Page 2 of Tangled Past
Asa stepped toward the child, not sure what to do, not wanting to leave his father’s side.
Before he’d taken a second step, a voice came from the shadows to his left, low and cold. Distorted. Unrecognizable.
“You never saw this, kid.”
Asa turned toward the voice. A man stood just outside the beam of light. All shadow. Calm. Measured.
“You take three steps back. You run home. You lock the door, and you forget you ever came here.”
The words didn’t carry a direct threat. That made them worse.
The man didn’t raise a weapon, but Asa heard it. A click. The kind his dad had taught him to recognize.
Asa backed away. One step. Two. His gaze collided with the frightened little girl’s eyes, silently begging him to stay.
“Don’t look back,” the man said. “Get out of here.”
Asa obeyed.
He ran down the path. Briars tore at his clothes. A branch cut across his cheek. His boots sank in the mud.
He raced toward the nearest neighbor’s place and tore up the porch steps. Asa pounded on the door with everything he had left. Mr. Pike opened it, wide-eyed, and Asa collapsed into his arms.
???
The birth of a new day pushed past the rain clouds, lighting the sky. Hope Island was waking up to a different kind of storm. The next few hours passed in a blur of police vehicles moving in and out of the Hardesty farm while Asa waited with Mr. Pike near the barn. Sirens wailed. Yellow police tape fluttered in the rainy morning.
They found Raymond Dutton in the barn, just as Asa had left him, and in the same barn, the little girl. She wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t move. Just held her rabbit and rocked.
She had no name. No memory of what happened.
The police car drove away with her in the back seat. Her eyes met Asa’s once as she passed, and then she was gone.
Soon, so was Asa. The ferry horn moaned as Asa and his mother’s brother, Uncle Jonas, rode across the bridge separating Hope Island and the nightmare that Asa would carry with him forever.
The badge. The blood. The voice in the dark—“You never saw this, kid.”
Yet he had seen it.
He remembered.
And one day, he would come back.
