Page 70 of The Lovely and the Lost

Sound. To my left.I turned on my heels. Willing my heart to hush in my chest, I prepared to bolt, but when the sound made its way to my ears a second time, I recognized it as human, young.

Alive.

Saskia lay down on her stomach and poked her nose under the brush. I knelt, blood rushing in my ears, and a pair of muddy brown eyes stared back at me.

There, beneath a makeshift canopy made of dirt and wood, lying on her stomach, was the missing girl.

“Bella?” I kept my voice soft and made no move to touch her.

The little girl stared at me, her face smudged with dirt, her expression eerie and calm. “The angel said someone would come for me.”

Her voice was high-pitched but coarse. Moving slowly and keeping my hands where she could see them, I withdrew a bottle of water from my pack. I opened it and set it on the ground in front of her.

Seconds passed before she sat up, still hunched beneath the canopy’s branches. First one hand closed around the bottle, then the other. Her eyes never left mine as she lifted it to her mouth.

“Slowly,” I told her, unsure how dehydrated she was.

After a moment, she lowered the bottle, her hands still wrapped tightly around it.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. So far, Bella had been calmer than I would have expected. I didn’t want to spook her, but I needed to know what I was dealing with.

Her expression impossible to read, the child answered my question by sticking out her right leg. She pulled up the mud-caked pajama bottoms she was wearing and showed me a long scratch that ran the length of her shin. The wound looked clean, all things considered.

It had already started to heal.

“Anyplace else?” I asked her.

Bella shook her head.

I heard movement to my right a second before Saskia took up position in front of Bella. The combination of movement and sound reminded me that we had no way of knowing if Bella was alone out here.

No way of knowing when the person who’d taken her would be back.

“Bella,” I said carefully, when she didn’t shrink back from Saskia’s presence, “the person who took you—”

“Took me?” Bella held the water bottle closer. “No one took me.” For the first time since we’d found her, she smiled. “My angelsavedme.”

“Saved you,” I repeated. Someone had hauled Bella all over this mountain. Someone had built the rudimentary shelter she was sitting under now.

“Mommy and Daddy said I wasn’t supposed to wander off.” Bella looked down, pulling her legs tight to her chest. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.”

She shivered. I knew the chilling shadow of memory when I saw it. Without much thought, I pulled closer to her.

“I wanted to see the river.” Bella squeezed her eyes shut. “The side was slick. It didn’tlookslick.…”

“You’re okay,” I murmured. “You got out.” I found myself thinking back to her earlier claim. “The person who took you—”

“My angel.”

“Your angel…saved you.” I brought my hand very close to Bella’s but left it to her to close the distance. “You fell in the river, and this…angel…pulled you out.”

“I was so cold.” Bella opened her eyes, but I knew instinctively that she couldn’t see me. She was seeing something else. “The angel wrapped me in a blanket. The angel built a fire.”

I had no doubts that Bella’s “angel” was a person—just like I had no doubts that the person in question had been dodging the authorities for days.

“This angel,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Why didn’t they bring you back to camp?”

“Mommy and Daddy left.” Bella’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I was bad, and they left, and the angel promised to take care of me until they got back.”