Chapter 6 - Where is Hannah?
The drive to Saint Jude’s Academy took forty-two minutes, but to me, it felt like an eternity stretched across jagged glass.
We traveled in a convoy: Colonel Whitmore’s SUV in the lead, followed by Sergeant Miller’s truck with me in the passenger seat, and two Cumberland County sheriff’s cruisers running silent code with their blue strobe lights flashing against the dense summer canopy of the Cumberland Plateau.
Beside me, Miller kept both hands steady on the steering wheel, his eyes scanning the narrow, winding mountain road.
“You holding up, Cole?” Miller asked quietly.
I looked at my reflection in the side mirror. The swelling on my lower lip was darkening into a dull purple bruise. The cut had stopped bleeding, but the phantom sting of my mother’s palm still lingered on my cheekbone like a burn.
“I’ve taken worse hits from an RPG backblast, Sergeant,” I said.
“That was from an enemy,” Miller replied, his tone devoid of judgment, only carrying the quiet wisdom of a man who had seen too much human wreckage. “Hits from your own squad hurt longer. Especially when your squad was supposed to be your mother and father.”
I turned the spiral notebook over in my lap, my thumbs tracing the embossed cardboard cover. “They weren’t my squad, Miller. They were my wardens. I just didn't realize the prison had an open front door until I was twenty-two.”
“Well,” Miller said, shifting gears as the truck crested a steep ridge, “we’re about to kick the door off the other one.”
Saint Jude’s Academy sat at the end of a gravel road, buried deep in the pine scrub three miles past the Crossville city limits. From the road, it looked like an abandoned Christian summer camp: rusted chain-link fencing topped with three strands of barbed wire, low-slung cinderblock dormitories painted an institutional beige, and a massive timber gate padlocked shut with a heavy steel chain.
There was no sign welcoming visitors. Only a painted wooden placard nailed to a pine tree: *THE FEAR OF THE LORD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. PRIVATE RETREAT.*
The lead cruiser didn’t bother asking for a key.
Deputy Sheriff Vance—no relation to the federal agent—rammed his steel push bumper directly into the center of the wooden gate. The latch snapped with a violent crack of splintering timber, the gates swinging wildly inward as the convoy roared up the gravel driveway, throwing white dust into the midday heat.
Two men in polo shirts and tactical trousers burst out of the main administrative cabin, their hands resting on holstered stun guns.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the larger one screamed, stepping forward with his hand raised. “This is private ecclesiastical property! You’re trespassing!”
Colonel Whitmore didn’t even slow down as he stepped out of his SUV. He flashed a federal search warrant signed by a United States magistrate.
“Federal warrant pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 1589—Forced Labor and Unlawful Detainment,” Whitmore barked, not breaking stride. “Sheriff, disarm these men and secure the office.”
Two Cumberland County deputies had the two men pinned against their own pickup truck before they could unholster their weapons.
I hit the gravel running.
I remembered Hannah’s face from her letters—the round, sweet cheeks of a fourteen-year-old girl who used to steal my hair ties and hide under my bed when thunderstorm sirens went off. In my mind, she was still a child. But as I kicked open the screen door of Dormitory B, the person who stood up from the wooden bench in the common room was no longer a child.
She was tall, thin to the point of gauntness, wearing a drab gray smock that hung loosely over her collarbones. Her dark brown hair, once long and glossy like mine, had been shorn unevenly to her jawline. But her eyes—wide, hazel, and burning with a fierce, terrified intelligence—were unmistakably my sister’s.
She looked at my uniform.
She looked at the name tape sewn over my left pocket: *COLE.*
She stopped breathing. The plastic cup of water she was holding slipped from her fingers, splashing onto the linoleum floor just as our mother’s coffee mug had four hours earlier.
“Becca?” she whispered. The sound was so fragile, so thin, it barely reached me across the empty room.
I ripped off my patrol cap and dropped it on the floor.
“Hannah.”
She crossed the room in two strides, throwing her arms around my neck with a strength that nearly took us both to the floor. She wasn't crying with soft tears; she was sobbing with deep, guttural gasps that tore straight from her lungs, her fingers digging desperately into the heavy fabric of my OCP blouse as if she expected me to dissolve into smoke if she loosened her grip.
“You’re alive,” she choked out, burying her face into the crook of my shoulder. “They told me… Mom told me you died in a military prison in Texas. She said you had a heart attack during solitary confinement. She told me last month…”
A wave of pure, white-hot fury crested inside my skull, so intense my vision blurred at the edges.
They hadn't just told the town I was a criminal.
They had told my little sister I was dead.
I wrapped both arms around her, pulling her thin frame tightly against my body, feeling the rapid, terrified flutter of her heartbeat through her ribs.
“I’m here, baby,” I whispered into her hair, my voice cracking for the first time all day. “I’m right here. Nobody is ever going to touch you again. Nobody is ever going to lie to you again.”
Sergeant Miller stood in the doorway, his broad frame blocking out the sunlight, his eyes wet as he turned his back to give us privacy.
Hannah pulled back, her hands trembling as she grabbed my face, her thumbs brushing against the swelling on my lip. Her eyes flared with immediate recognition.
“Mom did that,” Hannah said, her voice dropping into a register of terrifying calm.
“She tried,” I said, managing a small, crooked smile. “She’s in handcuffs now, Hannah. Dad’s company is gone. Daniel is under federal arrest. It’s over.”
Hannah slowly reached down into the waistband of her trousers. From beneath the elastic, wrapped in a strip of clear plastic wrap, she pulled out a tiny, silver thumb drive.
“Not quite over, Becca,” Hannah whispered, placing the metal drive into my palm. “Dad gave me the ledger. But Daniel didn't know I had the key to his personal safe behind the painting in his office. I took this the night before Mom brought me here.”
I stared down at the small piece of metal. “What’s on it?”
“The voice recordings,” Hannah said. “Daniel recorded every single phone call he ever had with his father, the state procurement director, and Mom. He was blackmailing them the whole time, Becca. He never intended to protect our family. He was going to let Dad take the entire fall for the Fort Campbell accident and keep every penny for himself.”
I looked up at Miller, who had turned around at the mention of the recordings.
Miller smiled—a cold, terrifying grin that boded very ill for Daniel Mercer.
May you like
“Sergeant Cole,” Miller said softly. “I believe you just acquired complete tactical air superiority.”
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