The Lovely and the Lost

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have made inappropriate jokes about murder,” Gabriel replied. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.” Whatever he could see of my face must have made an impact, because he stopped cracking jokes. “If I go first, and you freeze, I won’t be able to help you. But if you go first, and something happens, I can get you out.”

  “I don’t…” My muscles were already going rigid. There was a roaring in my ears, an indescribable whisper—

  “You don’t need protection—check. We’ve been through this. Are you, by any chance, capable of humoring me?”

  I was vaguely aware that his tone was low and soothing, like the one Mac had used with Saskia the day before.

  “Okay, so no humoring. What about a bribe?” He paused and waited for my eyes to find his. Eventually, they did. “You asked me why I lied to you about the caves. In response, I deflected, rather skillfully, if I do say so myself.” He waited until he had my full attention. “You want to know what I’m doing out here, if it has something to do with my brother. Under normal circumstances, I’d deflect those questions, too. But if you do this for me”—he jerked his head toward the tunnel—“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Gravel and stone bit into the flesh of my forearms as I pulled myself forward. I could feel my heart beating in my abdomen. I concentrated on the visceral sensation of my flesh scraping against the tunnel floor. Pain would keep me in the here and now—pain and my awareness of another living being, right behind me.

  “Why did you lie to me?” It probably said something about me that this was my first question. “Yesterday, when you pretended that you didn’t know the cave was there—”

  “I wasn’t pretending.” Gabriel made good on his promise: no flippant comments about how untrustworthy he was this time. “Like you said earlier, I’ve been mapping out the caves for years. I thought they might go all the way through Bear Mountain. I looked for an entrance on the northern slope. But yesterday was the first time I’d found any evidence to back that up.”

  I kept a hold on the flashlight as I dragged myself forward on my stomach. The beam of light was lost in the black hole ahead of us, the end of the tunnel nowhere in sight. I focused on forming my next question. If I could think—if I could talk—then I could believe that the flashlight wouldn’t go out, that the mountain wouldn’t shake again.

  That I wouldn’t die in the dark.

  “Do you think your brother’s disappearance is related to Bella’s?” I focused on forming the question, and then I focused on waiting for his answer.

  “Anything is possible, right?”

  I was breathing evenly, but each time air exited my lungs, they seemed to shrink, and the next breath was harder won. I thought of the maps on Gabriel’s wall. Questions, I thought. Ask them.

  “Are you looking for your brother,” I asked through clenched teeth, “or for his body?”

  Gabriel stopped moving behind me, but just for an instant. “I could have left you down here.”

  “You could have tried,” I returned. “Now, answer. You promised.”

  I heard a faint scratching sound—not Gabriel and not me.

  Bad things happen in the dark. Bad things happen to bad little girls.

  Maybe I hesitated, or maybe Gabriel just sensed that he was on the verge of losing me. He started talking again and didn’t stop. “I never believed that Andrés just took off. I can buy that he might have wanted a weekend to himself, but if he didn’t come back, it was because he couldn’t. I used to think that something had happened to him—an accident. Maybe he was climbing and he fell. Or maybe he had one of those heart murmurs you read about, and he just dropped dead one day while he was out here exploring. Maybe he ran into the wrong predator.” There was a pause, a slight one. “It didn’t occur to me until much later that the predator could be human.”

  Like the person who took Bella. The world around me was getting smaller. My fingernails bit into the palms of my hands as I pulled myself forward. My next question unwound inside me slowly, like a snake rising from coiled position. “Why were you arrested for kidnapping and assault?”

  The question had teeth. To Gabriel, it probably seemed like it came out of nowhere, but in my mind, it was all tangled together: Gabriel and his brother, the missing persons reports, Bella, the sheriff.

  “Been talking to the law?” Gabriel asked me, his voice echoing in close space.

  “Is that your way of deflecting the question?”

  He’d promised me not to deflect—and he knew it. As long as I kept going, he’d keep talking. He’d promised.

  “When Andrés disappeared, I could have gone off the rails. Instead, I got my act together. I spent every spare second I could out on the mountain, looking for my brother, but I also made varsity soccer, joined the debate team, started pulling straight As. My mother had just remarried. I thought her husband was a good guy. I thought that if I was that kind of guy, people would believe me when I told them that Andrés hadn’t just left.”

  The muscles in my arms were starting to ache.

  “The joke was on me, though. My good-guy stepfather was the one who convinced my mother to stop looking for Andrés. He almost convinced me.”

  “Almost?”

  “My mom and my stepdad had a baby. The novelty of a newborn wore off for that good guy pretty fast. Five weeks in, my mom was barely sleeping, and my stepfather would look at the dishes in the sink or bang around making himself dinner and say that if she would just be a little smarter about how she handled things, she wouldn’t be falling down on the job. My sister had colic. He thought that was my mom’s fault, too.”

  I could hear Gabriel grinding his teeth. As the first shard of light became visible at the end of the tunnel, I ground mine as well.

  “I got used to him making my mother cry. Every time that it happened, he’d tell her—and me—that she had postpartum depression. She didn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that it was something he’d said or something he’d done that had upset her. He’d start talking about how she was emotionally unstable, about how maybe she couldn’t be trusted with my baby sister because she was so illogical and irresponsible and erratic. He said it often enough that she started to believe it, and when he told her she was failing as a wife, she believed that, too.”

  Gabriel was breathing more heavily now. Every once in a while, his arm would brush my leg.

  “He never hit her,” Gabriel said.

  The end of the tunnel was close—five feet away, or six.

  “He never hit me, but he did like slamming things around. Punching walls, right next to her face. If they were fighting and the baby started crying, he wouldn’t let my mother leave the room. He’d stand in the doorway and block her when she tried to go, telling her that if she wasn’t such a horrible excuse for a mother, maybe my sister would be sleeping through the night.”

  We were almost out now.

  “One day, she said something he didn’t like, and he threw a glass into the wall. It shattered. A shard hit my mother’s arm. Another came this close to my infant sister’s face.” Gabriel paused, ever so slightly. “I snapped.”

  I didn’t need to ask what that meant. It meant the same thing it would have if someone had threatened Cady and Jude in front of me. Attack.

  Assault.

  The muscles in my neck and stomach tensing, I rolled over to my back and pulled my upper body out of the tunnel. I placed my palms beside my legs, braced, and lowered them to the ground. I was out. I was through.

  Fresh air had never tasted so good. The muscles in my chest loosened, and I breathed in hungrily—again and again, like a drowning man who’d made it up for air.

  “So that’s the assault charge.” Gabriel made it out and rose to his full height beside me. He examined a cut on the heel of his hand. “I clocked the guy, knocked him out. I was in a bad situation, and I made a bad choice. Pretty sure I’d make it again. Just between you and me? Part of me even enjoyed it.” He paused. “Wo
uld you like to hear about the kidnapping charge next?”

  “Your sister?” I guessed. He’d said that she was a baby, that she was there, that she was almost hurt. I wondered if he’d meant to take her for good, or if he’d just wanted to get her out of the house.

  “She’s almost four now,” Gabriel said quietly. “I’m supposed to stay away from her—and my mother. That was part of the deal I struck with the DA. I pleaded guilty to assault, they dropped the kidnapping charge, and my mother didn’t have to testify.”

  “But if your mother had testified—”

  He cut me off, his brown eyes capturing mine. “She wasn’t going to testify on my behalf.”

  I blinked back against the sun and managed one last question, though now that we were out, he was under no obligation to answer.

  “The sheriff, he was the one who arrested you?”

  No answer.

  “You told him the truth, and he didn’t believe you?” I guessed.

  Gabriel’s dark hair caught the sun. “Oh, he believed me. He was my soccer coach. I thought he was such a good guy.” The gleam in Gabriel’s eyes nearly took on a life of its own. “The sheriff knew exactly what happened, because my mom is his wife.”

  The hike down from the mountain didn’t take us to Hunter’s Point. We ended up two towns over instead.

  “Wait here,” Gabriel said, like he hadn’t bared his soul to me, like I hadn’t been searching for the right words to say in return the whole way down. “I know the guys who work here.” He nodded to the local auto shop. “I’ll see if someone can give us a ride.”

  I would have snapped, too. He was hurting the people you love. I’m sorry. All the things I hadn’t said cycled through my head as Gabriel disappeared into the garage. I’d known him just long enough to suspect he wouldn’t want sorry.

  “Still too good for the job I offered you?”

  The question made its way to my ears over the din coming out of the garage. If I’d been one of the dogs, my ears would have perked up. The missing persons report had said that Andrés Cortez had worked in an auto shop. I slipped inside, ignoring Gabriel’s command to wait.

  “I have a job,” Gabriel was telling a man whose upper half was hidden beneath a car.

  “Old man Bennett will get tired of you someday,” came the reply. “If I were you, I’d clear out before he gets sick of playing Daddy Warbucks.”

  “That old man,” Gabriel said, each word pleasant and precise, “could take on everyone in here—and then some.”

  I wasn’t an expert at the art of persuasion, but that didn’t seem like the most effective way to ask for a ride.

  “Can I help you, sweetheart?”

  I turned toward the mechanic who’d asked that question. I couldn’t offer Gabriel anything in exchange for what he’d given me up on the mountain, but I could save him from having to ask someone who was giving him a hard time for a ride. “I need to borrow a phone.”

  I dialed Jude’s number from memory. He answered on the first ring.

  “Kira?” The hope—and tension—in Jude’s voice reminded me that I’d taken off without a word. Jude and Free would have set Duchess on my trail.

  She didn’t find me. Knowing Jude and Free, they’d probably tried Saskia next. And she couldn’t find me, either.

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly. “I’m with Gabriel.”

  Jude let out a long breath. “I was in no way concerned that you might have been snatched by the person who took Bella or buried in post-tremor rubble. The phrase lying in a ditch somewhere never even crossed my mind.”

  There was no guilt trip like a Jude guilt trip.

  “It’s a long story,” I told him, “but I promise that I’m fine. I just need you to come pick me and Gabriel up.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line. “Dare I hope this long story will be accompanied by an elaborate reenactment? Preferably with musical numbers?”

  I told him where I was.

  “On my way,” Jude told me cheerfully. “But fair warning: Free might have been slightly less optimistic than I was when your trail disappeared in the mountains. She called Mom.”

  * * *

  Jude came to get us in Gabriel’s truck. Free was with him.

  “You abscond with our Kira,” Jude informed Gabriel cheerfully, “we abscond with your truck!” He paused. “I’ve never driven a stick shift before.”

  Gabriel audibly groaned. “Move,” he told Jude. Free was sitting in the back of the truck. NATO, Duchess, and Silver were with her. Saskia was there, too, but the other three were giving her a wide berth. I took that to mean that she’d been a bit testy. I climbed in, positioning myself next to Sass.

  If Jude had been worried, there was a very good chance that Free was pissed.

  “Hey, Free,” I said, well aware that I might be poking a bear. Free stared at me. NATO snuffed in my general direction, and Duchess farted—loudly.

  “Serves you right,” Free told me. She tossed my cell phone in my general direction. “How many times do I have to tell you that if you’re going to do something completely stupid and utterly inadvisable, I want in.”

  “I saw Gabriel leaving the property. I followed him. And once I was following…”

  “I’ve seen you in stalk mode,” Free said. “I know what it’s like, but I also know that at some point, you had a choice, just like you had a choice about keeping secrets.”

  Right before I’d left, I’d told Jude what the sheriff had said about Gabriel. I could see how dumping the words kidnapping and assault on a person and then pulling a disappearing act might have been cause for some concern.

  “The sheriff is Gabriel’s stepfather,” I told Free. It was easier to share a secret than to promise to stop keeping them.

  Free processed the barbed edge in my voice. “On a scale of one to ten, how much do we hate the sheriff?”

  In answer, I let my upper lip pull back from my teeth. Then I snapped them together. Saskia was on all four feet in an instant.

  “That much.” Free let out a low whistle. NATO ambled into her lap, and she gave him a good scratch before pushing him off. Duchess farted again.

  “You’ll have to excuse Her Ladyship,” Free said. “Being left high and dry at Extreme Hide-and-Seek gives her indigestion.”

  Free wouldn’t hold a grudge, not if she so much as suspected I might need her. But she hated being left behind. She probably wouldn’t say another word about it, but if a dog wanted to continually fart in my general direction, she was all for it.

  I was still weathering Duchess’s onslaught when Free’s phone rang. Free glanced down at the caller ID, then tossed it to me.

  Cady.

  This was not going to be pretty.

  “Hello.” I answered calmly and heard Cady let out a breath the moment she recognized my voice.

  “You want to explain to me why I have a message on my phone from Free, claiming you’d gone missing?”

  Cady didn’t sound angry, but that dry, no-nonsense tone never boded well.

  “Not particularly.”

  I expected Cady to rephrase the question as an order, but instead, she hesitated. “Are the flashbacks getting worse?”

  That question was a visceral reminder that there had been a time in my life when taking off—running, hiding, holing up—had been my MO.

  “I just got caught up in doing something,” I said. Something seemed so much less likely to set Cady off than the words earthquake and rockslide and juvenile delinquent.

  “Do me a favor,” Cady ordered. “Don’t get caught up again.”

  I had control. She expected me to use it.

  “Cell reception here is coming in and out.” Cady’s words proved almost prophetic. Whatever she said next, I didn’t hear it.

  “Go,” I said. “Find Bella.”

  “Kira.” There was another long pause on the other end of the line. “I’m not sure there will be anything left to find.”

  “You think she’s
dead?” I felt like I had a piece of bone caught in my throat. This was what I got for letting myself be taken off the case, for taking a step back and even entertaining the notion that reading missing persons reports and asking questions qualified as doing something. “You think she’s been murdered?”

  Silver rolled over, pressing her body against mine and stretching out along the length of my legs. To my surprise, Saskia didn’t just tolerate it, she lay down on my other side.

  “We’re not giving up.” Cady hesitated, just for a moment. “In the meantime, if you see Gabriel, give him a wide berth.”

  If I’d been walking, that instruction would have stopped me dead in my tracks. “What?” I said. “Why?”

  Had the sheriff said something to her? Why would Cady—who had better sense than anyone I knew—listen?

  “Gabriel’s volatile, Kira. If the circumstances were different, I would be fighting for him every bit as much as my father is, but he’s not my kid. You are, and you have a lot going on right now. Whatever Gabriel’s been through, whatever anger he’s carrying—it’s not good for you.”

  Hearing her say those words should have made me angry. Instead, it hurt.

  “I’m not fragile,” I said. “I’m not going to break.”

  Cady’s reply was lost under a web of static, and then the line went dead. Free arched an eyebrow at me in question.

  “She wants me to stay away from Gabriel,” I said flatly.

  I could see the wheels in Free’s head turning. If she told me that Cady was right, if she acted like I was broken—I wouldn’t be able to take it.

  Instead, Free twisted and pounded a fist on the window separating us from the truck’s cab. Jude opened it.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked pleasantly. “Gabriel and I are bonding.”

  Free just smiled beatifically. “How would you gentlemen feel about a little road trip?”

  Gabriel didn’t particularly feel like taking us anywhere, but Free could be very convincing. She requested a place with a view. That was how the four of us came to be standing on a stone ledge in the shape of an arrowhead, facing away from the national park. At first, all I could see as I looked out was green—a thousand and one shades of it. The landscape stretching toward the horizon looked like it had been painted with a knife: thick and textured and alive. I could see civilization if I looked for it. But why would I? Why would anyone?