“Where is it?” Vaughn hammered the brakes and hopped out.
“There!”
Ivy was already out of the car, pointing at a white structure about two hundred feet in the distance, on the other side of an empty field.
Vaughn was tempted to tell her to stay in the vehicle, but he knew she wouldn’t listen.
They broke into a run.
“How much time?” Vaughn yelled.
Ivy was fast, already about twenty feet in front of him.
“I don’t know!”
Minutes—there had to be only single digit minutes left.
Ivy got to the front doors first, barely breathing hard. Vaughn joined her moments later and looked up, blinking rapidly to clear sweat from his eyes.
The Thomas Clarke House was old, constructed of sun-bleached horizontal slats. A small overhang roof on the left half offered shade to what appeared to be the main entrance.
Ivy was at the door, yanking on it.
“It’s locked!”
It was the middle of the afternoon—why the fuck was it locked?
There was another door halfway down the building. Vaughn rushed to it but was met with the same result.
He pounded on the worn wood with his fist.
“Hey! Anyone in there! PPD, open up!”
He banged again.
Heard Ivy say something along the lines of, “It can’t be here.”
“PPD!”
He took a step back, went further left. There were two windows on the ground level. Vaughn cupped his hands and peered through the first. The lights were off, and it was dark inside.
“Hey! Anyone in there!”
Vaughn pulled away from the window.
“Ivy, you sure about—” He stopped. Ivy was no longer at the other door. “Ivy?Ivy!”
Where the hell did she go?
“Ivy!”
He heard a faint beeping. An alarm—Ivy had put a timer for twenty-seven minutes on her phone after finding the note. Vaughn followed the sound, calling Ivy’s name as he headed around the side of the building. He saw some sort of shed or barn, older even than the main building, just a couple dozen paces away.
“Ivy!”
Enter another sound, louder than her phone alarm.
A high-pressure hiss.
