Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
He lets out a long breath, looking me in the eye one last time. “I mean it, Low. You tell him, or I will.”
Then he tips that same imaginary hat at me and turns away, tippin’ it again as he passes Sassy and opens the door, leaving all the tension he created behind him.
“Well,” Sassy says, “I don’t know what that was about, but it was a thing, wasn’t it?”
I exhale, gather myself, force everything Grimm just said out of my mind, and smile at Sassy. “It was nothing. I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve got a million things to discuss. Let me introduce you to my assistant.”
Then I walk over to her, offer her my arm, and escort her over to Rosie. Who immediately takes over, chattin’ a mile a minute, so I can pull myself together.
I have always known that this loose end would come back to haunt me. I’ve always known it.
But it has been so long now that I guess I just… believed, maybe, that there would be no consequences for what I did on the one-year anniversary of my mama’s birthday after her death.
The original get-drunk day. The very first one-night-stand day. The day I made the biggest mistake of my life.
After Lowyn leaves, I go to the front window and watch her walk off. I wish she didn’t have work. I would like nothing more than for her to take the day off and to fuck her silly all morning.
That’s one thing I hate about the Revival. It takes up your whole weekend. And yeah, it was fun. But I get tired of crowds. Sometimes you just want to be alone with your pretty girlfriend and not have to put on a show for strangers.
I will have to talk to Jim Bob. But not now. I just want to forget about all that crap.
I take my coffee out to the back porch where Mercy is, checkin’ on her. She’s just sleeping like she hasn’t got a care in the world. Then I remember our little midnight treasure hunt. I left that piece of paper in the metal box down in the basement. And since I’m right here, just a few feet away, I go back inside, open the door, go down the stairs, grab the paper, and come back up. Then I take it and my coffee back into the kitchen so I can look a little closer.
Last night it looked like a bunch of scribbles, but this morning, with more light and a clearer head, I can tell that it’s something like a crude map. In fact, at least one of those chicken scratches looks kinda like a skull.
After a couple more seconds, I come to the conclusion that this map starts at my house.
Well, Lowyn’s house.
And then I’m thinking that whatever this piece of paper is, it belonged to my daddy. He drew this map.
I look up and around, then down at the map, trying to orient it. It begins at the back door.
“Hmm.” Do I want to fuck with this? Or should I just leave this alone?
If Jim Bob had not told me that there was some big-deal secret waiting for me at the end of my one-year contract that has something to do with my baby sister’s would-be kidnapper—i.e. the man I fuckin’ killed—well, I might leave it alone.
But I already know that the secret is most certainly related to that and so there is no way in hell I am not gonna follow this map to see where it takes me.
I go upstairs, pull on some jeans and a t-shirt, slip my feet into my work boots, grab my jacket, and then go out the back door to Mercy.
She hops up, wagging and smiling at me.
I show her the map, then tell her, “Seek,” just to see if this map was the reason she wanted to go outside last night after we found it.
She sticks her nose up into the wind, sniffin’. If Mercy was trained for cadavers, and Amon said she was even if she did flunk out, then she tracks scents through the air as well as the ground. This map has been in the basement for God knows how long, so I’m not expecting much, but she did bark last night. And I really do think that she smelled something relating to this map, or maybe the key that opened the metal box.
Mercy looks at me, then at the woods in the back of the house, and takes off in that direction.
“Well, fuckin’ A.” I shake my head, but I follow.
The hillside behind the house is muddy from yesterday’s downpour, so I grab a stick to help pull myself up the trail—which really isn’t much of a trail, since I haven’t come up this way for nearly two decades, but it’s easy enough to see it once I start looking. Plus, wherever Mercy is heading, it seems to be along the path.