Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
Oakwood Park
Dana Jo’s heart raced with panic as she sprinted back toward her car. She’d heard predators sometimes used animals or candy to lure children toward them. What if that was the reason Lou Lou had approached the woods? That little girl Iris was still missing, possibly kidnapped.
Pangs of fear shot through her chest like a knife, but she exhaled and kept running, until she reached her SUV. “Lou Lou, don’t ever wander off like that again,” she scolded as she planted kisses all over her little girl’s confused face.
Lou Lou didn’t understand the dangers in the world, but Dana Jo certainly did. They were everywhere. On the playground, in the yard, the staircase at home, the oven in the kitchen. Worse, pedophiles and violent people lurked in the shadows.
A shiver ripped through her, and she gently eased her daughter into her car seat and fastened her seatbelt.
“Play, Mama,” Lou Lou chirped.
“We’ll play when we get home,” Dana Jo said. “But it’s time for us to go.”
“Picnic,” Lou Lou cried as she banged her feet against the car seat.
Lou Lou poked out her bottom lip in a pout and Dana Jo snatched a packet of goldfish crackers, ripped open the package and handed them to her daughter. “Here, baby, have a snack on the way home.”
Her daughter dug into the bag of crackers, the playground temporarily forgotten. If only Dana Jo could forget, but panic still had a stranglehold on her.
Reminding herself that her little girl was safe now, Dana Jo closed the rear car door and slid into the driver’s seat.
But when she glanced back at the playground, she saw a dark figure staring at her from the edge of the woods. Her chest tightened, and a chill rippled up her spine.
Was that her paranoia again? Ever since she’d been abducted from her car and left for dead in the woods, she searched faces everywhere she went, wondering if she was looking at her attacker. If he was watching her. Coming back to finish what he’d started.
She narrowed her eyes in an attempt to distinguish the man’s face, but couldn’t see it.
A second later, he disappeared back into the woods.
But fear choked her. He had been there when Lou Lou was running toward the woods.
Was he lurking at the park to steal her baby?