Hannah Alexander - A Killing Frost

He laid it all bare to God. And then he continued to pray for mercy.

Doriann’s throat hurt, and she’d lost the sound of Humphrey’s howl. She couldn’t scream anymore. She sat huddled in the center of the boat, freezing.

Aunt Renee was always reminding them not to give up praying for something they really wanted-if they thought it was God’s will. So was it God’s will that Doriann get out of this river alive?

“Please, God, take care of me. I want to go home.” She felt tears again, and sniffed to keep from crying, because that just made her colder.

This was the first time in Doriann’s life that she was homesick. She loved to travel, to camp, see the country with her grandparents and vacation at their time-share. Once, she’d gone to England with Mom and Dad for a symposium. She loved adventure. But not now.

The boat bumped into something hard, jolting her. This was not the kind of traveling she liked. Oh, to be home listening to Mom and Dad talking about an exciting case, competing with each other over who had done the most surgeries that day, and who had engaged in the most compassionate doctor-patient heart-to-heart. They were really big on having a great bedside manner.

The boat bounced against something again, and then just sort of slid into some bushes. Leaves brushed across her face, and she jerked away with a cry. What now?

The boat turned again with the force of the river, but the clinging brush proved to be too much for the current. She had hit a shore of some kind.

She looked up to find trees hovering over her, the deep gloom of shadows and darkness. She’d landed somewhere. But where?

Jama was drying her hair with Zelda’s blow-dryer in the bedroom when her cell phone rang. It was Renee. As Jama listened to the news from her foster sister, she felt a cold vise squeeze her.

“Doriann might be on a boat?” The screams. The howling. “And you said there was an animal involved?”

“And of course Tyrell didn’t call and tell you. I told him to-”

“Renee, call the FBI. Tell them I think I heard her. It couldn’t have been fifteen minutes ago. If she’s on the river, she could be more than a mile away by now. They’ll need to set up a barricade quickly. Meanwhile, do you know of anyone in River Dance with a boat?”

“Why?”

“Never mind.” Disconnecting, Jama opened dresser drawers until she found some of Zelda’s old scrubs. When she pulled them on, they were a little tight, but they’d have to do. Thank goodness Zelda hadn’t washed the jacket. The gun was still in it, as well as Jama’s flashlight.

She pulled on some dry socks, her wet shoes, and then rushed out of the room, nearly colliding with Zelda in the hallway.

“You still up?” Zelda asked sleepily. Then she looked at Jama more closely. “Hey, what are you up to, young lady?”

“I think I heard Doriann just a few minutes ago,” Jama told her. “Who has a motorboat on the water right now?”

“Water?”

“The river. I’ll explain later. Do you know of any-”

“Sure. Phil Carraway’s here for a week on a fishing trip. He’s camping down by the river.” Zelda gave directions. “He’s got a bass boat with a trolling motor. Took me out on it the other day. So quiet, it wouldn’t even scare the fish.”

“Good. The FBI are on their way,” Jama said as she headed for the door. “But this can’t wait.”

“Who’s going with you? Did you call Tyrell?”

“No time.”

Zelda followed her to the front porch. “Don’t you dare go after them by yourself!”

“Tyrell is sure to know by now. I’m not leaving Doriann in danger any longer if I can stop it.” She ran down the steps, across the flagstone path to the street, and kept running as she followed the directions Zelda had given her. She only wished she had the powerful beam of Tyrell’s flashlight.

Tyrell stared at one passage that had been both highlighted and underlined. It would make sense that Mom and Dad would both be drawn to this particular set of words. “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?”

Paul had some straight things to say to the Galatians.

He also had some good things to say to the Corinthians. “Love is patient, love is kind…keeps no record of wrongs.”

And John’s “Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth” really hit home.

He closed his eyes as those passages made him ache.

Who was he to judge? He’d always excused his self-righteous attitude with the birth order. The oldest did tend to take responsibility, to expect more from everyone, and tended to have difficulty forgiving.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t specifically noted anywhere by the psychologists of the day, but it was an excuse he’d used more than once.

Sure, he was so good about excusing himself, but when it came to others, he tended to run out of excuses quickly.

He paged on through the Bible, but before he could read farther, Renee called again on his cell.

“I think Jama’s up to something,” she said. And then she explained.

He had his shoes on before she finished. “Did she tell you what she was doing?” But he already knew. “I’ll talk to you later.” He flipped off the phone, grabbed his jacket and ran out the door.

Doriann stood at the top of a rise and peered through the trees that surrounded her. There was water everywhere. She could see the moon reflecting from it.

She was on an island in the middle of the river! There were lights upriver, but no one would hear her tonight.

She sank to the ground on a pile of last year’s leaves. “I’m never getting home.”

It was a lot warmer here on land than it had been in the boat, and so she reached for some more leaves, gathering them around her like a blanket. If she could make it to morning, she could call to somebody passing by. “It’ll be okay.”

She had all the leaves around her, piled as high as possible, and then she curled herself into the middle of the mound. She closed her eyes and listened to her teeth chatter.

It was a few minutes before she heard another sound. She clenched her jaws and listened. An engine. The quiet hum of a motor.

She peered around the island until she saw a shape in the water. Long and dark. A boat pulling alongside her rowboat. No lights, no one talking.

Someone was coming for her. Someone who didn’t want to be seen or heard.

The sound of feet jumping to shore…grunts of pain. Cussing. A man.

Clancy had found her.

Jama guided Phil Carraway’s sleek new bass boat through the river of ink, his admonitions ringing in her ears about what he would do to her if she damaged his baby. She directed Phil’s wonderful, big, bright searchlight across the surface of the water, and understood why the man felt such passion for the vessel-it handled like a dream.

“Doriann!” she called. It was likely that, if those had been Doriann’s screams earlier, she would be much farther downriver by now, but after everything that had happened in the past seventeen hours, Jama wasn’t discounting anything.

“Doriann!” Her voice echoed against the cliffs to her left.

She used only the quiet, electric trolling motor so she could hear any sounds over it. She didn’t want to go too fast and miss something.

“Doriann!”

Silence, except for the soft hum of the motor…and then a sudden scream out of the darkness.

Ahead and to the right.

Jama switched on the gas-powered motor and ran it full tilt across the water in the direction of the scream.

Tyrell backed his father’s boat and trailer down the ramp by the campground at the edge of town. It was tricky for one person to put a boat into the water, but it could be done with a long enough tether. He’d done it many times before.