She had believed him but had still tried waddling to the trapdoor. There was a catch on it, but it was bent and warped. She was pretty sure she could just push it open. But then what? Her legs and arms were still tied up. As she studied it and tried to come up with a plan, she could hear the engine of the car. It was fading away as it pulled away, back out toward the road.

Mercy collapsed backward, her legs giving out. For a moment, she was afraid a rush of Cheerios and milk were going to come up out of her stomach, blocked by the tape and ultimately gagging her. But she managed to keep it all down. She focused on her breathing and stared up at the cracks in the floor overhead. Dirty little rays of light spilled in, illuminating the dirt floor of what she assumed had once been a cellar of some kind.

Im going to die here, she thought. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but I dont think hes going to let me go. Maybe at one point he had planned on it…but I think something has changed. Im going to die here. The only question is if it will be a slow or a quick death.

Staring up at those boards, Mercy Fuller started to cry for the comfort of a mother she knew was no longer alive. Through the tears, she could no longer hear the car outside, moving further toward the road, the driver oblivious to the young girl trapped in the barn just seventy-five yards to her right.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Kate hit the brake pedal hard enough to jolt her. Through the course of her long career, she had only felt an instinctual tug like this twice before. It was almost like a strange surge of déjà vu, a knowledge that there was something here that she should be recognizing. It was a feeling of something being incomplete…of something important just out of her reach.

The back end of her car was less than two feet from the back road that would take her back to the main highway through Duck Branch. She looked back toward Jack Kramers house, wondering why she felt so drawn to it.

Because you missed something, she said out loud. But what?

Her heart felt like it was beating straight up into her throat as she put the car back into Drive and crept back up Jacks driveway. This time, she did not focus on the driveway itself or the house sitting at the end of it. She kept her eyes on the edges of the yard, in the tree line and in the tall grass around the edges of the property.

And just like that, she saw what she had missed.