But there was no sign of Mary.
Where was she?
Had they killed her and left her lying?
Had they taken her with them?
He hoped not. Because there was no telling what a band of men this savage would do to a female hostage.
Better death than that.
But then, he remembered when he and Cole were kids, how Cole used to describe the house he would build someday, describing not only the dwelling but also the escape tunnel he planned to include.
Had he done it? Had he dug an escape tunnel?
“Mary?” Conn called into the darkness. “Mary, are you out there?”
He walked to the back of the house and called up into the darkened hillside, where he figured Cole’s tunnel would have led. “Mary! Can you hear me?”
He kept walking toward where he reckoned she might have run, calling out again every minute or two until he came to what he had expected to find.
Under different circumstances, the sight of the shovel and plugged-up tunnel would have pleased him, the manifestation of his brother’s lifelong dream revealing itself after all these years.
But given the current state of things, all Conn could think was he could use the shovel to dig the grave.
Or graves.
Was Mary dead, too?
“Mary!” he called into the darkness.
He lit a match and scanned the ground near the mouth of the tunnel, where he saw small footprints in the loose dirt but no blood.
He sighed with relief.
So she hadn’t been killed or wounded, at least not before escaping the house.
She had hidden in the cellar then used the tunnel to avoid the raiders.
If she was half the woman Cole had said she was, those men would have had a hard time catching her after that.
She was hunkered down up this slope somewhere. Or maybe she’d found a ridge and kept running, heading for a neighbor or town and the law.
It was too dark to follow.
So he stood and called for a while, hoping she would answer.
Finally, when she failed to do so, he decided to leave her a note and head after these men.
But as he turned downhill, a woman’s voice finally answered from the darkness high above. “Conn?”
8
Conn offered to go to her, but she told him to stay put and she would come to him.
He stood in the darkness, listening to the sound of her shuffling descent, which was punctuated by the occasional snapping branch or the tap-tap-crash of a tumbling stone.
When she finally reached the base of the hill, she drifted toward him through the gloom, an apparition with pale hair and huge eyes that caught the moonlight as she drew closer.
