Page 90 of Deadly Little Scandals
I could smell the dirt all around me, but I couldn’t feel it against my skin. I was lying on my back, my eyes skyward. I couldn’t feel anything except for my face.
I couldn’t move.
“Sawyer, are you there?”
Turning my head felt like swimming through cement. I only managed a slight movement, not enough to even brush my cheek against the dirt below me. “I’m here.”
“I can’t feel my feet,” Sadie-Grace told me, her voice high, the words bursting out at rapid speed. “Or my hands. Or my elbows…”
To say that Sadie-Grace was not the optimal person to wake up drugged and halfway buried alive next to would have been an understatement. She was 50 percent uncontrollable babbling and 50 percent utterly misplaced optimism.
When Aunt Olivia came to check on us, I fully expected Sadie-Grace to start chatting away and blow our cover, but she stayed quiet. I heard the sound of Aunt Olivia moving up above—and then the sound of a shovel hitting dirt.
I waited for her to toss it in the hole, waited for my proper, prim, perfectionist aunt to properly, primly, perfectly bury us alive.
But she didn’t.
After a minute or two, she dropped the shovel and left, and I resumed my job of managing the situation—and Sadie-Grace. The entire time, I silently reminded myself, over and over again,Aunt Olivia called Ellen “Mama.”
I had no idea what to make of that, and as I listened to Sadie-Grace insisting that the glass was half full and that she could somehow give herself a boost out of this godforsaken hole, I tried to make any of this make sense.
We’d gone to my grandmother’s twin to ask her about Ana’s baby. Lily had been there when we’d arrived, and by the time we’d gotten midway through our conversation with Ellen, Aunt Olivia had interrupted.
Not my aunt. If she’s Ellen’s daughter, she’s not my aunt.
I thought back to the picture I’d seen on the fridge in the Two Arrows house: Ellen, with her six children. The oldest was a girl, one who closely resembled Ellen—and Lillian.
And Aunt Olivia.The picture was old enough and the resolution crappy enough that I hadn’t been able to tellhowclose the resemblance between Ellen’s daughter and Aunt Olivia was.
What were the chances that they looked identical?
“I’m not leaving you.” Sadie-Grace was stubborn. She’d made her way out of the hole, but didn’t want to leave me. Unfortunately, whatever drug we’d been given was wearing off more slowly for me. The feeling was just now starting to return to my body. Even if Sadie-Grace could somehow get me out of what amounted to an open grave, until I could shake the numbness, until I could really move—I’d just slow her down.
“You have to.” I willed her to listen to me. “I have no idea where we are, but you need to be somewhere else when she gets back.”
The hole was significantly lonelier without Sadie-Grace. I had too much time to think about the fact that I might not get out of here.
About all the things I might never get to say.
I forced my arms to move. The movement hurt. I’d never been so grateful for pain in my entire life.It only hurts if you can feel it. I can feel my arms. The legs are getting there.
Sadie-Grace had left me propped up. Trying to shift my weight sent me facedown into the dirt. I managed to roll, all too aware that if I’d ended up facedown when Aunt Olivia—or whoever the hell she was—had tossed us down here, I probably would have suffocated.
Who knew what could happen still?
Sadie-Grace will get help.I struggled to my knees, trying not to really think about the fact that I was pinning my future survival on Sadie-Grace Waters, who had once told me, in all seriousness, that she thought that fish probably went to a separate heaven, because in regular heaven, people ate fish.
“Sawyer?” In the distance, I heard someone call my name. “Sadie-Grace? Are you guys out there?”
Campbell,I thought.Thank God.
y rescuer quickly proved to enjoy playing hero almost as much as she relished telling me how paranoid and deluded I seemed. And, yes, the story I’d just told Campbell sounded far-fetched, but what about our lives for the past year hadn’t? Regardless, persuading Campbell Ames that I hadn’t lost my mind currently ranked a distant third priority, behind finding Sadie-Grace and getting the hell off of King’s Island before our kidnapper came back.
“Please tell me you have a way off this island.” I leaned my weight into Campbell and allowed her to help me hobble toward the edge of the tree line. I might have been able to walk on my own, but for now, as the last of the drugs wore off, I’d take all the help I could get.
“Of course I have a way off the island,” Campbell retorted. “Do you think I swam here? My Jet Ski’s beached on the east shore.”
I wondered if Sadie-Grace had found it yet. The island wasn’t that big. I’d taken Campbell in the direction my fellow captive had gone, but so far, there was no sign of her. For someone with an utter lack of stealth, Sadie-Grace was surprisingly good at hiding her tracks.
