Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 124341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
“I don’t know if she did. Like I said, I just suggested it. And not in so many words. She understood what I was saying though. She was a bright little one.” She looked out the window again. “If they did discover it, maybe that’s the reason she was suddenly miraculously cured and sent away. She would have been useless to their research study. Not only would she have disrupted it by going off the cocktail, but she’d have far too many questions.”
Research study. He knew all about research studies involving innocent children who were completely alone in the world. Too much. He needed to speak to Autumn Clancy as soon as possible. He’d been biding his time, getting to know all he could about her in an effort to make sure he wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. But now…well, this changed things dramatically.
A smile played on Salma’s lips. “She’s been looking for me? All this time?”
“Apparently so, yes.”
“I had no idea. Like I said, they wouldn’t let me contact my patients at the hospital. Then later…I thought maybe they were all gone, and if they were, hearing it definitively would be too hard to bear.”
“I understand.”
There was a small ruckus of voices and what sounded like toys being dumped from a bin in the back of the house. “Oh dear,” Salma said.
“I know you’ve gotta get back,” Mark said, “but is there anything else you can tell me before I go?”
Salma stood slowly, shifting the little girl in her arms. She seemed torn. What had she seen that she’d had to hold back all these years? Mark waited. “I worked second shift, one to nine. I tucked my babies into bed, and I went home. But…I suspected something was going on at night after I left, but what it was, I couldn’t say.”
“What did you suspect?”
Her gaze flitted away. “I don’t know, only that those children sometimes woke up with scratches and bruises on them that couldn’t be accounted for. And it seemed to happen on the same night about once a month.”
“What could it have been?”
She shifted the child, and the small girl murmured in her sleep. “Honestly, after what I experienced and the lengths they went to shut me up, I wouldn’t put anything past them.” She sighed, and Mark heard her sorrow in the sound. “There was something else too.” She seemed to gather her thoughts. Or perhaps talk herself into saying whatever she was about to say. “Those vivid dreams that they said were a side effect of the medication seemed to be especially prevalent on that one night. And it wasn’t only scratches and bruises they woke with. On more than one occasion—and always during a full moon—a child I’d thought would live for at least another six months passed overnight.”
Mark took that in. “Are you saying the full moon had something to do with their death?” That sounded…mystical. Mark was many things, but a mystic was not one of them. He dealt best with cold, hard facts.
But Salma shook her head. “I don’t think the moon had a thing to do with it. But what did, I couldn’t say.”
“Miss Salma!” came a small voice from the back of the house.
Salma turned her head, obviously trying not to wake the girl in her arms when she quietly called back, “Coming!” She walked Mark to the door, and he thanked her for her time. Just before she shut it behind him, she said, “Mark, if you talk to Autumn, please, give her my contact information and tell her I’d love to see her.”
“I will.”
He jogged down the stairs, inhaling another breath of the delicious food cooking in the apartment above Salma’s. I wouldn’t put anything past them. Salma’s words rang in his ears. Mark had thought once that children were off the table when it came to evil deeds for profit, but he’d learned that that was emphatically not the case.
Jak Fairbanks and the fact that he’d been left in the woods as a helpless child and subjected to brutal experiments had been his introduction to the vicious acts men were willing to do to innocents when there was incentive involved.
Oh yes, children weren’t only profitable, they were especially so.
Chapter Twenty-Six
She opened the door quietly, slipping in and taking a deep breath to calm her nerves. What are you doing, Autumn? Only she knew very well what she was doing, and though she was anxious, beneath that beat the wings of a long-caged bird who knew it was about to fly.
Somehow, someway, this moment had been building for many years. She’d carried her boy made of moonlight in her heart all this time, the driving force that kept her searching, kept her looking for answers even when they seemed impossible to attain.
And he’d carried her with him as well.