The Hanging Hill

68

“Hello? Hello?”

Yep. Doll Face was definitely gone. Zack was alone. In the dark.

Never his favorite place to be.

It was where he saw her sometimes.

His dead mother.

She was gone and buried, but in the dark, when he was alone with nothing but his feelings of guilt, scary memories, and wild imagination, Zack sometimes heard her.

“You’re the reason I had to die! I had to get away from you!”

“It’s not true!” Zack yelled. His voice echoed off the low ceiling. “I. Did. Not. Kill. You!”

Finally. He had said it out loud. Okay, he had said it out loud in the dark in a crawl space but he had said it.

He did not kill his mother.

She caught cancer because she smoked too many cigarettes. She smoked too many cigarettes because she was miserable and sad, not because Zack was horrible and bad. She made her own choice. Zack did not make her make it.

Stumbling in the dark, Zack felt up and down the sides of the trunk until he found one of its leather handles and gave it a yank.

This was what Buckingham had wanted him to find.

Somehow, it would help him save Meghan, Derek, and Judy. That was what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to sit in the dark being afraid.

“So quit bugging me, okay?” he yelled at the blackness, hoping his real mother would get the message: He was absolutely, totally, and completely finished feeling guilty about doing something he hadn’t even done.