As his eyes adjusted, R.J. looked at Sara. She was limp in his arms, and for a horrible moment he thought she might be dead. But he could feel her breathing. Slowly, he ran his hands over her body. He began to breathe again when he found no blood on her head, nor even any lumps that showed she’d hit her skull. When he felt her ribs, she didn’t gasp so he didn’t think she’d broken any ribs. It was when he reached her leg that he realized her right leg was broken. He could feel the break in the shinbone, but was glad it wasn’t protruding from her skin.
Carefully, he laid her down on the ground, then got his backpack and pulled out the flashlight. The first thing he did was make a quick inspection of where they were. It was a round cave that seemed to open only at the top, a lot like the one they’d seen with the pool, except much smaller. As far as he could tell, there were no signs that any other human had ever been in the cave. He was glad to see that no resident of King’s Isle was lurking in the corners.
He ran the light over Sara, making another inspection of her body. Pulling out a big knife from a front pocket of his pack, he cut her trousers up to the knee. Broken but not bad, he thought, and he was glad she’d passed out in the fall. He needed to bind her leg to keep it from moving. He would have to carry her out of here and he didn’t want the jarring to dislodge her broken bone.
He used two broken tree branches as stabilizers, then he cut long strips from one of the flannel shirts and wrapped her leg from knee to ankle. When he’d finished, she began to move her head and groan. He grabbed a bottle of water and pulled her head onto his lap as he gave her something to drink.
She choked a bit, coughed, then opened her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, then the pain hit her.
“Ssssh,” R.J. said softly, stroking her cheek. “We fell into one of those holes. I think there must have been a volcano here at one time. You broke your leg and I tied it up.”
Sara tried to sit up, but the pain was too much for her. She bit her lip to keep from crying.
“You don’t have to be tough,” R.J. said. “Go ahead and cry. Yell. Scream at me for being a fool to bring you here and getting you into this mess.”
“I did it,” she said, gasping out the words. Above them the storm had quietened to just rain. The thick covering of the fallen pine tree kept out most of the rain, but little patches dripped through onto the floor. “I agreed with Ariel and she made Mr. Dunkirk’s wife get him to—”
“I know,” R.J. said. “But I only agreed to go because Arundel is your hometown.”
“My—?” she began, then waited as a wave of pain went through her. “That’s not on any application I ever filled out. How did you know that?”
“I know a lot about you, Sara Jane Johnson,” he said softly, stroking her hair. “Haven’t you realized that yet?”
“No,” she said flatly, then turned her head to look at where they were. The flashlight was beside R.J. and he lifted it to shine it on the walls. Rock walls that oozed little trickles of water were around and above them. Beneath them was a thick padding of dirt and rotten wood.
He pointed the flashlight up to the tree above them. “We didn’t make that big of a hole. I think we were on the edge of it and … see? It broke there. We just missed being hit by the tree. I think that over the centuries lots of trees have fallen across the hole and have rotted. Lucky for us or we would have hit rock.”
“I don’t feel very lucky right now,” Sara said.
He moved her head out of his lap and carefully put it on the second flannel shirt. “I’m going to see if I can find anything we can burn. It’s going to get cold tonight.”
“What about—?” She broke off.
“About Gideon?”
“Yes. I know I saw him just be
fore you turned. You seemed to be heading toward something, as though you knew where you were going.”
“I’d seen some maps on the Internet,” he said, but didn’t explain more. He was looking inside his pack and withdrew a small bottle of Amaretto di Saronno, an almond-flavored liqueur. “I want you to drink this.”
“Where did you get that?” Sara asked, again trying to sit up.
Without a word, R.J. bent and picked her up, then deposited her in the farthest, driest corner of the cave. “While you were drooling over the kids, I found it in Gideon’s cabin and put it in my pack. I had hoped for a romantic moment and—” The look she gave him made him smile. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”
“Sure you can,” Sara said, panting, her face breaking out in a sweat from the pain. She wanted to yell at R.J. She wanted to yell at anyone right now, about anything. Maybe rage would take her mind off the reality of the situation. How were they going to get out of here? Was Gideon, that nice-seeming young man, above them with a rifle? Was he planning to shoot them like fish in a barrel? Her thoughts showed on her face.
“None of that now,” R.J. said, his hand caressing her cheek. “It’s going to be all right.”
“You don’t know that, do you? We’re strangers on this island and no one knows where we are. You left a note to Ariel and David saying heaven only knows what, so they’ll be angry and won’t look for us. As for the rest of these people, they hate us. And they don’t even know that they’re going to think we killed someone.”
Standing up, R.J. handed her the bottle of liqueur. “I want you to drink all of it. Maybe it’ll give you a better outlook on life.”
“Life,” Sara said, taking a swig from the bottle. “That’s what I’m trying to hold onto. I still can’t understand why I let Ariel talk me into that ridiculous switch.”
“Which didn’t work for even five minutes,” R.J. said as he examined the cave with the flashlight.
“I think it did. David said—”