Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13), Matt Lincoln [ebooks children's books free TXT] 📗

if she had been tasked with running it, they would’ve been dead already.

She craned her neck as he worked to see around each dank corner of the cave, but nothing came of it. It took them some time to reach the back, and still, there was nothing and no one to be found except for some moss and the occasional clump of algae.

When they reached the back of the cave, Marston shook his head and stood up straight.

“Let’s wait here for a moment,” he said, leaning back against the side of the boat and pulling out the map again. “It looks like there’s one more cave in this configuration.”

“Does it say anything about what it’s like?” Nina asked, briefly peering over his shoulder at the map as she kept most of her attention trained on anything that might lie in front of them.

“No, nothing,” he said, shaking his head and folding it back up as quickly as he’d taken it out. “It’s not very detailed. Like I had no idea that this one was going to be so…”

“Hall of mirrors?” Nina finished for him when he couldn’t seem to find the right phrase, and they both laughed.

“That’s one way to describe it, I guess,” he chuckled, glancing around at all the twists and turns in the area. The way the light reflected back up at them in odd angles around the cave made it seem kind of like a hall of mirrors to Nina.

“Well, let’s hope the third one’s the charm,” Nina said, and Marston began to press the boat forward some more.

Nina still stood at the ready in the front of the boat with her gun, though she doubted anyone was in there with them. They’d searched the whole place, and even if they hadn’t, she doubted many people other than Marston could maneuver through here without crashing, and this Charlie character surely wasn’t one of them.

As they went back through the place, she also looked for any signs that they might’ve been there before and that someone had tried to get through the winding rocks and failed in the process.

She’d looked on the way in, and she knew Marston had, too, but they were looking at it from a different angle, now.

And that’s right when she saw it—the paint, grazing off a nearby rock near the mouth of the cave. So faint that she could tell it had been left not too long ago and nearly washed away by the water flowing in and out of the cave.

“Marston, do you see this?” she hissed, pointing at it roughly.

“Sure do,” he said, squinting in that direction in the light from her flashlight. “Looks fresh.”

As they passed the area slowly, Marston reached up and grazed his hand lightly across it so that a fleck of the paint came off on his finger. He looked down at it as if studying it carefully.

“It’s hard to say for sure, but it is white, and it seems like the same old shade of white as a lot of Mr. Samuels’s boats,” he said finally, seeing the confusion written across Nina’s face.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out for sure,” Nina said, glancing over her shoulder at the cave’s entrance, which was barely in their line of vision. “And that looks pretty fresh to me. I don’t know about you, but I’d estimate that if that paint had been there any longer, it would’ve washed away.”

“I agree,” Marston said, nodding to her. “Can you take a picture of it?”

But Nina was already pulling out her phone to do so, the flash blaring through the dark cave several times as she looked to get at the image from every possible angle, just in case the forensics team ended up needing any of this.

“Alright, then, let’s go,” Marston said when she seemed satisfied with her pictures, and she stood watch as he continued maneuvering the little motorboat around the twists and turns of the cave until they reached its mouth.

Nina’s stomach was doing backflips. Mikey had to be in this next cave, or at least near it. He had to be. She was sure of it, or at least she wanted to be sure.

They became very quiet as they whirred toward the third and final cave in the sequence. Nina wiped some sweat off of her hands on her jeans so that she could grip her gun more firmly.

Marston maneuvered the boat into the mouth of the final cave. This one was wider than the last, but still quite small. There were fewer twists and turns here, though unlike the first cave, this one wasn’t wide open, so Nina couldn’t see it all when she shined her flashlight beam across it.

Marston took them back and then to the left around a corner. Still, they couldn’t see the back of the cave. Only what felt like a kind of hallway filled with water, leading to another turn up ahead and to the right.

Before Marston turned the second corner, Nina’s flashlight beam landed on something floating in the water. She blinked and stopped for a moment before realizing what it was, holding up a hand behind her to make sure that the MBLIS agent didn’t take the boat any further than he already had.

She bent down and picked it up. A plain white wrapper with granola bar ingredients listed on it, a few soggy crumbs remaining in the package.

She turned around and held it up for him, quickly flicking off her flashlight beam as she did so.

It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, she saw that Marston had realized what she had. This was one of the wrappers from the rescue kit in Mr. Samuels’s boat. Charlie and Mikey were there. They might still be there.

Marston quickly silenced the motor so that they could listen. Nina worried that they’d already given themselves away to anyone who may be waiting there in the cave.

It was some time before