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Silas considers this offer for less than a second. “Not without me.”
He moves as though he plans to push past Darcy to the Lemon but makes it only a few steps before stopping abruptly. Meg can see what’s given him pause: Sheriff Walters himself blocks the way, his girth, more ample than when they last faced off, far more formidable than Darcy’s.
Silas curses under his breath, then surrenders. Meg guesses he meant to turn and retreat, to fall to pieces somewhere away from the crowd, but instead, when he pivots, the two of them find themselves again face-to-face. In the circle of searchers she and Silas are toe to toe, locked in a miserable dual stare.
This, too, feels painfully familiar, but before Meg can say or do anything, Walters is between them. With one large palm on Silas’s shoulder, he steers him away. The last Meg sees of him is the stiff, tense jut of his shoulder disappearing back to the sidelines.
“Show’s over,” Darcy bellows, and Meg glances back around to realize all eyes are on her. Danny, especially, is glaring at her, as if to say,See? I told you no one’s forgotten.She can read between the lines, too:Least of all you.
Meg looks away, tensing at the blast of Darcy’s search whistle as she picks up right where she left off, now dividing the most agile ground pounders into teams to navigate the more challenging terrain. “Danny Cairns, team leader, Team Five,” she shouts, to no one’s surprise. She yells off the team members from her notes on her clipboard. “Meg, you join him. Also, Phillip McCrady and ... let’s have Max Reece. You’re with Cairns.”
Max is a newbie, and with a sense of relief Meg hands him his copy of the USGS topographical map they’ll all be referencing. At least one person in their small party won’t be making comparisons to the 2003 search for Jessica. God, she sounds like Danny. She forces herself to focus, scanning her own copy of the familiar terrain. The first thing she notes: the highlighted line running in an oblong arc around the outside of the Loop trail, circling out several miles past the highway to the west and into Forest Service lands to the south and east. The search radius.
Danny explains it to Max. “Darcy used the established foot sizes of the boys, combined with any information Si—the father—might have provided about the mindset of the children. You know, whether their personalities were more likely to prompt them to hide or to run, for instance.”
“From that info,” McCrady chimes in, “she created a formula to determine how far they’re likely to have traveled in the approximate ten hours they’ve been missing.”
“Couldn’t be too far, though, in this cold. Right?”
McCrady shoots Max a stern look while Danny says more gently, “It’s important not to think like that.”
Max nods, while Meg swallows the hard lump that’s risen in her throat. She repeats Danny’s advice in her head.Don’t think like that.
Besides, they’ve only scratched the surface of the science behind search-radius determination. They can expect this perimeter to be altered two or three times over the next hours: drawn inward if, for instance, evidence of an injury to one of the boys is found—or, yes,God forbid, the temps drop even further. Inversely, it will be expanded as time lags on. New information trickles constantly into the com van during the course of a search—a scrap of clothing is found, a new footprint is spotted—sending the incident commander back to the drawing board.
“So don’t get too comfortable with this,” Danny says to Max, tapping the map with one gloved hand. “No doubt Darcy will be pinpointing the location of new evidence and recalculating this whole thing soon.”
“If we do our jobs right,” McCrady adds, and Danny nods in agreement.
The radius is a fairly ambitious one today; it must include at least thirty square miles. Clearly Darcy has no intention of underestimating the Matheson boys, which encourages Meg somewhat. If they’re anything like their father, they’ll be kids of action.
When the ground pounders finally move out, Team Five hikes down the dirt drive in the direction of the lodge to await their exact assignment. The road is wide enough to walk four abreast for now, but they walk silently, and Meg concentrates on the welcome sensation of feeling returning to her icy toes.
Which brings her mind right back around to the wintery conditions. Movement helps ward off frostbite, but schoolkids in Feather River are taught to stay put if lost in the woods ... had Spencer and Cameron Matheson gotten this lesson in Portland? Or from their father? And would that information save them or cripple them?
Her mind swings back to the haunted look on Silas’s face back by the com van. Ifshe’sthinking these thoughts, so is he. Ifshe’sworrying about the boys, he must be fighting back pure panic. The Silas Meg once knew was impulsive and daring and untethered. Les joked that ice water ran through his veins. Has he instilled these traits in his kids, or has time and maturity and fatherhood brought restraint? Knowing theanswer could help determine search strategy, which, as of now, remains by the book.
“We’re starting with a hasty search,” Danny reminds Max, explaining that searchers will be sent out on trails to key locations—the area directly around the lakes, the trail junctions, and the campgrounds. “There’s still too much ground to cover for a tight, inch-by-inch grid pattern,” he adds, anticipating Max’s next question.
Meg knows other teams have simultaneously been sent out in trucks—when she first heard them referred to as “hasty rigs” she imagined a type of tie-down device—to travel the nearby roads that weave in and out of the campgrounds, lights and sirens running.
“Is all that really necessary, all at once?” Max asks, his breath vaporizing in the cold.
“Hell, yeah,” McCrady offers. “Kids are unpredictable—scratch that,anyoneis unpredictable in situations like this. The boys might have decided to seek out familiar landmarks, or maybe they just headed downhill, traversing the inclines in the dark. Maybe they’re in full-blown panic, and then who knows where they’ll head? Course, we hope they’re just hunkered down nearby. Remember that autistic kid a few years back, guys?”
Meg nods. They found him right on the roadside, hiding from the search teams looking for him, disoriented but otherwise unharmed.
After a few minutes, they reach the periphery of the lodge property and stop to do a radio check. While Danny focuses all his attention on his radio dial, Meg finally lets her gaze sweep fully over the familiar buildings with their cedar siding and steeply sloped rooflines, refusing to let static from Danny’s receiver crowd out room for memory. A deep ache like a long-buried bruise tightens her chest as she takes it all in, and she wonders if it has been a mistake, avoiding these buildings and grounds since the Howard search. Maybe with practice she would be better able to cauterize the flow of memory this place induces. Or hasDanny had the right idea, bypassing even the once familiar trails of the Marble Lake wilderness?
“It’s morbid,” he said, the fragility of his tone urging Meg to drop it, the one time she suggested they return to hike the Lakes Loop trail together, on the first anniversary of Jessica’s disappearance.
She supposed it was too raw. Too fresh. And had Silas been there to chime in, he would have agreed.We have our own reasons to steer clear,he would have reminded her.We have our own tracks to cover.
In the years since, however, Danny’s position on the matter has remained as unchanging as the granite peaks overshadowing them now. Still, she knows him well enough to know he’ll follow orders. As he awaits Darcy’s command, she can imagine exactly what he’s thinking: they’ve been assigned to start here, at the base of the ridge, so start here they will, whether seeing Marble Lake Lodge sends them both into a tailspin of melancholy and grief or not.
“Team Five, come in.”
Darcy’s voice sounds gravelly on Danny’s walkie, which he brings to his lips to answer. “Go ahead, Base.”
