No one came. The hours dragged on.
She heard nothing; she saw no one. All she could do was huddle in the cold.
She was naked and in the dark. She had to stay alive; she had to hope and pray and not give in to desperation. She’d been dumped here to die.
Why not just kill her?
Because maybe her body wasn’t supposed to show up yet.
That thought almost made her laugh. Why were they worried about her dead body when no one seemed to know where her living body was?
She thought she heard singing. She listened and wondered again if she was dead, if the first stages of death contained all the pain and fear of life. She seemed to be hearing something like a very old hymn, one that might’ve been sung for centuries, although she couldn’t recognize any words.
She tried screaming again. Screaming and screaming...begging for help. Until she was hoarse again and no sound came.
She allowed herself a moment’s humor. Were the angels singing for her?
Was she in a vault, in some forgotten graveyard of a godforsaken town?
No, the stone in the middle told her it wasn’t a vault. The regular shape of the place was, however, created by man.
She thought she saw figures before her eyes and realized she was shaking.
The cold night had seeped into this place. And yet she felt strangely warm.
She was getting a fever.
Think about Meg. Meg would come for her. She could’ve sworn that she’d thought so determinedly about her friend that she’d actually seen her face—that she’d actually begged her for help. Was that yesterday? She didn’t know. In this world without day or night, without time, she had no idea.
Meg had seen her, too. Hadn’t she?
But Meg saw the dead. Soon, she’d be among them.
4
Back at Lara’s apartment, Meg went through her friend’s drawers and prowled the apartment, looking for anything that might indicate that Meg had been back. Her purse was gone; she hadn’t owned a car. Her work had been on Capitol Hill and she’d either walked, which she loved doing, or taken a taxi if she wasn’t with friends or business associates. She also used DC public transportation.
Matt Bosworth waited patiently, studying the house.
Meg could see that Lara had apparently made coffee and cleaned the pot the morning before she’d left. Her breakfast was usually fruit and cereal; there was a banana peel in her small compost bin, and a single cereal bowl in the dish drainer. Lara never used her dishwasher unless she had a party. She considered it a waste of energy.
In the bedroom Meg was going through the closet again when Matt Bosworth called out to her. “She kept a journal? A written journal?”
“Yes,” Meg called back.
“Then maybe there’s something in her most recent journal,” he said.
Yes, Lara’s journal! She should’ve thought of that first thing—before pawing through all her belongings.
Agent Bosworth came into the bedroom, a book in his hand. It was a journal with handsome black binding and an imprinted Green Man tree. He had it open and was reading it.
Meg suddenly realized that they were both delving into Lara’s life; she really had no more right to do that than he did.
At least she was Lara’s friend.
On the other hand, he’d been around for a while and this was business, this was his job. Delve, pry, do whatever was needed.
He read aloud, “‘Sometimes I want to go back. Way back to the days of innocence when we truly believed. Follow the trail as Meg and I did when we were students. Richmond to Sharpsburg, on to Harpers Ferry where we were home, and Gettysburg, where we learned that ideals are everything, and that good men may fight for different causes.’”
He looked over at Meg. “That was her last entry. Dated the day before she went missing.”
“What did she write before that?”
He handed her the book. She started to sit down on the foot of the bed—and then didn’t. A forensic team might come in and she wanted to compromise as little as possible.
She stood up again and flipped through the entries.
“She noted her meeting the other night, too,” she told Matt. “Right before the entry you read. She wrote it earlier that same day. ‘Stand by my convictions.’”