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Now D.D. is smiling, too.
“Pace yourself,” Kimberly warns. “Eyes open. Step steady. Good luck.”
Quincy looks behind us to the next guy. We move down the line of tables and finish picking up gear. The older woman from the sheriff’s department takes our names a second time, checks us off a list, and that’s that.
Up into the woods we go.
—
I DON’T MIND THE HIKING. I jog almost daily, though not in fancy clothes like Keith’s. But a woman who lives in my constant state of hypervigilance has to run endlessly just to burn off steam. Plus lift weights and scamper along buildings and swing my way around abandoned structures. I can’t reason my anxiety away by admonishing myself that the worst will never happen. Because the worst thing did happen to me, making all fears real, all terrors genuine. So I role-play my way through it. I find an old warehouse, I get myself untrapped. Samuel, my FBI victim advocate, first told me about the technique—easing anxiety by building strength—but I don’t think he expected me to take it this far.
Now, looking at the towering trees all around us, with a thick undergrowth of leafy green bushes—I think someone mentioned mountain laurel—it occurs to me all the new escape models I could be prepping for.
I keep moving. D.D. and Keith have no problem with the pace. Apparently, we’re all crazy.
No one speaks. We hit the one-mile mark. Shortly afterward we come to a small clearing, where another law enforcement type is standing with a clipboard. He checks us off as having survived this far, and gets serious about how to find our particular section of the grid.
He and D.D. talk for a few more moments. Keith, I notice, keeps looking behind the guy, as if there’s something he’s trying to see deeper in the woods. Then I get it. This is ground zero, so to speak. Where the hiker went in search of a stick and found a bone instead.
I look down the hill where we just came. And for the first time, I feel uneasy.
That climb was nothing for me. But Jacob? Jacob who sat behind the wheel all day and lived on fried food and was famous for his week-long drug- and alcohol-fueled benders...
I can’t picture Jacob here at all. Does that mean he never came to these mountains? That he lied to me about the Georgia cabin? Or does that mean I don’t know him as well as I thought I did? That he kept secrets even as I surrendered every last bit of me?
“It’s okay,” Keith says.
I realize I’m standing with my hands fisted.
“He didn’t win. You’re the one who’s about to help a murdered girl go home again. You got this.”
“Stop looking inside my head,” I mutter.
“Then stop being so easy to read.”
I scowl, but being pissed at him has made me feel better. Which is probably what he intended. Keith always seems to know me too well. Which is the reason I don’t trust him at all.
D.D. has our coordinates. We resume climbing.
—
BY THE TIME WE REACH our assigned area, we’ve shed our outer layers. We can hear things from time to time, other searchers in the woods, but we don’t see them. Each area is that large, given how much ground we have to cover.
“The body searches I’ve done,” D.D. says, “we stand in a line, walk forward at the same pace and prod the ground with a stick. You’re looking for softness, signs of recently disturbed earth. This is totally different from that. I’m not even sure of the best approach. It’s going to be hard to look beneath every leaf for small, random bones, so I’m liking Dr. Jackson’s advice: Let’s look for animal activity. Knock against some hollow trees, investigate fallen logs. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She pauses. “This is where we leave the trail. It’s important that we stay together. Keith, time for your magic compass app. We don’t want to become the next thing the search party has to find.”
Keith pulls out his phone. We’re all sweating. It’s cooler in the shade of the woods, but I now eye those same shadows skeptically. The trail had been easy to follow. Wide, nicely carpeted with fall leaves. Now we face clumps of giant mountain laurel clogging up the sides. There are gaps here and there.
D.D. picks one. Keith and I muscle our way through behind her.
On the other side, the woods are more open than I’d imagined. The trees spread out, the ground cover a mix of leaves, fallen debris, rocks, and scraggly bushes that don’t get much sunlight.
The earth smells loamy. It tugs at me. Memories of my mother’s farm, of a childhood spent running around forests not so dissimilar to this one. I always felt most at home in the wild. It’s been a long time now, though, since I left for the streets of Boston.
“Um, we should probably pick a line and walk it,” Keith suggests. “I say we head due west, straight across our grid. When we reach the coordinates on the other side, we’ll shift north, then head back due east. Like vacuuming a carpet.”
“Works for me,” D.D. says. “Remember, Team Roomba: stay together.”
We all start walking. I find myself trying to look up, down, and around all at once, which leads me to seeing nothing at all. I try to re-focus myself. First, eye level—looking for signs of nests, animal activities—then looking high.
