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The reporters show less restraint as they pepper Rick with questions that he ignores, slinging an arm over Meg’s shoulder to guide her into a crouch as they give the rotors a respectful berth. Once in the cockpit, she fits the extra helmet over her head and checks the radio frequency. Too much chatter on the same channel clogs the airwaves and makes ground communication difficult. She continues her safety routine by rote, checking her door lock, locating her emergency kit, half her attention still on the thought of Silas, alone on the ground. Cut off at the knees.
Rick glances over, eyes her five-point harness, and makes a quick adjustment; somehow, she forgot the last S-clip. “You okay?” he says, his voice gravelly through his mic.
She gives him a thumbs-up, hoping the low light obscures the heat that she feels in her cheeks. That pull toward Silas feels entirely too familiar, but she can’t let it divide her attention now. As a father, he wouldn’t thank her for it. “All good.”
He nods curtly and fastens his own harness before signaling to the ground-crew chief—in this case, Santos himself—that he’s ready for liftoff. They take off into the wind—the steady breeze that seems to be a permanent characteristic of Marble Lake Lodge now a welcomeasset—the nose of the helo dipping slightly as they head up and out at an angle of nearly exactly 10 degrees. They follow the ribbon of the dirt road below them for approximately twenty yards before rising significantly.
They clear the tips of the trees and the silver rooftops of the lodge as Meg waits for the buoying rush of adrenaline that accompanies takeoff. Sure enough, it lifts her spirits as her body breaks away from the oppressive pull of gravity, bubbling up through her veins with the heady effect of champagne. Finally ... she feels useful for the first time in hours.
The R22 careens south, rising several feet a second until it hovers just under the canopy of the gray cloud bank. Within seconds Meg spots the flat blue reflection of Marble Lake. She withdraws her map and finds the path they’re navigating upon its surface, her gaze alternating from the paper to the ground as they fly. Rookie spotters make the mistake of focusing all their attention on the terrain, but there’s nothing worse than finding a subject—or even a pertinent object—only to have no idea where the find is located in relation to the search grid.
The R22 can fly as high as fourteen thousand feet, but they’re nowhere near that elevation. The cloud cover is so low they’re just clearing the highest treetops, rising only over ridges as necessary while hugging the underside of the flat expanse of gray sky. It makes seeing long distances impossible, but if Rick flies any higher, they risk losing visibility altogether. They start by heading west toward Marble Peak, and Meg reaches out to tap Rick’s shoulder.
“I thought Walters put in an order for the Lakes Loop area,” she says into the headset, but Rick waves a hand at the flight sheet in his lap, as if to indicate it should be disregarded.
“Cairns caught me right before I geared up ... Santos issued a change back to Marble Peak, apparently.”
Meg grinds her teeth in frustration. Danny can dig his heels in when he thinks he’s right, and hell, he usually is, but this kind of casual disregard for protocol turns small-town search units into jokes. Dannycan revisit his and Silas’s old teenage pissing matches if he wants, but not on her watch. “Unless it came directly from Walters—”
Rick cuts her off. “We can cover both.”
But not thoroughly. Meg wedges herself back into her flight seat, trying in vain to ground herself while they rise upward with the topography. Bureaucracy—and a healthy dose of undermining—may be getting under her skin today, but she still has a job to do. She strains her eyes as they fly toward the peak. Tendrils of precipitation have begun to form; so far, it’s only a mist, but it still obscures her vision. With a mutter of frustration, she gets out her binocs and focuses them on the staircase heading up to the tower, then on the tower rail and peak itself. Nothing. Just like they thought.
In the viewfinder of the binocs she works from the top down, following the trail from the tower into the forest below, looking for anything out of place. Any color that does not fold seamlessly into the environment—a tiny trace of red, a swatch of orange or pink through the needles of the trees, even the flash of an aluminum can discarded along the trail—should pop out at her like a firework display.
Whenever she spots for Rick in this particular wilderness grid, she finds herself unconsciously scanning the terrain for two victims ... whoever is lost at the moment, and Jessica. Always Jessica. She was wearing pink that day in ’03, and sometimes, when Meg is especially tired, she can’t seem tounsee the color everywhere. No matter how hard she tries, her eyes play tricks on her, showing her pink Jessica splotches everywhere. And nowhere.
Today, however, she’s hyperfocused, even through stinging eyes. Still, nothing. No movement, not even the shadow of the helo upon the earth.
As Rick turns east, she bends nearly perpendicular in her seat to look down at the ground from the rounded side window, the map still spread on her lap. The sound of air-traffic chatter and the engine—distant due to her heavy headphones—resonates in her mind, but it’s onlybackground noise, filtered through her helmet as though through a strainer ... She only retains the small snippets that apply to her.
They finally return to the lower elevation of the lakes basin, where she makes out the low curve of the Lakes Loop trail and the far southern tip of Long Lake. Flying lower, she sets her binocs aside in favor of using the naked eye. This terrain, with this bird’s-eye view, is painfully familiar, but memories are easier to stomach from up here, from the sky, where the branches can’t ensnare her and the granite embedded in the earth can’t trip her up. She studies miles upon miles of green trees and gray granite, randomly interspersed by the dark brown of dense earth.
But just like by Marble Peak, she sees nothing.
The sky is now so flat the entire ground is cast in shadow. Everything is in such low light, Meg is forced to strain her eyes, and even then, anything below the treetops is obscured. The stopwatch on Rick’s control panel tells them they’ve been airborne for forty-five minutes, and Meg knows they’ll have to touch down before much longer. While Rick freely donates his time and talents just like the rest of the members of the SAR unit, he cannot afford to extend his volunteerism to include unlimited jet fuel.
Still, neither of them wants to be the first to call it off. They’re directly above Long Lake now, reminding her again of Danny’s reluctance to extend their search to its far shore. So much memory lies in wait there, she understands this, but then she frowns. What’s Long Lake to Danny, especially in the face of two missing kids? She points Rick toward the far shore, determined now to skim the circumference to search the uneven terrain her team wasn’t able to cover on foot earlier this morning. It’s still nagging at her, all of it: the boys’ ability to hike and their penchant to climb, Danny’s caution bordering on fear, Meg’s tug toward Silas like a gravitational pull. Rick dips lower, hugging the lakeside, and while she can see better here, there’s simply nothingtosee. They fly even lower, so low Meg can make out the individual whitecaps on the lake’s surface where the helo rotors are disturbing its smooth, flatplane. Farther on, she can see the ripples of water lapping the pebbled shore, can spot the tangled undergrowth where it hampered their hiking efforts earlier in the day. Even the lowest branches of the ponderosas clinging to the ridge near the access trail are discernible, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, out of place to her eye. She’s looking at acres upon acres of unspoiled wilderness, unmarred by even so much as a discarded candy-bar wrapper.
She spies the thick curtain of rain to the east several minutes before it’s upon them. She gestures in its direction, but Rick only nods, apparently having already spotted it. They both ignore the first raindrops to hit the curved glass plane of the cockpit. It’s intermittent—a sprinkle, really—one tiny burst hitting the glass of the cockpit, a pause, and then another, each one accentuating its predecessor like a punctuation mark. Rick flies on, and Meg continues to study the ground, but the air is rapidly becoming heavier and hazier. After a few more minutes she’s forced to admit her view is as cloaked as if she were peering down through a veil. The branches of the trees are no longer standing out in stark contrast to the sky but rather shimmering in a gossamer film.
When Rick finally radios the ground team to prepare for landing, Meg cannot argue, but even after the skids touch the wet earth, she remains for a moment in her seat, listening to the sound of the rotors powering down. They seem to mimic her disappointment, slowing in time with her heartbeat, which now feels dull in her chest. She lets herself admit now how badly she wanted to be the one to bring Silas good news. He trusted her to take his place in the center of the action, and she’s let him down.
She removes her helmet and unbuckles her harness slowly, in no rush to exit and confront the disappointed faces of the searchers, Silas no doubt front and center among them. In no hurry to face Danny, either, with this friction between them. When she eventually deplanes, she jogs straight from the LZ to the com van for her debriefing, hoping fervently that neither is present.
19
SILAS
Matheson search
November 20, 2018
4:45 p.m.
Marble Lake Staging Area
Silas strains to see Meg’s expression as she exits the helicopter, hoping to glimpse ... what? Success? Surely he would have heard already if she spotted Spencer or Cameron from her bird’s-eye view. Maybe he’s just looking for some standard optimism, then. A dash of hope. A sprinkling of encouragement, like he saw in her expression earlier as she climbed into the R22.
