by Emily France
“Puck!” Essa shouted. The darkness had thinned just enough; Essa could start to see. She hopped off the ground and shouted for her sister. “Where are you?”
There was no response.
“I’m going to go this way,” Essa said, pointing.
“Is that east?” Oliver asked Micah. “So I’m supposed to go—”
“That’s . . .” Micah looked into the brightening sky. “Generally eastward, but hang on. I’ll get the map, and we’ll take a bearing . . .”
“I’m not waiting,” Essa said. She looked at Oliver. “And Oliver can go with you.”
“Okay, but—”
Essa didn’t stay to hear the end of Micah’s sentence. She headed into the woods, her boots churning the dead leaves underfoot like a boat’s propeller making waves of water in her wake. She looked left and right as she ran, hoping to see a new brush shelter leaning against the side of a tree with Puck’s small sneakers sticking out. Her sister, a little hungry and cold, but happily asleep. Essa looked up in the trees, hoping to see Puck perched in one of them like a baby owl, silent and studying the ground below. Playing some cruel game of hide-and-seek, just waiting to be found.
Essa didn’t see that.
She didn’t see anything but dense stands of pine trees, the slope of the forest floor, the occasional clearing with a view of the knobs of Comanche Peak.
“Puck!” she called into the emptiness. “Puck, where are you?”
She stopped looking for brush shelters or for Puck’s hiding spot in a tree. She started looking for ominous things. A tuft of blonde hair peeking out from a mound of leaves. A lone sneaker, muddy and mauled, dropped in the woods like a last word. The curve of Puck’s shoulders, lifeless and cold as the boulder she leaned against.
She didn’t see any of that, either.
“Puck!”
The faraway screech of a hawk circling in the sky was the only response.
Come back.
She searched for another two hours, trying to keep her eye on the sky, on her direction, on her relation to the peaks in the distance. She saw nothing but wilderness, humming along as usual. Chipmunks scurrying between rocks, marmots calling with their usual squeaks, wildflowers carefully opening, reaching for the rising sun. She begged the forest to talk to her, to show her something, anything that would point to her sister.
It didn’t.
She began to circle back toward camp, making a wide arc to cover more ground. As she got closer, she heard something.
Her name.
“Essa!”
It was faint, but snaked through the woods loud and clear.
It was Micah’s voice.
He was calling her back to camp. Maybe they’d found Puck, maybe she’d be sitting by the campfire, drinking a cup of pine needle tea. Maybe she’d be telling of her adventure, getting lost last night when she tried to go the bathroom, getting turned around, spending the night in the woods completely alone. Essa ran, faster and faster, toward the sound of Micah’s voice. With each footfall, she felt higher and higher on hope.
She’ll be there. She’ll be standing next to Micah. They’ll be laughing.
Essa ran up a small rise, and their campsite came into view.
She saw Micah.
She saw Oliver.
By the time she reached them, she felt like a newcomer to high altitudes. Light-headed. Out of breath. Lungs aching, trying to pull enough oxygen out of the thin air.
“Did you find her?” Essa panted the question, bent over, hands on knees.
Micah shook his head no. “And you know what we have to do,” he said.
He was right. She knew exactly what they had to do. She was trained in wilderness survival. She knew the protocol for losing a member of your party. Especially if that member was a child. But the answer made Essa want to crawl onto the forest floor, to bury herself deep in the loam, to die right there, to rest until the soil reclaimed her, until all evidence of this trip was lost to time.
We have to go get help.
We have to leave here without her.
May 16
Chicago
27
OLIVER
“Do you think he has a girlfriend?” Oliver was on Lilly’s bed, his feet kicked up against the wall. He was tossing a wiffle ball. He watched it sail up toward the ceiling of his sister’s room and fall back again into his hands. He wondered why it had holes in it. A wiffle ball. Who thought it was a good idea to take something solid like a ball and slow it down like that? Let all the air in. All the resistance. “I mean, he’s always flirted with waitresses and shit.”
Lilly was on the floor, hunched over her toenails. She was slowly painting a triangle on her big toe. “No,” she said, leaning back to eye her work, checking to see if the sides of the triangle were even. “No way. That’s so plebian.”
The sounds of their parents’ argument grew louder. Their mother’s voice was shrill. Their father’s, low. Angry. They’d been at it for almost an hour.
Oliver glanced at his sister. He knew why Dad had filed for divorce. Partly it was the stress of his work schedule. The stress of their mom’s. But that was just the icing on the cake. The long hours, the missed dinners, the canceled vacations might have all been doable if it weren’t for . . .
“It’s not because of me,” Lilly said.
“No, of course not.”
But it was. It was Lilly’s hospitalizations. Her episodes. The stress had eaten away at their family, bite by bite. Oliver tossed the wiffle ball again.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
He eyed Lilly, trying to figure out where her mind was. He couldn’t tell if she was lying, if she knew her parents were constantly fighting about her. About her illness. Sometimes she wasn’t even clear that she had one.
“I know what it is,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she carefully filled the triangle with thick pink polish.
“Oh yeah?” Oliver tossed the ball against the wall this time. It ricocheted at an angle. Oliver lunged sideways, but couldn’t catch it. He watched it roll under Lilly’s bookshelf. He let his head hang over the side of the bed, stared at his sister upside down. The blood ran to his face, and he could feel it getting tighter and tighter, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears.
“He’s a criminal.” She said it casually. Like that was a typical thing to call your father.
“You mean, like criminally neglectful? Criminally rigid? Or criminally patronizing?” Oliver cracked a smile, hoping she’d laugh. Hoping that’s what she was thinking. Something normal. Average. Real.
“No.” She slipped the nail polish brush back into its tiny jar. She looked at his almost-purple face. “Sit up. It’s serious.”
No, no, no.
Oliver pulled himself up too fast, and the room spun around him. He tried to stare at the wall to get oriented, to make the moment stop. He looked at the place where Lilly used to have pirate posters taped up. At the spots where the tape had yellowed the wall paint, left rectangular sticky marks. After she started to get sick, she’d taken them all down and drawn on the walls with marker. She loved shapes. Triangles. Circles. Squares.
“He’s hiding something, Oliver.”
“Who, Dad?” He feigned shock. Stalling.
“I found this.” Lilly scooted across the floor to her bookshelf. She pulled out her favorite book, The History of Fairy Folklore. It had a misty green cover, sea-blue typeface. At least fifty pages were dog-eared. Well worn. Studied. She pulled out a folded piece of paper that had been tucked inside.
“Lilly. . .” Oliver stopped. An iciness started down his neck.
“Look.” She handed him a crossword puzzle pulled from the Chicago Tribune. The answer to four down was circled.
“H-I-T-C-H-C-O-C-K,” Oliver read out loud. Then he
read the clue. “Director of Rope, 1948.”
“Know anything about that movie?” Lilly asked. The conspiratorial look was in her eye. The look of a treasure hunter who’d just found the secret key to the prize. The look of a sister, gone. Totally and completely gone.
“No,” Oliver said, coaching himself to keep a neutral face, to not let on that he feared she’d come unhinged again. That a delusion had built up fast enough, strong enough, that it was going to finally spill out of her mouth. That she was going to let him in.
“Two guys murder a friend just for the fun of it. They put the body in a trunk. Have a dinner party to see if anyone knows what they did.” She smiled. “Get it?”
No.
“Oh,” Oliver said slowly. “So you think that . . .” He stopped, baiting her to finish her sentence.
“Mom and Dad’s fight about that dinner party. The one Mom canceled because of her deposition? And Dad had already put the tray of drinks on the trunk in the living room.” Her eyes flashed fairy blue. Fiery. Alive.
Mad.
“So you think that Dad . . .”
“He’s going to kill someone, Oliver. Or he already has. And Mom knows it. She’s uncovered his plan.” She pulled another piece of paper out of her book. It had notes scribbled all over it. “I think he’s—”
“Lilly, don’t.” Oliver couldn’t believe he’d said it. He was usually so good at playing along. If he let on, even just a little, that he didn’t believe her . . .
“Don’t what?”
“Just . . . don’t.” Maybe it was the fact that he thought his dad might move out of state after the divorce. Maybe it was that feeling of the bottom falling out. That his sister was gone. That his dad was about to be. Oliver suddenly felt so alone. His dad had his world. His mother had hers. Lilly flew with fairies and theories and schemes only she would ever see. And Oliver had . . . what? Who? He eyed the wiffle ball under the bookshelf. “Dad’s not a criminal.”
Lilly’s face went flat. Like the lid of a trunk, closing and locking.
Click.
“You don’t believe me,” she said slowly.
“No,” Oliver said. “I don’t.”
Her rage was instant. She separated the world into two groups: The ones who didn’t believe her and the one who did. The second group was empty now.
“Or maybe they’re splitting up because of you,” Lilly practically spat her response. “Because all you do is play video games and get Cs and have no friends and—”
That was it.
Something cracked.
“It’s you, Lilly. It’s you. You’re sick. You’re so, so sick.”
She looked like she’d been slapped. Kicked. Hit. Like deep down, she knew it was true. Just for a moment. In some space in her heart, a chamber that was locked behind door after door, a dark pool filled with algae and dying cattails and lit by fireflies that were swirling and swirling in the dank, stagnant air.
It was true.
And she knew it.
But just as fast, she didn’t.
“You’re with them? You’re in on it? You?”
He didn’t remember much after that. Just flashes. Flickers. He told her she was crazy. Schizophrenic. A maniac. Unhinged. Unreal. He was sure he was screaming. That she was screaming back. That she ran into the bathroom. That he followed her.
That the next words he said:
“Call an ambulance.”
June 23
11:30 a.m.
28
ESSA
“You were playing what?” The ranger eyed the three of them, looked over their muddy, sweat-soaked clothes, their exhausted faces. For a moment, Essa feared he wouldn’t believe them. He seemed suspicious, looking at them like they were a bunch of teens who’d been getting wasted in the woods, rolling in with an unbelievable story just to mess with him. But she couldn’t be the one to convince him. She’d tried as soon as they’d arrived at the ranger station, and she’d been able to say only one word: Help.
She’d lost it after that.
“Mountain Fugitive,” Micah said. “It’s really just orienteering. Doing multi-day treks. Less for speed and more for efficiency. We weren’t timing it or anything. We were just trying to find the quickest backcountry route west of the Comanche Trail over to Brown’s Lake.”
The ranger raised his eyebrows, and his stiff camel-colored hat tipped a bit to the front. He used one finger to push it back into place. “That’s extremely dangerous,” he said as he scribbled on a notepad. “There are already recommended backcountry trails.” He sighed. “Okay, so you were playing . . . a game. And why did you have a nine-year-old with you?”
“She stowed away,” Micah said. “We had no idea that she—”
“A stowaway?” The ranger’s auburn mustache twitched a little to the right as he smirked. “How did she accomplish that? Did you arrive in the Comanche Peak Wilderness by ship?”
“He doesn’t believe us,” Essa whispered. She wanted to say it louder. She wanted her voice to boom through the station:
HELP US. MY SISTER IS GONE.
But all that would come out was a whisper.
“He doesn’t believe us,” she said again.
“She was under a kite.” Micah said it like it was the most obvious method of stowing away in the world: kite riding.
The ranger put down his pen. “This is a really sick prank,” he said. “Really sick.” He ripped his notes out of his pad and crumpled them slowly. “You can go to jail for falsifying a missing persons report, you know.”
“Falsifying?” Micah threw his hands up in the air. “She was under the Lykos. It’s a huge kite. It’s been clocked at a hundred twenty miles per hour. Responsive without being—”
“He doesn’t mean that Puck rode the kite,” Oliver explained. His voice sounded commanding, steady. “Or that she hid under one in a pack or anything. She was hiding under a kite in the back of his Jeep. We didn’t see her before we set off. She exited the vehicle when we weren’t looking and followed us into the woods. By the time we realized she was trailing us, we were caught in a storm and it was too late to turn back.”
Exited the vehicle?
Essa had forgotten that Oliver’s mom was an attorney. That must be where he got his ability to speak like this to authority figures. He seemed so credible, believable. She watched as the ranger picked up his notepad again.
Oliver must be telling me the truth. He couldn’t have . . .
“Under a kite,” the ranger repeated, scribbling down the words.
“She just wanted to come along with the older kids. With her older sister,” Oliver said, eyeing Essa. “Whom she adores.”
Essa knew Oliver was right. Puck adored her; she always had. Essa thought about the feel of Puck’s small, warm hand, the smell of candy on her breath.
Essa found her voice.
“You have to believe us,” she said, stepping forward. The ranger was behind a counter that was loaded with maps and guidebooks. Essa spotted a safety poster hanging on the wall.
Be Prepared!
Never hike alone!
This is Mountain Lion Country!
“My sister is out there. Alone. Lost. We need a search team. Immediately. She’s already been gone since three a.m. Or maybe even earlier than that. That’s just when I woke up, and she wasn’t there, and we saw this guy in the woods—”
“A guy?”
“Yeah, a total creep. Said he was looking for antiques that had fallen out of his grandfather’s plane.”
“Okay,” the ranger said, finally looking concerned. He unfolded a large color map of the Comanche Peak Wilderness. “The best you can, pinpoint where you last saw her. And where you parked your car. Write down a description of everything. What she was wearing, what she had with her. And describe the man you saw before she went missing.” He
pressed the map flat on the countertop. “We’ll mount an SAR.”
Essa ran her hand over the curved topo lines indicating elevation. She looked at the slopes, the mountainsides, the steep drops. Which line are you on, Puck? Which line?
“SAR?” Oliver asked. The ranger was already on his walkie-talkie.
“Search and Rescue,” Micah explained.
“Here.” Essa plunked a trembling finger down on the map. “Here’s the Comanche Peak Trail. We followed this northeast and broke off somewhere around here.” Her finger ran slowly across the map. “This is the high meadow we crossed. Where Oliver first thought he heard something. See how it’s broad and flat here? All the same elevation.”
“Then it climbs on the eastern edge,” Micah said, following Essa’s finger.
“We skirted the mountainside, looking for shelter and dry wood. We walked for . . . how long?”
“An hour,” Oliver said. “At least.”
“We were going slow,” Micah said. “Maybe we made it two miles? Three?”
“Which would put us here,” Essa said, pointing to a ridgeline on the map. “This has got to be close.” She waved at the ranger, who was still busy barking things into his walkie-talkie. She pointed at the map.
“They’ve pinpointed the approximate location. Backcountry. West of Comanche Trail. Hold for the coordinates,” he said. He held the walkie-talkie away from his mouth. “They’re sending the search helicopter. Think hard. Tell me everything you can remember.”
Essa described everything. Her sister’s unicorn T-shirt, her jeans, her bright pink sneakers. The man’s straw fedora, his rubber clogs.
“A crew is on its way,” the ranger said. “We’ll find your sister, okay? Most missing people are found within the first twenty-four hours. Just give us a day.”
Essa nodded, holding on to his words, deciding to believe them.
She had to.
June 24
29
OLIVER
Puck had been gone for almost two days.