"Bianca!" Sam shouts and runs toward her.
Her eyes are wild as she looks at him. He gets to her and rests a
hand on the girl's back. "She just showed up at home," Bianca
says. "I work a later shift today, and when I was leaving for work,
she just stumbled up into the yard and collapsed.
Oh, god. What if I had my regular shift?
What if I hadn't been there when she got there?"
She turns her sobbing face into Gloria's neck.
"Why didn't you bring her to the emergency room?" Sam ask.
"She's softer in the children's wing. The ER has doors that open right to
the outside. That if he comes looking for her?"
It's the type of logic that only makes sense because of the situation,
but we aren't going to argue with her. A doctor runs up, and she hands
Gloria over to him. The little girl groans, and her eyes flutter open.
"Mama," she says weakly.
"I'm right here, baby. I'm not going anywhere. The doctors are going
to take care of you," Bianca whispers through tears.
The doctor and a nurse rush her into a nearby room with Bianca close
behind them.
"What do we do now?" I ask.
"We need to talk to her. Until we figure out what this clue is supposed
to mean, we don't really have anything to go on. We have to just wait,"
Sam says.
There's a small waiting room off the side, and he and I go into it.
He pulls up the picture of the show again and stares at it.
"Click on the image and make it bigger. Maybe there's something in it
that we're not noticing," I suggest.
He fills the screen with the image, and we continue to stare at it. I
start in one of the top corners of the image and inch my eye across it,
taking in every tiny piece of it individually rather than the entire image.
By the time I get to the bottom corner, I haven't found anything new. It's
just the shoe with the words written across it.
"It's on a track. Like a running track," Sam says. "But I can't tell
where."
"It's outside," I say. "The way the light is hitting it looks like sunlight."
"That means it wasn't taken this morning. It was too cloudy."
"Where are there outdoor running tracks in Sherwood? The middle
and high school have them, right?"
YOU ARE READING
The Girl that vanished
Mystery / ThrillerA ten year old girl has vanished on her way home from camp. And things took a turn for the worse when another child, a child that Emma knows, goes missing. Disappearances death and tragedies have followed Emma Griffin throughout her childhood. Her o...
