The Bone House - Brian Freeman [90]
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Chapter Thirty-One
Hilary hung up her phone with a pang of worry. She'd tried to reach Amy Leigh in Green Bay half a dozen times since the previous night, and each time, the call had gone straight into voicemail.
Wherever Amy was, she wasn't answering her phone.
She knew it didn't mean that anything was wrong. The girl had sounded drunk during her odd phone call. It was possible that Amy was embarrassed about making the call and was now ducking Hilary's attempts to reach her. Things like that happened at college parties. You drank too much, and you no longer knew what you were doing or why. Even so, that wasn't the girl that Hilary remembered.
Her former student had always reminded Hilary of herself in her high school days: confident, bubbly, determined, and sometimes naive. The girl was self-conscious about her larger frame and determined to make everyone forget it when she was on the dance floor. Amy was religious, just as Hilary was, and she came from a solid Chicago family. On the other hand, she was also young, and fun, and prone to impetuous mistakes, like any student away from home.
Hilary just wanted to make sure that Amy was OK. She dialed again. Voicemail. She left another message. 'Amy, it's Hilary. Listen, sorry to be a pest, but could you call me back? I'm a little concerned.'
She wouldn't have made a big deal of Amy's strange call, but the girl had talked about Florida in the midst of her ramblings. More than that, she'd said the one name that made Hilary sit up and take notice.
Glory.
Hadn't she? It had all happened so fast on the phone, and Amy's voice was a drunken whisper, and Hilary had barely understood the words. Amy had been talking about her dance coach, Gary Jensen. Then she'd said it. Glory. Or maybe Hilary had simply had Glory on her own mind, and when Amy said Gary's name again, she'd heard Glory instead. Maybe she was hearing what she wanted to hear. Maybe.
Hilary padded into the kitchen and poured herself a third cup of coffee from the pot. She wore a roomy sweatshirt, running shorts, and white socks. Her blond hair fell loosely about her shoulders; it was clean and wet from her shower. Her body ached, but it was mostly a pleasant ache now. A post-sex ache. She'd come home not realizing how badly she and Mark needed each other, like both of them grasping for a lifeline. The result was a wild, almost animal coupling, the way it had been in the early days, when they were getting to know each other's bodies. She could still feel him where he'd held her and been inside her.
It made her believe in him all over again. He couldn't fake what he felt for her. There had been a time when she, like Amy, was naive about relationships, but she'd left that part of herself far behind in her twenties. She had open eyes about men and about Mark. If Cab Bolton had a witness, then the witness was wrong. Whatever had happened in Florida, it wasn't what everyone else thought.
Florida. Glory.
Hilary was sure that Amy had said Glory's name.
She took her coffee into their bedroom, booted up her desktop computer, and logged into her Facebook home page. When she called up a listing of her online friends, she found Amy Leigh on the third page. She clicked on Amy's profile and saw that the girl had updated her status at 6:47 p.m. the previous day.
Amy's status read: I'm going into the lion's den.
Hilary didn't think that Amy sounded like a girl heading for a college party. She reviewed the rest of the girl's profile page and noticed a comment from another Green Bay student that had been posted earlier this morning. Hey, Ames, missed you in class today.
Hilary didn't like that at all.
She replayed the brief, hushed phone call from Amy in her head. She didn't know if there was anything she could glean