Chapter 8 - Lily Remembered the Missing Piece
Vincent drove back to the house like a man balancing on a knife-edge.
By the time he returned, the sun had started to drop, turning the courtyard light amber and long. Marcus, Cole, and Dean were gone. They had taken the motorcycles. Left only tire marks on the marble drive and the wrecked garage door hanging crooked on its frame.
Inside, Lily was sitting on the couch with her stuffed rabbit in her lap and a cup of warm milk untouched on the side table. The moment she saw Vincent, she slid down and ran to him.
“Did you find Mommy?”
“Not yet,” he admitted, kneeling. “But I’m closer.”
Her little face crumpled, then steadied in that strange brave way frightened children sometimes manage. She touched the front of his jacket with one small hand.
“I forgot something,” she whispered.
Vincent went still. “What, sweetheart?”
“When Mommy hid Bunny, she said if the first place wasn’t enough, I had to remember what she sang.”
He frowned. “What did she sing?”
Lily looked down, thinking hard. Then in a shaky little voice she sang three lines of a nonsense bedtime tune Naomi had made up years earlier:
“Red door sleeping, red door still,
Don’t wake up the house below the hill,
Where the boats can’t see the window light…”
Vincent stared at her.
Not nonsense.
A location.
There was only one red-doored building below a hill with a blocked view from the lake—a maintenance boathouse on Vincent’s old riding property, farther down from the tack house Dean had named. A place almost no one used anymore because the lower road had washed out two winters ago.
Naomi had hidden the clue in a lullaby because Marcus would never pay attention to a song.
Lily looked up at him anxiously. “Did I do good?”
Vincent gathered her into his arms so fast she squeaked.
“You did perfect.”
And for the first time since he had seen her in that cage, he felt something like hope move through him.
Not because the nightmare was ending.
But because Naomi, even trapped, had kept thinking three steps ahead.
May you like
Which meant she was still fighting.
And if she was still fighting, Vincent was not going to let sunset win.
