First Girl Gone(97)

She only half saw the gun arcing downward for her head, a dark blur at the end of his arm. Slashing through the air.

Bright light flashed in her skull when it hit. Endless white that flashed and blazed and blotted out her vision.

And then everything went black.





Chapter Eighty-One





Charlie dreamed. Drifting.

She felt Allie there before she saw her. Her sister’s presence was tangible here, as obvious to Charlie as heat or the color red. That familiar feeling of being with someone you knew so well, rich with all its nuances. You often only became aware of the feeling when they were gone, Charlie thought—the absence left a hole that showed you what you’d lost.

The dream images filtered into her consciousness a beat after that sense of Allie’s presence. Flickering pictures that slowly strung themselves into a movie, like a flip-book animation from when they were kids. All the colors were saturated, exaggerated, hyper-real the way her dreams sometimes were.

She and Allie lay together in a field of soft grass. A simple wooden fence stood in the distance, but no other buildings, no other signs of civilization.

They ate popsicles from the ice cream truck—the usual bomb pop for Charlie and one of those disgusting Mario heads with gumball eyes for Allie. Allie’s tongue was all red from licking Mario’s hat. She currently tongued one of the jeweled eyes surrounded by flesh-colored ice cream, trying to pry the tiny prize free.

Charlie laughed at this visual. Then she stuck out her own tongue to confirm that it, too, had been dyed with food coloring—bright blue in her case.

They didn’t say much. They didn’t have to. They just ate their ice cream and looked up at the puffy clouds rolling by, finding animal shapes and cartoonish butts rendered in the white, vaporous mounds.

Nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear. Just a simple togetherness. One of life’s many moments of joy—mild joy, but joy nonetheless. Profound in its own way.

Allie sat up, and the sun glinted down at just the right angle so that it looked like her hair glowed. Bars of bright light shooting through it. A gleam atop her head.

And in the distance Charlie heard the waves rolling up on the island. The smooth, wet churn of the water. The slap of the tide hitting the rock face of a cliff.

She turned to look toward the sound, but she couldn’t see it from here. Couldn’t see the water at all, but she heard the constant babble there in the distance. She stared out at the horizon for what felt like a long time. Listening.

And then something flicked her earlobe. She turned enough to see Allie out of the corner of her eye.

Her sister had moved closer. She lifted her hand again. Index finger catapulting off her thumb to strike the tip of Charlie’s nose.

Charlie realized that Allie was muttering something as she did this, but she couldn’t make out the words. She listened closer, turned to face Allie fully.

They made eye contact. Held it.

Allie flicked her finger again, connecting with Charlie’s cheek. This time she understood what Allie said.

“Wake up, dummy.”





Chapter Eighty-Two





Charlie woke in stages, reality arriving in her consciousness piece by piece.

First, the sound filtered in. The faint purr of a car engine. The hum of the tires rolling over the pavement, a kind of white noise periodically broken up by the crunch of snow and the throaty grating as the tires touched the rough places where the snow plows had chewed up the top layer of the asphalt.

Then the throbbing. Sharp jolts of pain in her skull that flashed like a strobe light.

She remembered getting hit in the head—not the visual memory of the event happening. Just that piece of information, the knowledge that she’d been struck, the reason why her skull ached the way it did.

Fear came to her next. Made her skin crawl. A sense of danger without explanation. An amorphous thing, somehow undefined, that she couldn’t understand just yet. She thought maybe that made it all the scarier.

Finally, her eyes peeled open. Just a crack at first. Trees flitted by on the side of the road. Dark shapes rising up from the ground. Hulking lines of black against the gleam of the streetlights. Crooked branches bending up toward the night sky.

Looking down, she saw that a zip tie bound her wrists. It was tight enough to crease the skin, two little bulges on either side of the plastic.

She sat in the passenger seat of a car she didn’t recognize. It smelled vaguely of pine. She could see only a glimpse of the driver to her left, a tiny flash of the side of his face, lit in the pale glow of the dash lights. Not enough to recognize him. But rather than trying to get a better look, she closed her eyes again.

An urgent voice inside told her not to lift her head. Not to reveal her return to consciousness. To wait. To rest. To breathe. To think.

None of these pieces of reality added up to make any kind of sense. Not yet.

After a few breaths, she braved another look. Opened her eyes again. Tried to blink away some of the confusion.

Looking again out of the corner of her eye, she saw him. Knew him.

Todd Ritter. Amber’s stepfather.

His head snapped in her direction, and she closed her eyes again. Waited.

He exhaled once. A vaguely aggressive sigh. Then he fell quiet again.

If he’d seen her awake, he gave no sign of it. Good.