The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [141]
“Come on.” The woman tugged at her arm, and they set off again.
They had gone another half mile when she knew she wouldn’t be able to carry Sophie one more step.
“We have to stop here,” she said, lowering Sophie to the ground again. She checked the GPS. “Please. Stay with her,” she said. “Let me find the highest point around here and see if I can call out from there.”
The woman did not even look at her. She dropped to the ground next to Sophie, putting one arm around the little girl’s shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “Hurry back, though. Please.”
Checking the GPS, Janine walked ahead a bit and to the north, where she began climbing up a hill, slipping on rocks and grabbing the branches of trees to keep her balance. She tried the cell phone every few yards, finally catching a signal when she neared the crest of the hill. Pulling a scrap of paper from her shorts pocket, she dialed the number for the sheriff’s office.
She barely had the breath to speak into the phone. “This is Janine Donohue,” she said. “I’ve found my daughter. We’re in the woods, and we need to get her out of here right away. She needs immediate medical attention. She can’t walk, and she’ll need a helicopter.”
The sheriff was silent for a moment. Maybe he still thought she was crazy. “Do you know where you are?” he asked.
She gave him the coordinates for the area where she’d left Sophie and the woman.
“We’ll get right out there,” the sheriff assured her.
She hung up the phone without saying goodbye, already making her way back down the rise. She needed to be with her daughter.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Zoe leaned back against a fallen tree, watching Sophie’s mother as she sat cross-legged on the forest floor, holding her ill—perhaps her dying—child in her arms.
“What’s your name?” Zoe asked her.
Sophie’s mother raised her cheek from where it had been resting against her daughter’s head.
“Janine,” she said. She looked into the woods, in the direction of the road, still two or three miles away from them. “Please let them come soon,” she prayed aloud.
It had been nearly a half hour since Janine had returned from making her call. She’d told Zoe that help was on the way, and then the two women had settled into a silence made necessary by Janine’s fervent attention to her daughter.
Zoe had not been able to stop herself from listening for the crackle of leaves that would indicate that Marti had followed—and found—them. But aside from the hum of insects and birdsong, Sophie’s labored breathing had been the only sound in the forest.
“Where did you find her?” Janine asked now. “Are you one of the searchers?”
Zoe was not certain how to answer. “I was living out here in a shanty,” she said. “Sophie showed up there a few days ago.”
“Didn’t you know she was lost?” Janine asked. “Why didn’t you call the sheriff’s office?”
“I have no phone,” Zoe said. “And I didn’t know how much of an emergency this was. How sick she was.” She hated herself for making excuses. If Sophie died, she would have no one to blame but herself.
Janine lowered her cheek to Sophie’s head again and closed her eyes. She rocked her daughter slowly, holding one of her small, bloated hands in her own, and Zoe fell back into a guilty silence.
Two men and one woman, all dressed in EMT uniforms, arrived after another half hour had passed. None of them looked at Zoe with any unusual interest, and she guessed she had made a more successful transition from actress to mountain woman than she had thought.
They’d brought a stretcher with them, and they strapped Sophie onto it, her tiny body asleep, her breathing still uneven and rasping.
“I have medication she needs with me,” Janine said, pulling the strap of a small case from her shoulder. “Can one of you start an IV?”
“Can’t do it here,” the woman said. “Let’s get her to the chopper. They can run an IV there.”
They raced through the forest as quickly as they were able, the stretcher making the going rougher and slower than it would have otherwise been. Finally, they reached a road, but it was