Bolted Read Online Free

massive helping of crap in her mother’s lap when she finally got around to explaining her own marriage, meaning, of course, her own divorce.
    Damn you, Ryan. This is all your fault. Greta knew saying that was illogical, but it still made her feel better. At this point she was willing to blame Ryan for just about anything short of the Great Train Robbery.
    And Dorothy too , she threw in. Oh yes, most especially Dorothy too.
    She leaned back in her seat again, turning the key in the ignition. Really, she wasn’t ready to go into that house with her mom and Owen and the neighbors and then give her mother another set of problems to deal with. Maybe later, like say tomorrow. She’d get around to it. She really would.
    She turned the car toward the outskirts of the harbor, heading for Highway 1. Maybe an hour spent walking along the cliffs would help clear her head. And maybe when she went back, she’d have found a way to explain it all rationally to her mom.
    Yeah, right, Greta. Just like you always do.
     
     
    Hank Mitchell looked down at his foot, still wedged tight, still unmovable. The rocks in that part of the wall had looked sturdy enough when he’d stepped on them. By the time he’d realized how unsturdy they really were, and how ready they were to crumble under his weight, it was too late to jump back. He’d already tried pulling his foot out of his shoe, but the rocks on either side were squeezed too tightly to get it loose.
    Okay, how many times over the years did you tell the interns never to go to a dig alone? Not enough times to drill it into his own thick skull, apparently. Now he stood at the base of a three-foot wall, the possible remains of a Wampanoag settlement, his foot jammed tightly in the midst of some Wampanoag rocks that had crumbled when he’d stepped in the wrong place. He didn’t have the right angle to pry the rocks apart, and he didn’t have any tools that might make it easier.
    If he were a superstitious man, he’d say the Wampanoags were having their revenge on him. If so, they were doing a damned good job of it.
    He checked around the dig one more time, hoping against hope that something might have changed in the three minutes since he’d last looked and that he’d find some kind of tool he could use to pry himself loose. His notebook and cell phone still sat where he’d left them next to the ladder, thoroughly out of reach, along with his trowel and his pick. He might try lying down full length to see if he could touch them, but he was guessing his knees wouldn’t exactly bend in that direction.
    Surely the sisters would miss him at some point. Even if Alice didn’t, surely it would occur to Nadia that he hadn’t been around when he should have been. Surely they’d call the cops to at least check on him. Of course, he didn’t exactly have a regular schedule at Casa Dubrovnik. They might not even notice he hadn’t come home until he’d been missing for a couple of days.
    He’d get very hungry in two days, not to mention thirsty. At least the five-foot depth of the excavation would keep him from getting chilled by the wind.
    Unless it rained. As it had regularly for the past month.
    Hank sighed. He was possibly going to die here. At the very least he was going to get hungry, thirsty and probably wet. And it was all the result of his own idiocy, which made the whole thing that much worse. Alice would probably say she’d told him so, although he was fairly certain even her wide-ranging complaints had never covered this particular situation.
    He tensed. For a moment, he could have sworn he’d heard something rustling. Probably a rabbit or something in the underbrush. And he couldn’t think of any way to use a rabbit to rescue himself.
    He paused, listening again. The rustling seemed more persistent than a rabbit, and it was coming closer. He ran through a quick list of large animals found in the Massachusetts woods. Bears and moose were possible, but unlikely. Coyotes were