeah, but they don’t know that.” Taylor hauled me out of the chair from under the arm, displaying some impressive upper body strength. “I’m undercover, remember? You have to be the one to update them on Melody.”
The deputies were getting closer, on the sidewalk of our side of the street now.
Little Girl Lost [Book 2] Page 5