GrantTrent 06 - Beyond Reach by Karin Slaughter

Author:Karin Slaughter [Slaughter, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781423333227
Published: 2007-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

LENA

CHAPTER 12

LENA SAT AT HANK’S KITCHEN TABLE, her back against the wall, waiting for him to come home. The clock over the stove ticked loudly, and Lena had to force herself not to match her breathing to the noise. The Mercedes was in the driveway, so he must have come home at some point, but he was nowhere to be found now. The house was empty, the shed and beat-up old pickup in the backyard were both vacant. She’d driven by the bar, called the hospital, even talked to some old coot at the sheriff’s office who gave her the standard line about waiting twenty-four hours, but Hank had pretty much disappeared. His cell phone was on the kitchen table, the battery dead. The answering machine showed no messages. The blue metal box, his drug kit, was gone. There was no way Hank would go anywhere without his kit. He must have taken it with him, which meant he’d left the house of his own accord—but that didn’t tell her where he had gone.

Lena didn’t even know what she would do if and when he turned up. What would she say if he walked through the door right now? What could she possibly ask him? Four hours had passed since she’d talked to Charlotte at the school, but the passage of time had done nothing to give Lena any clarity.

Hank had not been driving the car.

Angela Adams had blinded her own daughter, then—what? Driven away? Left Hank to deal with the fallout, to shoulder the blame?

The one thing Lena had sworn she’d never forgive him for and the bastard hadn’t even done it. All that anger she’d held against him for most of her life was still boiling up inside her, only now she had nowhere to direct it. Should she be mad at her mother, a woman she couldn’t even remember meeting? What was so bad about Angela Adams that Hank would let people assume he blinded his own niece rather than let the girls know that she was alive? What had she done to all of them?

The fluorescent light over the kitchen sink bathed the room in a blue cast as the sun started to go down. Hank’s AA pamphlets were still scattered on the table, strewn across the floor, stacked hundreds deep on the gas stove. The clock kept ticking, marking away the minutes, then another hour.

After the accident, Sibyl hadn’t been able to remember running into the driveway, or even the fact that she’d been playing ball with Lena in the first place. At the time, the doctor said this was fairly normal with severe head trauma, that sometimes the memories never came back. The sisters had never really talked about it afterward. Maybe they had as children, but as time passed, Sibyl’s blindness and the cause of it had just become an accepted thing between them. Talking about the accident would have been like talking about the sun rising every morning: a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, Lena had blamed Hank and Hank sure as hell hadn’t done anything to disabuse her of the notion.

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