Chapter 16 Cara
SIXTEEN
CARA
Jail is NOT kind to women with fine, brittle hair. Announcing my GoFundMe for @carasloveisgold’s haircare commissary account.
The shadows had lengthened, and the air held the last warm breath of afternoon heat as Cara continued moving uphill, deeper into the woods and farther from the little town.
As she ran, she found herself thinking about Sanjay and Devin.
Sanjay would be distraught when he learned he had aided and abetted a fugitive.
While she suspected Devin would find the whole encounter amusing (and be consoled by the fact that he hadn’t lost his favorite black shirt to a convicted murderer) she hated what the shock might do to sweet Sanjay’s trust in humanity.
She could practically hear Devin telling him, I told you so.
Cara hoped she hadn’t given them anything but nice things to say about her and that they were telling everyone who would listen: Yes, she stole from us, but she was so apologetic. She really looked beaten and bruised. It never occurred to us that she was Cara Campbell.
Devin’s voice continued to echo in her ear as she continued on into the middle of nowhere.
At least, that’s where she thought she had arrived—until she spotted a cluster of dilapidated buildings in a nearby clearing.
It was a fenced compound consisting of two or three old trailers that had been welded together, as well as a Quonset barn and just enough rusty car parts and farm equipment to convince her the rutted, weedy dirt track leading to the compound wasn’t a creek bed but a road.
The gates were padlocked and the whole place looked abandoned.
Creeping forward for a better look, she spotted a watering trough with a spigot inside the open-sided Quonset barn.
The need for water trumped her fear.
She hung back until she was sure there was no movement inside any of the buildings or the Frankensteined mobile-home mansion.
The two trailers in the front were identical except for their colors, one a faded orange-and-white, the other flat gray.
The small opaque slider windows on each side were probably bathrooms. One large window was boarded up and another had closed curtains.
A rough-hewn deck wrapped around the entire front.
Cara sprinted over to a patch of tall grass bordering the back of the barn and crawled on her hands and knees to the gate.
She waited, listening, hearing only the chuckling clucks of chickens somewhere on the property.
Then she climbed over the rusty fence, stepped around some cow or whatever pies, and crept into the barn.
She approached the trough, turned the spigot, and gulped water as fast as she could.
Two brownish, fuzzy sheep were peering at her from the far side of the trough.
“Are you guys thirsty?” she asked, only slightly terrified. Did sheep bite?
She sensed movement behind her and turned. A large black goat with white eyebrows and a chin beard had appeared in the doorway to the open barn, blocking the exit.
She’d done goat yoga, but with adorable baby pygmy goats, not a full-sized goat with yellow teeth and knobby horns.
He gave her a nudge.
“How about a little drink for you, too?” she asked nervously, hoping that was all he wanted.
While the goat put its head into the trough, she stepped over and grabbed a coat—military green and smelling of musk and mutton—from a nearby hook.
Below the jacket hung a pair of giant shears.
Unlike regular scissors, they looked like two large triangular knives attached by a vinyl-coated squeeze grip.
Her next thought surprised her—that she should cut a tuft of wool from one of the sheep, rinse it, and use it for a not-so-sanitary pad.
She’d had worse ideas.
The shears were spring-loaded, and the handles squeezed together like those old-timey hand strengtheners. When they heard the blades scrape together, the sheep bleated loudly and backed away.
But then she had another idea.
The grocery shopper’s video of Cara, capturing her leaving the store like a bandanna’d Bigfoot, would be all over the internet. Feeling one of her hair extensions—which now had the consistency of Barbie doll hair that had been washed with dish soap—she grabbed a hunk and snipped it off.
Cara had made it halfway around her head before she realized the animals had suddenly gone completely quiet.
Then she heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun racking.
She whirled around. Holding the shotgun was a grizzled, muscular man in a yellow tank top with a hissing cobra on the front. He had a shock of wavy gray hair, and a full, long beard to match. The glint in his blue-gray eyes seemed to say he wasn’t afraid to use the weapon.
“I’m not dangerous!” she blurted.
He eyeballed her for a moment.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Because you’re holding my sheep shears, and you look like a Victorian mental patient.”