The man looked up, and so did Tara, to see the old woman standing on the other side of the kitchen, holding Tara’s gun in her hand, pointing it past Tara and her son, to a body in the mudroom, collapsed onto the floor—it was Warren.
Tara’s heart sank. He must’ve been trying to sneak in, but the woman saw him too soon. He stared at Tara defenselessly while a hole in his shoulder bled out onto the floor.
Tara didn’t have a second to check on him. She needed to finish it all. Warren’s gun had skidded to the nook of the doorframe. And in the split second of distraction, the man had loosened his grip around her neck. She moved ever so slightly, grabbing hold of the rock beside her, and then hurled it through the air. It cracked his face, sending him into excruciating pain as he slid off of her onto the tiled floor.
The old woman fired a shot, just missing Tara as she scrambled to reach Warren’s gun and was finally able to grab hold of it. And just before the woman let out another shot, Tara took aim, then two shots cracked the air, and both bodies fell to the floor.
Chapter Thirty Three
Tara sat on a stretcher as an EMT carefully bandaged up her arm. The youngest girl, Kelsey, had already been taken away to the hospital, but the other ambulances had arrived only moments ago, quickly attending to Warren and the older sister, Anna. Tara’s eyes couldn’t stop darting toward them to check that they were still okay. They were each being placed on a stretcher and Tara could hear their distinct voices as they spoke to the EMTs. Each time they spoke, a wave of relief washed over her.
Before the ambulances arrived, she had waited with them and attended to their wounds as best she could, wrapping them in whatever she could find, applying as much pressure as she could. Warren’s wound was the most serious. He had been shot in the shoulder, and it was keeping him talking that became most important in those moments. It was during those crucial moments that Tara learned he came as soon as he saw her text. He didn’t mention if he was still angry with her, didn’t scold her for her rash moves—Tara knew that was yet to come. Instead, he only asked her the details of her discovery, and as she explained, he nodded.
Keeping them talking was the only way she could truly be sure that they were going to be okay, and so, even though they were in safe hands now, their voices still filled that need of reassurance within her.
However, it was the younger sister that she was most concerned about. Tara had checked on her too before the ambulances arrived, but unlike Warren and Anna, Kelsey remained silent, her eyes stayed closed, and her pulse was weak—so weak that at times Tara didn’t know if she would make it before the ambulances could reach them.
But she had held on, and once the EMTs arrived, they immediately put her on a stretcher and were soon on their way to the hospital.
“Any word on the younger girl?” Tara asked the EMT who had just finished bandaging her arm.
“She’s stable,” the EMT replied. “She’ll pull through.”
Tara nodded in return as she hopped off of the stretcher, looked down at her bandaged arm, and thanked him. She would still need stitches, he informed her, but she was lucky. Even though she had been cut deep, she had been sliced close to the bend in her arm, where her forearm was meatier.
“If he cut you any closer to your wrist, he probably would’ve severed your tendon,” he told her, before expressing the severity of an injury like that—that she could’ve lost mobility of her hand.
Again, she thanked him as the thought of what that would mean to her career seeped into her mind. That would’ve meant her having to turn in her badge. There was no way she’d be able to be an FBI agent with only one useable hand. The thought stung for a moment, but it wasn’t just the thought of what could’ve happened that made her feel momentarily uneasy. It was the fact that after this entire ordeal, she came out of it with the least serious injuries. It was this odd guilt that weighed heavily on her conscience. It was the same feeling she had for years after her mother’s death—that even though she was just a child, she sat in a closet while her mother fought for her life.
Even though this situation was in no way identical, she still had that same feeling, because in a way she did feel responsible for Warren’s injury. She’d acted on instinct and saved those two girls, but maybe if she pushed a little harder on Warren, maybe if she worked harder at getting him to listen to her, he wouldn’t have had to go after her like he did. He wouldn’t have had to sneak in at such a dangerous moment. She wouldn’t have been fighting for her life. If they arrived together, like they were supposed to, they would’ve each had each other’s backs. She wondered if he blamed her too.
Warren and the girl were each loaded into their own ambulance, and Tara walked toward Warren’s. As she did, she could see cops in the distance, securing the area around the barn and bed and breakfast. A forensics investigator breezed past her, holding the box of compasses she had spotted in the barn hours earlier. They gleamed in the daylight, and she got a quick peek as he strode by. There were dozens inside the box and it reminded Tara of how many lives she had actually saved, because now there would be no more victims, no more missing persons. She had put an end all his future
