Ransom River by Meg Gardiner Page A

the window and caught him. He scrolled through his contacts and hovered over his dad’s number.
    On TV, the news crew that was hunkered down in the parking garage zoomed in on the courthouse. Sirens in the background. The focus blurred and sharpened on the image of hostages pinned to the courtroom windows.
    Seth’s hand slowly fell to his side. He forgot about calling his dad. His dad was fine. His dad was retired and wouldn’t go within two miles of the courthouse for fun or profit.
    The reporter’s voice was hushed. “This is Jennifer Warner-Garcia at the scene of a developing hostage situation at the Ransom River Superior Courthouse.”
    There on-screen, up against the glass, stood Rory.
    Seth’s nerve endings seemed to snap with sparks. It was Rory, no question. No doubt, not a chance he was imagining it. Two years since he had seen her, since he had touched her, since she had given him that fateful look and told him,
No more.
Two years that hadn’t passed so much as scored him like a rusted knife.
    When had she come back? Nobody had told him. Not her parents, of course—if her father approached him, it would be with a baseball bat. Her dad, the guy who wouldn’t let a sparrow with a broken wing die on the forest floor, the guy who thought Seth Colder was a maniac with a death wish.
    Seth had thought she would never set foot in Ransom River again. That she was gone for good.
    Aurora Faith, what are you doing there?
    He heard reporter Jennifer Warner-Garcia mention
gunman
and
shots fired.
    Rory looked beautiful. She was wearing the turquoise necklace he had given her. He thought, seeing it, that he might crack into pieces.
    The hostages at the windows had their hands up, palms pressed to the glass. They looked like figures in a Navajo sand painting. Seth could guess what they’d been told: Hold still or get shot.
    Though Rory was holding still, she seemed to thrum with energy. And he saw that she wasn’t completely motionless. Her hands were moving. She put two fingers of her left hand against the glass. She shaped her right hand into a gun.
    “Goddamn,” he said.
    Two guns.
    Then she walked her fingers up the glass, as if they represented a little human figure. With her left hand she continued to press two fingers to the window.
    Two gunmen.
    The sparks beneath Seth’s skin turned chill.
    She was silently signaling the police that two armed hostiles were inside the courtroom. Obviously, Rory thought the cops didn’t know how many attackers were inside. And she thought they needed that information to rescue her and everybody else there.
    Rory paused and glanced to the side, as though checking that nobody in the courtroom had seen what she was doing.
    “Watch yourself,” Seth said.
    She put one finger of her left hand against the window. Slowly, with her right, she drew letters on the glass, like a kid writing in condensation.
D-E-A-D.
    She paused. Again she put one finger against the window with her left hand. With her right, she spelled out
H-U-R-T.
    One dead, one injured.
    The reporter didn’t comment. Maybe she didn’t see what Rory had done. She said, “We have no audio from inside the building, but it’s apparent that the hostages are in fear for their lives. We can see—it looks like nine people—against the glass. We can’t view anything of the interior of the courtroom.”
    “Of course not,” Seth said. “The gunmen want it that way.”
    He raised his phone and scrolled to a new number. It was time to take this to another level.
    But he stopped, riveted by the sight of Rory, her necklace gleaming in the sun. She had gone very still. But her lips were moving.
    The reporter said, “The hostages in the Ransom River courtroom seem to be a microcosm of the people who make up this Los Angeles suburb. Women and men, young and old, black and white and Latino. We can’t know what’s in their minds, but it has to be terror. And…one woman seems to be praying.”
    The camera focused on Rory. She