Free Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

married, got two kids. Now he’s got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can’t stop.” She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. “My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?”
    “When we were growing up,” Jack said, “parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids.”
    Nina paused for a moment, considering. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make what they did better, does it?”
    They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.
    At length, Nina said, “Where are we going?”
    “There’s a secret path.” Jack pointed ahead. “Well, it isn’t a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults …”
    They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.
    “Except you.”
    He nodded. “Except me.”
    Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.
    “With all the manicured lawn, why hasn’t the school pulled this stuff out?”
    “Natural barbed wire,” Jack said.
    “What do the kids do in here?” With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. “Drugs and sex, I expect.”
    “I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students’ minds,” Jack said, “but so is escape.”
    Nina frowned. “Why escape from the lap of luxury?”
    “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
    “Who told you about it? Emma?”
    Jack’s laugh held a bitter edge. “Emma never told me anything.” Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. “It was Alli. She was worried about Emma.”
    “Worried? About what?”
    “She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path.”
    “Did she go after Emma?”
    “She didn’t say.”
    “Didn’t you ask?”
    “I take it you don’t have a teenager. I went after Emma myself.”
    “And what happened?”
    They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.
    When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina’s astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in thewall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.
    “I followed her through here.”
    Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.
    “I saw her meet someone; I couldn’t tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree,” Jack said. “Either she heard a