Chapter 9 - THE BREATH WE ALMOST LOST
They found Sarah behind a false service wall inside the buried vault, curled on a foam mat in a space barely large enough to lie down in. Her wrists were zip-tied in front of her. Her mouth had been loosely taped at some point, though it had slipped partly free. There was a battery-powered work light on the floor, two empty water bottles, and a metal bucket in the corner.
Jason hadn’t taken her far.
He had done something worse.
He had hidden her within feet of the pool, the cage, and the backyard where Emily had been forced to sit.
The paramedics who brought her up said she was conscious but weak, dehydrated, and showing signs of head trauma. She had bruising along her jaw and temple and a deep cut at the hairline that had clotted badly. She had likely been down there since the night Mrs. Harris heard the scream.
Almost forty-eight hours.
When they loaded her into the ambulance, she turned her head once toward the hospital entrance where I had been waiting after racing over from Emily’s room.
She looked at me, dazed and pale, but there.
I walked alongside the gurney until a medic stopped me.
“Is Emily safe?” Sarah whispered.
That was the first thing she said.
“Yes,” I told her. “I have her.”
Her eyes closed in visible relief.
Then she forced them open again. “He’ll run.”
“We’ll find him.”
She made a tiny movement with her bound hands, as if reaching toward mine. “He took the gray duffel.”
“What gray duffel?”
But she had already faded.
The clue mattered quickly. A search of Jason’s financial activity turned up a cash withdrawal at an ATM twenty miles away and a gas purchase tied to a prepaid card. The surveillance image showed him carrying a gray duffel bag.
Inside that bag, Bennett guessed, would be whatever he thought mattered most now that the house was blown open.
Cash.
Documents.
Or perhaps the final thing Sarah was still too weak to explain.
At the hospital, Emily was sleeping when I returned to her room.
I sat between her bed and the window with my hands clasped so tightly they ached.
My daughter was alive.
Sarah was alive.
Jason was not in handcuffs.
May you like
Not yet.
And until he was, none of us were safe.
