The threat had been made to make himrun?“Clearly you don’t know me at all,” Cal returned.
Mr.Everly snorted.“Doesn’t matter.The two of you made your own bed.Now you’ll lie in it.You’rethe ones who are making it end like this.”
End.Cal didn’t like the sound of that, or the way the man with the gun was looking a little too intently at Glenda with the gun pointed in her direction.
So Cal tried to pull the focus back to him.“Secrets never stay buried, and the truth is hardly ever the end,” Cal offered, earning himself a glare frombothpeople.
Mr.Everly studied them both.“You know, I only need one of you alive for this first phase.One of you dead here might even work in my favor.It’ll slow everyone down.Deal with a body before they keep going on.I’ll disappear by then, that’s for sure.Leave Glenda somewhere she’ll never be found.Yeah, I like that.”
Cal stilled.The gun was pointed directly at his heart, and he found himself with no smart words to Everly’s very clear threat.
“Enough death.”Glenda’s creepy rasp, as always, did something to him.
Unlocked all that was locked up tight.Almost like she was the center of it all.
He’d blamed his father for all his mental issues—but maybe Glenda was actually the demon in his story.
Fucked-up thought, but he could see it now.His mother’s face.Eyes glazed over with pain.His own pain throbbing from somewhere… somewhere…
Mr.Harrington is going to get you out, she whispered to him, pulling him by the arm that didn’t hurt.Walking through the mud, just like this.Blue sky.Mountains.
But he didn’trememberMr.Harrington.Couldn’t picture the man if he tried.He couldn’t even picture himself hiking with Mr.Everly, because he’d neverdonethat.
He’d been with his mother, though.They’d both been in pain.Walking in pain.Then Glenda had taken him… where had she taken him?
“I really can’t believe you were telling the truth about him not seeing anything, Glenda.”Everly pointed at Cal with the gun.“You get that yet?She saved you.Said you didn’t remember.You didn’t see anything.”Mr.Everly laughed.“I didn’t believe it.So I watched you.Kept you under my wing, didn’t I?You never acted like you knew, like you remembered.”
Because he didn’t.Caldidn’thave any clue what Everly was talking about.Even with the snippets of memory, there was just a big, fat blank where any explanation should be.
“Surprised you ever managed to do anything with a memory like that.”
“He wasn’t there,” Glenda rasped.“Just let him go.This is ours.”
But that wasn’t true, was it?Yes, he only remembered darkness, but he could hear things in those memories—whispers, Glenda’s voice, the gunshot—but he didn’tseeanything.
His head pounded, that old wave of nausea that hadn’t plagued him in a while.
Still, he didn’tseeany of the things he could hear in his memory.He felt stifled.Stuck in the dark.
Cal was starting to put it together that it wasn’t because he didn’tremember, it was because Glenda had been telling Everly the truth all these years.
Whatever Cal had been around to witness, he hadn’t actually seen.Because someone had hidden him away—in the dark, where he could only hear muffled sounds of what was happening outside.
“Turn around, Cal.Get her up there.We’ll decide how to go on from there.”
Cal found himself compelled to follow Everly’s instruction.He helped Glenda up the rest of the incline, holding her when loose rocks tried to take out both their footing.
When they reached the end of the incline, a kind of flat part in the rocks, the nausea nearly won.
There was a crevice in the rock wall.A cave opening.He knew, because he’d been there.He’d been inthatcave.
And Glenda and Mr.Everly had been right out here.
*
Glenda Harrington hadnever considered herself the perfect woman.She’d never even considered herself a particularly good woman.
Life was hard so she had to be hard to face it.She’d learned that young and kept it with her the whole of her life.
