Love Gone by Elizabeth Nelson Read Free Book Online Page B

strange lying
there unmoving. She’d never seen Mac so still. He was always a blur
of energy. This stillness scared her more than anything.
    “Is he okay?” she called, fighting her
way out of her friend’s tight embrace and rushing toward the door,
following them as they carried Mac to the waiting
ambulance.
    “Is my husband going to be okay?” She
screamed. Why would no one look at her?
    She tried to get into the ambulance
with him, but the attendant gently blocked her path.
    “We need you to follow us to St.
John’s in your car ma’am. We’re doing everything we can, but we
need room to move around.”
    Her neighbor Lisa, Bill’s wife
appeared at her side.
    “C’mon Faith. Bill and I are driving
you and Liam. We’ll be right behind them the whole time. C’mon
honey.”
    She let herself be pulled away from
the ambulance toward Lisa’s car. Inside she could see the medical
team hovering over the stretcher. Watched them attaching tubes and
IV’s and starting some kind of pumping action.
    She wanted to be inside that car with
him. Mac would never have left her. Would never have let anyone
tell him he couldn’t be with her or Liam if they were in
trouble.
    “I’m sorry Mac,” she whispered to the
departing ambulance. “I love you. Don’t leave me.”

CHAPTER 8

    At the hospital she sat huddled with
Liam and a distraught Lisa and Bill on the hard, plastic chairs in
the ICU waiting room. It was a depressing place with sick colored
walls and flickering fluorescent lights casting a deathly pall over
everyone.
    Why must hospital waiting rooms look
like the most depressing places on earth, Faith thought as she
stared numbly at the same dark, dirty crack in the tiled floor in
front of her. Of all the places where a cheery décor could actually
do some good, she couldn’t think of anyplace more deserving than
the waiting room. The worst thing about the waiting room was the
sheer literal truth of the name. Waiting. Room. All you could do
was wait. It was the most hopeless feeling in all the
world.
    “Who were those people?” Bill wondered
out loud…not for the first time since they’d arrived.
    The police had been there, asking the
same question, “why?”
    In fact, they were probably still
there somewhere, waiting to see if Mac woke up from the coma. Just
waiting, like everyone else.
    Faith merely shook her head. Liam
didn’t move a muscle beside her. She had already explained what she
knew when they’d arrived and found out that Mac was in a coma. He
was being tended to in an ICU unit. There was nothing she could do
for him but wait.
    The police had questioned her and Liam
extensively about the attack. She told them about the accident. It
was all she knew. Their fender bender seemed like it had happened a
million years ago, but had actually just been hours earlier. She
told them about Emily and how the psycho had called himself “Mr.
Asher” when he’d been terrorizing her behind the closed door of
Liam’s bedroom. She didn’t have anything else to tell them.
Couldn’t believe it herself. Liam just shook his head speechlessly
when they’d turned to him for answers and clung to her hand like he
hadn’t since he’d been a little boy.
    “We’ll find them ma’am,” the police
had told her, but the blank look in their eyes told her they
wouldn’t.
    Alaska was a big, empty space. It was
a place that criminals and innocent people alike came to hide. It
was a state meant for escaping, and with no other clues to go on
the town’s small police force would never find the father and
daughter. Not a police force that was used to breaking up bar
fights and arresting drunken drivers. They didn’t have much call to
do anything more serious, there wasn’t a lot of serious crime in
Ketchikan. Until there was.
    A sharp pain in her womb made her gasp
and clutch her hands to her stomach. Lisa, Bill’s wife, sat up
alert.
    “Are you okay Faith? Is the baby
kicking?” She asked, concerned.
    “I don’t