by Marta Acosta
“Ben, I need to tell you something. I have relationships with men, too.”
“Georgie said something nonspecific. I’d assumed it anyway.”
“Oh, good. I wanted things to be clear between us. If you have anything you’d like to reveal to me, please feel free to disclose it.”
He hesitated and then said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to seduce me. Because if you hit on me, we’d have to stop being friends.”
I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, and I flapped my arms to release my anxiety, one, two, and on the third rise. “Ben, I wouldn’t know how to seduce anyone if I tried, so I’m not going to try and I’m asking the same of you.”
My phone buzzed and I grabbed it like a life jacket. “What the hell, Oliver? Because I am minding my own business at home.” I glanced at Ben, who’d stepped away.
Oliver said, “Nice manners, Whitney. You’re quite the lady. Get the dogs and meet me at the entrance to Oak Forest Park. Time to show me what you’ve accomplished with your elite SAR team.”
“You’re barely capable of walking a dog, and I’m not going with you on a drill so you can jerk me around.”
“I am not...” he began. “A senior with Alzheimer’s wandered off at a picnic and her family hasn’t been able to find her. You know how the temperature drops. She’s eighty-three.”
“The new vet, Ben Meadows, and I will be there in ten.” I looked to Ben for confirmation.
“Fifteen,” Ben said. “I need to change into jeans and boots at my place first.”
“Fifteen minutes,” I told Oliver.
I GRABBED MY JACKET, hiking boots, and heavy-duty Maglites. As we were loading the dogs into my truck, I said, “What do you know about search and rescue?”
“Only the basic concepts. What about you?”
“I know a lot in theory, very little in practice. However, Bertie’s had experience and Zeus would hunt for the Abominable Snowman if he thought he’d get to play with a tennis ball afterward. The park’s over a thousand acres of places to get lost, as well as bobcats, coyotes, rattlers, and skeezy guys doing nefarious crap.”
I gave Ben directions, got in the truck, took off. The small Oak Forest Regional Park sign was easy to miss even in daylight. A lime-green fire truck and half a dozen cars crowded the entrance. I turned into the shoulder of the road and parked behind Oliver’s patrol car.
As I took the dogs from their crates, I heard a woman say, “She’s the dog psychic.” I tried to ignore the people crowding around us. Each dog wore a harness with a 20’ lead. A middle-aged couple came forward and began talking over each another as they told me that his mother, Eileen Wainwright, had left their picnic area at around 4:00. They’d searched for her for over an hour before calling 911.
“How often have you done this?” the man said nervously. “Why does your dog have those scars? Is he okay?”
“My dog is ideal in every way, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Do you want my help or not?”
Ben drove into the lot and got out of his SUV with a backpack just as Oliver strode out of the park toward us. “Oliver...I mean, Sheriff, could we speak privately?”
We edged away from the others and I introduced the men. Oliver was leading the search and he said, “We had a team of volunteers on horseback until it got too dark. They’ve flagged all the locations that have been cleared.” He showed us a map that folded in the wind. “We’ll spread out in quadrants from the picnic area and cover the area again. Do you know how to use compasses?”
“Yes,” I said, and Ben said, “What about GPS?”
“Even when it can grab a signal, GPS might lead you off a cliff or into a pond on this terrain,” Oliver said. “Mr. Wainwright told me noise confuses Eileen and she might turn her hearing aid off, so keep that in mind.”
“There’s too much of everything now,” I said. “All the foot traffic probably muddied the scent trail. Sheriff, can you call the volunteers in and give me at least forty-five minutes with the dogs? I don’t think an old lady is going to get very far.”
“She used to run marathons and she uses a treadmill,” Oliver said. “So she can move. That is if she actually wandered off.”
The nerves tightened along my spine, upward: Sherry Rae might have been a victim of opportunity and Eileen might be one, too.
Oliver checked his watch. “I’ll allow forty-five minutes for the dogs to search. If we don’t have any luck, we’ll come back and try again with a line of volunteers.”
Ben slid on his backpack. “I brought my first aid kit.”
“Good,” I said. “Okay, these are the ground rules. You guys can only come with me if you don’t question my decisions because I know these dogs.”
Ben said, “I reserve the right to offer my opinion,” and Oliver said, “After forty-five minutes, I call the shots. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Oliver left to tell his deputies our plan, and Ben said, “He’s your ex-girlfriend’s brother?”
“The very one.”
We stopped talking when Oliver rejoined us. He held up a plastic bag and said, “I had Wainwright bring clothes from his mother’s laundry hamper.”
“Ben, hand Zeus to Sheriff Desjardins. You’ll be his second,” I said.
Oliver took the lead without any enthusiasm, and I said, “Greet your dog, Sherriff. Give him a good scratching behind his ears.”
Oliver looked warily at the Dutch shepherd, who darted to the end of the lead and then darted back. Only after Ben reached down to rub Zeus’s back did Oliver pet the dog.
We crunched through the layers of live oak leaves, each tipped with sharp points, and soon arrived at a picnic table illuminated by kerosene lanterns. A deputy sat on the table and said, “Any word?”
“Nothing,” Oliver said. “We’ll be fanning out with the dogs. Stay here and report any news to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I slipped on plastic gloves and took Eileen’s clothes out of the bags for the dogs to sniff. “Bertie was trained to trail ground scents, and Zeus can air scent fairly well. At least he can find me when I’m hiding. I don’t know what he’ll do now.”
I handed plastic gloves and a sock to Oliver. “You don’t have to keep the gloves on but we don’t want to contaminate their introduction to the scent. Get your dog excited about the sock. And ‘excited’ is not the same as ‘murderous.’ It’s a game for him and if you want Zeus to locate Mrs. Wainwright, you have to make him want to play.”
Oliver smiled, but I recognized the set of his jaw. “Here, boy.” He waved the sock in front of Zeus. “Good boy. Smell the sock,” he said. “Whitney, do I really have to do this?”
“You don’t have to have a conversation with him,” Ben said. “Because it’s all ‘Blah, blah, blah, Ginger.’ He’ll respond to your attitude and your tone.”
I stood by a green trash barrel and slowly made a 360 degree turn, the flashlight held in front of me, pausing when I saw areas wide enough for easy passage. The path of least resistance was a narrow trail used by bicyclists. “This is our starting point. Oliver, let Zeus smell the socks again and give him his command, revier. It means search. Revier.” I took a tennis ball out of my pocket and handed it to Oliver. “Now he knows if he finds the scent, you’ll play catch with him. I’ll go first with Bertie. If we lose each other, we’ll return to the picnic table and regroup.”
I crouched close to my beautiful dog, praying I was not sending him to discover a corpse. I held a thin sweater to his nose. “Search,” I commanded, and he dropped his nose to the ground and began sniffing.
“Revier,” Oliver said, and Zeus bounded forward, then to one side, lifting his nose to a breeze that whispered like a ghost moving through the trees.
The men and I could only see to the end of our flashlight beams, but the dogs moved swiftly through the darkness, leaping over fallen logs that I had to clamber over, and splashing through puddles where I slipped and fell. Ben helped us untangle the long leads from shrubs and sh
ined his light ahead.
The dogs yipped with impatience at our awkwardness, our uncertain steps. As we ran, we began to find a rhythm and a synchronicity, when the leads no longer tangled and when Bertie’s nose-to-the-ground stride matched Zeus’s raised head as he darted ahead.
There was a moment when we reaching a small clearing and the icy half-moon shone down on us, turning the scene a chiaroscuro flipbook as we tore through the undergrowth, and I felt every sense heightened, discovering shapes within the darkness, scents on the wind, the taste of the air in my mouth, the grasp of coyote bush against my leg, the sounds of insects and animals, and we ran and ran, the dogs coursing ahead, and we panted together, and our feet pounded the earth together, and we were alive together, in this moment, in this place of darkness and trees and earth and wind and water.
Then the dogs bounded down an incline so steep we slid to catch up and tumbled into a crevice carved by a narrow chilly fast-running creek. The dogs followed the creek and we sloshed after, breaking into a tangle of blackberry brambles that tore at my arms and face, but couldn’t gain purchase on my short hair, the thorns scraping against my scalp.
“She couldn’t have gone in here,” Oliver said, but the dogs yelped excitedly, so we pushed on and called out, “Mrs. Wainwright! Eileen, Eileen!” until our voices were hoarse and we pressed through the brambles ripping at us and we followed the dogs, who crawled beneath the densest branches, and Ben said, “Quiet! Listen.”
We heard the creek swirling along, our dogs barking close by, a coyote yelping in seductive response, the hypnotic drone of crickets, the heavy flap of wings overhead of wild turkeys we’d disturbed, and the thud as they landed nearby, and we heard a faint, reedy voice singing wordlessly, tunelessly, distant and hollow as if from a cave.
Oliver shouted, “Mrs. Wainwright! Mrs. Wainwright, tell us where you are. This is Sheriff Desjardins and we’re here to help. Direct us to your location!”
There was no response so he tried again, “Mrs. Wainwright, are you all right? We’re going to help you.”
We heard the dogs rustling, but our flashlights couldn’t cut through the blackness.
“She’s scared,” Ben said. “Sing to her, Maddie.”
It took me a minute to catch my breath and then I sang, “Come on, Eileen,” and soon a weak, off-key voice was accompanying me, and Zeus barked to give us direction. I sang and we crawled in the mud under the brambles, descending all the while, Oliver and Ben joining in on the chorus, and we saw her then, her bony arms around the dogs, as if they were her familiars in this underworld.
I dropped into the mud next to the old woman and continued to sing while Oliver radioed our location. Ben wrapped the Mylar blanket over her and Oliver searched for an easier route out. There was none so we waited and warbled and Mrs. Wainwright joined in a beat behind, smiling now.
Oliver tossed the tennis ball to Zeus and said, “So ist brav,” and I was so happy he remembered, and Mrs. Wainwright said, “Guter hund. I had a shepherd when I was a girl. They are the best dogs. Can I go home now?”
Someone nearby called, “Dr. Ben! Are you there? Olly?”
I shouted, “We’re here, Dawg!”
We swung our lights toward his voice until we saw him sweeping aside a curtain of vines, crouching down, unable to come any farther into the tiny space. “You found her. Hi, Mrs. W. You remember me? Dawg from Dr. Pete’s office.”
AND AS EASILY AS THAT, Dawg had broken the spell and we were merely a lost old lady, the small town law officer, a married man missing his family, and the village idiot.
Eileen’s face scrunched like a dried apple. “Douglas O’Donnell, of course, I know you—always loitering with your no-good friends by the Riley’s Liquors, smoking drugs and pitching pennies. Where’s my son? He’s supposed to come home right after school, but I can never rely on him.”
“Nice to see you, too.” Dawg ran his flashlight’s beam over her and said to us, “The rescue team’s on its way. Can she walk out?
Ben examined Mrs. Wainwright, with a far gentler touch than he used with me. “I think her ankle is broken.” He used the sweater to pad her ankle and the scarf and sticks for a splint.
We engaged in an elaborate game of Twister to maneuver Mrs. Wainwright into the culvert, where the rescue team had dropped a harness on a rope. She panicked several times when we tried to strap her, struggling and shouting, “It’s too bright,” as she shielded her eyes from the emergency lights above, where a crowd was waiting for us.
Oliver said, “Maybe she doesn’t want to go into the goddamn light,” with a look at me.
“Make yourself useful and sing,” I said, and our voices calmed Eileen; we were the choir singing as she ascended into the land of the living.
I wanted to avoid the lights and noise, too, and crawl back the way we’d come, but Bertie was tired. He was too heavy for me to lift up so Ben buckled in and carried my dog.
While we waited, Oliver rubbed Zeus’s back. “We did okay.”
“We did a damn sight better than okay. Do you realize how special Zeus is?”
“I’m getting the idea.”
The harness was thrown down again and this time Oliver went up with Zeus. I had only a moment alone in the darkness. I wanted time to slip back and run again through the shadows of the oaks, fighting the scrub brush, hearing our feet pounding on the hard earth. The elemental feeling was already as ephemeral as a dream, and I was already trapped in a labyrinth of my own thoughts with paths, stairs, and doorways turning upon themselves with no escape, and I couldn’t understand what I was feeling. Something, I felt something welling within me, filling my eyes, spilling down my cheeks.
I rubbed my face, scouring mud over my tears, and when the harness dropped, I buckled myself in and was lifted to the surface. Most of the activity had moved to the entrance, where Mrs. Wainwright was fussing on a gurney, refusing to go into the ambulance.
A news van was there, and Sasha Seabrook stood in front of the Oak Forrest Park sign, in high-heels and a snug dress, reminding me it was still Saturday night. Abel Myklebust had cornered Oliver and the fire chief.
Sasha waved at me and said, “Dr. Whitney! Yoo-hoo!”
I returned her wave and trudged to my truck. Ben had loaded the dogs in their crates and was closing the tailgate when Dawg came up. “Dawg, how’d you find us so fast?”
“I recognized the spot from Ollie’s description. I spent a lot of time partying in this park when I was supposed to be in high school. Mrs. Wainwright was always on our ass, but I’m glad you rescued the old nag.”
I saw Sasha picking her way on the uneven pathway toward me, and said, “Me, too. But now I really need to get out of here.”
Ben said, “I’ll play defense while you make a break for it.” As I hurried to my truck, I heard him say, “I’ve seen you on television!”
Chapter 11
THE DOGS WERE TOO FILTHY to bring inside so I took them to the rehabilitation center, and gave them rawhide bones. As I was walking to the house, feeling strangely hollow and empty, I saw a car turning into our drive. The dogs recognized the engine and didn’t bark. For a moment, I hoped and dreaded. I hoped Ben had returned because I wanted him, and I dreaded it because he was married. I hoped Claire had heard the news and dreaded it because I knew that somehow I would make everything worse. Hell, I even hoped Sasha might come by to flirt and keep me company and yet I dreaded a gossipy interview.
I hadn’t hoped or dreaded that Oliver Desjardins would arrive. Under the porch light, he was as muddy and scratched up as I.
“Hey, Maddie. I didn’t see you leave and wanted to see if you got home.”
“You mean instead of cruising the Country Squire? Hell, I’m too much of a mess even for the Ring-A-Bell.” I opened the door and he came inside with me. He noticed the bowls of melted ice cream and the wine glasses.
“Do you have anything to drink?”
I picked up the wine bottle and held it to the light. “Not much here. The
re’s tequila somewhere and orange juice. My sister has cream liqueurs in the living room. Sugary stuff.”
“Tequila and juice is fine.”
I washed my hands, trying to scrub the grit from under the broken nails, and then I made two strong drinks and gave him a glass. “Cheers, Olly.”
“Cheers, Maddie.” He waved toward the wineglasses. “Sorry if I interrupted your plans with Meadows.”
“Can’t you just say ‘thank you’ and not give me shit for thirty seconds?”
“I gave you more than forty-five minutes.”
I looked at the clock. It was past midnight. “I lost track of time. I was afraid we wouldn’t find her, and I was really afraid we’d find her too late.”
“Like Sherry Rae. She had a totally different victim profile. Eileen was with her family and much older.”
“What else was different?”
“Dozens of things. Eileen’s family was happy to give me too much information. Sherry Rae’s family, not so much, and her law firm is determined to make things difficult.”
“So you think it’s related to her work?”
“I never said that.”
“What about the location?”
“Phineas and Tess’s place is convenient, which is why you happened upon it...although you seem to show up everywhere, so maybe it’s not a good example. I can’t talk about the investigation.” Oliver set his glass on the counter and said, “Something happened out there, as if time passed differently. I can’t explain it.”
My skin tingled with recognition. “We became a pack.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, his voice rougher from our yelling and singing and breathing the cold night air.
“That’s what people say to dismiss women with disturbing or unfamiliar ideas.” The drink soothed my raw throat. “Dogs, wolves, humans, we all survive by cooperating. Most people think that canine packs have alphas who control behavior, but packs are more like families. The relationships are constantly in flux, roles shifting, sharing a common goal. Like us tonight. Didn’t you feel it, too?”