Chapter 66
KANE
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“I can’t find Amy anywhere,” Mel announces urgently.
Her words knock the air from my lungs.
“Are you sure, love?” Ross asks.
Mel nods. She explains how she spotted the half-finished watermelon on the kitchen counter and assumed Amy needed the bathroom. After ten minutes, Mel went looking for her, but she wasn’t able to find Amy anywhere in the house.
Ross turns to me. “Could Amy have run away?”
That was my first thought, but the notion doesn’t sit right with me. I keep circling back to our conversation this morning. No, Amy won’t have run away.
The decision is made to split up to search the sanctuary. Ross and Mel comb the grounds, while I take Saba with me to check the stables and dispensary.
After fifteen minutes, with each second feeling like an hour to my increasingly frantic imagination, we regroup on the back porch. Ross delivers the news that Nolene is also missing.
Rage pounds inside my skull. It’s several seconds before I can speak. “She’s got Amy.”
If she hurt her...
Mel’s brow furrows in confusion. “Why would Nolene take Amy?”
To get back at me because she knows hurting Amy will hurt me.
My fingers tangle in Saba’s fur. Keeping it as brief as I can, I update them on Saturday’s conversation with Nolene, my dismissal of her from AFD.
“How many times did I warn you about Nolene?” Ross demands angrily. “I knew her militancy would be a problem. She’s always had a disturbing penchant for violence.”
I allow Ross to have his pedestal, leashing my own temper because the dread in my gut mirrors what I see in Ross’s face. Amy is my responsibility. I promised her no harm would come to her.
Ross eventually runs out of steam and stands stiff and silent on the porch.
Mel touches my arm. “You said Nolene is due to leave tonight,” she says, her calm voice penetrating the roaring in my head.
I nod. “She’s booked on a midnight flight to Manila.”
And why I mistakenly assumed Nolene no longer posed a threat to Amy.
“Do you think she’ll be on it?”
After a pause, turning it over in my mind, I say slowly, “Yes, she will. That’s her ticket out of here. Nolene won’t miss that flight.”
“And she won’t be worried about us knowing the details of her flight,” Ross says, “because if we inform on her we implicate ourselves as well.”
I grip the porch’s railing. “So whatever Nolene has planned, she has roughly a three-hour window to work in.”
“What do you think she has planned?” Ross asks me.
Knowing Nolene, it will be something spectacular, something that will make one heck of a statement to animal researchers, to the authorities, to Amy, and to me.
“She’s going to want to write her own ending to this operation,” I say at last.
“You probably know Nolene better than anyone,” Mel points out. “Where would she take Amy?”
Ross and Mel are silent as I attempt to creep into the lunacy of Nolene’s mind and see this unfolding from her perspective.
Minutes tick by.
Finally, it comes to me. “I think I know where Nolene’s taken Amy, and I can guess what she has planned.”