She couldn’t finish. Because it wasn’t.
In what LaDonna would surely have pronounced another miracle, Cara spotted a phone in a purple sparkly case on the asphalt near the truck. She picked it up, turned it over, and saw a half-written text on the spiderwebbed screen.
Don’t worry Bree happy!it read.See u soo
Cara dialed 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“There’s been a bad accident on... I don’t know where I am,” she said, the words rushing out. “We were just outside Fresno when we detoured from the fire. I think it’s Highway 41. People are dead, and there’s a teenager badly injured. Send help.”
She hung up before the operator could ask her to stay on the line.
“Help is on the way, Bree,” she told the girl.
Bree might have nodded. Or it might have been a spasm. Bloody bubbles were forming on her lips.
Cara thought about the Lord giving and taking. She’d always considered herself spiritual, plugged in to the universe at least, but the past year had certainly challenged her belief that everything happened for a reason. Yet here she was, still alive when a half-dozen people around her had died. She’d been praying for justice every day since her arrest but had let go of hope after the crushing verdict. Wasn’t that exactly when manifestationsmanifested?
Bree’s breaths, still shallow, were growing raspy.
Cara moved closer, gently rubbing the girl’s arm.
The tears she had managed to hold back for the entire ride from LA finally began to pour down her cheeks. Her body convulsed in racking sobs.
Karl, she thought.Oh, Karl. I’m so sorry. I miss you so much.
Then the freckle-faced, lavender-haired girl stopped breathing.
Cara expected to see a mystical vapor or to feel a cold rush as the girl’s spirit left her body. Instead, a white-and-gold sedan pulling a trailer slowed and pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway and stopped beside the overturned semi. She watched, screened by the wreckage of the pickup, as the elderly couple cautiously emerged from their vehicle. Urged on by his wife, the husband looked into the cab and turned away, his face drained of all color. He seemed to steel himself before heading toward Bree’s truck.
Why couldn’t Cara claim she was in shock or had amnesia and simply wandered off, too? Even if no one believed it, what could they do to her? She already had a life sentence. If she ran, she’d be caught quickly, she was sure—she had no idea how to survive on the run—but shouldn’t she at least seize a few hours of justice in the meantime?
Cara leaned in and tenderly moved some hair from the girl’s face.
Then she ran.
TWO
JORDAN BURKE
Guilty! Guilty! Guil-tay!
—@Memphismom14
Madera County Sheriff Jordan Burke braked to a halt at the end of the gravel driveway as two people suddenly emerged from the bushes. When they began hammering on his windows with their hands, he instinctively shifted into reverse, dropped his hand to his hip, and unsnapped his holstered Glock.
After a second look at the man and woman attacking his car, he sighed and shifted into park. He had been surprised by tweakers and crazies in the backwoods before, but none of them had been wearing Lululemon and Patagonia. COVID-19 and the ensuing work-from-anywhere revolution had brought with it a bougie invasion he suspected he’d never really get used to.
Lifting his handset, he addressed them through the PA of his Ford Police Interceptor Utility: “I’m coming out. Please step away from the vehicle.”
The man at the passenger-side window jumped back in alarm when he heard Jordan’s amplified voice. The woman on his side—wearing yoga pants and a puffer vest over a hot-pink crop top that read100% THAT BITCH—folded her arms. When he opened his door, she stepped back just far enough for Jordan to swing it open.
He stepped out and surveyed the scene. He was parked next to a brand-new Tesla X, behind a new home with a green metal roof and red cedar trim. The door to the house was wide open.
The woman pursed her artificially bee-stung lips, her panic seeming to have evaporated since his arrival. “It took you long enough.”
Jordan knew from long experience there was no point in telling her how far he’d come or how fast he’d driven. He’d been dealing with folks like this more and more often; job number one was to calm them down and assess the situation. All he knew was that Gracia, his sixtyish, grandmotherly dispatcher, had relayed a near-hysterical 911 call from two Airbnb renters about an intruder.
