For now, all she wanted to do was get her back against the wall behind her so she could rest. This would involve pushing off with her good leg and scooting backward on her butt. An easy mission on the face of it, but the reality was she was on a heap of garbage, not a solid floor. Could she get enough leverage to push? And when she pushed she would then drag the right leg with its hideously broken ankle, and the pain would be blinding.

Stop whining, Gina. Just do it.

Shut up, Marissa.

She couldn’t have said how long it took her to work up the strength and the nerve to try. She looked around for something to help her effort, something to use like a crutch or a lever.

Discarded lumber was strewn amid the garbage, odd scrap pieces from someone’s home project. Within reach were several short stubs, butt ends of two-by-fours. Not helpful. To her left and away from her was a longer piece—narrower, thinner, but about three feet long.

She couldn’t reach it with her right hand. She might have reached it with her left, but her left arm hung limp. Gina flexed the fingers of her left hand, but she couldn’t lift the arm.

Slowly she stretched her leg back down and tried to get the toe of her shoe under the piece of wood and move it closer, but managed only to push it farther out of reach.

Exhausted, she brought her knee back up and rested her head.

She had no idea how long she had been in this hole. She hadn’t worn a watch. It might have been hours. It might have been days. She hadn’t eaten since hearing the news of Marissa’s murder. She hadn’t been able to keep anything down. She hadn’t had anything to drink since just after the detectives had left her house—after the older one had put that photograph in her hand.

The smell of the place kept her stomach turning over and over, but thirst was parching her throat. She looked at the garbage around her. Beer cans. Lots of them—most of them crushed. Soda cans. Empty liquor bottles. She was in the dumping ground of a party spot. Teenagers probably came out on the fire road for a secluded place to drink and smoke dope and do whatever teenagers did now.

Gina remembered a place like that when she and Marissa had been in school—a place out in the hills above Malibu. Her memory drifted back to an illegal campfire, cheap beer, and Boone’s Farm wine; “Smoke on the Water” and “Horse With No Name.”

They had thrown all their garbage into a cave. It had never occurred to her to imagine there might be somebody trapped in that cave, dying while they partied.