Page 7 of Wicked Promises
Chapter 3
Caleb
Icurl my fingers into the hat on my lap. It’s hard not to critique Eli’s driving. For one, he’s drivingmycar. And we’ve been going in circles for hours. Literally and figuratively.
After he picked me up at the school, the detective sufficiently ditched, he pried the entire story out of me. At some points, I let information go willingly. But others… He slowed the truck, and out my secrets came. It was impulsive, like vomiting. I couldn’t have stopped the words if I tried.
They now float between us, although I’m suffocating.
We have madenoprogress searching for her. We started near the prison. I stood on the corner of an intersection three blocks away, bits of shattered glass under my shoes. The car had already been towed. Robert…
I don’t know. Hospital, I imagine. The detective didn’t mention anything else.
“Just so I’m reading this right… your folks hate Margo because of something her dad did?”
“Basically.” I run my hand over my face.
“And your mom just… left. She dropped you off with Uncle Evil and said, bye honey, see you…?”
“She went upstate. To some sort of… I don’t know. She called it treatment, but I’m pretty sure it was a resort.” I laugh at the memory of her selling it to me that way. That she needed this place to recalibrate and deal with hergrief. “She’d call every once in a while, drop in when she needed more money from my uncle. She’s been around more recently, although I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”
“Oh, Lydia.” Eli scowls. “And meanwhile, you were a punching bag for your uncle.”
“He’s a twisted fucker,” I mutter.
“Karma will get him.”
He’s confident in that assessment, but he’s wrong. Rich men don’t often bow to fate. They’re the exception to the rule. Always have been… always will be. I’d love nothing more than for my uncle to pay for what he’s done, but it just won’t happen.
I feel as helpless as ten-year-old Caleb.
My phone buzzes. I freeze at the text from Unknown, but it’s just a string of numbers.
Followed by…
Unknown
Time’s ticking, Asher.
“What the hell is this?”
Eli pulls over to get a better look. He copies the numbers over into his phone’s web browser, and a location pops up as the first result.
In Rose Hill.
I sit up straighter. “Is this—did they?—?”
“I mean, it looks like it.”
He zooms in on the area. It’s an old, abandoned farm. The owner was a bit crazy, totally believed in the end of the world, and built a bunch of bunkers in one of the pastures. An old haybarn is still standing, and I think the place is littered with rusted equipment.
It would be the perfect place to hide Margo.
“Fuck.” Eli squints at it. “What if we actually find her here?”
Time’s ticking, Unknown said. Which makes me think they did something to Margo. I withhold my fear, my throat closing, while Eli taps on his phone again.
He puts the location into the maps, and it routes us there.