The Girl and the Unlucky 13 (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery) A.J. Rivers (historical books to read TXT) 📖

Her head drops and her shoulders shake with renewed sobs. “I should have gone to the hospital. I should have listened to Ashley. If I had, none of this would ever have happened. Nothing would have happened.”

Thirty-Six

“You said Ashley was upset,” I say. “She wanted you to go to the hospital before the baby came.”

“Yes,” Allison says.

“Is that when you argued? Did you get mad at her and she left?” I ask.

It makes sense. I can understand Ashley arguing with her friend as she tried to convince her the best thing to do would be to call for help. She might not have wanted to be a part of what was happening and walked away. This was a familiar area to her. She had come here many times before, and likely thought it would be no problem to make her way home, even without the others.

They had all been clear with me that Ashley’s parents would pick her up without question from anywhere if she called them. Maybe that was what happened. She wanted to remain loyal to her friends and not admit the truth to the adults, so she walked a distance away from the abandoned school, intending to call her parents and get a ride home.

What happened after that remained a mystery to everyone.

Except, Allison isn’t telling that story. She’s still staring down into the grave and I can see she’s holding onto something.

“She didn’t leave. She was here the whole time. But she was so upset. Vivian told her to drink more. She said it would help her get through it. That maybe she wouldn’t remember. I had never seen Ashley drink that much, but I couldn’t think about anything but Charlie. By the time I was even aware of anything else, Tegan was trying to wake her up. She was sick, but also unconscious. He finally got her awake and said we had to get her to a doctor. She could die of alcohol poisoning. I couldn’t watch my best friend die out here. We had to do something.”

“But you didn’t call an ambulance,” I guess.

“No. We didn’t want anyone to know we’d been out here. We thought it would be faster to just take her ourselves. My boyfriend and Tegan got her in the car, and I sat in the back with her and Tegan. We’d already been driving for a while before I realized my boyfriend wasn’t going in the right direction. He wasn’t heading for the hospital. I asked what he was doing and he said he was getting her to someone who would help her. Somewhere that no one would know we had anything to do with.”

“Did you argue with him?” I ask.

“I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have done any good. He was the one driving and he was so adamant. All the emotion left him. I’d never seen him that way. I didn’t know what to do but go along with what he was saying. The whole drive he was telling me that this was the only option. It was the only thing that made sense. We couldn’t let anyone know what actually happened. We would take her to the emergency room and they would find her. “

“What did he think was going to happen when she woke up? Did he think she was just going to say everything was fine and not talk about what happened?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says without hesitation. “The group of us were tight. We promised to protect each other in any way we could. If she did wake up remembering what happened, she would make something up to cover for us. But my boyfriend really believed she had so much to drink she wasn’t going to remember.”

“Where did you take her?” I ask.

“The hospital in Acadia. It’s far enough away we didn’t think anyone would recognize us. We took her into the hospital, put her in a chair in the emergency room waiting room, and left. She wasn’t passed out when we got there. She was only partly awake and incredibly drunk, but she had enough control to sit in the chair when we put her there.”

“Did you get seen by anyone?” I ask. “You must not have been feeling great by that point.”

“Not there. I was feeling dizzy and weak, but my boyfriend didn’t want to stay at the same hospital as Ashley. He thought people might make the connection. So, he took me to another hospital. In the next town over. You can check. I’ll authorize you to look at my medical records,” Allison says.

“What did they do for you there?” I ask. “Didn’t they check you and find out about the baby?”

“I told them I thought I had a miscarriage. That I went to the bathroom and there was a lot of blood and clots, and that I felt really sick and weak. They gave me fluids and discharged me. They said they didn’t have to contact my parents if I didn’t want them to, which I obviously didn’t. I threw my discharge papers away before leaving the hospital.

“After that, we went back to Sherando Ridge. We pretended that everything was fine. We figured the next day Ashley would be at home and would call to find out what had happened the night before. We worked out the story of her getting mad at us and leaving, and that we assumed she had just called her parents to come pick her up. It seemed as if it was going to be so easy,” Allison says.

“Until it wasn’t,” I say.

“Until it wasn’t. We realized Ashley didn’t have her backpack. It hadn’t even crossed our minds. So, we decided the next day I would take it to her house and drop it off. I was really expecting that I would show up and her mom would be upset, but say she was inside, sick. Or that maybe even she would come to the door and ask me what happened. When