Page 46 of Insidious Threats
“You’re being melodramatic, now. Armageddon? I don’t think he’s foretold the final battle between good and evil.”
“I do. Read your note again.”
“He was unhinged.”
She gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re scared.”
“I’m notscared,” he scoffed.
“No? You should be. I am. I’ve had a glimpse into how Landon’s mind worked. And maybe he wasn’t the most mentally balanced person. But he was smart, and, more important, he had a high tolerance for risk and viewed unintended consequences as an acceptable outcome if it meant making the world incrementally safer. So, if he was scared—and it sure sounds like he was—you should be, too.”
She sat back, crossed her ankles, and pressed her lips together as if to indicate she’d said her piece and she was done. He turned his attention away from her, staring down at the leather-bound journal in his hands. There was nothing to say to her. Not because she was wrong, but because she was right.
She cleared her throat, but he kept his gaze locked on the page.
A moment later, Jordana burst into the room with August in tow.
23
The crappy little town with the amazing apple pies was further from the airport than Amanda had estimated. Or she’d gotten lost in those freaking dormant cornfields as she’d thwacked through dead cornstalks. Or both.
She guessed she’d been running for well over two hours. Maybe three. There was every likelihood she was going in circles. She hadn’t passed by the shed at the farm where she’d first sought shelter, which was encouraging. But then again, she hadn’t seen any other structures either, and every field looked identical to the last.
She stumbled across a gully and sat down heavily on a tree stump to catch her breath. Raw blisters had formed on her big toes and rubbed against her socks with every stride. Her warm thigh-length coat had been more than sufficient for her short trips outside the hotel and office building yesterday, but it wasn’t up to the job today. The cold had seeped into her bones so thoroughly that she no longer shivered.
Is it possible to be too cold to shiver?
The entirety of her survival experience had come from a wilderness leadership program her parents had shipped her off to one summer when she was in high school. She had a vague memory of the stages of hypothermia and thought the lack of shivering might be a sign that she was moving from the first stage to the second. Or she could be entirely wrong.
Pie.
Shereallywanted that pie. She could taste it. The promise of mouth-watering apple pie had become her new primary goal. Forget starting a new life, free of Leith Delone and his skeletons. She wanted pie.
Just another fifteen minutes,she promised herself as she massaged her sore feet through her socks. If she didn’t come across the town after fifteen minutes, she’d take shelter in the first spot she found. Even if that meant digging a hole and crawling into it. She was pretty sure she’d seen that in a movie.
If Amanda hadn’t been experiencing symptoms of moderate hypothermia, she would have had the mental acuity to remember that confused thinking was, like the cessation of shivering, a symptom of moderate hypothermia. But how does a person recognize a decline in her own cognitive ability? If she’d realized her situation, she’d have appreciated the irony of it.
Instead, she trudged, zombie-like, down another hill and up a crest. She thought she heard the rumble of trucks driving at speed, and hope flickered in her chest. A few moments later, she spotted the tall, lighted sign forErma’s Dinertowering over a long low aluminum-sided structure.
She raised her fist in triumph and whooped. From its perch in a bare tree, a fat crow squawked in response. Amanda’s body reached deep into some reserve that it should have exhausted hours ago and produced a final glucose-fueled burst of energy. She laughed as she sprinted down the hill and out of the field.
When she reached the berm along the side of the highway, she stopped and stared across at the diner to confirm that it was really real. Her lungs burned and her legs shook, but she’d done what she’d set out to do. Just as she always did.
Amanda turned her head to the left, then the right, and then back to the left to confirm there was a break in the flow of traffic before she darted out to cross the two-lane highway. She’d almost made it to the dividing line when the eighteen-wheeler barreled around the blind curve on the opposite side of the road.
Later, the driver, Seb Boardman out of Dayton, Ohio, would swear she stutter-stepped forward, which is what caused him to swerve off the road and onto the strip of grass in front of Erma’s Diner. He explained at the inquest that he’d avoided slamming on his brakes because he was hauling a full load of washers and dryers, which might’ve shifted, possibly toppling his big rig onto its side. His vantage point from the narrow shoulder gave him a front-row seat to the carnage that occurred when the small woman—who, at first glance, he’d taken for a little girl—jerked back into the westbound lane and was hit at full speed by a dark subcompact.
The force of the impact launched the woman airborne. She flew across the eastbound lane and bounced off the windshield of Seb’s truck, leaving a large red smear down the front when she crumpled to the ground. Through the blood, he watched the car that had hit her accelerate and careen out of sight. He knew before he even climbed out of his cab that there was no way the victim had survived, and he was right.
Shaken, Seb wasn’t certain about the make and model—maybe a Honda Fit, maybe a Chevy Sonic—or the color—might have been dark gray, might have been black. He’d managed to get a partial plate that the state police would be unable to run down and had caught a glimpse of blonde hair on the driver. But the one thing Seb Boardman knew for sure was the driver had made no attempt to stop after hitting the Jane Doe and possibly had even sped up before the impact, not after.
More than a year later, a navy blue Ford Fiesta with significant front-end damage and West Virginia plates matching the partial provided by the truck driver would be found by engineers draining a lake in a state park over the Maryland border. The car would be traced back to a stolen vehicle report filed the day of the accident by a worker at a service station two towns over from where the hit-and-run happened.
It’s possible that trace blood or DNA evidence might have survived the lengthy submersion in fresh water. But by then, what was left of Amanda Teale-James (which wasn’t much at all) had been buried at county expense in the nondenominational cemetery just three miles from the cornfields where she’d spent her last hours. The commissioners didn’t see the point in exhuming her, and so she remained a Jane Doe.
24
August handed the drive back to Leo with a disappointed expression. “Man, I’d love to help you, but you’re right. If we try to brute force crack into that thing, the data on it will self-destruct. You’re sure you don’t even have a guess at what the PIN would be?”
