Happy.
I turned the picture over, half expecting a caption, but the back was blank. Ignoring the tightness in my chest, I turned my attention to the second photograph. It was facedown, and for several long seconds, I couldn’t bring myself to turn it over.
Free reached over and did it for me. Her sharp intake of breath was the only warning I got before the face in that photo cut me, straight to the core.
“Jude.” I bit down, like I could somehow unsay it. Like I could make the familiar, loopy grin in that photograph any less Jude’s. The picture was old—a year or two at least—but Jude still looked like himself. He’d been unmistakably Jude since he was a kid.
“Silver died.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling Free this now. “Silver is dead, and Ness drugged NATO, and Jude…”
I couldn’t keep talking, but I refused to give in to the haze of shock that threatened to fog my mind. I didn’t have the luxury of losing it right now. There was one thing that mattered and only one thing.
There was a white cloth, nailed to the wall, directly over the circle. I grabbed it and pulled it down, the sound of the ripping fabric jarring the rest of my senses back into play. I lifted the cloth to my nose. A faintly sweet, faintly chemical smell had me jerking it away from my face.
I didn’t recognize the scent. I didn’t have to in order to picture weatherworn hands pressing this cloth over Jude’s face. The fingers on my left hand held tight to the pair of photographs from the envelope, to the map, and I thought back to the moment when I’d found Bella, lying beneath that canopy. I thought about how the child had said that her angel needed her help.
I remembered wondering if Bella had been bait, if I’d fallen into a trap.
Not a trap, I thought, bending at the waist with the force of the realization, the chloroformed rag in my hand. A distraction.
The FBI confiscated the map, the pictures, and the cloth. The rangers began coordinating transportation to the far end of the park, an expansive ancient forest as different from the mountains as night from day.
We were told, by people who knew what they were doing, that Jude would be returned to us unharmed. That meant nothing to NATO. Jude’s dog was groggy—and inconsolable.
I wasn’t much better.
Inside the main house, Bales immediately started packing. He had an emergency pack half-ready to go, and the crisp, dispassionate way he moved reminded me that he’d been military—either intelligence or special forces. Without a word to the rest of us, he took out his phone, sent a text, and reached into his bag.
Cady caught his arm halfway there. “You’re going after her.”
“The FBI thinks the place Ness marked on that map is an end point,” Bales said gruffly. “I happen to know the woman well enough to know that she wouldn’t give away the game.”
“You think the map is a starting point.” Mac’s eyes were sharp.
“I should have seen it.” Bales never stopped moving, never sped up or slowed down or showed any hint of the toll this had to be taking. “The way the trail kept disappearing and reappearing. The way she was keeping to herself.”
“You couldn’t have known.” Cady wasn’t being generous. If she hadn’t believed that, she wouldn’t have said it.
Every muscle in Bales Bennett’s body went taut. “She did this for me.”
Ness had taken Bella to bring Cady home, to bring Mac home, to give Cady’s father one last chance to make things right. I could see that but couldn’t bring myself to care, because Ness Ashby had victimized an innocent child. She’d taken Jude. Whatever game she was playing, whatever her goal was now, she was using the person I loved most in this world to do it.
The person I’d hurt. The person I’d meant to hurt. The person who’d never done anything but try to take care of me.
“She did this,” Bales said a second time, his voice sharp, “for me.”
“And what about the bodies she buried?” Gabriel had hung back, silent in the shadows, from the moment the FBI had taken the evidence we’d found. Now he didn’t seem to be able to stop himself from speaking. “If one of them is Andrés—did she do that for me?”
I hadn’t stopped once to think about what Ness being the kidnapper might mean for Gabriel. He’d known her. He’d trusted her.
“Whatever she’s done or hasn’t done,” Bales said, meeting Gabriel’s gaze and holding it, “I cannot believe the woman I know would have kept any information about your brother’s disappearance from you.”
“The woman you know took Jude.” Free was on the warpath. “She knocked him out and took him and left some sick treasure map behind. I don’t think we can assume there’s much she wouldn’t do.”
“Free’s right.” Cady’s voice resonated with the ache I could feel building deep in the pit of my stomach, deep in my bones. “The Ness I thought I knew wouldn’t have taken my son. She couldn’t have.”
“You didn’t see her,” Bales said, his head bowed, his fingers holding tight to his pack. “When Ash went missing, you were too caught up in your own grief to see hers. But I saw it, day in and day out.” He forced his eyes back up to Cady’s, his head still bowed. “I made the call to my contacts in South America.”
Cady took a literal step back from that admission.
“I told you that I wouldn’t,” Bales continued. “I told you that some things weren’t worth the cost, but I loved Ash, too, and eventually, I broke. I called in favors that I never should have called in. I paid a price I never should have paid, and I went down there.”
“You should have told me.” Cady shuddered. “If I’d known…”
“You would have insisted on coming with me,” Bales said. “I couldn’t let that happen. So I went alone. And when I came back, when I told Ness that there was no trace of her boy—not a body, not rumors, nothing—she accepted it. She let go. She moved on.” Bales swallowed. “And she started spending more and more time in the park.”
Ash had been gone for eighteen years. I thought of the hash marks on the tree. Days since he went missing? I wondered. Weeks?
I tried to make this—any of it—make sense. “She didn’t start burying people who died in the park until recently,” I said. “Four years ago—or five.”
“What changed?” Free asked.
“Five years ago,” Bales Bennett said finally, “I broke down and hired a private detective to find my daughter.”
“Five years ago”—Mac laid a hand on Cady’s shoulder—“she realized that you had a son. She would have thought Jude was Ash’s. She always thought that someday, for you, it was going to be Ash.”
I couldn’t tell how Mac felt about that—any of it.
“I told her the truth yesterday,” Cady uttered desperately. “I told her that Ash and I weren’t…that Jude wasn’t…” She shuddered. “What if she takes that out on him?”
“Jude is yours, Cady.” Mac drew in closer to her. “And he’s mine.” That acknowledgment sucked the air from the room. “Whatever she’s gone through—whatever she’s going through—Ness wouldn’t hurt him.”
“She won’t hurt the boy.” Bales sounded infinitely surer of that than I felt. “But if we don’t find her before the authorities do, she might hurt herself.”
The deafening sound of a chopper drowned out Cady’s reply. Bales strode toward the door.
“Let me guess,” Mac called as we followed Bales out and saw a massive military-grade helicopter landing on the lawn. “You called in another favor.”
Saskia pressed to my side the moment my foot hit dirt. Up ahead of us, Cady didn’t tell her father that she was coming with him. She just climbed onto the chopper, calling Pad to her as she did. Mac followed but ordered his K9 to stay.
“Come on,” Free told me, grabbing hold of my arm and pulling me toward the chopper. I signaled for Saskia. Duchess hesitated, reluctant to leave NATO to come to Free.
“You two stay here,” Cady yelled over the sound of the blades.
“It’s Jude,” I said. W
hen my words were lost to the din, I repeated them, yelled them. “It’s Jude.”
“I’ll stay.” Free pulled back. Nothing she could have said or done would have surprised me more. “I’ll take care of NATO.” She had to shout to be heard, but the look on her face was far fiercer than her tone. “Duchess and I will stay here, but Kira goes. Gabriel, too.”
Free hated being left behind. She hated being left out. She was fearless—but she would stay if it meant that I didn’t have to. She would take care of Jude’s dog the same casual and no-nonsense way she took care of Jude and me.
One for all, and all for trouble.
Cady shook her head. “Kira, I can’t let you—”
Free folded her arms over her chest and offered Cady a dangerous, glittering smile. “If you think I’m not resourceful enough to somehow rustle up an airlift of my own for Kira and Gabriel,” she commented pointedly, “you’d be wrong.”
Stepping foot into a grove of giant sequoias was like walking back into the Jurassic age. All around me, trees that had stood for thousands of years stretched skyward, as tall as twenty-story buildings and thicker through the base than some apartments. In my entire life, I’d never seen something so majestic, so primal.
“There are dozens of groves in the Sierra Glades,” Bales said, his voice echoing through the silent forest. “Ness marked one of the smaller ones on her map.” He paused. “This one’s the largest.”
“And you think we’re in the right place why?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t think,” Bales replied evenly. “I know, because I know her.” He lingered on that statement for a fraction of a second before returning to military strategist mode. “We’ve got a thousand acres to cover and depending on how competent the official search teams are, we could have less than an hour’s head start.”
None of us asked what Bales thought might happen if the FBI got to Ness and Jude first.
“There’s upward of twenty thousand trees in this grove,” Bales continued, his enunciation crisp. “Ness and Jude could be anywhere. The rest of you will take the dogs and search in pairs. Stay aware. With the drought, we’ve had more than our fair share of dying branches, and from that height…” He angled his head toward the breathtaking treetops. “Any falling item could be lethal.”
“What about you?” Cady asked, staring at her father with an expression on her face that I couldn’t quite parse.
“I’ll head west,” Bales replied. “I know a thing or two about hiding, and I might not need a K9 to pick up her trail.”
That was the only good-bye the four of us got. Within seconds, Bales had disappeared into the forest. I turned toward Gabriel, but Cady stepped between us. “You’ll go with Saskia and Kira?” she asked Mac. He nodded, and Cady spared a single glance at Gabriel. “You’re with me.”
Before I could formulate a reply, Cady drew a plastic bag out of the pocket of her cargo pants. Inside was a plain white T-shirt.
Jude’s.
I stared at it, unable to draw my eyes away as Cady let Pad get the familiar scent. Moving robotically, I took it and offered it to Saskia next. And just like that, we were off.
Mac was a silent companion. He kept pace with me as my K9 blew past us both.
“You didn’t bring your dog,” I said as minutes ticked by and the silence of the forest overwhelmed me.
Mac said exactly what I needed to hear. “We’re not looking for a body.”
My eyes threatened to leak. “Thank you.” I heard a tremor in my voice, but I didn’t have the time for or the luxury of breaking down. Mac believed Jude was alive, believed that Ness wouldn’t hurt him.
I could believe that, too.
Focus. Listen. Feel. Mountains and underground caverns weren’t my territory. Waterfalls and rivers weren’t home. But this was a forest—the ultimate forest—and I would be whatever I had to be, open the door on any memory and every instinct, to bring Jude home.
As I pushed onward in the direction Saskia had gone, I found myself wanting to say something. “I told Jude about you.” I wasn’t sure if that was a confession or a statement. “I told him that you were his father.”
“If I’d known…” Mac replied, his voice lost to the massiveness of the wilderness around us. “If I could have been there, I would have.”
I hadn’t been sure until that moment that I would ever be able to look at Cady and not think about the way she’d kept my past a secret. But now? Now I knew that when I looked at her, I’d think about what—and who—she’d kept from Jude.
“He’s loyal.” Suddenly, I needed Mac to know that. “Funny. Stupid when it comes to girls. A total geek.” I managed a smile that almost broke me. “He loves too easily and gives too much, and he’s never even heard of a glass that’s only partway full.”
There was a sound like a crack. Mac lunged at me, grabbed me, twisting our bodies to the side. A massive branch crashed to the ground, an inch away from my face.
An instant later—if Mac had moved an instant slower—I would have been dead.
“Kira.” Mac’s tone was urgent. It was another second or two before I realized why. A dog was barking in the distance.
Not Saskia, I realized. Pad. Darting from Mac’s grasp, I bolted toward the sound. The forest, the mammoth trees overhead, the burning in my muscles as I pushed myself to the brink and past it—none of that mattered.
Find. Recall. Re-find.
Pad was the best we’d ever trained. Cady was with her. They’d found something.
When Saskia fell in beside me, I followed her lead. Mac yelled my name, but I didn’t care what he was saying.
The only thing that I cared about was Jude.
Saskia made it to Cady before I did and added her voice to Pad’s. The woman who’d raised me stood with her hand on the trunk of one of the giants, its gnarled bark twisting like something out of a fairy tale.
Like something out of a nightmare.
It was only when Cady stepped forward that I realized that the dogs weren’t barking at the tree. They were barking at what was inside.
I hadn’t seen it at first, but as Cady disappeared, I made out an opening in the tree’s base, a doorway. I was halfway to following when Mac locked a hand around my shoulder. An instant later, Gabriel appeared, winded, and skittered to a stop beside us.
It’s hollow, I thought. The tree is hollow, and my family’s inside.
Before I could shrug off Mac’s grip, a familiar form appeared where Cady had stood a moment before.
Ness held a hand up to the dogs. “Stay.”
There was enough casual oomph to that command that Pad looked to me. It took every ounce of control I could muster not to tear into Ness myself, but we still hadn’t seen Jude.
“Stay.” I repeated Ness’s command. Pad sat, her ears flicking forward, but Saskia took a threatening step toward the old woman.
“I guess Saskia won’t be staying out here,” Ness commented wryly, “though I’m afraid I can’t vouch for her safety inside.”
Jude was inside. Cady was inside.
“Well,” Ness said, turning her attention to Gabriel and Mac. “Don’t just stand there, boys. Come in.”
The sequoia wasn’t completely hollow, but someone had carved out enough space for a small room. Jude lay prone on the floor. Cady knelt beside him, trembling. I started for them, but Ness stopped me, something metal digging into my side.
Gun. My brain processed the situation on a delay. Rifle.
Saskia had bolted ahead. She nosed at Jude’s still body.
“Get away from my daughter.”
I could barely hear Cady’s words over the ringing in my ears. Jude wasn’t moving. Guns were blood. Guns were vicious. Guns were cheating.
“Whatever this is, Ness, it’s between you and me. Leave my kids out of it.”
I forced myself to focus on Cady’s voice. On the other end of the gun, Ness looked at me, the oddest expression in her eyes. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she asked Cady softly. “Ho
w much you can love a child?”
Ash. I struggled to form the name in my mind. She’s talking about Ash. Not me. Not Jude. We don’t have anything to do with this.
But there was a gun pointed at me, and Jude was…
“Unconscious,” Cady told me. She latched a hand around Saskia’s collar. If Saskia attacked, Ness might shoot me.
And if I attack… That was the reason Cady had told me that Jude was unconscious. He wasn’t dead, and I was able to keep a whisper’s hold on myself.
“You brought me back here.” Cady did what she could to draw Ness’s attention. “I came.” Her voice vibrated with intensity. “I’m here.”
“And if I lower this gun,” Ness countered, “you’ll leave, and whatever you know, whatever secrets you’re keeping—they’ll walk out of this park with you.”
What secrets? I wondered, but deep in my mind, the question was lost under the cacophony of others. I wondered what it would sound like if Ness pulled the trigger. I wondered what it would feel like. I wondered if I would feel anything at all.
“What about your secrets, Ness?” Gabriel’s voice snapped me into the moment. “What about the things that you’ve been keeping from me?” Gabriel was smiling, but the curve of his lips was utterly out of place on his face. His eyes glittered dangerously in the scant light. “The bodies,” he clarified. “The ones the FBI found. You can’t think of any reason I might have a vested interest in how that turns out?”
Ness wavered, just for a moment. The gun never moved, but her gaze flicked toward Gabriel. Beside me, I saw Mac shift his weight ever so slightly.
“Nature can be merciless,” Ness told Gabriel. “I gave them what mercy I could.”
Mac eased toward Ness—toward the gun. Her head whipped toward him.
The Lovely and the Lost Page 20