Summer Searcher

by M K Dymock

She knew one man who knew the mountains better than anyone—but he would not be happy to see her.

  30

  Sol had screwed up big time. He contemplated playing dumb to Clint, but that would end with him in a deeper hole. And, after the week he’d had, he was over being underground.

  With only one option, he walked into Clint’s office and laid out his evidence—the little of it there was. He held back one minor fact—he told him about spotting Hylia in the cave but not the part about her leaving him. He would hold onto his dignity for a while longer.

  Clint maintained his silence for an uncomfortable moment. “You didn’t think to mention the missing kid sooner?”

  “I wanted to find something more concrete. Nobody but me believed there was a chance that little girl existed.” Clint flinched and opened his mouth, but Sol jumped in before he could. “I know it’s still a small chance, but I keep finding evidence that whomever this ghost is, there’s a kid involved. We have to be sure.”

  Clint closed his mouth and took a second. “Agreed. But there’s nothing else you’re not telling me?”

  The briefest of pauses. “Not yet.”

  Clint pushed the chair back from the desk in a soundless scoot. When Sol had that chair, it squeaked at every movement. “They still need a lot of help up north at the fire.”

  “You don’t want me on this?”

  “Sol, you are one of my oldest friends and my mentor. I’ve learned so much from you, but the last couple of years your judgment . . .”

  There it was finally on the table. “You didn’t see him for what he was either, and you cannot fault me for falling apart a little when Daisy–”

  Clint threw up his hands. “Whoa, I’m the last person judging you for not seeing through the devil himself. The entire town missed that one.” There was a very good reason Sol was asked to be sheriff when the previous occupant hadn’t proved up for the job. “But as for Daisy, I don’t think you ever handled her death. A month later you were working as sheriff with a whole lot of expectations and very little training.”

  “I may not have been the best sheriff, but I find people better than anyone.”

  “We’re not talking about a missing hiker, Sol. We’re talking about a possible fugitive. I’m going to put out an APB for this Hylia. So far, she’s the only person any of us have seen, and we still have an open warrant for her.”

  “You don’t know that she filed a false police report.”

  “Then let her come in and clear it up herself.”

  “You didn’t find her the first time; you won’t find her now.”

  “It’s a start, but I don’t want you working this.”

  “Fine.” He lied, but he wouldn’t get anywhere with an argument. Finding the girl would be enough.

  The swinging door of the sheriff’s office, which must’ve also been oiled and spring-loaded since he’d occupied the place, almost hit him on the way out. With the door slamming behind him, he jumped into his pickup and revved the engine.

  He pulled into his driveway, the crunching of the gravel and the engine masking every other noise. As he yanked the key out and the roar died down, a knock sounded at his back window from the truck bed. He whirled around to the back window.

  He was right; Hylia wouldn’t be found unless she wanted to be.

  It took two tries to slide open the seldom-used window, but it didn’t matter. She jumped over the truck’s side and met him at the driver’s side door.

  He had so many words jostling in his brain as he pushed open the door. “Are you crazy?” was what he went with.

  “Possibly, but I need your help.” She looked him straight in the eye. Not many women had the height to do that. She’d gained weight and no longer looked like the gaunt woman who’d stumbled out of the forest.

  “I offered it once, but you left me for dead.” Every time he closed his eyes he still found himself in that death hole.

  “You got out, didn’t you? It’s not that hard.”

  He scanned her eyes for a hint of remorse. “I helped you once.”

  “You promised me you’d find her.” She still had the same challenging eyes of the little girl in the photo.

  “Who is she, and who are you? Tell me the truth, and maybe we can talk.”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t know the girl’s name, but I’m fairly sure she’s my niece. And as for me, once upon a time, I was a girl named Hylia.”

  31

  Hylia—the forbidden name sounded surprisingly familiar on her tongue—more so than Jen ever had. With that one word, she’d sprung back to life.

  She was done being Jen or Meg or Jess—or any of the other generic names she’d carried over her lifetime. Her father had stolen her identity, but Hylia was claiming it back. She would no longer be shackled to her father’s paranoia.

  Sol lived in a small home with a chimney that looked like it could tip over at any moment. He led her to the porch, but she stayed by the door. Homes were uncertain places for her—as were strange men. He was oblivious to her hesitation and marched onward, soon carrying on a one-sided conversation.

  He must’ve realized it once he went around a corner to a back room because he stuck his head back out. “Are you coming?”

  She took a step in and another but stopped within escaping distance of the door.

  “Fine,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll bring it all out here.”

  All referred to a plethora of maps that he spread out on the floor of the front room. Like a child being enticed with candy, she left the relative safety of the door and kneeled in front of them. Once her father had led them into the wilderness, they went most places by memorization rather than print. Hylia could find almost anywhere with enough landmarks but nothing beyond her known world.

  Sol knelt next to her, and she scooted a few inches away. “Here,” he said, pointing. “This is where you left me to die a slow painful death in a crypt.”

  “I didn’t leave you; I made sure you got out.”

  “Bull.”

  “You got down all right, but it looked like you hurt your side. I would’ve gotten help if you’d needed it.” She didn’t bother to look at him but instead focused her attention on the map. “We lived there for the first two winters, but Merrell decided that was too close to society. I wasn’t even that sure where the mine was until that boy went missing and I recognized some of the area. I was still a child then, and everything was new.”

  Something had shifted in her while reading through her father’s ramblings. Anger at her wasted life crept in first, but she pushed that down and filled it with determination. She would get her brother and her niece out.

  Hylia glanced back at him. “Merrell was what we called my dad.” For the first time, instead of panic at the release of information, she felt a sense of her own release. That tightness she carried eased a bit.

  He leaned back and brought his legs around to sit cross-legged. “The final cause of death said your mother committed suicide. Although, I gather a lot of people thought otherwise. Why did he bring you here? Did he kill her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Every part of her heart still rebelled at the notion, but her brain was slowly sifting through the evidence. “I’m starting to think it’s possible. That’s why I came to you.” She met his brown eyes, which held the same look as the day she’d stumbled into him—a plea to be useful. “I don’t trust him not to hurt them anymore.”

  “Did he ever hurt you?”

  “Not directly.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  That last winter she’d been with her family, she’d started to see the cracks in her father.

  They’d found an old trapper cabin with an actual stove. For the first time in eight winters, she felt warm when she crawled into bed at night. With no storms coming, they stayed inside, buried and hidden from the world.

  After two weeks of no measurable snow and only the deep cold, the winds started blowing from the south, the temperatures
lifted, and the barometer dropped. Everything pointed to an advancing storm. They could finally leave their confines—confident their tracks would be covered by morning.

  Link had been coughing for days on end, driving her batty with the incessant hacking. But that day he felt better, and they raced through the snow, hurling snowballs and taunts at each other. Despite Link’s almost six-foot size, he was still a little boy some days, and she reveled in bringing that out.

  It was a good day when so many of them weren’t. The winds howled as they settled under their furs with warmed rocks at their feet.

  The next morning Merrell woke them up with yells of pure terror. “They found us. Move now.”

  Her brother jumped immediately to his feet, beginning the drill they’d practiced so many times before.

  She moved slower, exhausted at the previous day’s excursion. “What are you talking about?”

  “There are tracks everywhere. Probably thought the storm would cover them, but it held off.”

  Jen pushed off her coverings and stepped into the cold morning. Her father tried to pull her away but she ignored him to look outside for herself. “Dad, those are our tracks from yesterday.”

  “No, there are far too many for two people.” He threw her pack at her. “Get going.”

  “No,” she said, refusing to move. “We had a snowball fight.” She gestured to her brother. “Tell him.”

  Link kept packing. “We can’t chance it. Not all of those prints can be ours.”

  She stared at both of them as if they’d lost it—because hadn’t they? There was no way her ever-vigilant father would not notice someone creeping around. And if someone had been, why hadn’t they busted in?

  They finally had a warm cabin to sleep in, and she wasn’t leaving. “There’s a storm coming,” she yelled. “There’s no way we can leave.”

  “Better to face the elements than face a killer.” Her father tossed her some clothing she’d left drying by the fire. “Pack or we leave you.”

  For a moment all she could do was stare at his hazel eyes, looking for some resemblance of the man she once knew. “Fine.” She didn’t relent so much as not have a choice.

  There wasn’t time to make it to another cabin or a cave. As the storm descended on them, they huddled together in a pine tree well. Hylia would lose two toes by the time they found another refuge. By summer she would walk out alone.

  Sol listened without question and let the silence fill the space between them.

  “Link never doubted, never questioned,” she finally offered. “But he needs to know . . .” She took a ragged breath.

  “We’ll find him,” Sol said. “Between the two of us, no one knows these mountains better.”

  32

  Sol and Hylia had spent a good chunk of the night marking their best guess of each of her family’s hideouts on the map. The hideouts lined up fairly well with the notations he’d made of the break-ins and stock thefts.

  At about midnight they both started to yawn. “You can take my bed if you want it,” Sol said.

  She shot him a look that told him she’d rather sleep with scorpions.

  “Okay, take the couch.” Her look didn’t change. “Or the floor. I won’t bother you.”

  She stood and grabbed her green backpack. “I’ll bunk down outside.”

  “In the yard?” How was that better than his floor?

  “I know a place nearby.”

  When she returned the next morning, Sol didn’t bother to ask where she’d bunked down for the night and acted like it didn’t bother him how little she trusted him.

  “When did your dad start to seem off to you?” he asked as he warmed them up a very flavorless bowl of oatmeal in the microwave. Sol wasn’t used to entertaining guests.

  “He didn’t. He was always weird to the world but dad to me.”

  “When did he start acting paranoid?”

  She climbed onto a barstool in his kitchen. “I know he did contract work for the government. I’d overhear my parents talk about it, but it was generic stuff like ‘the government should pay you more.’”

  “He say what office?” Sol opened the microwave and stirred the goo.

  “Not that I remember. He did consultant work from home. Every once in a while, he’d fly out to DC, but that was it.” She accepted the bowl of mush he handed her without complaint. “One time, though, he came to speak to my class about his career—all the dads did. He went off on how the satellites are constantly watching us, gathering information, and he knew about it.”

  “You didn’t find that odd?”

  “No, the only reason I remember is the teacher interrupted him and ended it. I thought she was the rude one.” She stirred the oatmeal—or tried to—he’d left the mixture in too long. “Men in suits did come to the house once.” She lifted a spoon to her mouth but paused with it midair. “Sol.”

  He set his bowl in the microwave. “What’s wrong?”

  “That was right before he took us on a trip without our mom. That’s what the lawyer was talking about when he said she didn’t know where he was. That’s what first set him off.”

  He didn’t know how that helped them now. “Here,” he said passing her a protein bar.

  “I’m good.” She started chowing down on the breakfast, and he wondered who could be a worse cook than him. Between bites, she continued. “That’s also when he started to tell us the stories about the mines.”

  “What would he tell you?”

  She hesitated. “Apparently, his family mined here back in the day.”

  Sol was getting better at spotting her lies—or at least her half-truths. “About that—I want to call someone over today to help.”

  She stopped him with a glare. “No.”

  Despite his better judgment or at least with his lack of judgment, he’d told her about the warrant for her arrest. He tried to promise that once she explained her circumstances it would go away, but she wouldn’t risk it. He also suspected she had more than a few crimes in her past that would make her less likely to waltz into a sheriff’s office.

  No one spent that much time on the run without using some less-than-legal means to survive.

  With a protein bar and definitely no oatmeal, Sol moved to the kitchen table and the map. He would drop the subject of including anyone else—for now. He hadn’t, as yet, told Hylia about the stolen horse and its journey to the Triumph mine. She could keep a secret, and so could he. Neither one of them could afford to give too much. His job was on the line, after all.

  He’d already circled the mine in red. “What’s that?” Hylia came up behind him.

  “Nothing helpful, a gated mine that is well-known. Rangers have to go up there at the end of every summer and haul out trash from the entrance. Teenagers love to have bonfires up there. Plus, it’s not very big.”

  Hylia took his side so close she bumped him with her hip; they both quickly shifted away. “What mountain is this?”

  “It’s the north slope of Twin Peaks.”

  “Is there a waterfall between the two peaks?”

  “Yes, this time of year it ought to be a roaring one.”

  She nodded with a neutral face, but he spotted the hint of a smile before it disappeared.

  “Do you remember something? It’s a fairly well-known spot; I can’t imagine your father finding it a safe place.” Unless, of course, it was the only place around for miles and he had something to dump.

  “Not everything is as it seems.”

  “It’s not a long hike. We can be up and back before dark.”

  She smiled an actual smile. “I promise to help you out this time.”

  33

  The opening of the cave was an overhang twenty feet high with a view of the mountains around. The tan rocks had long since been dyed black by the smoke of countless fires.

  Hylia paced the entrance in a failed attempt to jog some sort of memory. Sol was right; this wouldn’t be a place her father would frequent. While she paced, he
kicked a few Monster cans out of the dirt and picked them up.

  She suspected his backpack would go home heavier and packed with trash. He’d done the same thing the one full day they’d spent searching. She’d liked that about him then—how he did the right thing without calling attention to it.

  The entrance narrowed into a small tunnel about four-feet wide in the back. The forest service had bolted a now-rusty gate into the rock. Why had her father marked this mine in his notes?

  She shook the gate. Despite its rusty state, it didn’t budge.

  Sol came up behind her. “Maybe I can get the new sheriff to request a key.” A trace of bitterness stuck on the word sheriff. This wasn’t a man to carry a whole lot of emotion in words, or his face, or his actions. Growing up with men who went from ecstatic to terrified in a sentence didn’t give her experience for him.

  She turned to face him. “Why aren’t you sheriff anymore?”

  “I never intended it to be a long-term job.”

  “So, it was a temp job?” She took a step closer, and he took a step back. Something about him made her want to push his buttons. Maybe she wanted to see how far it took until some emotion came out.

  “Something like that.” He turned to leave. “Coming up here was a wash.”

  Hylia pulled off her backpack. “Not quite yet.” She yanked out a pair of wire cutters. “The gate is made from rebar; it’s a soft metal.”

  “You can’t do that,” he whispered as if they were breaking into a bank.

  “You have two choices, Deputy.” She opened the blades and wrapped them around a bar. “You can come with me or arrest me. If you arrest me, you have three miles to the truck, and I guarantee you won’t be able to hold onto me.” She took a step away from the cutters. “I could use a stronger hand if you don’t mind.”

  Sol held onto an empty Doritos bag, which he jammed into his pocket. “Okay, give me some space.”

  He snapped the first bar in two and then a second. Three times she’d asked him for help; three times he’d acquiesced despite her actions. She now knew his weakness. Could she keep exploiting it? Probably—if that’s what it took to get to her brother.