Close to You by Kara Isaac Page A

screams.

Eight
    T HE RAIN HAD BEEN NICE plump drops when Allie marched out of her room but had turned into the stinging, pelting kind that seemed to be coming from all directions. It slapped her cheeks and hit her eyes like little needles, making it almost impossible for her to see where she was going, in spite of the fact it was only midafternoon.
    After being propelled by her self-righteous fury down dirt tracks crisscrossing the farm for a while, she decided to take a shortcut across a couple of back paddocks to get back to the house. Unfortunately, her alternate route turned out to be the longest possible way to get from point A to point B, since what it appeared to lack in distance, it more than made up for in difficulty.
    Everything she was wearing was soaked through. And it was all going to have to be dried again by morning. That was going to take a miracle.
    Her foot skidded against the sodden grass and she only just managed to throw her body to keep herself remaining upright.Changing approach, she started sliding in her boots, the way she used to propel herself on roller skates when she was eight. Hopefully that would be more stable than her current futile attempts at walking.
    She couldn’t believe it. Her mother was such . . . such a . . . Her mind tried to form the appropriate words but failed. Now it wasn’t just rain, but tears that blinded her. Stupid, pointless tears. They always were when it came to her mother. Veronica was never going to change, never going to be any different. Allie didn’t know why she kept hoping maybe one day she would be.
    She’d always played by the rules. Had always done what was expected of her. Been the quiet, reserved one who never gave her parents any trouble, head too buried in a book for her to find any attraction in the hijinks her peers were up to.
    Her biggest teenage scandal had been her quitting her parents’ lifeless church, where people only went to be seen by others. From her mother’s reaction, you’d have thought Allie had started frequenting a street corner of ill repute.
    So of course, the one time she did the unexpected, the one occasion she threw caution to the wind and followed her heart, it turned out to be her personal equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.
    Meanwhile, Susannah, who had spent her teens flitting between the wrong guys and borderline illegal activities, was now the golden girl for marrying the most boring man alive.
    Her thoughts scattered as her legs flew out from underneath her and she landed heavily on her backside. Which wouldn’t have been catastrophic if she hadn’t managed to finally lose her footing at the top of a slope, which she was now shooting down like an Olympic bobsledder.
    Oh no. No. No. No. No. No. The rain suddenly parted like the Red Sea before Moses, revealing what waited for her at the bottom. A swamp. A dark, muddy, oozing swamp.
    Digging her heels and fingers into the ground, she attempted to stop, or at least slow, her flight. Nothing. If anything, her Waterloo seemed to approach even faster.
    She hit the bottom, her legs plunging into the thick mud, arms whirling as she floundered for a few steps in an attempt not to go face-first into the cold, stinking mess.
    The dark, thick mud slipped over the tops of her boots and down her legs. Struggling to get her legs free, she only seemed to succeed in getting them even more entrenched in their position.
    There was no way she was losing these boots. Not when they were almost new and had cost her the better part of three hundred bucks. Even if she was sure what was currently filling them up contained a significant proportion of animal poop.
    The more she fought, the more she got stuck. Unbelievable. This entire tour had been nothing but a disaster from the beginning.
    Planting her hands on her hips, she surveyed her surroundings. The rain had eased, allowing her to at least peer through it to see . . . absolutely no