89: Sam removed the battery from the phone and threw both pieces out into the center of the lake. The water swallowed them whole, harsh ripples rolling out from the center until they faded away to nothing, another secret beneath the blanket of black.
“Why toss the phone? You told him where we are,” Sarah said beside him.
Porter knelt back down a few feet from the water’s edge, his fingers covered in dirt. He had been digging.
The path had led them about a quarter mile into the woods and ended at a small clearing just as the diary described. A small clearing, looking out over the lake.
Bishop said the water froze during the winter.
That had been a lie.
While temperatures in South Carolina could fall below freezing, the winters were much milder than farther north, nothing like those in Chicago. Even if they dropped below freezing, they never seemed to hold there long enough for the ground to freeze, most definitely not a large body of water like a lake. This was by no means a big lake, but it was big enough to escape the worst of the cold, of that he was certain. Bishop had probably only written that to help conceal the location. Porter could think of no other reason. Misdirection.
He knelt in the dirt. Sarah held both flashlights. The beams were focused on the base of the large oak tree looming over the clearing, a laurel oak. At the base of the tree was a small hole. Porter didn’t have to dig very deep at all. Part of it had been sticking out of the ground. It caught Sarah’s eye right away.
A white metal lunchbox, covered in rust.
Porter didn’t expect to find the skeleton of a dead cat.
He didn’t expect to find this either.
The lunchbox was open now. Inside was an envelope, the paper yellowed with age, bound to a composition book with black string. The envelope addressed simply—
Mother
“Sam, why’d you toss the phone?” Sarah asked again.
Porter took the bound package from the box and handed it to her. “I’m not worried about Poole knowing where we’ve been, I’m more concerned about him learning where we’re going,” he told her.
“What about Bishop? He gave you that phone for a reason.”
“We need to shake him up, disrupt him. We’re not his puppets. If he can’t reach us with that phone, he’ll need to find some other way. Maybe this will flush him out,” Porter said.
He took Bishop’s diary from his pocket and put it in the lunchbox before closing the lid and tossing a little dirt on top, nearly covering the Hello Kitty image stamped into the rusty metal.
Bishop’s cat.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”