Brilliant, right?
Wrong.
Suddenly, I looked around to realize that I was the one being gamed. Clay was baiting me, knowing that I could hear his last round of whispering. He was just loud enough that I could catch his details, not loud enough that it was obvious.
He’d lured me to crawl into what I now saw was a central cluster of the rock formation. He’d orchestrated our rendezvous.
I was in serious trouble.
I expected him to get quiet now that he had me where he wanted, but he talked directly to me.
“Miranda,” he said. Not shouting but projecting. Like a Greek orator. Saying my name like a dad would say it, like he was addressing his teenage kid who was caught sneaking back into the house at 2 a.m.
“Miranda,” he repeated.
I didn’t answer.
“My name is Clay Hobson.”
He couldn’t see me. Though he ensnared me, he still didn’t know exactly where I was or whether I was armed. It was a miracle he and his pet thug hadn’t stormed my nook. If they did, both of them at once, I’d be cornered in broad daylight. It’d be over.
But they weren’t coming.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” said Clay.
Yeah, right, you can fertilize the lawn with that one.
“I’m not here to hurt your family, Miranda.”
He was playing verbal chess.
“I’m here to help,” he added. “We both are.”
I was too scared to retort but I couldn’t afford to stay quiet. I needed to assert some kind of competitive quality. My silence was a giant white flag, being waved like a sheet of Kleenex, indicating I was weak.
“I’m Clay and my partner’s name is Terrence Unger. We’re worried about your husband.”
“You can fertilize the lawn!” I yelled.
He went quiet. The lawn? That was not what I wanted to say. That was the worst phrase possible. I strained to listen for them trading more instructions, but I could only hear the nearby rapids, which certainly didn’t help. Every splash and babble seemed to have Clay’s communications hidden within it.
“Miranda.” He finally spoke up again. “I’m sorry about the other two gentlemen you met. They were hostile to you. And that’s inexcusable. The truth is—”
“If you touch my daughter, I’ll kill you!” I shouted.
“Not everyone in our little group is agreeing on how to proceed,” he finished. “Yes, absolutely, if I touch your daughter, please kill me. I’m not here to do anything but help you and help your daughter. And especially help Aaron. Where is Aaron?”
Directly north.
That’s what I wanted to say—the opposite of where he really was. But I knew this statement would be too elementary. Clay would have to assume I’m suggesting the opposite direction. He would go south. And he would find my family.
“Miranda?” shouted Clay.
Then he stopped talking. The other guy—his partner, or goon, or rent-a-thug—was quietly asking about something that almost sounded like the word dynamite.
“Wish we had some of that dynamite here,” he murmured.
Dynamite?
“It’s at the ranch,” Clay murmured back. “With Branch. Wish we could use it on that strike.”
Dynamite for what? And what’s the branch he mentioned? What kind of strike were they planning?
“Miranda, do you need food?” said Clay loudly.
I didn’t have a wristwatch but I could tell our standoff had been going on for a while.
“We have food,” he added. “Do you need some?”
The stalemate was seductive. Simply the opportunity to eat something felt irresistible. Yet as we kept talking in circles, I was beginning to realize Clay’s game was deadlier than I thought. It was only after the third round of silence that I pinpointed it but I could hear him mumbling very quietly again, which I’d assumed was to his partner, but he wasn’t talking to him.
Clay was on the phone. Clay had been on the phone.
“Where is Aaron?” he randomly said aloud to me again, this time in an even nicer tone than before. Then he resumed murmuring.
A phone call. He must have been using a satellite phone, like we used when doing survey work in remote locations.
Clay wasn’t playing mind games to get me to move, he was manipulating me to keep me still.
Chapter 16
I probably should’ve been more strategic. I could have waited a moment and at least calculated some defensive geometry. But I jumped up and left, with no plan or preparation. I jumped up and sprinted.
My new friend Clay Hobson had been summoning his extra troops. He’d pinned me down and held me at bay while he gathered his forces. I cursed myself for being so gullible.
But now I was sprinting full speed in the opposite direction. Away from the highway.
The game had changed. The call had changed everything. I had to get to Aaron and Sierra.
Call it willpower. Call it fear. Call it ovaries. The point is I ran so hard that I stopped caring about things like pain and air. My leg muscles were scalding, my lungs were screaming, but I didn’t care. I ignored it.
I came stumbling up the crags, stumbling toward the cave entrance, and nearly collapsed. Only now did I notice that my leg was bleeding. So was my mouth, actually. I’d dry-heaved so hard—gasping for breath, failing to swallow, failing to dampen the palate—that I scorched the back of my throat. I spat blood. I was far from caring.
I was 100 percent preoccupied with the cave I’d finally reached, worried—no, terrified—that I’d be walking into a tomb. They’d spent a night in here and I was ready to find a mortified child huddled over a stiff corpse with a single, diagonal beam of sunlight cracking through the darkness from above, illuminating them like a medieval painting.
And that’s exactly what I saw. Minus the sunbeam. Minus the corpse.
“Mommy!” said Sierra from the far corner of the darkness. She jumped up, dissolving into tears.
We embraced for what must’ve been a three-week hug. She clamped onto my chest and I looked across the cave to find Aaron looking back at
