Gone Missing: A gripping crime thriller that will have you hooked

by T. J. Brearton

  “Affirmative. The village of Atwell isn’t far, either. Maybe six miles. But we’re not thinking they came in that way.”

  “No. We’re not.”

  “There’s also an unmarked trail, about five miles away. It’s the tail end of Haskell Road, just a couple wheel ruts, probably.”

  “Got it. I remember.”

  “And now – be careful – just to the south there from where you’re standing are cliffs. Over.”

  “Alright. I’m going to check it out. Over, out.”

  A murder of crows interrupted the stillness. He couldn’t see them, but they came from the direction Laura had indicated. Cross saw the cliffs and slowly approached the edge, crouching down, spreading out his weight.

  He lowered to all fours and then to his stomach, inching along until he could peer down the drop.

  “Oh shit…”

  The crows surrounded a body on the rocks below. The pecked at it and tore flesh from bone.

  Cross felt clammy, his throat dry, palms sweating.

  Hard to tell who it was. Who it had been.

  He thought back to the final call from Montgomery, the frustration in the kidnapper’s voice. Something had happened, something unintended. Cross wondered if Vickers had gotten into some trouble, but it might’ve been Katie. She could have tried to run – in the dark, maybe, hands tied, who knew, and taken a fatal tumble into the abyss.

  He backed carefully away from the crumbling ledge and gained his feet. He took up the radio.

  “Ranger Broderick, meet me over on channel two,” he said, aware that David was listening in on the main frequency. David’s headset was only able to pick up what was said in the helicopter, or what came in on channel one.

  “Go for Broderick on two,” she said.

  “We’ve got a body. No way to visually ascertain who, from this position. How long will it take to get a medical examiner up here? We’ll need forensics on the cabin, too.”

  “My guess is about four, five hours. Over.”

  Cross sighed. It was a long time to wait to find out who it was. Maybe there was another way down so he could get a closer look. He relayed this to Laura, who advised him to be careful.

  She added, “David is asking questions. What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Tell him there are signs Katie was here. Leave it at that.”

  “Roger. We’re headed back to refuel. Over and out.”

  Cross put away the radio. He heard the chopper fade into the distance and tried to pick out a safe descent to the rocks below.

  * * *

  As Cross made his way down to the body, his thoughts swung to Katie and David, and the health of their marriage. He doubted David had anything directly to do with his wife’s disappearance, whether he was a party to tax fraud or not. David seemed genuinely devoted.

  Cross wondered about his own devotion.

  There was something subtle which happened in a marriage, he thought. He’d been married to Marty for eight years. In the beginning, he’d checked in with her on just about everything he did. From major things such as new car purchases to minor stuff such as meeting a buddy for a beer after work. She’d done the same, seeking his approval to spend a few extra hours with her own friends, inquiring about the best time to go for a jog, what he preferred for dinner.

  But it wasn’t the kind of permission that was always sought outright – that was what was subtle – sometimes it was non-verbal. It was just there, in the fabric of their lives.

  Part of seeking and granting permission was to avoid the little fights and arguments that peppered a marriage. If you didn’t get the permission, if you didn’t sense the concession, a little black spot formed.

  After a while, those black spots grew.

  He grabbed a slender tree for balance, realizing his failure. He’d retreated from the whole crazy, complex scenario, withdrawn into his work, and atomized himself to the point that he’d refused to ask Marty’s permission for anything, nor granted it when she needed it.

  He’d rebelled.

  In his mind, at the time, it all made sense. Screw the subtlety, fuck the game, he was going to do what he needed to do when he needed to do it.

  And his marriage had wound up like that body on the rocks.

  Cross yelled and waved his arms, scaring off the picking crows. They took to the surrounding conifers, where they cawed and capered at his intrusion.

  The body was in catastrophic condition. It was face down, head turned to the side. The eyes had been pecked out. The muscles and tissue had been ravaged by something other than crows.

  Cross was no wildlife expert, but he didn’t think there were wolves in the Adirondacks. Bears wouldn’t have done it, though.

  A pack of coyotes, then.

  But despite the poor condition of the cadaver, Cross was pretty sure it was a man. What little was left of the clothing didn’t offer much, but one hand was still whole, shaped like a claw against the rock. A man’s hand, not a woman’s.

  Cross grabbed the radio and sent word back to incident command. He’d already relayed his position to Burt Frost and explained the situation. Now he had visual confirmation.

  He climbed closer to the body. The sun was just breaking over the cliff and the rocks sparkled with mica. The crows continued to jeer from the trees.

  Two of the pants pockets were still intact, and Cross fished around for a wallet, turning his head to the side to breathe clean air. The smell coming from the body wasn’t so good.

  He didn’t find anything and scrambled away, gasping for air.

  He didn’t need a wallet anyway; from the other side of the body, he got a closer look at the face. It was in rough shape, but Cross had stared at a mug shot of Troy Vickers long enough to believe this was him.

  Cross perched on a rock, breathing hard, and looked down the steep slope, then glanced up at the clifftop, imagining a scenario in which Vickers lost his footing and tumbled. Another in which Katie Calumet pushed him. Where would she go?

  Montgomery might’ve ventured to the cabin. That had been Cross’s theory for a while now. Montgomery comes in, absconds with Katie to a second, backup location. Or Katie had already fled and was out there on her own.

  There’d been blood on the bed, and the windows were smashed. Cross considered the terrible possibilities of what might have happened to Katie Calumet.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Mom?

  Katie came to a boggy area. She set down her foot, put some weight on it, and sank up to her knee. The ground was too mushy and the bog seemed to stretch on forever.

  It was good news, on the one hand. Bogs occurred in lower elevations. The last nature walk organized by her Riverside School committee at the VIC had been a bog walk.

  A bog was a small lake or pond that had gradually filled in with sphagnum moss, forming a mat five feet thick. Not suitable for walking – she’d have to go around.

  That was the bad news, because she was already losing daylight.

  She saw what was called the pitcher plant, a species that devoured insects and looked a bit like a child’s pinwheel toy with the fans crumpled.

  Mom? You there?

  So far she’d stuck to her course as best as she could, only a handful of times doubling back to get around an unpassable area – rockslides or groves of white pine too tightly packed to slip through. But she had never really regained confidence after the black bear encounter.

  As the sky dimmed, she was suddenly sure she was nowhere near the trail, that despite following the compass, she was no closer to civilization than when she’d started out eight hours before.

  Mom? Talk to me, mom. Please.

  The prospect of circumnavigating the bog was very unsatisfying. Katie looked at the compass for the tenth time since coming to the edge of the soft ground. She needed to keep heading toward that setting sun. And it would be no good to camp here for the night. The bugs were bad, and it smelled like rotten eggs: dead, decaying biomass in the thick and mushy unde
rlying peat.

  Stinky peat! the kids called it.

  Katie slogged her way back a few steps then started the slow, tedious process of going round, practically dragging her bad leg behind her.

  I’m sorry, mom.

  I need you.

  The doctors had said tongue-tying things like “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” and Katie had heard further terms like “apical ballooning syndrome” and “stress cardiomyopathy.”

  It all meant heart muscle failure brought on by severe stress and chronic depression.

  Some people called it broken heart syndrome.

  At first Katie had resisted such nonsense. But she’d done her research since then and knew that women’s hearts were more affected by stress and depression than men’s. Monica Calumet had also just gone through menopause, when heart failure becomes more common.

  No one had seen it coming. On a Tuesday in the middle of summer, Monica had complained of chest pains. She’d been at home, doing nothing strenuous.

  Once admitted to the hospital, she told the doctors she’d been getting dizzy and fatigued at times, every now and again with abdominal discomfort. But she was otherwise in good health.

  They’d let her go.

  Three days after being released from the hospital with an appointment to return for follow-up tests, she’d suffered a heart attack while walking in the city. Clutching her chest, she’d staggered out into the street to hail a cab. A delivery truck barreling along wasn’t able to brake in time.

  Katie kept moving around the bog, but she needed to make a wider circle – the ground kept sucking at her feet. Her running shoes were filled with squishy muck. The sweat was rolling, despite the late hour and lowering sun. The flies swarmed her head.

  Mom! Help me – God! Do something!

  A warm woman, so slight there seemed to be nothing to her. Monica Calumet was an ex-hippie from the sixties, a bohemian type who’d later had some religious conversion which had always been nebulous to Katie, her sister, and their father.

  Mom! Monica!

  No answer from beyond the grave. No sense of her mother’s spirit watching over her as Katie struggled to get free of the fucking marsh trying to suck her down like something from a child’s nightmare.

  Monica hadn’t died right away.

  She’d been rushed to the hospital. Katie was at school, unaware. Her father had gone to be with his wife in her last hours. She was lucid, Katie had learned, but Jean never spoke of their last moments together, their last words.

  They’d only let him see her for a few seconds before rushing into surgery to try and free the ribs crushing her lungs, to revive the heart which was in critical failure.

  Ten years later, he’d married Sybil, a woman in just about every way the total opposite of Monica Calumet.

  Katie pulled her foot out of the peat. Instead of extricating herself from the bog, she seemed to be getting deeper in it.

  She needed firm ground. The light was dwindling. This was taking too long. That she’d ever thought she could walk out of the Adirondack wilderness on her own seemed utterly ridiculous now. Something dangerously naïve, the same stupid thing every other fool thought when they got turned around in the woods. When they wandered off the beaten path for a little sightseeing, then either spent days getting themselves out or called for help if they had service.

  No service for Katie. Not a GPS that worked, or a sat phone with batteries.

  I’m not getting any love from your god, Mom.

  She laughed abruptly, aware that the sound coming out of her was a bit deranged, but she only laughed harder when she was overwhelmed by how typical this all seemed – she saw herself from above, this foolish woman angry at God when she was just frustrated with her own human limitations.

  Angry with Sybil because she represented the loss of Monica.

  Like something from a bad Lifetime channel movie.

  The NeverEnding Story! That was the children’s movie with the kid sinking in the swamp. The horse had been called Artax, or something – she couldn’t recall the boy’s name, though.

  She slapped a mosquito biting the back of her neck. The flies and mosquitoes were working in concert to drive her insane. She wondered if they were able to communicate, if there was an interspecies form of data transmission.

  You’re not so unique, Mr. Mosquito. You’re a dime a dozen. I kill you, and no one cares. You live in a swamp. You live in this dismal shithole among the Pickerelweed and Swamp Candles. You live…

  She stopped when she saw the lilies; something jogged in her mind.

  The foam boards she’d spent a few nights working on for the nature walk, the presentation to the children after they’d returned from their hike to review the plant life they’d seen.

  The Yellow Pond Lily.

  The bog at Paul Smith’s College was Barnum Bog, called so because it had Barnum Creek flowing through it.

  Certain plant species grew on the margins of the brook, and only because it was a brook, and freshwater.

  Bogs and marshes weren’t interchangeable terms. She’d been thinking of this surrounding muck, graying in the fading light, as both. But a marsh had water moving through it. And a marsh had Yellow Pond Lilies and Swamp Candles. Like this one.

  It filled her with a kind of frisson, renewing her energy.

  She hadn’t seen the point in following a winding river before, which might only prolong her walk out, but now she wanted it…

  She followed the lilies wherever she found them. They almost seemed to glow in the failing light.

  The walking got easier – she was still knee-deep, but the thick peat was giving way to less viscous water. She even heard the sound of it flowing, a marvelous thing – water purling over the spongy vegetation. The moving water sounded almost like wind at first, then it babbled and splashed in proximity.

  She was able to follow the creek out of the marsh, climb up onto a bank of dry land.

  It was getting colder. A bracing chill to the air that tasted sweet in her mouth. The day had been clear, the heat had escaped, and it was going to be a cold night.

  She had Carson’s book of matches, plus a small box from Hoot’s cabin, and she kept them all dry inside a plastic baggie from Carson’s snack supply. Now she raced the darkness, searching for birch bark and kindling and wood.

  A coyote yipped in the distance, and its voice was joined by a chorus of others.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The powerful two-way radio crackled with static and a voice said, “Gates for Cross, over.”

  Her voice was a welcomed relief. Cross had only been on his own at the cabin for a few hours, but it had gotten lonely fast. He sat on the front porch and thumbed the button. “Go ahead, Gates.”

  “The cabin on Jones Mountain belonged to a man named Jack Holderied. He’s been dead for twenty years. The state acquired the land before he passed.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Might be that Abel Gebhart knew about it, so did his brother Jeff, and Jeff told Jonathan Montgomery. But Abel Gebhart has lawyered up for now and isn’t talking. And Jeff Gebhart is still in a coma.”

  “Got it.”

  A pause. “How you doing, Justin?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “David is coming in on foot with Laura Broderick.”

  Cross sighed. “Roger that. What’s his state of mind at this point?”

  There was only a static reply. Cross got up and moved away from the cabin, trying to get a better radio signal, and caught the tail end of what Gates said. “… let him help.”

  “Please repeat, over.”

  “I said it’s the only real choice, at this point, to let him help.”

  “Feds don’t want him?”

  “They seem to be waiting, like everyone else.”

  “I’m waiting, too. For the crew to get here and scrub the cabin. Place is in pretty good shape. There’s a clearing, but not too wide, trees all around, a cliff on one side, pretty secluded. Over.” He looked
down at the rocks Katie had used to spell SOS.

  Cross listened for anything else Gates might add but got only static.

  “You there, Dana?”

  He thought he heard Gates buried beneath the distortion saying, Hang in there.

  “Over and out.” Cross hung the radio from his belt.

  The sun was starting down, would drop behind the next summit along the range in a couple of hours.

  * * *

  When the team finally emerged from the woods, led by Laura Broderick, the clearing was dark with shade.

  The four CSTs looked exhausted from the hike in but worked quickly, setting up battery-powered lights, opening crates of tools – fingerprint dust, jars and vials, ultraviolet lights. Two of them went down to the body on the rocks; two stayed with the cabin.

  Laura walked over to Cross.

  “We’ve got 400 searchers in the woods right now,” she said. “Tomorrow morning there will be almost 800. A hundred are headed right to this spot. Some will turn around, walk right back out, others will continue on the ridge there, some down the other side.”

  Cross just shook his head. It was a massive undertaking. He trusted Burt Frost knew what he was doing; the searchers were well-instructed and would keep tight bump lines – no one else would get lost.

  “You think she’s alive?” Laura asked.

  “I think there’s a good chance.”

  “And the blood in the cabin?”

  “Probably hers, yeah. We’ll find out. I’m sure she’s, you know… she’s been banged up.”

  “What about your man on the rocks there? What happened to him?”

  “Don’t know. Looks like he did a little boozing. Maybe he thought he could fly.”

  Laura looked toward the cliff. Then she patted the rucksack she was holding. “Brought you an extra sleeping bag.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll get a fire going.”

  Laura hustled off and started gathering kindling. Cross watched her, feeling suddenly like he was in some old-timey story about cowboys and mountain folk. Jeremiah Johnson. He’d planned to take his family camping when the girls had gotten a bit older. Those plans had been back-burnered during all the problems he had with Marty. Now the summer would soon be over.