Once again, she pressed down on the gas like there was nothing she wanted more than to get out of the haunted woods.
The next blink of time was too much to process.
The woman’s scream.
A deer leaping over the car, its foot coming through the windshield behind the steering wheel.
A thunk. A thud.
An explosion of white.
Another deer that touched the car then fell away.
The woman shoving her door open.
Sommer’s body wouldn’t follow her brain's commands. Her hand wouldn’t reach out to make the grab. Her mouth chomped at the air without sound.
And then the driver was on the ground.
Sommer’s brain forced her into a freeze response.
And this time it was lifesaving.
Sommer had lived through the crash.
The woman had not.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gabriel
Friday, Dawn
Gabriel clipped Whiskey’s lead to her collar, and they walked out the side door. He felt relieved when she turned toward the graveyard.
That meant Sommer was most likely singing, and he could have that chat with her about the dangers posed to the Cerberus teams when she posted her video.
But when they got to the stop sign, which was Whiskey’s singing spot, Whiskey lay down and whimpered.
Gabriel knelt. “Hey, are you crying?”
Whiskey looked at the graveyard, then up the street, then at him, and whimpered pitifully. That, and her woeful mug, pulled at Gabriel’s heart.
“Big bad Cerberus-trained hound, and you’re crying like a baby,” he teased, but a sense of unease came over him as well.
The sensation was big enough that he stood and said, “Come on, Whiskey, let’s go knock on her door.”
Whiskey lumbered up to her feet and started walking toward the cottage.
They stopped at the picket gate, and Gabriel watched a woman on her hands and knees lifting rocks along the flower border, then replacing them.
“Sommer Hayes?” Gabriel called.
She was incredibly, painfully pregnant, and Gabriel wondered if that was why Mourning Notes only videoed herself from the chest up.
“She’s my sister,” the woman said over her shoulder without stopping. “My husband has the key to her house. And usually she hides one outside.”
“Why are you breaking in?” he asked.
