Wildwood Creek by Wingate Lisa

Author:Wingate, Lisa [Wingate, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC042000, FIC042040, FIC027020, Missing persons—Fiction
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

ALLIE KIRKLAND

JUNE, PRESENT DAY

No sooner had I gotten dislodged from the window than Blake Fulton disappeared into the woods and never came back. I probably should’ve reported the whole thing, but I figured enough of it had been caught on camera. Production could report it if they wanted to. From my standpoint, the less said the better. I was hoping the incident would go unnoticed—just another random camera test that no one was really watching.

I should have known I wouldn’t be so lucky, of course. Even though no names were given, I was the talk of a last-minute morning safety lecture. Someone tried to climb through a window without putting in the brace and got stuck this morning. Always use braces in open windows. Keep hair, fabric, ribbons, bonnet strings, and other dangling items well away from possible sources of entrapment. . . .

I’d only begun to gather my tattered dignity when the set photographer showed up to snap pre-production photos of Wren and me in the schoolhouse. After that, Mallory Everson came to do the interview for The Frontier Woman blog. The whole time all I could think of was the iPhone hiding under my cabinet and the need to be rid of it. I was relieved when the interview was over, and since I couldn’t just leave Stewart hanging, it seemed that the best course of action would be to sneak off with the phone now, see if he’d sent me anything, and then let him know this was the last he’d be hearing from me until summer was over. I could hand the phone off to Stacy tonight, thereby removing further temptation and the danger of getting caught with it in the future.

Since engaging in illegal communication with the outside world definitely involved a hike, I shed my hoop, corset, and petticoat, then pulled my tennis shoes on under the skirt before leaving the schoolhouse with the iPhone hastily tucked into my skirt pocket. What I needed now was a secluded place—very secluded—and since photo ops were going on at the miners’ camps scattered between Wildwood and the river, it only made sense to head beyond the brush arbor and find my way to the shores of Moses Lake, where no part of the production was set to take place. That was actually closer to civilization, so a cell signal was a good bet. If anyone found me, I could say I’d used the time after my photo ops to go exploring.

Escaping Wildwood unnoticed wasn’t all that that hard, really: head down the path to the spring behind the schoolhouse with a water bucket in hand; ditch the bucket near said springhouse, where I could pick it up again later; follow the spring down to Wildwood Creek. Follow Wildwood Creek down to the lakeshore . . . because, what do small bodies of water do eventually? Flow into larger bodies of water.

I was impressed with my own rugged pioneer ingenuity. For a girl who’d recently gotten herself trapped in a window, I was doing exceptionally well.

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