“After she ran out, saying she was going to get help.” Cash shrugged. “I couldn’t stay there. You don’t . . . you don’t know.” His eyes snapped to hers. “There wasn’t anything else I could do.”

Something slid into place. She kept asking how Earl had gotten there so fast.

“You called your dad.”

He nodded, just once.

“Henry Jackson and Jimmy Roarke weren’t helping cover up a crime Earl committed,” Izzy said slowly. “They were helping clean up after you.”

“I didn’t . . . I didn’t do anything,” Cash said, his voice small.

“Right. You didn’t.”

Cash flinched, the blow squarely landing. He didn’t defend himself.

So where did Lacey come in? “There were just the three of them,” Izzy repeated, almost without putting sound to the words.

“You keep saying that,” Cash said. “Why?”

Izzy made a decision. “Because, if I’m right about everything else, there should have been one more.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

MIA

Lacey was behind Mia.

Mia could sense it more than hear it, as she dodged through the branches. Broken, brittle limbs caught at her exposed arms, and blood trickled from her hairline, dripping off her jaw into the hollow of her collarbone.

The lighthouse was close. It had a door. She could lock it. Maybe the phone line was even working. She couldn’t picture it. Everything that had happened before this moment, this chase, this consuming desperation for survival, was lost to adrenaline.

There.

The clearing. Up ahead. Her thighs bunched as she picked up her pace, careful not to stumble again, careful not to give up her seconds—minutes maybe—of advantage.

A meadow stretched out before her, open, wide, and exposed. It was what stood between her and the relative safety of the lighthouse. The potential vulnerability scared her, terrified her so that panic throbbed along with each step she took closer.

It was evening, but early evening, so there was no bright moon to betray her movements, no silver to catch on pale white flesh. Just a blue-tinged darkness that should shroud her in shadows. If she was lucky.

She paused just at the edge of the tree line, the animal in her whimpering at the thought of going out in the open. But the only other choice was to stay and be caught.

And she was not prey.

Mia took off. Her mind cleared of anything other than the siren’s song of safety.

Time stretched, like it always did on the island, stretched and became meaningless beyond the distance her feet ate up. It stretched, it stretched, and then it snapped back. And she was there. In front of the door, grasping at the knob.

It refused to budge beneath her numb, frozen fingers, and the frustration nearly took her to the ground.

Key. It was a shout inside her own head, loud and demanding.

There was an extra key. She’d used it when she and Izzy had come.