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Santos lifts one hand to quiet the crowd. “As of now, we are still operating as a rescue mission, folks! And even if—and it’s only anifat this point—you’re told we’re in recovery mode, a quick find is as essential as ever.”
Meg squeezes Max’s arm in solidarity, because no one knows this better than her.Fifteen years!her brain screams. With no answers, no body, no recovery. How does a person justdisappear?
She refocuses her attention on Santos. If she considers this a lost cause, if she resigns herself to looking for a body instead of a child—instead of two children—she may as well go home right now. Far better to search as if the clock is not ticking. It’s the only way to keep putting one foot in front of the other when the hours drag into days.
“Listen,” she tells Max, “no one’s rolled the evidence tape out yet. So chin up, all right?”
“You mean like the tape at the lodge?”
“That’s just protocol,” she says swiftly, even as the thought of it makes her granola bar turn to sawdust in her mouth.
“Well, I come out here to search forpeople, not evidence or whatever,” Max grumbles.
“We all do. But while we do our job, we have to help the sheriff’s department do theirs.” Sometimes searches turned into investigations. And investigations turned into unsolved cases.
Her mind flashes to Teresa Howard, still advocating for her daughter after all these years, and she trashes what’s left of her granola bar, her appetite lost. With effort she refocuses her attention on Santos, who has returned to the subject of evidence bags.
“When we find things, we don’t touch them, people. We don’t move them. We call any object into Command. I don’t care if it’s arusted soda can or a cigarette butt or a damned juice box ... we plot it on GPS. When a representative of the department arrives, they’ll bag it.”
Santos begins assigning everyone their next tasks, and Max looks relieved to be propelled toward the radio bank to retrieve his walkie, leaving Meg to fight her losing battle against dejection alone. She’s just looking around to see if Danny has surfaced when she hears, “Tanner! You’re with me again.”
She’s never been so glad to see Rick Waggins back in the staging area. To burn jet fuel two days running is rare. Despite Santos’s less than optimistic “pep talk,” Walters is sparing no expense for the Matheson boys. Suddenly she feels buoyant enough to take wing right here and now.
They don’t waste any time firing up the Robinson R22, another relief. Waggins must have been up even earlier than her, making all the necessary calculations for the day’s flight pattern. Danny finally materializes as she prepares to reboard for their Day 2 sweep of the mountains, offering to get her pack for her as she awaits her turn to climb in.
“Where have you been?” she asks as he hands her her gear.
Danny doesn’t answer right away. “Walters had a few questions this morning.”
“Of you?”
He clears his throat roughly and doesn’t look her in the eye. “Routine, I’m sure. He says he chatted with you, too.”
“We ran into one another by the lodge yesterday,” she says, “just by happenstance.” Though as she says this, she wonders how much of a coincidence that actually was. She looks hard at Danny, who is still stubbornly training his gaze just shy of eye contact. Should they compare notes? Do they need to debrief?
No; she and Danny don’t have time for a conversation, anyway. The cloud cover this morning is low and the wind is insistent, but it’s not yet raining, and Rick wants to get in the air quickly. She finally feelsDanny’s eyes on her as she pulls her SAR hat from her head and stuffs it into his hands before ducking under the rotors to her place in the tiny cockpit beside Rick. The sun won’t be an issue today.
“Hold up,” Danny objects, his hand on her shoulder. When she turns, he bends toward her, placing a hasty kiss to the exposed skin of the side of her neck. “When you get back,” he insists, speaking into the curve of her ear, “please get some proper rest before continuing on.”
It’s only after she’s airborne, Danny an ever-shrinking form standing in the rotors’ turbulent wake, the wind causing her cap to dance violently in his fist, that she realizes his words to her were every bit as bleak as Santos’s. If he thinks rest is on the agenda, he doesn’t expect her to set back down with anything to report other than shadowed ponderosa and craggy granite.
Rick navigates the helo back to the same area they were forced to abandon the night before, starting at Long Lake, at her insistence. As he flies over the flat expanse of the lake, Meg peers down at the endless ripples upon the water. The wind blows just enough to produce tiny whitecaps upon the surface, and the foam, combined with the reflected light of the sun bouncing off the metallic cloud banks, turns the color of the lake to stony gray. Its ominous appearance serves to remind Meg that within a day—maybe even within hours—the county’s Emergency Service Aquatic Team, or ESAT, will likely be joining the fray, trolling the bottom in wide sweeps.
She thinks again of Silas back at base having to see these teams preparing, knowing the implications, and her stomach clenches. Then she remembers he has Miranda with him now, just as the helo takes a dip through a particularly nasty air pocket, and she nearly loses her breakfast. She refocuses on what she can control, forcing her eyes open just a bit wider and concentrating even harder on the frustratinglycamouflaged terrain below her. She wants to beat ESAT to it. She wants what she knowstheywant ... for their job to become obsolete.
She spots the first hint of an unnatural object amid the forest approximately thirty seconds after clearing the far side of the lake. The pop of dark blue on the uphill slope isn’t anything dramatic. She might have even imagined this slightest shift in the pattern playing out before her eyes, a subtle alteration to the green trees and brown dirt, green trees and gray granite. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up but reaches out to tap Rick on the shoulder anyway. Pressing down the talk button of their shared intercom, she asks him to retrace his last sweep, starting back at the eastern edge of the lake.
This time, as he repeats his air pattern, Meg cranes her neck, bending her body nearly horizontal in her attempt to look straight down. The side of one skid blocks her vision, and she leans still further, the chest harness now digging into her clavicle, but this new position has earned her an unrestricted view of the treetops. Rick slows, dropping to the lowest elevation he dares, and from this height, Meg can even see a few patches of bare ground between the tree trunks. She strains her eyes, willing them to once again pick out the tiny scrap of color she’s now sure she saw.
At first nothing’s out of place: not one branch, not one stone. The forest appears so damnsereneMeg blinks back the quick sting of frustrated tears. She requests yet another sweep, and this time Rick looks dubious as he yields, signaling to Meg that this’ll be the last one.
The last sweep ... the last sweep ...She squints, trying desperately to make the most of it, grasping at any chance to return to base with good news for Silas, with a newly written ending to the awful indeterminateness of fifteen years ago. But now the pressure feels too intense, and she’s consumed with doubt. Danny was right; she should have slept more. Her eyes are watering ... she’s ill-equipped ... someone else should have taken her place ... and still she strains to see, leaning as far as the belt will allow, and then, amazingly—
“There!”she yells into the mic, loud enough that she should have made Rick wince. Instead, he shouts in agreement, and she knows he’s seen it too. She experiences a heady surge of vindication, the kind that fills the bloodstream like an exoneration, and then they’re returning to the site in the tightest circle Rick can manage.
It’s a pair of pants. Blue jeans, to be exact. They lie discarded on the ground, their abandoned presence much more ominous than Long Lake’s volumes of unsearched terrain directly behind the helo’s flight path. Just beyond the pants, Meg can see a very small pond. It sits off trail, which explains how her ground team had missed it, in a tiny clearing like a flat silver dollar. As they hover, the rotors seeming to work double time, she scans it, bracing herself to see what she doesn’t want to see: the black speck of a body upon its surface.
The water, however, appears undisturbed, which only builds the suspense in Meg’s brain. The pants are here, and while they could be anyone’s, they’re not—she already knows they’re not, in the hollow of her gut—and then, just beyond the jeans, she spots a pair of shoes. From this distance she can’t make out the brand—they’re looking for Nikes—but they’re small, and they’re a child’s, and even as she alerts Rick, part of her wishes she were anywhere but in this Godforsaken helicopter.
