Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  “That one,” I say, pointing. “The camouflage mummy bag.”

  Bill and Dawn exchange a confused look.

  “Are you sure?” Dawn steps carefully over the bags, careful not to contaminate any of them with her shoes, then stops at an unzipped puffy bag stretched out by the far wall. It’s black and expensive looking and utterly unfamiliar. “It’s not this one?”

  “No.” I point to the bag I gave him just yesterday morning, smack in the middle of the chaos. “That’s his sleeping bag. I bought it for him specifically for this trip. The receipt is still in my wallet. There’s a strip of his baby blanket tucked in the inside pocket.” The one he didn’t want any of his classmates to know he still slept with.

  Dawn snaps at a man in rubber gloves, and he hurries over, squats beside it and pulls out a well-loved chunk of yellow fabric. The sight of Ethan’s blanket makes me dizzy, and it’s everything I can do not to snatch it out of his hand.

  “Yes.” I give him a stiff nod. “It’s Ethan’s.”

  “Then whose is this?” Dawn says, stabbing a finger at the black sleeping bag by the door.

  “I have no idea.”

  A long, pregnant pause, followed by an uproar of angry chatter. Dawn pulls out her cell phone and begins screaming at the poor sucker on the other end. A furious Bill turns to the rubber-gloved men, admonishing them for something I don’t understand. The men bicker among themselves, animated accusations of who’s to blame. I try to sort through the words, but they fly through the air like knives, sharp and deadly, and I can’t pick out more than a few.

  “What?”

  My question gets lost in the commotion in the room. Nobody answers me. Nobody even looks my way. They just keep doing what they’re doing. Screaming. Arguing. Cussing.

  I grab on to Bill’s arm, give it a shake, raise my voice until it rises above the clatter. “Tell me. What’s going on?”

  “We were working under the assumption that Ethan’s was the black sleeping bag, the one by the wall,” Bill says with a wince. “That’s what the teacher told us, and at least three of the kids confirmed it.” He pauses, and he looks like he might throw up. “It’s why we used it for the dogs.”

  It takes a few seconds for my sleep-deprived brain to catch up, for it to process what he just said. They let the dogs smell the wrong sleeping bag, sent them out into the woods chasing the wrong scent. “So whose scent did the dogs chase to the road?”

  “That’s just it. We thought it was Ethan, but now... Now we’re not sure.”

  KAT

  7 hours, 28 minutes missing

  We end up back in the dining hall with a skeleton staff—Dawn and Bill and an exhausted-looking sheriff. A mud-smeared man named Keith, who’s been in the woods with Detective Macintosh and Lucas, barreling toward Black Mountain Road on Lord-knows-whose trail. A couple of the rubber-gloved men whose names I’ve already forgotten. The rest of the searchers have packed up and gone, relocated to the police office across town. Somebody made a fresh pot of coffee, and it sits untouched at the far end of the table, next to a pile of crumpled sugar packets and a stack of foam cups. The bitter smell churns like acid in my stomach.

  “This explains why the dogs have been running in circles,” the sheriff says, “and why half of them kept coming back to the camp. If the kids were swapping sleeping bags, the dogs are confused. There are too many scents in those woods. They don’t know which one to chase.”

  Hope alights in my chest. “So Ethan might not be in a car?”

  “Whatever trail they caught led them to the road, and since Ethan’s the only one missing, I’m going to assume it’s his. Best way to know for sure is to ask the humans who are tracking it. In the meantime, we’re calling the dogs back in. I want them to start over with a scent that belongs only to your son. They should be here within an hour.”

  “Do you have something we could use?” Dawn says. “A shirt. Some pajamas. Something you know for sure hasn’t been contaminated.”

  She scrubs at her face with both hands, and her tone tells me that she’s still royally pissed but doing her best to hold it together. I notice the tight lines around her mouth, the dark puddles under her eyes, the way her hair has gone limp and lifeless. Dawn is working on less sleep than I am, and I’m sure she wants nothing more than to go home, shower off the mud, fall into bed and sleep until next week.

  “I brought some of his clothes from home, but they’re clean. He hasn’t worn them since they came out of the washer. Oh! I threw in one of his stuffed animals. He normally sleeps with it, but he didn’t want his classmates to know so he didn’t bring it.”

  “Perfect. Where is it?”

  “In my bag, on the floorboard of Detective Macintosh’s car.”

  “Somebody go get it,” the sheriff says to no one in particular. His eyes are glassy and so bloodshot they’re practically glowing.

  One of the rubber-gloved men rises from the table and hustles off.

  “And you.” Sheriff Childers stabs a finger across the table at Bill. “Go over to the hotel and fetch that teacher. If she fucked up something as fundamental as the sleeping bags, I need to know what else we got wrong.”

  My stomach stirs into a sick stew at the idea there could be more bad news.

  Sheriff Childers digs a map from the tornado of papers on the table, spreads it across the top of the pile. “All right, Keith, tell us what you got.”

  Keith rises up on an elbow and leans over the map. He points a finger to a sea of green, a forested area wedged between the outskirts of Dahlonega and US 19. “When I left Lucas and the detective, they were here, following the trail to the northwest. Assuming they’re maintaining the same pace, I’d put them somewhere around here by now.” He slides his finger a half inch to the left, taps it twice. “They’ve got, oh, about another forty minutes before they come up on the road.”

  “And we’re sure they’re tracking a human?” Dawn asks.

  “Lucas for sure knows the difference between human and animal tracks,” I say. “He’ll know everything down to the size and weight of any other human tracks he comes across. He’ll be able to distinguish if it’s Ethan or someone else.”

  “Call over there and find out,” the sheriff says, waving at somebody to pour him a cup of coffee. “I want details on the trail they’re following, and tell them for now to ignore wherever the dogs are pointing them. I need them to go at warp speed and to let us know the second they have something Kat might be able to identify. No more mistakes.”

  Dawn nods, handing the sheriff a cup of coffee and two sugar packets.

  He thanks her by barking out his next order. “Call the feds. Find out what’s taking the CARD team so long.” He shakes the sugar packets against his wrist, aiming his gaze across the table at Keith. “And hit the pause button on that AMBER Alert—”

  My heart stutters. “What? Why?”

  “Because we don’t have a description of the abductor or vehicle, which is one of AMBER’s main requirements, or which direction he’s headed. That’s the whole goddamn problem—we don’t know diddly, and we may have wasted precious hours chasing the wrong damn trail. We’ll order the choppers to head back over the woods with the heat sensors. Essentially, though, we’re back to square one.”

  “No, we’re not. Ask Lucas. He’ll know if this is the right trail or not. He’ll know who he’s following.”

  The sheriff ignores me. “Back to work, people. There’s a little boy out there who needs finding, and he could be anywhere.”

  Anywhere could mean in the back of a van. At the bottom of a still, murky pond. Chained to the pipes in somebody’s basement. Hurtling toward the Mexican border on the backseat of Andrew’s Mercedes.

  “Dawn,” the sheriff says. “Call the volunteers back in, and then start working your way down the sex offender list.”

  Those two words—sex offender�
��are like coming upon a bear in the forest. I suck in a gasp, loud and strangled, but if the sheriff hears, it doesn’t slow him down.

  “I want eyes on every pervert within a fifty-mile radius. Every period Single period Goddamn one exclamation point. Keith, you gather up everybody who’s still here and start the search again from scratch. Now that it’s light and dry, I’m expecting things to move a hell of a lot quicker than the last time around. One of you call Atlanta PD and see where they are with the warrant for the father’s house. And both of you, I want progress reports every half hour, on the half hour, and that’s nonnegotiable. Now go.”

  Everybody scatters but the sheriff and me.

  He holds my gaze across the table, and I couldn’t look away if I tried. His awful words still thrum between us, angry drumbeats that rumble through my mind and turn me inside out.

  Sex offender.

  The sheriff’s brows crumple into a frown. “Aw, hell,” he mumbles, and despite the profanity, it’s the kindest I’ve ever heard his voice.

  I open my mouth, but I can’t respond. My chest has completely locked up. I gulp at air, telling my lungs to breathe, but they don’t obey. No oxygen moves in or out. It’s like the air in the cabin has suddenly turned solid, like someone wrapped my face in Saran wrap while I wasn’t watching. I claw at my throat with both hands, my lungs screaming, burning, on fire. Across from me, the sheriff’s face blurs and the edges of my vision darken.

  “Listen to me, Kat. I need you to puff up your cheeks and blow, okay? I know you feel like your lungs are gonna explode, but blow anyway. Blow like you’re blowing up a balloon. Blow like you’re blowing out a million birthday candles. I want to feel your breath on my skin, all the way over here.” He reaches across the paper chaos, gives my arm a squeeze, then a jiggle. “Come on, now. Blow as hard as you can.”

  The body is an amazing thing. Just when I think I’m going to pass out, the concrete in my chest dissolves and my lungs release. Air rushes out of me in a great gasp. My needy body sucks more in too quickly, and the concrete starts to harden all over again.

  “Again,” the sheriff commands. “Keep going, keep going, keep going. Good. One more time.” He coaches me through another round, and then another, until my breathing calms to a light wheeze. And then he plunks his elbows on the table and leans in. “Listen, Kat, you can’t lose it on me now. You and I are partners in this thing, okay? I need you, and you need me, and together we are going to find your son. No matter what.”

  I want to weep at his words. They’re the ones I’ve been so desperate to hear, and from the person I was so desperate to hear them. I give him a shaky nod.

  “Now. As much as I need us to get along, I can’t be holding your hand the whole time. My priority is to your son, and I won’t have time to explain every single decision I make as I’m making them. That’s what Dawn’s for, so anytime you have questions or concerns about my approach, you take them to her. You have her number, don’t you?”

  I nod, even though the paper she wrote it on is in a cabin across the clearing, and my cell phone is dead at the bottom of my pocket.

  “Great. But since she’s not here and I am, is there anything you’d like to ask me now? Anything at all. Now’s your chance.”

  I think back to the long list of questions I made back in the tiny cabin, the way they flipped through my mind almost too fast for me to record. A new one floats to the top like a rotten egg.

  “Did anybody find Andrew?”

  “Yes and no. According to the TSA, he left the country on Saturday headed to St. Martin and has not reentered by plane or sea. I’ve got someone working their way down the island’s hotels and resorts, but so far, no hits. For now, it looks like if your ex-husband had anything to do with Ethan’s disappearance, it’s by proxy.”

  “Oh.” I don’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed. When it comes to choosing between Andrew versus a sexual deviant, I’d pick Andrew any day. Even though it means Ethan would still be gone, at least then I know he’d be with someone who loves him, someone who wouldn’t harm him. “So now what? What are the next steps?”

  “Now I really need you to rack your brain for who else might have taken him. It’s not gonna be pleasant, because I’m asking you to think about people you know. Neighbors. Family and friends. Teachers or somebody at school. People who’ve got some access to your son but might be looking for some more. The more names you can give me, the better.”

  “I already started a list. It’s in the other cabin.”

  “Good, keep going with that. And just because we put a hold on the AMBER Alert doesn’t mean we are clamping down on the others. We’ve got every police department in the vicinity keeping an eye out for your son, and we’ve already distributed Ethan’s description to the media. He’ll be the lead item on every news station in a hundred-mile radius. And like I said before, CARD’s on the way.”

  “CARD?”

  “Child Abduction Rapid Deployment teams. They’re FBI agents experienced in child abductions in multijurisdictional settings, like this one. These guys are the big guns, okay? They should be arriving any moment.”

  “Okay.” I tell myself this is good, that the sheriff is committed and capable, but fear still trickles up my neck.

  “In the meantime, what are your thoughts on making an official statement?”

  His question confuses me, as does his hopeful tone. “A statement?”

  “I’d like to get you in front of the news cameras and have you make an appeal to whoever took Ethan. We’ll write it, you read it word for word. Do you think you can do that?”

  I think about standing at a podium before a sea of journalists, bathed in the glare of their camera lights and bursts of flashing bulbs like a movie star. The idea makes me want to throw up. “Yes.”

  “You’re going to have to be calm and clear and say things you don’t mean. Things like if he lets Ethan go, if he returns him to you safely, then you promise the police won’t hunt his ass down and kick it straight to prison.”

  “You’re asking me to lie?”

  “No, I’m telling you to lie your ever-loving ass off and be convincing about it. This guy needs to not just feel sorry for taking a little boy away from his mother, but to believe every promise coming out of your mouth. He has to believe you mean it when you say that we won’t come after him. Now I’m going to ask you again. Do you think you can do that?”

  I swallow, then swallow again. “I can do anything if it will bring back my son.”

  For the first time since we met, the sheriff smiles. “Good girl. I’ll have Dawn set it up.”

  * * *

  The sheriff’s walkie-talkie crackles, then erupts in a burst of dialogue. Two, maybe three voices, talking in fits and spurts. I don’t catch all of their words, but I understand enough of them. I’m off the bench and bolting for the door.

  Outside, three men and two women—fresh faces in clean clothes—are working their way up the muddy hill. I fly out the door and slip on the muddy stairs, landing tail-first in the dirt. “Are you okay?” one of them calls out. I hoist myself up and take off into the woods without replying, sprinting down the winding path to the kids’ cabin.

  Where Bill has arrived with Miss Emma.

  I don’t slow down long enough to think about what I will say to her. My body is on autopilot, my brain buzzing on high-octane anger and base instinct. All I know is that I have to confront her. I run until I come out in the tiny clearing.

  Bill steps out onto the porch, followed closely by Emma. She sees me and lets the screened door of the cabin slam behind her. The sound echoes like a tinny cymbal through the forest.

  Her skin is pasty, her eyes swollen from crying or lack of sleep or both. The pretty makeup she was wearing the last time I saw her is gone, scrubbed or cried off. Her hair, usually a glorious mane of blond curls, is shoved in a messy ponytail that hangs
tangled and listless over one shoulder. She’s breathing fast, her chest heaving with effort and emotion.

  Bill takes a step in my direction, then halts at the top of the stairs. “Ms. Quinn verified that Ethan was in the black sleeping bag. The one by the far wall.”

  Emma’s gaze creeps to mine, and she confirms it with a nod.

  The cool morning air stretches tight between us. I stand in the clearing and wonder if the woods will tear in half.

  “This is our fault, Kat. We should have asked you to identify Ethan’s things earlier. As soon as you got here. And Sammy’s name was on his. We just missed it somehow, and then the dogs were—”

  “Why?” The word shoots out of me like a bullet, abrupt and deadly.

  Bill glances between us, looking uneasy. He frowns like he doesn’t know what to do first, comfort Emma or pacify me. “Why what?”

  “Why was Ethan in a sleeping bag that wasn’t his? You know his was the camouflage one. I gave it to him for this trip as a surprise. You took it from his arms when you helped him onto the bus.”

  Emma shakes her head, a jerky back and forth. “I have eighteen students. I can’t keep track of all their things.”

  “No, I guess not. How could you, when you can’t even keep track of them?”

  The sarcasm is a technique I gleaned from Andrew. As much as I detested it when he aimed it at me, it sure hits its target now. Two pink spots bloom high on Emma’s cheeks.

  “You know how much I love my students. I love those kids like they’re my own.” She presses both hands into her chest, but it doesn’t stop her hands from shaking. “I am traumatized about Ethan, Kat. I am devastated.”

  I hate this woman. I hate her with such an intensity that I have to hold myself back from slapping the distressed look off her face. I know Emma is not the one who sprayed kerosene at the back corner of the cabin and lit the match, but I don’t believe her I’m-just-so-devastated attitude, either. What she should be feeling is guilt. This is her fault. She let this happen. If she really loved my son, she’d have been paying better attention.