“You said to keep them alive, you idiot!” The voices were low, but this one was oddly familiar.
“Rotting bodies smell. They can’t be found until after...” She couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence.
She strained to hear. There were two of them. If they were armed, she might not be able to bring both of them down with her scalpel.
She had to lead them away from Lara.
Meg drew the blanket up higher, hiding her friend’s face, praying that Lara would look like a mannequin in the surgeon’s displays.
Then she made a point of rustling as she walked out of the tent. And to her relief, she heard the whispers again.
“That way!”
“Let’s go.”
*
“The house?” Jackson said. “We’ll search it again.”
Matt closed his eyes and tried to think, to concentrate, to will Meg to use whatever she had, whatever skill or intuition she possessed, to tell him where she was. When he opened his eyes, he was staring across at the ruins of the old mill. Killer stood beside him, whining anxiously.
Then the dog started to bark. “No, that way,” Matt said.
Jackson stayed behind to begin another search of the farmhouse. Angela had already gone in.
Killer raced ahead and Matt followed. They reached the old mill and he threw open the old doors, letting the moonlight flood in. “Meg!” he shouted.
There was no answer, but Killer was barking and running in circles. Matt headed over to some of the old broken millstones and the machinery to the rear. He trained his flashlight on the area; there was a deep pit with stone vats for the corn to be milled around a threshing floor.
“Meg!” he shouted her name again. The sound of his voice, loud as it was, seemed muted. He found himself remembering their conversation with Sylvia Avery earlier that day—and how people had sworn they’d heard the ghosts of the battlefield crying out.
They hadn’t heard ghosts; they’d heard the living. Lara Mayhew, begging for help.
But no one was here now.
“Killer, find Meg. Get her scent. Find Meg, boy, come on, you can do it.”
The dog sniffed the floor in a fury. Then he dashed out.
As Matt hurried after him, he saw something shimmering on the ground. He paused to pick it up.
And then he knew. They had all missed it, but who would ever suspect...
The killers had been there before them. He could only pray that Meg had made her way out.
The dog was racing across the field toward the Union encampment, exactly where Meg would have gone for help. As he ran past the farmhouse, he shouted for Jackson and Angela.
He didn’t wait for them but kept on running, his heart thundering in his ears.
He realized in that moment that he couldn’t bear to lose her.
No. He wouldn’t lose her. It was that simple.
*
Meg wasn’t sure where to run. As she moved forward, she had to ignore the cuts on her feet—and the pain that streaked through her as she stepped on a nail by the blacksmith’s tent.
She dashed by one of the sutlers’ displays; it had been covered with canvas for the night but someone had left a pair of cavalry boots beside it. She swooped them up as she ran, trying to decide what direction to take. She heard something fall behind her; a rack set up for drying clothes at the laundry, she thought. They were close.
The soldiers’ tents, where the hard-core reenactors were sleeping, were to the right, tucked away from the rest of the encampment. The road was the other way. If she tried running across the field to the soldiers’ tents, she’d be seen. If she made for the road, she’d be an easy target, as well.
Definitely an easy target—for anyone with a gun.
And her pursuers would be armed. One of them, at least—she could tell by the voice—was security for Congressman Walker.
But the other...
She felt she should have recognized the whisper. There was something that teased at her mind. Something she couldn’t quite place...
*
Matt reached the encampment with Killer.
The dog came to a dead stop, and Matt slowed just in time to keep from tripping over a body. He hunkered down to see that it was a young man dressed in a private’s uniform. The sentry? There was a bloody gash on the man’s forehead; Matt raised his voice and shouted for Jackson—who came pounding along behind him.
Jackson was already on his phone. “We need ambulances...every cop in the vicinity. Union encampment by the old mill and the ruins of the farmhouse,” he said quickly, and crouched beside the body, too. “He’s alive?”
“Yes, has a pulse,” Matt said.
Angela was almost there and Killer was running toward the surgeon’s tent where they’d watched the doctor and listened to the medical lecture. “I’ve got this—go,” Jackson said.
Matt stood and started running again, following the dog, Angela directly behind him.
He burst into the tent, Glock drawn. There was no one inside the tent.
He saw a form on the cot. He stepped forward, his heart in his throat, and pulled the blanket away.