I push her head under the water. We struggle and roll. Finally, she releases Carrie. I jerk loose from her and slug through the water to Carrie.
She isn’t breathing. Her eyes are open, staring at me.
Oh shit. Oh shit. I try to help her but the water is so deep. I hold her head up out of the water and try to squeeze any water out of her lungs. But it’s nearly impossible to keep her above the water level.
“She’s dead!” Ellen snarls. She stands in front of us with a knife in her hand. “Now hold her up so I can get the key.”
I stand there in a kind of shock, holding Carrie under her arms, her head sagging forward, while Ellen cuts into her. Blood rises up around us. Hot tears slide down my cheeks but there is nothing I can do.
It takes forever—the water is at our chins now. Blood swirls with Ellen’s frantic movements. The water sloshes back and forth, hitting me in the face. I taste the saltiness of Carrie’s blood. I stagger, almost fall. I don’t care. I hope we all die.
“Got it!”
Ellen pulls Carrie’s body away from me. I watch her sink to the bottom. Her insides floating all around her. Blood widening like a crimson cloud...
“Stand by the lock,” Ellen orders.
Instinctively my head tilts back to keep the water out of my nose. We are going to die. It’s too late to save ourselves. I don’t care.
“Do it, Joanna!” Ellen screams.
I move to the spot beneath the lock we cannot reach. It hangs from the cage-style door eight feet off the floor. The door is flush with the ceiling.
Ellen climbs my back. I stumble, nearly fall over, but I right myself and sputter water from my mouth and nose. She sits on my shoulders and works until she releases the lock. It splashes in the water next to me, sinking to the bottom with Carrie.
We should die, too. We don’t deserve to live.
As if the lock released more than the cage-like door, the water stops running in and immediately starts to drain.
The sound is deafening. The pull of the water almost drags me down.
Ellen is jerking and pushing. I peer up. She’s trying to push the cage-style door upward. Suddenly it starts to fall in on us.
We topple backward into the water.
When we surface again, the cage door is hanging from the ceiling like a ladder.
Ellen slogs through the water that is now only waist deep and grabs onto the ladder.
I rush after her and jerk her away from the ladder.
“Wait!” I put my face in hers. “We’re taking Carrie with us.”
“We have to get out of here!” Ellen cries.
I shake my head. “Not without Carrie.”
Only two of us are alive, but all three of us will get out.
52
2:30 p.m.
Forty-nine minutes had passed since Jo walked out the back door of the restaurant. They had searched the restaurant from top to bottom, twice, and combed the surrounding blocks.
Tony had called Phelps for backup. He, Bobbie and Nick had searched the restaurant and expanded their search a full block around the building.
No one had seen her.
“What the hell is she thinking?”
Standing next to him on the sidewalk, Nick said, “She’s thinking she had a lead or some plan she needs to do alone.” He glanced at Tony. “We’ve all done it. At the time you think you know more than anyone about the plan or the lead or whatever it is you feel you have to do.”
As badly as Tony did not want to admit Nick was right, he was. But that didn’t stop him from being worried and pissed. Jo was an adult; she had the right to make a stupid decision. Tiffany was a kid. This move, he feared, would somehow impact her and maybe not for the best.
That wasn’t fair. He didn’t know Jo well, but he was certain she would never purposely hurt Tiffany or anyone else.
“Bobbie said her cell rang before she went to the restroom, but she didn’t answer,” Nick pointed out. “Maybe she got a call she couldn’t ignore but needed privacy to take it.”
Tony was pretty damned sure that was exactly what happened. “Son of a bitch.”
Phelps joined them. “You know, LeDoux, it’s always possible Ms. Guthrie decided she’d had enough. Or maybe she has something to hide. She was silent about what really happened for a very long time. Maybe there’s more to the story than we know.”
Tony resisted the impulse to punch the guy. “She came here to help set the past to rights. If she hadn’t come back, we’d still be kicking around irrelevant scenarios.”
Phelps turned his hands up. “Just saying. You never really know what a person is capable of and, the fact is, we don’t know the full story about what happened eighteen years ago.”
Tony bit his jaw, letting the pain distract his temper. Right now he needed this man’s help. “But we do know what’s happening right now and at least four lives are at stake.”
“Hey,” Bobbie called from the restaurant entrance. When they turned to her, she went on, “I went through the ladies’ room again. Jo left a note.”
Tony followed Bobbie to the ladies’ room, the place Jo had claimed she was going before she took off. Nick was right behind him. Since witnesses in the kitchen had watched Jo walk out of her own volition there was no need to consider any part of the restaurant a crime scene.
In the first of two stalls a note had been written in red ink on the wall among half a dozen others of varying shades of black and blue.
Going to save Tif. Sylvia is there, too. Lunch was too close to the dead. Look up and you’ll see me.
Tony looked from the note on the wall to the ceiling. “What does she mean look up?”
“One way to find out,” Bobbie offered.
They moved through the entire restaurant scrutinizing the ceiling.
“Wait.” Nick turned to Phelps. “Is there a cemetery nearby?”
Son of a bitch. Nick was right. She’d said this place was too close to the dead.
“Memory Hill is maybe two or three blocks away.”
“Show us the way.” Tony was already headed for the door as he said the words.
The cemetery was no more than a three-minute walk from the restaurant. Two and a half if you moved quickly and knew that every second you wasted could cost lives. Tony ran the entire distance. En route way behind him, Phelps called a couple of uniforms to help with the search of the cemetery.
Tony walked around the memorial to the thousands buried at Central State Hospital several times. He’d expected that to be the first place she would go. Nothing. No messages, no clues. No bread crumbs.
Nothing.
They searched the entire cemetery and found not one damned thing that showed Jo had been there.
When they were at the front gate again, Phelps shook his head. “She said to look up and see her but I’m not finding anything in the trees.”
Tony surveyed the street. His gaze lit on the traffic cam and he smiled. He pointed to the intersection of Greene and Wayne. “Traffic cams. She was talking about the traffic cams.” He turned to Phelps. “If someone picked her up here, we might be able to see who it was and what kind of vehicle they were driving on the traffic cams.”
Phelps gave a nod of agreement. “It’s worth a try, but it’ll take some time.”
There was nothing else they could do.
Milledgeville Public Safety Office, 4:15 p.m.
Forty-five minutes were required to get the engineer on-site, and then for him to pull the traffic cam data. Phelps had relayed the latest turn of events to the rest of the task force. Bobbie and Nick had remained at the cemetery location to question anyone nearby who might have seen Jo. Tony had paced a hole in the carpet of the chief’s office by the time the engineer scooted back from the screen and said, “There you go. That—” he pointed at the screen “—is about two this afternoon. Once you hit Play, it will move forward.”
Phelps grabbed his phone from his utility belt. “Phelps.”
Tony didn’t wait for the chief, he hit Play and took the seat the engineer had abandoned.
“We’re on our way out right now.” Phelps snapped his phone back onto his belt. “One of my detectives is out front with a local cab driver. The cabbie says he’s the one who picked up Guthrie and that she left a note on the back of his seat.”