58
Sheena
The soft green shimmer of monitor screens in the dark hospital room made just enough of a night light that Bonnie and Sage finally fell asleep.
“ Promise those glowy lights won ’ t go off?” was the last thing Bonnie murmured, her voice raspy and quiet, before her eyes closed.
“ I promise. I love you, Bonnie Bear,” I told her, squeezing the one finger I could find that didn ’ t have cuts on it, careful not to jostle her IV.
Her other hand was locked firmly on Sage ’ s arm. The nurses had allowed us to push the two beds next to each other so the girls could still touch.
Sage hadn ’ t tried to pull her arm away once.
I blinked back fresh tears as I stared at the shapes of my beautiful girls.
They were safe.
They were alive.
So were all nine other children on Bus 315.
“ If you ’ d called the police even a minute later, some of those kids would almost certainly be dead.”
Those words—from the chief of police—would haunt me for the rest of my life. The subtext, of course, was that I was a fool for waiting as long as I had. That I ’ d been lucky. So damn lucky.
The CO2 levels in that bunker were close to fifteen percent, based on the severity of the kids’ symptoms. Imminently lethal. They ’ d gotten them out of that hole just in time.
But then again, the luck of those few minutes weren ’ t mine alone to claim.
If Sage hadn ’ t made it to Cherished Hearts to point the police down that quarry road, it still might have been too late.
And if that nineteen-year-old kid—“Mr. Edward,” one of the kidnappers, who ’ d been fired from Bright Beginnings—hadn ’ t started digging with the excavator when he had, the officers, who only had one shovel among them, would have been forced to waste time scrambling to find the excavator keys. Or wouldn ’ t have been able to find them at all.
I didn ’ t know how to feel about that part.
I wanted to hate the punk. I was glad he was spending the night in county jail, awaiting a bail hearing. But all I knew was that when I thought about the number of dominos lined out in each direction from the choices I ’ d made, the choices the kidnappers had made, the choices my daughters had made, it was hard to find my own breath.
If I ’ d called the police the second I got that ransom note, would Sage ’ s hands be bandaged up to her elbows? They were so completely covered in exposed muscle, scrapes, and blood, it looked like the skin had been pulled off like a glove.
Or would she and the other kids have met a different fate?
And if Sage hadn ’ t clawed her way out of that hole over the course of a day, would it have stayed intact instead of caving in?
Or would the kids have been fish in a barrel when the kidnappers realized that their identities might have been exposed through that hole in the painted-over window in the van Sage had told me she ’ d scraped away before they put them in their tomb? I ’ d pieced the events together over the last few hours as Sage eked out the story to the police and FBI from behind her oxygen mask, lying in her hospital bed.
I closed my eyes and let the tears drip down my chapped cheeks.
“ Mom,” Bonnie whimpered in her sleep, and my eyes flew open.
I rubbed her arm, careful not to dislodge the IVs in her hand. “ I ’ m here, baby. You ’ re safe,” I told her, and her eyelids stopped fluttering.
She sighed, and I scooted the hospital chair closer so I could lay my head beside her on the clean white sheets.
The sliver of light beneath the door, coming from the hallway, shifted, and I forced myself not to look at it. There was a guard stationed outside our door at all times.
At first, I thought he was there because the police still hadn ’ t captured the second kidnapper—Andy McQuain—who had been named in the press as soon as the news of the rescue and arrest had broken. But when I left the room briefly to get a cup of coffee another officer escorted me there and back.
I still had answers—and maybe more—to give for my choices. Police had discovered exactly half the cash from my bank runs in a cooler near a lean-to near the bunker. And t hankfully , Ted Barrett’s lawyer had finagled the return of the Bitcoin funds back to the city treasury. The other half of the cash was still in the wind with Andy McQuain. I didn't know if that would be my responsibility to repay. I also didn’t know if I would be facing my own lawsuit from the school district or maybe even the city in the coming months. But I didn’t let myself go down that rabbit hole of worry quite yet.
Only time would tell.
Still, like a moth to a flame, I ’ d read the comments section in the breaking news articles. I hadn ’ t been named as an involved party yet. It was too early for that. The press didn ’ t know most of the details about what had happened tonight, but they would. I knew that some people would call me brave, a hero. Others would say I was the stupidest person alive. Reckless and foolish.
All I knew tonight was that I could hear the soft sound of my daughters breathing beside me.
At one point a detective working on the investigation had told me the driver, Jessa Landon, was under police custody here at the hospital, until they could clear her of any involvement in the kidnapping. But I knew in my heart she had nothing to do with endangering my children.
Sage and Bonnie had both sworn over and over that Ms. Jessa had treated all the kids like her own while they were in that dark, awful bunker. She had been a good mom to all of them.
Even though I hadn ’ t slept for more than twenty-four hours, I knew that sleep was still a long way off for me. Between the coffee and the fear that if I closed my eyes the girls would disappear again, I could barely let myself blink for very long.
So, careful not to make too much noise, I pulled a pen and notepad from my purse on the floor and started a note to the only other person I thought might understand how I felt at that moment.
The white lines swam blurry in front of my tired eyes, but I put the pen to paper and started writing.
Dear Jessa ….