The Lovely and the Lost

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Free walked right up to the edge and looked down. “How far is the drop?”

  “Maybe a hundred feet?” Gabriel guessed.

  Jude looked at me. He looked at Free. And then he peeked over the edge of the ledge, threw his head back, and howled. Free joined in: half yodel, half victory scream.

  “Don’t you ever just want to yell?” Jude asked a visibly startled Gabriel. “To take everything inside of you—every worry, every what if, every question that haunts you—and just…let go?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Free flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder. “Are you a liar or a stick-in-the-mud?” she asked Gabriel.

  He probably had a smart-mouthed response to that question, but he didn’t get a chance to use it, because I did know what it was like to swallow screams and howls. My dark place was a living, breathing thing. I’d barely held it at bay in the caves. It rose up like a wave inside me with each setback in the search for Bella, and in between, it churned. Watching, waiting, feeling, scratching against the door to be let out—

  I raised my face to the sky and let loose a howl of my own. Jude whooped, and Free joined in, and soon, the dogs had added their voices, all except for Saskia, who was pacing the fringes, her blue eyes focused on Gabriel. The edges of his lips had just started to curve upward when, suddenly, he paused, cocked his head to one side, and then started jogging back toward his truck.

  I followed him, and Saskia followed me. I made it back to Gabriel’s truck just in time to see him reach through the open window and fiddle with the dial on what looked to be a

  radio. It took me a few seconds to register the fact that the radio was on when the truck was not, and another after that to process the muffled words coming out of the speaker.

  This wasn’t a radio.

  This was a police scanner.

  Gabriel must have realized I was standing there, because he turned toward me. “Kira.”

  I bristled. He hadn’t mentioned owning a police scanner. He hadn’t even hinted that he was keeping tabs on the sheriff’s department.

  “Kira,” Gabriel said again, his voice softer this time and oddly devoid of emotion.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. “What is this?”

  Very slowly, he straightened his body. He dropped his arms to his side. “Behind you.”

  As I turned, I became acutely aware of the world around us. The smell of dirt. The sound of Free and Jude and the dogs on the ledge.

  The feeling of being watched.

  I scanned our surroundings, pushed back against the sound of my own heartbeat, my breath, and listened. I heard nothing, but my head swiveled to the left of its own accord. There, in a tree less than ten feet away, I made out two eyes glowing an unearthly yellow.

  Reflecting the sun, I thought, but the words were distant, like someone else had thought them and I’d only overheard. My own thoughts—the ones I lived and breathed and felt rushing like blood through my veins—were entirely focused on the shape of the animal watching us from that tree.

  Bigger than Girl. Faster.

  “Mountain lion,” Gabriel said. “They rarely attack humans.”

  That was what he thought.

  That was what the statistics said.

  That wasn’t the message I received from the liquid grace with which the predator leapt down from the tree.

  Food. Hungry. I remembered being hungry. I remembered hunting.

  I remembered being prey.

  The mountain lion stood between us and the others. Saskia was the first one to notice. I knew her. I knew what she looked like when she was on the verge of a lunge.

  “Stay.” The word burst out of me. Saskia growled, and the mountain lion’s head swiveled from me to her.

  No.

  I took a step forward. Gabriel caught my arm, but I shook him off. Another step, and the animal’s gaze was right back on me. I knew better than to corner a predator. I also knew that Saskia’s control was even more tenuous than mine.

  “Don’t turn around,” I told Gabriel, fighting the instinct to lower my voice. “Raise your hands. Make noise.”

  The way to fight a predator was to convince it you were the bigger threat.

  “Don’t look away,” I continued, my eyes on the cat’s as I felt a scream bubbling up in my own throat. Not terror. Not fear. Rage was a human word. The yell I let out when the cat took a languid step toward us was anything but.

  Beside me Gabriel added his own voice to the chaos, stomping, taking up space, staring the mountain lion straight in the eye. The animal eyed us for a moment, then made a chuffing sound, deep in its throat.

  But it didn’t come any closer.

  As quickly as it had begun, it was over, the mountain lion melting back into the wilderness—all 130 pounds of it.

  Sharp teeth. Strong jaw. Claws. Lethal. The drumbeat of warnings thrumming in my brain persisted long after the threat was gone.

  “You okay?” Gabriel asked me.

  “I’m fine.”

  What I didn’t say was that there was a part of me—hidden and wild and free—that was better than fine. There was a part of me that had enjoyed it.

  Saskia let out a sound—half growl, half whine—and I realized I hadn’t dropped the order to stay yet. When I did so, she bolted for me. The second she reached us, she turned around, snarling.

  Another predator would approach her human over her dead and rotting corpse.

  “Now was that so hard?” Jude called out to Gabriel. “See what I mean about letting go?”

  “You get all the fun,” Free told me.

  “I understand now,” Gabriel said thoughtfully. “The three of you share a single iota of common sense. I’m just a little unclear on which one of you has custody of it now.”

  “I’m not positive,” Jude told Free. “But I think that’s a compliment.”

  “No,” Gabriel replied. “No, it is not.”

  A sound from the truck reminded me of why I’d followed Gabriel off the ledge in the first place. “Gabriel was just about to get over himself and tell us why he has a police scanner.”

  “Gabriel,” Jude declared, “is my favorite.”

  According to what Gabriel had told us, he’d acquired the police scanner for the same reason Jude, Free, and I had wanted to get our hands on the missing persons reports. He wanted to know when someone in Hunter’s Point went missing.

  He was looking for a pattern.

  “Anything else you feel like sharing?” Free asked him, her tone casual, but her eyes intensely focused on his face. In her free time at school, Free played poker. That never turned out well for her opponents. She was an expert at finding tells.

  “The police found something in Alden.” Gabriel addressed the answer to me, not Free. “Town about an hour from here. Witness thinks she saw the missing girl. Sounds like the FBI is canvassing the streets.” He gave us exactly two seconds to process that. “I’m going.”

  This wasn’t just about Bella, not for him. The maps on his walls, every piece of research he’d done—none of that was for Bella.

  Not knowing. There should have been a word to describe the emotion that went along with that. It wasn’t a longing or a need or a fear, not exactly.

  “I can drop you off back at the house, or you can walk.” Gabriel didn’t wait for a response before he climbed into the truck and jammed the key into the ignition.

  I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Cady wouldn’t want me sticking my nose into this, but when she’d kicked me off the search, I’d let her. I’d sat back, and I’d done nothing, and look where that had gotten us.

  Nowhere.

  I turned toward Jude and Free. The moment our eyes met, a silent, split-second conversation followed. Jude held out his hand, palm down. Free and I mimicked the motion, and then, in unison, we voted.

  My fingers curled into a fist. Yes.

  Jude—yes.

  Free was the last one to vote, but we all knew that her fingers were
going to fist, too. One for all, and all for trouble.

  “You’re not dropping us off anywhere.” Free climbed into the truck next to Gabriel. “We’re coming with.”

  * * *

  By the time we arrived in Alden, I wasn’t sure who was more ready for our road trip to be over: Saskia, Gabriel, or me. All three of us were out of the truck before Free had even unbuckled her seat belt.

  Alden wasn’t much bigger than Hunter’s Point, just a dot on the map that people passed through without giving the town or its inhabitants a second thought.

  “We’re dealing with a kidnapper who knows how to survive in the wilderness. Someone who knows Sierra Glades National Park.” Gabriel shut his car door, harder than necessary. “The person who took Bella knows how to cover their tracks.”

  I thought of the number of times the trail had gone cold and Bella—and the person who took her—had seemingly just vanished. “This person doesn’t just know how to cover their tracks,” I said. “They know how to disappear.”

  A muscle in Gabriel’s jaw ticced. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Free gave him a once-over, then threw out a question. “So why would a wilderness expert give up that advantage and bring Bella back to civilization?”

  Jude was the first one to come up with a response. “If they’re local, they might have been afraid that if they stayed gone too long, someone would notice their absence.”

  “Or maybe the kidnapper wants to take Bella somewhere.” Free squatted next to Duchess, scratching behind her ear. “Or the witness was mistaken. Or this sicko is just playing with us.”

  “This isn’t a game.” Gabriel’s voice was so low that I had to strain to hear it. I tracked his gaze to a man and a woman in dark-colored suits across the street. “Feds,” Gabriel continued, muted. “Kidnapping is a federal offense.”

  As if she’d heard Gabriel, the female in the pair glanced our way. I wondered what she saw. Four teens and four dogs? Could she tell that we weren’t supposed to be here?

  “Should we mosey?” Jude asked brightly. “I suggest we mosey.”

  We moseyed away from the street and down to a creek to regroup. The trees were thicker here than in Hunter’s Point, the divide between civilization and the Glades less sharp. I wondered how many people in Alden had land that backed right up to the national park.

  If Bella’s kidnapper had that kind of access… I couldn’t keep my mind from sorting through the possibilities. Beside me, Saskia lowered her head to the creek, her front paws braced against the rocks. She drank for a moment, then went stiff and still, her blue eyes focused on something in the distance.

  “We should go back,” Gabriel was saying. “Ask the people in town some questions. If the feds realize we’re asking around about Bella, so be it.”

  I barely heard him. My muscles had gone as taut as Saskia’s. She sensed something—heard it, smelled it, felt it, I wasn’t sure—but I knew in my bones that my K9 knew something in hers.

  “Kira?” Jude got out my name an instant before Saskia bolted across the creek and into the densest part of the woods. The other dogs took off after her, like this was a game, just another round of Extreme Hide-and-Seek.

  Except that we hadn’t given them a scent to find.

  I sprinted after them, barely aware of the creek water seeping through my jeans. Free called for Duchess to heel. NATO managed to wait for Jude. But Saskia didn’t stop, and neither did I, not even when it became clear that Silver couldn’t keep up.

  I could hear the others on my heels, but I didn’t turn to look at them, my attention focused on tracing the path my K9 was blazing. I didn’t stand a prayer of a chance of keeping pace, but as my leg muscles began to scream in protest, as stones and limbs bit haphazardly at my flesh, Saskia slowed.

  She stood, regal and still, just long enough for me to catch sight of her again, and then she took off once more.

  It continued that way for a small eternity, Saskia leading us farther and farther into the wilderness, over the border into the park. I wished that I’d memorized the maps on Gabriel’s wall, wished that I had more of an idea of where we were than “in the shadow of the mountain” and “deeper into the park than we meant to go.”

  This section of Sierra Glades had no rangers’ stations, no trails. There was nothing special about it, nothing majestic. Just trees and dirt and rocks—and us, chasing after my possibly unhinged, possibly on the trail of who knows what, dog.

  Finally, Saskia stopped. Finally, I caught up with her—and finally, the others caught up with me.

  “Bella?” Jude was the one who managed the question.

  I knelt next to Saskia. “I don’t know.” I sank my fingers into my girl’s fur, scratching softly behind her ears. She turned her head toward me and whined.

  None of this made sense. This wasn’t how Saskia had been trained. This wasn’t what we did. What is going on?

  Saskia butted my hand with her head, and my breath stilled in my throat. I trust you, girl. I felt those words, more than thought them. Whatever instinct had possessed Saskia, whatever had led her here—whatever she’d smelled, whatever she’d followed—I trusted that, too.

  Standing up, I did a 360, taking in our surroundings. What if the person who’d taken Bella hadn’t left the park permanently? What if this latest lead was just another misdirection? Another game?

  What if Saskia had recognized the kidnapper’s scent?

  What if she’d recognized Bella’s?

  Slowly, I began to make my way from tree to tree, toward a clearing maybe fifty yards away. Two-thirds of the way there, my toe caught on a stone, and I stumbled.

  Free caught me. For a moment, her eyes held mine, and I saw in them the same sense of eerie foreboding I felt.

  This is it. This is something.

  I caught sight of the stone that had tripped me. And the stone next to that—and the one next to that…Each of the rocks was about the size of a bag of flour. They lay in a perfect circle, each one half-buried in the ground.

  “That’s not a natural formation.” Gabriel knelt next to me, examining the ground.

  “Forest art?” Jude suggested, but even he couldn’t manage a hopeful tone.

  Someone had dug into the dirt, buried the rocks, arranged them just so. It felt intentional. It felt ritualistic.

  I sank to the ground to get a better look. Saskia came up behind me, pushing herself between my arm and my body. I followed her gaze—uncanny and intense—to a tree positioned at the base of the circle.

  A breath caught in my throat. Hash marks—thousands of ragged hash marks—had been carved into the trunk of the tree.

  Why? I ran my fingertips over the marks. What do they stand for?

  “I choose to believe that those are hash marks of the non-nefarious variety,” Jude said, but the sound of a twig snapping—of footsteps—in the distance had him taking three steps back.

  These marks weren’t made all at once, I thought, my heart beating viciously in my throat. Someone has been coming back to this tree—someone has been marking something—for years.

  Gabriel stood and positioned himself in front of the rest of us. Saskia whined again, then bolted forward. I grabbed for her but missed.

  No. Sass— The words died in my throat, and I was on my feet in seconds.

  “Saskia?” A familiar voice broke the tension building in the pit of my stomach a moment before an even more familiar figure came into view.

  Cady?

  Of all the things—and people—I’d thought Saskia might have scented, this option hadn’t occurred to me. Saskia took up position at Cady’s side, then turned back to me, her tail wagging.

  “Mom,” Jude said awkwardly, keeping one hand on NATO to keep him from bolting to bestow doggie kisses upon her. “Fancy meeting you here!”

  Cady spent exactly two seconds narrowing her eyes first at Jude and then at Free before turning 100 percent of her attention to me.

  Walking toward her, I was fairly certain that this was
about to get ugly, but before she could say anything, before I could say anything—about the rocks, the hash marks, the tree—a loud, sharp bark broke through the summer air.

  At first, I thought it was Pad, thought that she’d found something, but then I realized that the golden retriever was standing just behind Cady. NATO, Duchess, Saskia, Silver… they were all here.

  The barking came from farther down.

  I pushed past Cady, pushed toward the clearing. I told myself that the rangers might have brought in another team, that the feds might have had an SAR expert of their own, but the deep tenor of the bark suggested that the K9 in question was large.

  As large for its species as Mackinnon Wade was for his.

  I broke through the tree line, and the world fell into slow motion. Mac’s dog was barking, nose to the ground.

  “Cadaver dog.” I heard myself say the words. “Mac’s dog is trained to find bodies.”

  Human remains.

  I thought of Bella, of rocks laid in a perfect circle and hash marks scratched into the bark of a tree. Someone had come back to this place, again and again. It held meaning—for someone.

  “Kira.” Cady came up behind me, wrapping an arm around me and coaxing my head onto her shoulder. “It’s okay. I promise you—you’re going to be okay.”

  I wanted to really hear those words. I wanted to believe them. But I couldn’t, because as Mac bent down to mark the spot his dog had indicated, the animal lumbered through the clearing, nose in air, then started pawing at another spot, a few feet away.

  The cadaver dog barked. More remains. When Mac came to mark that spot, the K9 repeated the process.

  Again.

  And again.

  I’d thought that the worst-case scenario was that the search for Bella ended with a body. Instead, it ended with five. Five unmarked graves, one visibly more recent than the others.