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“Seems Siri forgot to catch a ride with us from Portland,” Silas says. “No cell service up here, kiddos. And no Pizza Hut.”
“No Pizza Hut?” Cameron echoes, his voice incredulous.
“Not within seventy miles or so.” The closest is probably in Reno, or, in the other direction, Sacramento. He gauges his boys’ reactions to this stark reminder of the distance they’ve put between themselves and the suburban existence they’ve always known. Will there be tears of protest? Fear or uncertainty? Cries for their mother, past co-procurer of pizza delivery? He’s not a man who’s used to second-guessing himself, and he doesn’t enjoy the feeling now, as a fresh wave of doubt, laced with a healthy dose of guilt, washes over him. Has he just made everything harder on them all instead of easier? But his boys surprise him.
“Cool,” Spencer decides after a moment of consideration. “We’ll be like Bear Grylls, hunting and trapping stuff.”
Silas smiles, giving himself a mental pass for all those hours of Discovery Channel he allowed when he’d still been wrapping up his cases in Portland. But then he sobers, because while Cameron nods along, following his big brother’s lead, his face is clouded with a vague confusion that’s become all too familiar of late.He’s only five,Silas chastises himself. What sense could Cameron possibly make of the adult decisions that have brought him here? Miranda testing the limits of their co-parenting arrangement to pursue her dreams. Silas deciding to return to Marble Lake to face his demons. He pulls Cameron in close, bending down to breathe in the scent of him as he tucks his head into Silas’s side.
“How about breakfast for dinner?” he suggests, which instantly earns him the popular vote.
“Yeah!” Spencer agrees as Cameron looks up, a spark of remembered joy in his hazel eyes. Breakfast for dinner has always been Silas’s weeknight go-to.
They find left-behind pancake mix in the pantry, along with canned peaches and applesauce. They have so much fun cooking on the massive Viking stove, Silas forgives himself for allowing cowardice to prevent him from making a grocery run. After dinner, he lets the boys play in the rec building, where they unearth dusty Monopoly boards and poker sets. Cameron finds a giant puzzle, and Spencer digs ping-pong paddles out of a cupboard.
“We need to get a new table, though,” he decides, eyeing the weathered and warped one propped against one wall. Silas used to play on that one, whooping Danny’s ass game after game. He smiles before that damned memory trail leads him further down the same path again, to Jessica and all that had ensued, and he frowns.
It takes entirely too long to make the beds and find the toothbrushes, and by the time the boys are settled in their new room—once Silas’s room—at the top of the lodge stairs, the day has fully caught upwith Silas. He settles into one of the Adirondack chairs on the lodge porch and peers out into the night.
He’d forgotten how dark it gets up here, in the Sierra. At least until he looks up, and then it’s like the heavens have iced over, each blazing white star blending into the next. He just stares for a while, letting all that whiteness bleach his brain.
The silence of the mountains settles in around him, packed in like cotton, and for just a few minutes he doesn’t have to question his decision to uproot his boys. He can forget that he is now solely responsible for this lodge, aka his new livelihood, and that it will be up to him entirely to ensure his kids are happy, healthy, and whole.
He doesn’t enjoy the peace for long. He remembers too late that this type of stillness has always left him with too much blank space inside his head, an empty slate like a rolling expanse of virgin snow, undisturbed and untouched. Tonight, he finds it leaves him vaguely restless, fretful about digging too deep and overturning too much.
2
SILAS
Fifteen years previous
August 30, 2003
Marble Lake Lodge
Search teams. Sheriff’s-department officials. Sirens. And sitting. So much sitting. Silas wasn’t sure what he’d expected a search-and-rescue operation to feel like, but it sure as hell hadn’t included this much time stuck in this chair, waiting in the cloying heat of the lodge while a blur of humanity spun around his periphery. With the focus so squarely on him and his friends, he would have thought they’d be at the center of things, able todomore. Instead, here in the eye of the storm, the air felt heavy and silent and thick. Instead of adrenaline, there was only dread.
A full call-out, that was what they called it. Dozens of vehicles. Hundreds, probably, of volunteers, from who knew how many counties, all combing the forest for Jessica. Dogs. Dive teams, even, in sheriff’s-department boats they launched from trailers into Marble Lake. What could those divers possibly see, Silas kept asking himself, in that murky water? Duckweed and algae, maybe. Tree roots long submerged,slowly decaying in their aquatic resting place. Surely not Jessica. It made no sense for her to have ended up there. But then, where?
It was what the guy from the sheriff’s department, Lieutenant Halloway, had been asking Silas, Meg, and Danny from the moment they’d reported Jessica missing, back on Day 1. Like if he just asked enough, he’d get a different answer thanWe don’t know.But nothing in this narrative had changed since that very first night of the search, when Uncle Les had first put out the folding chairs in the lodge great room, and they’d all sat there, the three of them, sweaty and spent from looking for Jessica, hungry but not wanting to eat the sandwiches Aunt Mary made, not even tired, though they should have been. Sometime around midnight, their little sharing circle had widened to include Meg’s mother and Danny’s father. Then, just before dawn, Jessica’s mom had appeared in the doorway of the lodge, accompanied by a sheriff.Thesheriff, Halloway told them, of the whole county.
“Greg Walters,” this man had said, “at your service.”
Silas’s first impression: he didn’t look anything like the grizzled sheriffs in the old Westerns Danny liked to watch on TNT, the only free movie channel he got. Thin and fit, with a neat mustache, this guy looked more like a city cop.
He’d recognized Teresa Howard only vaguely ... earlier that year, hadn’t she chaperoned a school trip to a production ofHamlet? To his surprise, however, Mrs.Howard had made her way across the room directly to Meg. For one brief, horrific second, Silas had thought she meant to hit her. He’d actually braced for it, on Meg’s behalf. But instead, Mrs.Howard had enveloped her tightly.
“Honey, honey,” she’d cried, “whathappened?”
And Meg had only been able to shake her head, crying into this woman’s coat sleeve.
It didn’t stop anyone from imploring them to remember. To retrace their steps. Like Silas or Meg or Danny might magically remember where they’d left Jessica up in these mountains, like when Uncle Leslooked all over the lodge to find his truck keys. But unlike keys, Silas wanted to shout, people didn’t just stay where you misplaced them, waiting for you to discover the glint of them again, shining up at you from the dirt. People did unpredictable things. Brave things and stupid things and, sometimes, things they regretted. Silas should know.
The only place to escape Sheriff Walters’s relentless questioning was upstairs, by the window ledge on the second-floor landing of the rec building. Every few hours, when Uncle Les and Aunt Mary insisted the kids took breaks from their vigil, Silas retreated there, where he knew he could catch a breeze even on the hottest of summer afternoons; all August he’d taken his shirt off to catch a tan as he’d cleared bugs and dirt from the screens, working alongside Uncle Les. Now, on Day 4, he straddled the ledge, staring out at the woods and watching a knot of mosquitoes the size of his fist buzz in a spiral just out of reach. Trying not to think.
He didn’t hear Danny climb the stairs. When he looked over, he was just suddenly there, as Danny had a habit of being, and Silas had to grip the sill with his thighs to avoid tumbling out in surprise.
“It’s going to get called off,” Danny said, his voice hollow. “The search.”
