The Death of Colleen Rivers

Chapter 41: Colleen

One problem with escaping this hell-like mansion grounds: we didn't know where the heck we were at.

Baylor had never heard of a random mansion in the woods and neither had I. We didn't know how far we were from town. We didn't even know if we were still in Kentucky.

All we knew about the mansion was it was huge, the wooden outside structure was painted white, chipping and fading away from the weather of many years, and on one end there was a rounded room, the roof over top of it like a cone. Many vines were growing around the walls, including covering some of the windows.

The weird part of the building was that it looked fairly new and well taken care of inside, whereas from the outside it looked abandoned. That was probably Leila's cover up for her "secret fortress" here in the middle of no where.

But why was she doing this? How long had she been planning this? And how'd she get those big burly men to work for her? They could take her out in what hit yet they are terrified of her.

None of it made sense to me, but it didn't matter. As soon as we found a phone — Leila had taken ours — we would call the police and tell them about Leila's mansion and she would be gone for good from our lives.

A smile grew it's way on my face although I was exhausted from helping Baylor along. But the thought of never seeing Leila's face ever again made me ecstatic.

Baylor must have seen my face because he asked, "Why so happy? Did you figure out where we were?"

"Can we stop for a second?" I asked, panting. "You're exhausting to help hike through the woods."

"Sure." Baylor hobbled over to a log and sat down, cleaning off the space beside him and patting it telling me to join him.

I walked over and sat down, trying to catch my breath still. We didn't have any water so my mouth was very dry by now. When was the last time I ate or drank something?

At least it wasn't hot outside. There was a slight chill in the air but the temperature was fairly nice.

I was still dressed in the hospital gown, my blood bright red against the light blue material. I didn't have anything underneath it, and it was starting to irritate me that I didn't.

"So, why were you so happy?" Baylor asked again.

"I was just thinking about Leila and how after we get to the cops, we will never have to see her again."

He adjusted his ankle out in front of him carefully. "Yeah, that would be a reason to smile. But we need to know where we are and we can't see anything on the ground, how 'bout you climb a tree and look?"

"No way." Did he really think I was gonna climb a tree with this gown on? Sorry dude, no. It was still daylight. No way was I even going to stand up on the log.

"Why not?" he asked.

I pointed to the hospital gown, slightly annoyed.

"Oh," is all he said. I didn't know if he understood, or just didn't want to ask why.

Smart boy.

"Why don't you do it? You said you're ankle was fine, right?"

"Yeah, yeah! It's just sore like I said before. To prove it, I will climb a tree."

Baylor slowly rose, still not putting very much pressure on the hurt ankle. He approached the tree trunk and turned around to look at me. "This one good?"

I nodded.

He took a deep breath then began to climb. I could hear whimpers and groans now and then, but he finally made it to the top and situated himself on one of the high branches.

"You see anything?" I shouted up.

He waved me to shut up so that's what I did.

After a couple of minutes he came back down and sat back down on the log. "I can see what looks like a town, but it's a couple miles off in that direction." He pointed slightly to the left of where we were already heading. "Let's start in a couple more minutes, okay? Let's just rest right now."

"Okay. Sounds good." I hooked my arm in his and laid my head on his shoulder, closing my eyes.

It was okay to rest for as long as he wanted.

As long as Baylor was with me, I wasn't in any hurry in going anywhere else.

I was already where I wanted to be.