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Peg Herring
Category:
Mystery/Suspense
Publisher: MysterEbooks
Type: Fiction
Pages: 188
Copyright: 2011
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
When a long-time friendship dies, whose fault is it?
Although she's decades past junior high, Caroline Batzer finds herself snubbed more and more often by her best friend. At first confused, she is later stunned to learn that Sarah Leigh has betrayed her in a way she would never have suspected. In an all-too-public setting, Caroline airs her anger at the woman everyone else in town considers saintly. When Sarah disappears soon afterward, it looks like Caroline murdered her. Desperately she tries to figure out who else could have done it—Sarah’s philandering husband? Her useless son?
Caroline’s nightmare is just beginning, because the people responsible for what happened to Sarah now come after her, and they don’t care how rough things get.
Excerpt
Darkness masked the face of the terrified woman beside me, but her labored breathing matched my own. Stumbling blindly through the dark woods, we ran into tree trunks and tripped over mounds, each of us occasionally gasping from pain at the lash of a branch across the face or stubbing a toe on an unseen rock or root. I sensed her waning spirit and flagging energy. I was not much better off. And why should I care if she fell behind?
We had to stop running soon. For one thing, we had pushed ourselves farther than I would have thought possible for two women in the fifth decade of life. In addition, our hippo-like crashing through the woods made so much noise that our flight had to be easy for pursuers to track. And worst of all, we had no idea where we were going. We could end up circling back to the very people we now sought desperately to avoid.
Suddenly my path was blocked, and I stopped, breath rasping in my chest. A tree lay before me, broken off halfway up, probably by lightning. Its jagged trunk pointed into the sky, but its branches swept the ground, held in place by a splinter of raw white wood that caught what little moonlight there was. My companion blundered into my back, unaware that I had stopped. Her push sent me forward a step, and I stumbled into the still-springy jumble of branches. As I caught my balance, my foot felt the edge of a depression. I thumbed the flashlight on for the briefest moment, beam angled downward. The ruined treetop hung over a gully, and the thick layers of dying branches hid an empty space beneath. My belabored brain grasped at an idea. The safety we might find there was better than nothing.
In low tones, I communicated my thought. There was no objection, in fact no response at all, from the dim form beside me. I navigated my way through the branches and into the hole, sharp spikes catching at my clothes and gouging my bare arms. Once past the worst of them, I held the main branches aside for my companion. We found ourselves in an earthy space just wide enough for the two of us, a nest half filled with old leaves that were almost compost. With the tree’s branches above us, the surrounding depth felt protective. We lay down, struggling to quiet our exhausted lungs and staring into the black around us as if through sheer will we could see danger approaching.
In minutes, we heard them. One was some distance off but noisy. The nearer one moved stealthily, listening for movement. When I realized how close he was, I could have reached out and touched the fluorescent white strip on his sneaker.
The two men took their time. Each second’s passing felt like a year off my life. Any noise meant death in a place where no one would find our bodies for years. Our only hope for life was complete silence.
“They’re here somewhere,” the noisy one called.
“Quiet.” The reply was barely a sound.
The men stood for a long time, waiting for us to betray ourselves with a shift, cough, or cry. Some say it is impossible for two women to keep silent for long, but neither of us so much as twitched. While my body remained tense and still, my mind worked overtime.
How had this happened to me, middle-aged Caroline Batzer, the Bilbo Baggins of Aldridge, Michigan? The fact that I was hiding from murderers, desperate men who intended that I breathe my last before this night was over, was because of a woman who had once been such a close friend that I could never have imagined she would turn on me. Because of her, I had suffered confusion and stress, told the biggest lie of my life, was suspect in a mysterious disappearance, and was now a candidate for murder victim. I had a long time to think about the situation as we sat petrified, our legs cramping in that dank almost-grave. What had I done to deserve this? Until two years ago, I had been Sarah Elizabeth Leigh’s best friend.
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