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Meg bites her tongue until she feels a sharp stab of pain.Silas has nothing to do with this. He couldn’t possibly.She fights back a feeling of nausea, because no matter how comfortable she’s gotten with Walters, working for him for years, she’ll never forget the feeling of being on the wrong side of his interrogations, his piercing blue eyes relentless as he asked her the same two questions in a dozen different ways.When was the last moment you saw her?Who else was there?She wouldn’t wish that on anybody, especially not Silas. Not again. “What exactly are you saying right now, Danny?”
“Only that ’03 is the only other year we’ve had a blemish on the one-hundred-percent find record,” Danny shoots back.
“Ablemish? Danny!”
“All the years since, we’ve proven—you and me—ourrecord is clean.”
“Which leaves Silas to blame?”
Danny hesitates, long enough for Meg to hear her heart pounding with indignation in her chest. “You said it, not me,” he mutters.
Meg stares at him. He can’tmerithis way out of this, no matter how many volunteer hours he banks. No matter how many honor badges he earns. Neither of them can. She’s about to say as much, but he’s not done.
“Jessica Howard’s case has remained unsolved forfifteen years, Meg, and Silas Matheson has never once looked back.”
Because he can’t,she wants to yell. But she swallows hard instead. That’s the problem with harboring secrets. They don’t make for very compelling arguments.
At a loss, Meg stares at the tree line, watching the reflective striping on Max’s jacket bob between the branches toward them, watching McCrady crest the far slope. Is it her imagination, or is he looking back at her through the lingering fog with more wariness than warmth? What if Danny is right? What if, in light of this new search, what the old-timers have always seen as the catalyst for Meg’s and Danny’s tirelessdedication now looks like guilt? As wrong as it is, Danny’s determination to separate himself from everything Howard-search-related makes tragic sense.
“Meanwhile,” Danny continues, “you and I have to live with what happened, every damned day. At every meeting, when a case involving a teen girl is reviewed, or worse, when the Howard search itself comes up ...” His voice lowers. “It makes me feel fucking helpless. Tell me it’s not the same for you.”
It’s not the same for me.Silas may have fled, but Meg’s life with Danny is her own form of self-preservation. Year after year, search after search, she’s buried herself deeper into this life she chose, or that perhaps chose her, that day she interviewed at the department. She’s given up too much to cut bait now.
“We can only do what we can,” she manages. “Each of us.”
Even Teresa Howard said as much at the ten-year anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance. “The sheriff’s department has gone above and beyond for my family,” she conceded. Then she looked toward Meg and Danny, in the front row of the gathering. “Her friends have never wavered in their dedication.”
Neither one of them was able to hold her gaze. The all-too-familiar guilt snaked through Meg, a thread of misery that wound through Danny, too, cinching them both tight. And he’s right: Silas wasn’t there that day to hear it. To have that blessing laid at his feet. But despite all that’s happened, Danny’s life is still on course. He’s doing exactly what he set out in high school to do: Serve. Protect. Be the hero.
“Dan,” Meg prompts now. “No one is blaming you.”
He doesn’t answer, and she leans back against the nearest ponderosa trunk, pack and all, just for the solidity of a boundary she can trust. The sun is trying to emerge from the fog; every few seconds the stripe on Max’s jacket sleeve bursts before her eyes like a flashbulb as the sun reflects off it through the trees.Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.She closes her eyes to it.
Maybe it’s for the best that they never speak of that summer, she decides. Because with every step forward in SAR, every certificate earned, every recognition of dedication received, Danny’s put distance between himself and that awful August night. He’s polished his track record to a spit shine. Meanwhile, every time Meg studies the topo maps of the Marble Lake wilderness, every time she hikes these trails, her love of these mountains and her memories pull her back, spinning her in yet more circles as she tries to make sense of what she has never been able to solve. What will it take to break free? More than a new position in victim advocacy, she suspects, though that might be a place to start.
“Jessica’s disappearance was the worst week of my life,” she finally adds, because this, at the very least, is completely true. This is one thing they can agree upon. The chaos, the barking of the dogs, the whir of the helicopter blades batting the air ... it all flashes through her mind in a terrible highlight reel.
As an olive branch, it suffices. The memories are mirrored in Danny’s eyes as he reaches out to encircle Meg’s wrist with one thinly gloved hand. “I know,” he says, and it’s all the atonement they have time for before Max stops at their side.
All business, Danny calls their new coordinates in to the com van, and they listen, circled around his radio, as Susan Darcy delivers their next search assignment. Danny inputs these new coordinates for their next waypoint, a high ridge overlooking the aptly named Long Lake, into his GPS, and they spread out once again, preparing for their next sweep.
The terrain becomes milder on the next set of coordinates. It’s still a far cry from flat, but the placement of each footfall no longer requires Meg’s full attention. If she still feels unsteady on her feet, she knows she has the sight of Silas, emerging from the Lemon this morning, to blame. Seeing him again, here, where he’s always seemed to inexplicably justbelong, has left her feeling as exposed as the blanket of pine needlesbeneath her boots. Because whatever she ultimately decides to do with her life, she belongs here, too. With every search, every mission, she has made it so.
They continue to call for the Matheson boys as they hike, pausing at intervals to stop and listen, but all Meg hears are her search team members’ voices ringing out against the pines and the low whistle of the wind in the branches. She keeps a careful eye on her position between Danny and Max, the flash of their jackets popping out against the green of the forest here, then there, and she tries not to think. For now, she tries not to be anything more than Meg Tanner, search volunteer and sheriff’s department administrator, giving up her free days to do what she feels called to do.
And who, exactly, is Silas now? Who did he become after leaving Marble Lake? Everyone changes. Even Danny, she decides, darting a glance his way as he begins his ascent up the final slope toward Long Lake. He’s still ever the do-gooder, of course, but the bitterness she heard in his words earlier as he condemned Silas continues to nag at her. Is it really just Silas’s abandonment of them that has Danny still so angry? And has she failed to notice this thanks to her participation in his long-standing silence on the matter?
Silas’s return has the effect of hydraulic pressure wearing down rock ... his presence, or maybe just Meg’s presence back at the lodge, is stirring up the many layers of silt she and Danny have carefully built up in order to stay in Feather River together, to share a life together. A moratorium on discussing Jessica Howard. An unspoken agreement to forget that their duo was once a trio. One glimpse of Silas, and suddenly everything is murky. Suppressing 2003 and all it entailed is no longer an option, and Meg’s not sure if she’s relieved or terrified. Either way, she should have seen it coming: Silas has always managed to wash all but what is essential away from a person, laying bare what’s underneath.
12
SILAS
Eight months prior to Howard search
December 2002
Marble Lake Lodge
