The Juliet Code by Pepper Basham

Author:Pepper Basham [Basham, Pepper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636096957
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2023-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Grace pressed her palms against the sides of her prison, the darkness closing in on her like the sand in the trap in Egypt. Her throat squeezed with sudden panic, her breath growing shallow. She could almost feel the weight of the sand promising to steal her air as it had in the sand trap. Her pulse thrummed in quick succession. Doom. Death. Darkness.

She gripped at the neck of her blouse, pulling it loose, as if that would help. She couldn’t catch her breath.

“Oh, God, help me,” she whispered.

Just the sound of her prayer in the dark shook her spinning thoughts. She grabbed at the logic. What had her grandfather told her? When anxieties arise, check your thoughts against God’s list. She focused on her breathing. In and out. She searched her memory. What was the list? From one of the little books in the Bible. Short. The sort she could read without getting lost.

A phrase filtered through the panic.

Whatever is true?

She drew in another breath. True.

What was true about right here and now?

She was not in the sand trap. She was in a trunk. And the trunk had air coming through the little keyhole, so for the time being, she was not suffocating.

So basically she was physically well, just trapped.

What was another one?

Whatever is lovely.

Right. Yes, lovely.

Frederick came to mind. His smile. His tenderness. His strength. Then she thought of God’s goodness to her and His love. Even if she ended up dying inside this trunk, which seemed highly unlikely, she’d be with Him.

She frowned. Were dying thoughts still considered lovely?

Whatever is admirable or excellent.

Well, it would be excellent to get out of here. She nodded, her breaths coming more regularly. Her pulse slowing.

She smiled. Yes. She might very well be able to get out. After all, she’d learned a thing or two about picking locks since the last time she’d been trapped inside a trunk.

Her hair had already loosened enough to make finding two hairpins an easy feat. Armed with her pins and a newfound focus, she turned her body in a rather uncomfortable direction so that she had better access to the keyhole. True, she’d not experienced picking a great many locks. Once the gardener had shown her a few tricks, assisted by Elliott, she’d succeeded in unlocking six out of seven doors at their English estate of Havensbrooke. Thankfully, dear Brandon, the faithful and generous-hearted butler, had heard her knocking from the other side of a locked closet and rescued her from the seventh door. He proceeded to bolster her wavering confidence by informing her that the closet’s lock had been broken for over a decade.

But she’d not practiced on a great many trunks. She’d have to remedy that when they returned to England.

Wardrobes would prove somewhat similar, she supposed. And she’d practiced on plenty of those.

She’d just gotten the pins into a promising position when the sound of footsteps clipped against the floor nearby. Maybe in the room next door? She paused her movement, listening. Was her assailant coming back to finish the job?

“Grace?”

Her fingers paused.

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