Page 106 of Buried in the Woods Below

“Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”

Baby Face lays a hand on my shoulder. His grip is firm. “Calm down,” he says. “It’s gonna be fine.”

The cabin door swings open.

A stairwell plunges down into darkness.

Something primal takes over. My body spasms, kicking, jerking, trying to tear free. The stretcher bucks beneath me, but the cuffs hold.

One last plea.

“Please.” The word barely makes it out.

They lift me through the door.

No.

My skins screams. The walls close in.

“No.”

The door swings shut, the hinges letting out a slow, final creak.

I drag in one last desperate breath.

And then I scream.

“Nooooo!”

Chapter 49

I pace my concrete-block isolation cell at the Hennepin County Public Safety Facility and chew my nails down to their nubs. The air is cold. The floor is colder. After my tantrum on the boat ride over, the cops eighty-sixed the stretcher. They processed me through booking, took mug shots and fingerprints, searched me, took all my personal possessions, and dumped me in this grim, eight-by-eight room in a gray uniform that looks like they fished it out of a garbage dump. It hangs on me as if it were meant for someone else. Someone who didn’t make it out.

I used my designated phone time to call my mother, a rock as always, who told me she’d be right over with Tom Kim in tow.

As I pace the cell, I try to make sense of it all. This must be a setup. I know I didn’t kill anyone. But then I remember the night Laelynn died, waking up soaking wet. No, that was sweat. But the cuts on my arms, my cheeks? From my fight with Vivek or the trees? Did Olivia scratch me while I was sleeping, so it appeared I did this? Wait, Eric said Olivia’s been dead for eighteen years. That’s not true. I was talking to her, for God’s sake. I saw her in the woods.

The two of them must be conspiring. This was their plan from the start. They wanted Big Island to themselves, then invited me to be the pawn. They figured if they could convince me and everyone else that I’m insane, then no one would suspect them.

It was the drinks.

They drugged them to confuse me. First bootlegs, then wine, then tea.

For a moment, their plan worked. I was questioning my sanity. Did Olivia really exist? Could I have killed the girls, Laelynn, Vivek, and Freida? But in the bright light of day, I realize that can’t be true. I could never do something like that.

The external door to my cell squeaks open, and two corrections officers enter.

“Your attorney’s here,” one of them barks at me.

The guards escort me through a tunnel of locked doors to a private room with a table bolted to the floor and cheap plastic chairs. The overhead light buzzes faintly, interrupted only by the occasional sounds of metal doors slamming, inmates shouting. It smells of bleach and steel and sadness. The room has no windows, no clocks, no sense of time. Only the quiet hum of the fluorescent bulb and the hollow ache of waiting. A purgatory of sorts.

My cheeks rise into a smile when I see who’s greeting me. It’s my mother and our old family attorney. My mom looks her usual self. She wears gray slacks with a white blouse and a yellow cable-knit sweater draped around her shoulders. A burst of light in this drab confine.

Tom is as frumpy and adorable as I remember. Wrinkled suit, tie with a stain on it. A round, kind face beneath a mop of black hair. He helped me when Olivia fell and my dad died. He’s my guardian angel.

My mom rises from her chair.

“Oh, darling,” she whispers, brushing her hand against my cheek. “I’m so sorry. We’re going to figure this out. I promise.”