The tension mounting inside Olivia quadrupled on hearing the girl’s expressed fear. She blurted out the first question that came to mind in hopes of suppressing it. “Do you two know who lives here?”

“No idea,” the boy spat out. “We just wanted to check out the flooding. We spotted the dog on our way back. We were down the road a way. It’s a trip, man. The river access—the whole parking lot—is swallowed up by water.” He pulled out his phone and started filming again.

“I kind of get the feeling nobody lives here,” the girl added. She dropped her voice and shot a glance back toward the house. “The front yard already looks like a flood ripped through here.”

Olivia was inclined to agree with her.

A glance at Gabe showed he was fifteen or twenty feet in, and the water was already over his knees. He still had a long way to go before he reached the dog. As a rush of fear pressed over her, all Olivia could think to do was pray harder than she’d prayed in a long time.

Chapter 5

It wasn’t a good time for Gabe to think about the ridiculous fear he’d had as a kid of rivers and brown, murky water. Wasn’t a good time to think how, at ten or eleven years old, obnoxious little Susan Drier—who’d lived two blocks away and ridden the same bus—had insisted that everyone’s biggest fear was a foreshadowing of how they were going to die.

The rushing water was sharply cold, forty-five or fifty degrees at most. Each new inch of skin experienced the shock of it as he headed in deeper. When the water hit his groin, he suspected his balls wouldn’t descend again until July. Worse than the cold was the sweeping pressure of it. Gabe felt like a leaf caught in the runoff along a storm drain. If he lost his footing, he’d be swept ten feet before he could even react.

Then, too, there was the debris in the water bumping into him every few feet: sticks mostly, odd pieces of litter, and, from the way it seemed to react with a will of its own rather than just bounce off him, one sizable fish. The bolt cutters were shoved in the back of his jeans, but he had the ax at the ready. Ready for what? The fact was he’d seen entirely too many episodes of River Monsters a few years back.