One to ten? I could hear Cady asking. Eight. It had been months since the last nightmare, years since I’d had one that vivid. That real. I didn’t need any of the specialists I’d seen as a child to tell me that the hunt for Bella had triggered something in me.
The last psychologist Cady had taken me to—the only one who hadn’t made me feel like an animal trapped in a hole—had told me that she could help me remember, if that was what I wanted.
She’d also told me that the brain repressed memories for a reason.
I pushed myself off the floor, digging the heels of my hands into the wood floor harder than I had to. I stalked out of the room and down the stairs. I needed space. I needed air.
I needed to breathe.
But as my hand closed around the knob on the front door, I heard the murmur of voices coming from the kitchen and turned toward them.
“You won’t sleep tonight.” Ness’s voice was matter-of-fact. Without meaning to, I crept toward it, in time to hear the reply.
“Cady knows her way around the wilderness.”
“Of course she does,” Ness replied evenly. “And of course that doesn’t matter. You’re her father. Worrying is what you do.”
I came to a stop just outside the kitchen door. The light was on inside, but the hallway was dark—better to mask my presence.
“I’ve missed this,” Ness commented after a long silence.
“Coffee you didn’t have to make yourself?” Bales asked gruffly.
“Worrying about them,” came the reply. “Knowing enough to know what we should be worrying about.”
There was a long pause. “Cady’s the one who chose to leave.”
“The one who didn’t even tell you she was pregnant,” Ness said. “I know.” She paused. “Would it have made a difference if she’d told you?”
I came to you, Cady had told her father. Do you remember that? Do you remember me begging you to help us find Ash? I would have done anything to get him back, and you wouldn’t even pick up a phone.
I missed Bales’s reply to his housekeeper’s question—if he’d answered it at all. There was almost a minute of silence before he spoke again. “You never blamed me.”
“Blame doesn’t change things, Bales Bennett. You, of all people, should know that by now.”
There was another pause, and I heard the light clink of a coffee mug being set down. “Mac came back to town,” Bales commented. “For the search.”
“For you,” Ness corrected.
“Not for me.”
There was something in the old man’s tone when he said those words. I needed Jude here to translate.
“Did you tell Mac—”
“No.” Bales clipped the word. “And you won’t, either, Ness Ashby.”
Tell him what? I wondered. My weight shifted from one foot to the other, and the floor creaked beneath me. Did they hear that? The sound of a chair scraping against the kitchen tile made a breath catch in my throat.
I went to retreat, but Ness’s voice held me back. “Thirty-plus years, Bales Bennett, and you’re still telling me what to do.”
“Thirty-plus years,” Bales replied, his voice rough and hoarse and oddly quiet, “and you still don’t listen.”
I felt suddenly like this wasn’t something I should be eavesdropping on.
This—whatever this was—was private.
I backed away—from the door, from listening—but as I edged toward the exit, a final piece of their conversation made its way to my ears.
“Cady won’t thank you for bringing Mac into this, Bales.”
“Since Ash, Cady doesn’t thank me for much.”
I spent the night outside, sleeping propped up against the base of a tree, Saskia and Silver curled by my sides for warmth. I woke the next morning to the sound of a low, warm chuckle. At first, I thought I’d been spotted, but then I tracked the laughter to its source.
A dozen yards away, Gabriel Cortez knelt on the ground, his body disappearing under an onslaught of wiggling, yipping little balls of fluff. The pups’ mother—a golden retriever—watched, amused, as they mobbed Gabriel. A crooked smile on his face, he set down several bowls of food. The entire litter descended like a horde of locusts, except for the biggest puppy, who appeared quite satisfied rolling back and forth at Gabriel’s feet, and the smallest, who couldn’t seem to find a way around his siblings to the food. As I watched, Gabriel lifted the runt toward one of the bowls.
Beside me, Saskia stood and shook the morning dew off her fur, pelting me straight in the face.
That’s what you get, her expression seemed to say, for admiring puppies.
I stood, and though I moved with near silence, Gabriel looked up. “I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t want me asking why you look like you slept on a tree.”
I stared directly at him. “I slept on a tree.”
“Never would have guessed.”
Jude had once spent an entire day trying to teach me what a smirk looked like. It had ultimately been unsuccessful because Jude was as bad at smirking as I was at recognizing that particular expression.
But I was nearly certain that Gabriel was smirking now.
“Why do you keep talking to me?” The question came out lower in pitch and more intense than I’d intended.
“Because I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut.” Gabriel delivered that statement in a tone that matched his facial expression almost exactly.
Beside me, Silver huffed. She stood, pressing the front half of her body down toward the ground in a stretch. Within seconds, she’d made a loop around my feet. She sniffed me, then glanced at Saskia, as if expecting the younger dog to report.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gabriel said, lowering his voice. “But I’m pretty sure they’re talking about you.”
I almost smiled, but Gabriel chose that moment to shift his weight—slightly, almost imperceptibly—and the reminder that he was a stranger and unpredictable and a threat thrummed through me.
I didn’t put my guard down around threats.
He wants something. That’s what people do. They want, and they take. They—
A door slammed behind me, muting the thought, but not the increase in adrenaline that had come with it.
“I mean this in the least confrontational way possible, Gabriel, my well-muscled, puppy-feeding friend, but if this devolves into a wrestling match, I do not like your odds.” Jude knew how to make an entrance. He also knew how to take the attention unerringly off of me. “So let’s keep this civilized,” Jude continued. He gestured toward the puppies. “Think of the children!”
I managed a smile, and that let me refocus my thoughts. We were here for Bella. Everything else was noise.
“Grab breakfast and the bloodhounds—and Free, if you can find her,” I told Jude, channeling the restless energy inside me toward a purpose. “We need to get back out there.”
As long as I was doing something, I was in control.
“Technically,” Free hollered in our general direction as she carried a plate piled high with bacon out of the house, “we need to get up there. Sheriff called. They found Bella’s trail again, farther up the mountain. He’s on his way here to personally deliver us to our new ground zero.”
The moment Free mentioned the sheriff, Gabriel went very still. If I wasn’t already on high alert, I might not have noticed, but there was something in that stillness that hit me like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, like a dog whistle, too high in pitch for normal people to hear.
A moment later, Gabriel, who claimed to be incapable of keeping his mouth shut, walked away without a word.
When the sheriff arrived, Gabriel was nowhere to be seen. Bales beat us to answering the door. He looked the sheriff up and down. “Mind if I ask how you’re planning to get the kids to Sorrow’s Pass?”
“Airlift.” The sheriff kept his reply brief. “The rangers will fly them out.”
I didn’t like the sheriff’s tone—and I really didn’t like
the fact that it was at odds with the small, sharp-edged smile on his face.
Bales said something else. The sheriff replied. I lost track of what was being said. We didn’t have time for this.
“Bella’s out there.” I looked past the sheriff—and past Bales—as I spoke. “Talk won’t bring her home.”
The sheriff shifted his gaze from Bales to me. “Then let’s get you kids in the car.”
His stare coated me like oil. The muscles in my stomach clenched, and before I knew what was happening, the sheriff was reaching for Saskia’s collar. In a flash of motion, Bales stepped in between them to push the sheriff back. Saskia’s teeth snapped together a fraction of a second later. A growl vibrated through her entire body, and she snapped again.
The sheriff shook off the old man’s grip. He rounded on me. “You need to control that animal.”
The way he said animal slithered under my skin. I stood there, nostrils flaring, caught between lunging forward and skittering back. My girl had come to us with scars—visible, human-inflicted scars. Saskia didn’t like men, and she didn’t like being touched.
I should have been the one to protect her.
“She doesn’t know you,” I told the sheriff, shifting my weight forward. “You can’t just try to grab her like that.”
“As a general rule,” Free added, drawing the sheriff’s attention away from me, “most dogs aren’t terribly fond of being manhandled by total strangers.”
There was a single beat of silence.
I didn’t realize that I’d stopped breathing until the sheriff took a half step back, and my lungs started functioning again.
“It’s a beautiful day to rescue lost children,” Jude offered brightly. “Wouldn’t you say, Sheriff?”
“Thinking this through a little,” the sheriff said, turning back to Bales, “we really only need two of them.” Something about his posture and the tone in his voice made me think of a house cat, batting a mouse between its paws. “Sorrow’s Pass is dangerous terrain. I want all our searchers working in pairs, and since there are three of them…” He paused and glanced back at Saskia—and at me. “Why don’t we give Kira and her…partner…a little break. Seems like they could use some time to decompress.”
I felt like he’d kicked me straight in the teeth.
“You need as many hands on deck as you can get,” Bales replied before either Jude or Free could.
“Bringing any of them into this goes against my better judgment,” the sheriff retorted. “I’m not opening this up for discussion, Bales. They search in pairs, or they don’t search at all.”
“Fair enough.” Bales turned his attention from the sheriff to the three of us. “Jude, you’re with Free. I have another partner for Kira. He knows the mountain better than anyone.”
That got a response out of the sheriff, the way that a match gets a response from gunpowder. “You can’t seriously think—”
“I think,” Bales said, his voice quiet and low, “that I know things that you would prefer I not know.” He gave the sheriff a moment to process that statement. “And I think Kira’s right. Talk isn’t going to bring that child home.”
The sheriff didn’t drive us to the rangers’ station. Bales did, and the us in question included Gabriel. He knows the mountain better than anyone.
In the old man’s presence, Gabriel didn’t poke and prod at me, but he did seem to get some pleasure out of watching me. No matter what I did or how hard I stared back, he didn’t look away. I kept hoping Jude would explain to Bales that Saskia was my partner, that I didn’t need Gabriel, and that if I had to work with another human, I would have preferred one I knew.
Instead, Jude decided to make conversation. “If you were a crustacean,” he asked Gabriel, “what kind would you be?”
Gabriel blinked. Twice. “I’m going to pretend that’s a rhetorical question.”
Jude grinned. “But it’s not a rhetorical question.”
“For what it’s worth,” Free interjected, “the correct answer is usually lobster.” Without waiting for a reply, she asked Bales about the specs of the helicopter awaiting us at the rangers’ station.
“Two-blade, dual engine,” Gabriel answered on the old man’s behalf. “Military-grade.”
I absorbed that information without joining in the conversation that followed. The helicopter was a means to an end.
A too-small, too-loud means to an end.
Knowing what to expect didn’t keep my shoulders from squaring or my teeth from grinding against each other as the car came to a stop and I took in our ride. The deafening roar of the blades saved me from having to speak to Gabriel—or anyone else—as we loaded up. The helicopter was a seven-seater—bigger than most of what I’d encounter if I went into SAR.
Still not big enough.
I didn’t let my heart race. I didn’t let the tight quarters matter any more than the company. Fear was one thing. Adrenaline was another.
Adrenaline, I could do.
Focused and in control, I latched myself into the seat. Saskia sat at attention between my legs. I kept my hand on her collar, but she seemed to sense that there was no leeway here—if any of our K9s showed the least bit of anxiety at the noise or tight space, that was game over, before we’d even taken off.
After a safety check, the pilot nodded to Bales, who was observing from a distance, then coaxed the aircraft slowly off the ground. The front of the copter tilted forward, and my harness bit gently into my shoulders as the world below us got smaller and smaller. We cruised over the top of the tree line. From this vantage point, Bear Mountain didn’t just look massive; it looked ancient and unmovable, beautiful, deadly.
I could feel my pulse thrumming in my wrists, my stomach, my neck. I concentrated on the feel of Saskia’s fur beneath my fingers as the copter angled hard to the right. The mountain was a blur of colors—silver and white and green. The trees were dense enough on this side that I wasn’t sure where—or if—we could touch down, but slowly, a flat brown area came into view.
“Sorrow’s Pass is about a half-mile hike inward,” our pilot informed us as we touched down. “This is as close as I can get you. Exact coordinates—”
“I know Sorrow’s Pass,” Gabriel said, and somehow, the words weren’t lost under the sound of the slowing blades.
Thirty seconds later, we were feet-on-the-ground, and the helicopter was in the air again.
“I am only mostly as motion sick as anticipated,” Jude said, looking distinctly paler than usual. “I count that as a win.”
“This way.” Gabriel barely looked back at the rest of us as he hoisted his pack onto his shoulders and headed across the packed dirt toward the tree line. For a good ten minutes, we followed him, Jude and Gabriel and Free taking turns filling the silence. The trek to the pass was steeper than I’d expected—not for the faint of heart. Free, Jude, and I had trained for this. Endurance was almost as important in search and rescue as the ability to assess the terrain and know your limits—and your K9’s.
“A little kid wouldn’t have come this way,” Gabriel commented as rocky forest flattened out in a clearing. “Obviously. If she was coming in from the southeast, there’s a path.”
“Path,” Jude murmured. “What is this path you speak of? I am a big fan of paths.”
Free tossed her blond ponytail over one shoulder. “I’m guessing the scenic route takes a bit longer and isn’t helicopter accessible.”
Gabriel glanced over at her. “Good guess.”
* * *
Cady met us at ground zero. There were a half dozen rangers in the area, already combing through the surrounding woods and calling Bella’s name. Instinctively, I began to scan the scene for the development in the case that had brought us here. I’d expected physical tracks, or another piece of our target’s jacket.
I hadn’t expected blood.
Gabriel knelt to the ground, touching the tips of his fingers to the dirt at his feet as he observed the trail. “Shallow wound.” Th
ere was no emotion in his voice, no hint that he was talking about a little girl. “Blood’s dripping, not pooling. And whatever happened, it didn’t slow her down.”
“That was my read as well.” Mac approached. He introduced himself to Gabriel.
“Any reason you’re standing around here instead of searching?” That was apparently Gabriel’s version of an introduction. “I somehow doubt that ‘wait for teenagers to arrive’ is search and rescue SOP.”
“Standard operating procedures,” Jude translated, whispering in my left ear. “And in case you can’t tell, our good friend Gabriel doesn’t appear to deal well with authority figures, our own dear grandpapa excluded.”
Mac didn’t rise to the bait. “The dogs needed to rest. So did Cady.”
“Cady can take care of herself.” My foster mother strode past Mac to address Gabriel directly. “You know this mountain?”
“I spent a lot of time out here growing up,” Gabriel stated. “Then again, from what I hear, so did you.”
Free chose that moment to lean forward and pluck a stray leaf from Cady’s hair. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like crap.”
Now that Free had mentioned it, I could see the strain on Cady’s face, the wear. She’d sent me home to sleep, but the dark circles under her eyes told me that she hadn’t gotten any herself.
“Last I checked,” Mac told Cady mildly, “pacing the scene, badgering the rangers, and waiting for your kids to arrive doesn’t qualify as resting.”
I expected Cady to put Mac in his place, but a flicker of emotion took hold of her features. “Mac? You don’t need to tell me that when people get tired, they make mistakes.”
What mistakes? I thought. What people?
Cady supplied zero context for her words. “One hour off,” she told Mac. “For both of us. That’s all we can afford. In the meantime…” She knelt down to greet the dogs. “Jude, Free: See if the bloodhounds can pick up the trail and follow it as far as you can. Kira, I want you and Saskia to give the hounds a wide berth. We’ve got weather headed in and need to cover as much ground as we can before it gets here.”
The Lovely and the Lost Page 6