Hush Little Girl by Lisa Regan (best chinese ebook reader txt) 📕

shook her head. With a frown, she started counting again. “One, two, three, four.” She repeated the process six times and then she began to pack the piles into the duffel bag. When she finished, Josie walked over to the dresser and selected a pair of socks from her top dresser drawer. Emily pulled them on and then retrieved a pair of sneakers from under her bed. Once those were on, Josie helped her zip up her overfull duffel bag.

“Wait!” Emily said when Josie went to pick up the bag. “I need to bring my other things.”

“What other things?”

Emily walked over to her desk and pointed to a pile of random items arranged into a circle. There was a small gray stone roughly the size of a quarter, a tiny pink sequin, a bird feather, an unused birthday candle, and a bright red bottle cap that had come from a gallon of milk. Emily began counting them, her small finger hovering over each object as she did. “One, two, three, four, five.”

She repeated the count six times. Then she looked up at Josie. “Now I can put them in my bag.”

Perplexed, Josie watched as Emily carefully put each item into one of the side pockets of the duffel bag. “I’m ready,” she told Josie.

Josie had a lot of questions, but her immediate priority was to get Emily out of the house. It was still a crime scene. “Emily, what’s going to happen now is that I’m going to take you to the hospital, okay? Because bad things happened here today, we’d like the doctors to talk to you, okay?”

Emily nodded.

“Then you might have to go stay with someone—a stranger, but someone who will keep you safe—until we find a place for you to live permanently. Do you understand?”

“You mean a foster home.”

Surprised, Josie said, “Yes, exactly. How do you know about foster homes?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“Who told you not to say?” Josie asked.

“My mom,” Emily replied.

Again, Josie was wary of pushing the girl too hard. On top of that, there were legal implications of any conversations that Josie had with the girl without a guardian or parent present. To get a proper statement from her, Josie would need to wait until they’d either located next of kin or until Emily had been taken into the care of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Still, Josie had no idea how long it would be before she could get such a statement, and it was clear that there was a killer on the loose—a killer who had no issues murdering children. Changing subjects, Josie asked, “Do you hide in the wall a lot?”

Emily shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“Can you tell me who you’re hiding from when you go in there?”

Slowly, Emily brought her index finger up and pressed it against her lips in the universal symbol for hush.

Josie managed a smile, trying to put her at ease. “You can tell me, Emily. Nothing bad will happen to you now, and you don’t need to hide anymore. It’s really important that I know who you and Holly hid from when you went into that little room.”

“I can’t,” Emily whispered.

“Why not?”

“Because if I say, bad things will keep happening.”

Josie felt a chill slither down her neck. She worked hard to keep her smile in place. “Okay,” she told Emily. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Josie guided her outside to Gretchen’s car and strapped her into the back seat. Gretchen had called off the search and the Amber Alert. The patrol officers had gone, as had Deputy Sandoval and Rini. Everyone on the ERT had gone except for Officer Jenny Chan, who was packing up evidence bags in the back of her SUV. Josie left Gretchen standing by the driver’s side of her car, on the phone to the hospital, and walked over to Chan. “Anything interesting from the greenhouse?”

Chan peeled off her Tyvek suit and booties, crumpled them up and tossed them into the back seat. “Afraid not. A whole lot of ashes. A destroyed laptop and phone. I can have a tech expert look at them, but I think they’re too damaged to get anything from them. You’d be better off just getting a warrant for her phone records. I also found some bits of what look like color photographs, but none that have anything identifying in them. Scraps from what look like documents of some kind. Hard to say. There are some scraps with the ends of words on them, but without context, I’m not sure they mean anything. Sorry.”

Josie shook her head. “It’s not your fault. I appreciate you being here.”

Chan pulled off her skull cap and shook out her long, dark hair. “Sorry about your wedding.”

Josie gave a wan smile. “We can get married another day. Hey, did you find anything of interest inside the truck?”

“No, I’m sorry. Nothing in the truck except Lorelei’s vehicle registration and insurance card.”

Josie thanked her, watched her pack up the rest of the vehicle and start down the driveway. It was almost dark now. The sounds of the night started to rise all around them: frogs peeping and trilling; cicadas rattling; crickets chirping.

Josie turned back and began walking toward Gretchen’s car. Gretchen was now on the phone with Chief Chitwood. Josie could tell by her tone and the way she kept saying, “Yes, sir.” She had put her heels back on as she paced beside the vehicle, occasionally pausing to wrench one of the spikes from the soft ground. From the back seat window, Emily stared at Josie, looking frozen, her eyes so wide that Josie felt a little shiver pass through her. Josie stopped in place, feeling as though Emily was trying to communicate something to her. Then, slowly, Emily’s head swiveled toward the front steps of the house. Josie’s gaze followed hers.

A cry escaped Josie’s throat before she could clamp her hand over her mouth. Gretchen stopped dead in her tracks.

There, on the top step, was a pinecone doll.

Josie spun in a circle, looking all around