World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters Read Free Book Online Page B

desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.
    There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.
    I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. Inthe center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.
    When I’ve completed the grid I stand for a long time under the flags with my hands on my hips, rain in my eyes like tears, rain dribbling down my nose and chin. There is a level of tiredness where your body feels tender, like a bruise. Your throat hurts; your eyes sting. The hunger intensifies it—you feel shriveled, sort of, bent, burnt, hardened. Like the crust of something, the rind.
    Budgeted for today I’ve got three little bags of the honey-roasted peanuts, plus a green apple from a basket we took from a Residence Inn in Penfield. I eat one of the apples rapidly, like a horse. I almost eat one of the bags of peanuts and then I decide to save it for later.
    Two overlapping trails of blood; two passages down the corridor; one going out and one coming back.
    Lily is attacked inside the kitchenette. She runs, blood singing out of her neck, perpetrator chasing after, and manages to lose him in the woods. Collapses in the clearing where we found her. Assailant goes back inside, blood still dripping off his three knives. Hangs them up and disappears.
    Disappears, though, what does that mean? It means he goesunderground. Through the hole in the floor of the garage.
    Right? Detective Palace, isn’t that right?
    Right, except how does the determined and murderous perpetrator fail to track down a defenseless, hundred-pound girl, stumbling through the woods and bleeding from the neck?
    Right—except why, and how, is he juggling three knives?
    I stare up at the sky and clench my teeth and fight back a fresh wave of panic and guilt and desperation because I will probably never know. This mystery, along with my sister’s, will remain unsolved forever. It
is
the right place, the police station in Rotary, Ohio, it’s the right place but now it’s the wrong
time
, we’re too late, we didn’t get here in time to stop this girl from being attacked and we didn’t get here in time to stop my sister from slipping down through the earth and away. My fault. All my fault.
    I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.
    *  *  *
    It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really