Page 46 of The Souls of Lost Lake

Hanny didn’t answer.

“I don’t know where I’d go,” Ava admitted. She didn’t have a home, a place, a family... She only had, well, if any place was home, it was Lost Lake. But going back there would be running headlong back into a nightmare. A nightmare she’d left behind in hopes she’d never have to return.

Ava tiptoed down the hallway. She had slept little and now midnight was stretching into the longest hour of the night yet. Now she had Preacher Noah Pritchard’s welfare on her conscience, thanks to Hanny. Ruin his ministry? Get the man arrested? It made Ava sick to her stomach just thinking about it. Her jaunt to the church hadn’t really paid off anyway. Aside from learning that her parents had indeed been married, her brothers baptized, and she herself not even mentioned, the church records had done nothing for her.

The floor creaked under Ava’s weight. She halted just outside Noah’s bedroom door, her right foot raised, balancing her weight on her left. Moonlight stretched across the wood floorboards from the window at the far end of the hall. She held her breath.

There was movement behind Noah’s door.

He was supposed to be asleep!

“Ava?” Noah’s voice filtered through the door.

Darn it. She put her foot down. “Yeah?”

“Where are you going?” His voice was muffled. He hadn’t opened his door.

The air thickened around her. Ava swallowed. She could picture the preacher standing in his room, hand on the doorknob, wrestlingwith whether it was even decent enough to open the door or not. Alone. In the parsonage. Unmarried. A single woman accused of murder.

Oh heck, yes! Hanny was right! Ava needed to leave! Forboththeir sakes.

“I’m—” she choked—“I’m leavin’.”

There was a slight thud on the door, as if Noah had leaned his forehead against it in resignation.

A few long seconds passed.

“Where are you going?” he asked through the door.

“Don’ know,” she admitted.

More seconds.

She started to count.Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—

“It’s not safe.”

“Not safe here either.” Ava stated it as truth. A different sort of dangerous.

The knob rattled, and the door opened. Noah stood half hidden behind the door. Ava looked down at her feet. He wasn’t wearin’ a shirt. Pants, sure, but a shirt? No.

Not safe. Noooooot safe.

“I shouldn’t have lied,” he said. “I’m not sure why I did.”

Ava poked the toe of her shoe against a chip in one of the floorboards. “People do crazy things when nothin’ makes sense.”

“I guess.” He gave a sigh.

There was a long enough moment of silence that Ava risked lifting her eyes. Noah’s silhouette in the darkness was chiseled. His jaw straight. His face shadowed, but his expression worried. “I can’t let you go, Ava. It’s not safe.”

“Let’s be honest,” she said and managed a wobbly smile, “I ain’t ever been safe.”

He flinched.

“So let me go,” she finished.

Noah opened the bedroom door wider and made a pretense ofstepping out of his room. Instead, he hesitated, then closed the door back a bit as if it were some sort of shield.