Red Herring ✔️

62. The Witching Hour

5 Hours to Midnight, Halloween

It was getting dark. Disturbingly dark. 

Jason, Christian, and Mazie eventually gathered their wits and spread in a wide perimeter around the gravesite. Periodically, Mazie glanced up at the sky to note the placement of the setting sun and the pale white moon. Jason busied himself by curving the toe of his shoe back and forth in a wide arc through a mass of dead brittle leaves. When he wasn't staring solemnly at the gravesite, Christian glanced up at her but she avoided eye contact. She wouldn't let him see the fear that continued to plague her. Since Lonny and Ailene left, she couldn't stop shaking. 

"It's been too long," Mazie mumbled, hoping she wasn't the only one who thought too much time had passed. Then again, standing there doing nothing, it felt like time was passing at lightning speed and simultaneously not moving. 

She was starting to think that the shaking in her arms and legs were actually the shivers. The cold seeped through her clothes and penetrated to her skin. Taking a fall and digging her hands into the wintry frigid dirt sucked the warmth right out of her. Though the breeze didn't blow, the dead of night was quickly approaching and the bone chilling dark encroached upon their position in the forest. The absence of human intelligence, save their own, creeped up her spine with a malevolent foreboding. If she were a cat, the hairs on her spine would be standing at attention, alert to the pernicious shadows that encompassed the woods. Her vision narrowed on the horizon, aware that she couldn't see as far into the distance as she used to. 

"It's just been an hour," Christian concluded after he checked his watch. "They had to drive all the way into town and convince the police to follow them out here. It's at least a twenty minute drive there and back. We have time." 

"It's freaking freezing out here," Jason muttered, teeth chattering. 

With not much to talk about and corpses on the mind, they reverted back to silence. She was hyper aware of every leaf that blew, every branch that creaked, and every minuscule disturbance in the forest. She imagined that the cracking of a branch was a person trudging through the woods, someone out there watching them. By the end of today, her nerves would be shot. 

Another twenty minutes passed. And then forty. 

"Jason, do you have your phone on you?" Christian asked, breaking the silence. His shoulders curled up around his ears to protect his exposed neck from the wind. The tiniest sliver of golden light painted the surface of the earth. It was nearly insignificant, plaguing the forest in obscurity. 

He nodded. "Yeah."

"Call Ailene or Lonny," he instructed. She knew she wasn't he only one troubled by the encroaching bleak of night when Christian periodically glanced at their surroundings. 

Jason held up his phone above his head and moved in a circle. A line creased between his brows with confusion. "No service."

Mazie pulled out her phone and opened the screen. "Me neither."

Perplexed by this news, Christian checked his phone too. Instead of confirming their suspicions, he cursed under his breath and squeezed the bridge of his nose. Sighing heavily, he paced back and forth along the perimeter of the gravesite. 

As if she couldn't help herself, Mazie stared at the fingers sticking out of the earth. She hoped it wouldn't be there anymore. She hoped this would all go away. "It's been too long," she repeated. "Almost two hours have passed."

"Why do you think it's taking so long?" Jason asked, the obvious question they couldn't wrap their brains around. 

"They might not believe them," Christian answered gruffly. "They're probably questioning them. But the police should have sent someone out here to corroborate their story. Ailene or Lonny should have called us."