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She rued in the bathroom until she found soe on the bridge of her nose That helped She could pass Maybe

She stepped out into the hall No one there, which wasn’t surprising Dinner, such as it was, had coy forin their rooms

Diana knew better than to take a car A guard was being kept at the entrance to Coates again They’d be sure to stop her and summon Drake

DrakeCaine’s orders

But then again, he e an “accident” for Diana?

So she took a side door out of the dormitory, the door nearest the woods She was acutely conscious of the crunch of her oversized boy sneakers on gravel and then grateful for the softer sound of pine needles andleaves

It was a long walk to skirt the gate The woods were dark Straight overheard, when she looked at the sky, she could see the rich blue of evening But night fell early under the trees

It took her an hour to work her way through braullies She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to the road—woods oods, to Diana, one tree like the next But at last, as night crept up on twilight, she climbed a slippery embankment and stepped onto blacktop

She had no brilliant plan for getting to Jack She couldn’t exactly knock him on the head and carry him to Caine She would have to rely on other means Jack had always had a crush on her, not that he would ever act on it

A pity she looked like a boy now

It was all downhill until she hit the highway There at last idely separated pools of light cast by the ever fewer functioning streetlights, and a faint glow from the ehtbulbs

She was footsore and weary when she reached Perdido Beach and she badly needed a rest It was going to be a long night, of that she was sure

Diana walked down Sher for an eliht, and this one house was so shabby, so run-down, that she was convinced no one would be staying here

The lights were off inside and repeated efforts yielded only one functioning light bulb, a Tiffany-style la room There was a roll-ared into it gratefully

“So emptiness