Summer Searcher

by M K Dymock

  Whatever it was, he told Sol, he shouldn’t have trusted her as much as he did.

  No matter how sure everyone had been that the so-called mother wasn’t legit, the possibility he’d failed to find a missing kid haunted him. And if she was as unhinged as Clint said she was, he was ashamed everyone saw it but him. Either way, he’d failed, so he’d resigned.

  He tossed the stuffed bear in the back of his van, its one remaining black eye staring back at him. If Ben had stumbled onto a buried mystery, Sol would excavate it.

  10

  No matter how far she wandered, Link never left Jen’s thoughts.

  Link’s nickname had been bestowed by her father within a few short months of his birth. He was a surprise baby with six years separating the two siblings. Even before their life went upside down, she mothered him more than she sistered him.

  Once their mother died and they lost the tether she gave them to the world, Jen took over most of Link’s caretaking—it wasn’t like Merrell would do it. Leaving the mountains meant leaving her brother, an act she would never forgive herself for.

  Once she left Costa Rica, it took four weeks and the crossing of five international borders before she stumbled into a town called Summit about fifty miles from Lost Gorge. She spent another month working odd jobs and waiting for fall.

  One day as she meandered through a convenience store, she looked up and saw Link standing in the candy aisle studying the rows of sweetness. It took her a moment to recognize her little brother under the dark beard filling in his hollow cheeks.

  Her face ached at the attempt to hold back the tears. Neither one of them could afford a scene. His eyes darted to her once before he returned his attention to the candy.

  She stood, open-mouthed, as he chose a few packages of Reese’s Pieces and made his way to the clerk. Had he seen her? How could he not have? The years had wrought their change on her. Her hair had darkened along with cutting it to her shoulders.

  Shock and indecisiveness didn’t allow her to move from her position in front of the jerky until the jingling of the door jolted her into action. But by the time she reached the sidewalk he was gone.

  Summit, like Lost Gorge, was a town her family would periodically visit for supplies. It was bigger than Lost Gorge and had a town bus system they’d used a few times. It had two routes, and only one of those carried passengers to where the town met the wilderness.

  That day Jen rode the bus again and again, desperate for one last look at her brother. Late in the day, as dusk dragged itself across the horizon, Link got on the bus. It was only a third full. He caught her eye first thing; she was sure of it. Despite that or maybe because of it, he chose a seat a few rows in front of her.

  A petite blonde woman, who couldn’t be more than seventeen, sat right next to him. Jen couldn’t help but laugh a little at the annoyance this would bring her shy brother. To her utter shock, not only did he not flinch or move away, he put his arm around the back of the seat. She recognized the girl from earlier in the gas station but hadn’t realized the two of them could be together.

  He glanced back for a second, and, so briefly she would question if it happened later, he winked at her.

  Jen knew no conversation would be had and no answers given. If he was willing to talk to her, he would’ve. She got off at the next stop and made her way back to town and the RV park she was staying at. Her steps dragged on the concrete sidewalk, and she felt more alone than she had in all her wandering years.

  Who was the young woman? Where did she come from? By the looks of things and the supplies he carried, Link still had to be living with their father.

  She wanted to leave but she couldn’t—not without her brother—not again. She could show him how they could survive in the world if they were careful. But she knew him well enough to know he would have to be the one to reach out to her. She would wait and hope and, occasionally over the next few years, spot him.

  One time she did try to talk to him, but he ran. Probably fearful their enemies followed her to get to Merrell.

  Who was the girlfriend anyhow? Why was she allowed in from the outside world and not Jen? How could they toss her off as if she didn’t exist?

  The next time she saw them was in a café. Link had followed an old trick of Jen’s and positioned himself within line of sight to the TV to watch without looking like he was watching. A cartoon played, and she could still see the little boy in him. Her attention on Link, however, changed abruptly when a green-eyed toddler, who looked at least two years old to Jen’s inexperienced eye, looked over the girlfriend’s shoulder.

  Without waiting for a waitress to seat her or even acting consciously, Jen slipped into the booth behind them. Her eyes never left the child’s. The girl smiled a toothy grin, which Jen struggled to return. Over the light softness of her barely-there hair, Jen met Link’s eyes.

  For the first time, she saw a longing she understood better than anyone. He blinked, and Jen could’ve sworn he sighed. Her arms shook at the need to climb over the table and hug them all, beg them to stay. He was getting closer to reaching out—she sensed it.

  They stayed longer than usual. The woman handed the toddler to Link, who grasped her with a delicateness Jen didn’t know him capable of. They walked past her on the way out, his dangling arm brushing against Jen’s shoulder.

  She would never see either of them again. After a year of watching for the family, she took to the mountains to find them herself.

  Jen disappeared into the wilds for weeks to search, desperation causing her to make reckless mistakes. The first snow came before she had time to get the proper supplies—even the proper clothing. She stood on a cliff’s edge, scanning the horizon, when she inched out one step too far and hit a patch of ice. Who knew how long it took her to wake up at the bottom of a ravine? Blood clouded her vision and caked her eyes closed, holding her in between life and death. When she finally became fully conscious with a relentless headache, two inches of snow covered her body.

  Jennifer, in her concussed and starving state, found a trail and stuck to it. Instinct drove her down the mountain and into the empty parking lot of a trailhead. Empty, except for one man, Sol Chapa. She knew him by sight and reputation. In all the years of living in these woods and the few years after, she’d made one friend in town, Elizabeth, who didn’t ask too many questions and who’d helped her after she left her family.

  Elizabeth had pointed him out one day as they pulled into the parking lot of the local outfitter store. “If you ever get in trouble out there, find him. He knows this land better than anyone.” Jen had remembered Sol’s face, but as a potential threat to her family’s way of life.

  When she stumbled into that parking lot, out of hope and with no one to turn to, Jen made a critical error. She asked the man who knew too much for help.

  She only mentioned the child, not wanting questions she had no good answers for. Maybe, her fevered mind thought, he could find a trail, a sign, something she missed. After that, it would be easy enough to ditch him and strike out on her own.

  Except he hadn’t found anything, and then his suspicions had turned on her. She vanished before any more questions could be asked, before her stupidity could threaten her family further.

  She hadn’t searched anymore after that—whatever life her family led, they didn’t want her to be a part of it.

  Finding that body in the cave changed everything. She would return to the place they’d called home for three winters, the place Merrell swore they’d never come back to after hikers came too close. Maybe there she’d finally find a trace.

  11

  Sol parked on the gravel beside his home, a ramshackle hundred-year-old house on an acre of land. The two snowmobiles parked out back with grass growing between the sled runners were worth more than the enclosure they sat next to.

  He dropped his muddy clothes on top of the washing machine and went into what he called the “gear room,” where he kept anything and everything a person might nee
d for a sojourn into the mountains. Ropes hung across the wall with climbing harnesses, and under those sat four backpacks of various sizes. Racks of skis crossed another wall with several sets of snowshoes stacked underneath. It wasn’t enough to outfit himself; he had to be ready to outfit the other searchers. He ignored all of this and went to the closet, where he pulled open the doors.

  On the back of the closet doors were his failures—the never-found.

  During the last fifteen years, he’d been a part of some three hundred search and rescues. He’d returned almost all of those, some alive, but some dead. The souls of the nine still missing followed him constantly.

  His eyes scanned each photo needlessly; the images were etched on his brain. Six males, three females, with three of them being children.

  His attention moved to the little girl, who might or might not exist outside the photo. The girl hadn’t looked at the camera, hadn’t seemed to know someone was taking her picture. Had “Hylia” taken a shot of a strange girl to claim as her own?

  She’d stood next to an adult wearing jeans, with everything from the waist up cut out of the picture. Any attempt to assume the gender of the adult would be a guess. The little girl clutched the pink stuffed animal in one arm. Sol could not say with any certainty that the animal was the same as what he’d sealed in plastic.

  The girl was smiling up at the adult—her face smudged with red around the mouth. Could be a rash, could be a popsicle. No logo on her t-shirt, nothing that made her discernible from the other tourist kids who flooded the town every summer. A tree covered in green leaves narrowed the window of the season.

  Yep, Sol decided, he was a fool to assume the toy was the same, that the girl could be found, and that he would be the man to find her.

  Still, the nagging worry that hadn’t left him for a year would not let up.

  He slammed the closet door shut. Clint would think him a fool, tell him they had too many cases and too much work to go chasing after another ghost.

  And didn’t he already have a case and a ghost to chase after?

  The Lost Gorge ghost had always been a backburner case. He came and went with no damage to the property. The remoteness of the crimes and the things stolen had convinced him the ghost was a drifter, in need of food and shelter. But it never appeared the man spent any time in the homes he broke into. The question of how he survived and where he went had set off Sol’s curiosity.

  But up until last winter, the ghost had been a mere annoyance, a story told over a beer.

  A husband and father of three had snowmobiled into his family’s cabin two days before Christmas to get the place ready for them to come for the holidays. He’d arrived a few minutes before dusk and an oncoming storm, shut up the machine in the shed, and crashed for the night. If he’d bothered to start the generator and turn on a light, the entire situation could’ve been avoided.

  A thud woke him up in complete blackness. His first sleepy thought was that a bear had chosen his cabin as a proper place to hibernate. The second was that of the ghost.

  He grabbed a rifle and a flashlight. The front door had been opened to the cold night air. Someone else walked through the front room, carrying a flashlight—someone who had no business being there. The homeowner fired once without aiming, intending it as a warning shot. The light dropped to the ground, and the shadow disappeared into the storm.

  It took almost twelve hours for the man to make it back to his truck and call for help and for help to make it to the cabin. The storm effectively wiped out any trail—even for Sol. The only clue the story was true was a few drops of blood on the hardwood floor and the abandoned flashlight.

  With the mountain man house, maybe Sol could chase two ghosts on one trail.

  He packed a backpack with all the essentials, including two days’ worth of food; he always carried extra. He lived his life with the ability to pack for anything in ten minutes—as long as that trip didn’t require suits and a lot of cash.

  He would not call Clint. All he needed was a day to prove the toy was nothing. All he had to do first was find the cave.

  12

  Jen took the closer and more direct route back, which led to the cabin—at least that’s what Merrell had called the hole in the wall. As if calling it that could somehow normalize it.

  A grouping of three pines stood guard at the entrance of a small canyon barely more than a ravine. The middle tree’s top had been cut off, making it about five feet shorter than its peers.

  The previous night’s thunderstorm had left the trail slick and treacherous. Any day now, monsoon season would be over, gifting them about eight weeks of true summer before fall took over.

  The family would never venture here before November. After that, any tracks they left would be immediately covered by the relentless blizzards. Several miles separated them from the ski resort and most backcountry trails. The thickness of the trees and jagged rock protected this area from the recreational pursuits of the town.

  In the winter, the barely-there stream provided fresh water. How she’d hated climbing up and down rocks carrying buckets of water to be heated by the fire—if they were lucky. Some days Merrell refused fires, fearful the smoke would attract attention.

  She plunged into the creek to avoid any unnecessary trail. This place should be forgotten.

  Within a few minutes, she stood at the cabin’s doorway—a narrow crack they kept covered by a hide—the doggie door as she and Link had called it. She’d grown too large to squeeze through it. Another entrance dropped from the ledge above and directly into the cavern. She’d brought rope, knowing Merrell pulled the ladder out and destroyed it every spring.

  As she lowered herself into the black hole, using a doubled-up rope wrapped around a tree, a flood of memories overcame her, good and bad depending on perspective. Their first year in the caves, Merrell disappeared for two days for “supplies.” When he returned, he had a real Christmas tree, bulbs, and two presents wrapped in bright red paper.

  She dropped to the floor and turned on her headlamp. “I’m home.”

  Her jump disturbed the dust, filling her light with a cloud. Scuffed footprints in the dirt and a few bright red starburst wrappers stood out as the only color in a grayscale world. The missing boy had found his way there. How he’d managed it she’d never know.

  She yanked one end of the rope, pulling down the entire coil. “Never let them follow you,” Merrell had always said without elaborating on who “they” were beyond “bad people.” She moved through the cave, the memories slamming into her. As if in a dream, she wandered to the area they called the bedroom, where she and Link had curled up in a single bed for warmth until his height outstripped hers.

  The first miner who had called this place home had also wanted to remain hidden from the world. He worked for the Argus Mine Company—a corporation that would wind up owning 90 percent of the ore leaving the Lost Gorge Mountains but only 10 percent of the mines. While working the Lucky Strike mine, the largest in the area, he’d struck a small vein of silver.

  Being the good employee he was at the time, he immediately notified a supervisor. After a little blasting and digging, the vein proved too shallow to be worth the effort, and everyone moved on—except the miner. It nagged at him with each pound of the shovel that maybe the vein pointed to something deeper, more valuable.

  A few weeks later his hunch proved correct, but this time he didn’t notify the bosses. He quit his job and loaded up a mule and horse. It took a while, but he found the other side of the vein. He never filed a claim, never told anyone of the location, and every time he returned to the town for supplies, he loudly regretted ever quitting such a good paying job. Slowly the silver accumulated without anyone else knowing about it.

  Winter came that year with a fury, as it always did, but the miner had prepared. High up the cliffs, he’d walled off an overhang using homemade concrete and the plethora of rocks in the area. Merrell never revealed how he’d learned about the dwelling.
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br />   A tattered blanket, pieced together from the hides of coyotes, lay on the ground. Someone had returned to this place in the last few years.

  She lay on the shelf, its hard rock cutting into her without the pine needles they’d used as a mattress. Above her, letters had been drawn with charcoal—the only writing utensil they had for an entire winter. Merrell taught them a secret language that year. If they ever had to leave a message or a note to one another, it had to be in code.

  “What is it?” she’d asked as he guided her first feeble attempts.

  “The language of the miners,” he’d said. “It’s been long lost.”

  “Are we the only ones who know it?”

  He’d sat back on his heels, rubbing his beard that had grown more than an inch past his chin in the year since they’d died. “Not the original language—not many still speak that. But this version is ours and only ours.”

  Jen sat up so fast she scraped her head on the ceiling above. The cave hadn’t been the first time she’d seen those characters. In another place and time, they’d existed in a book in notes jotted down in the margin—notes along with crudely drawn maps. She strained her memory to recall more details, but that time of her life held so much pain, she’d always blocked them.

  From the day they arrived, Merrell knew where to find abandoned mines, forgotten by men and time. The book hadn’t come with them on their wanderings. Years of living with only what they could carry convinced her of that.

  That meant he’d left it in Washington along with their mother’s body.

  She’d exhausted all her options wandering these mountains on the slim chance she’d find their trail. But she would never find it as long as Merrell didn’t want her to.

  A dreadful, hopeful idea took hold.

  Before she could find her feet, a foot stomped outside the cave. She punched the button of her headlamp, plunging herself into darkness other than a little line of light allowed in by the crack.