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At the staging area, the medic flight helicopter waits with Miranda and Darcy, its blades cutting the cold air and sending it in every direction. A huge part of Silas longs to leap into the bay with Spencer and join him and his mother on his thirty-minute commute to Washoe Medical Center in Reno, but the med flight team assures him Spencer is stable, or will be, at least, once secured in the warm transport cabin, and Silas’s brain is still screamingCameron,tearing a jagged line through his conscience, rending him in two. They tell him it’s his choice, but when the time comes to step onto the runner to enter the cockpit, he’s still immobile.
“Stay,” Miranda shouts from the helo, “I got Spence,” and he nods gratefully as the rotors send a gust of air in his direction. With their tag-teaming strategy restored, he won’t have to leave their younger son in this wilderness alone.
He feels Santos’s hand on his shoulder and turns. “The moment he’s awake and alert, he’s only a thirty-minute flight away.”
Silas nods. He knows that right now, Spencer’s finally finding some comfort. In the meantime that breath of a word—Cam—continues to echo in Silas’s mind, fueling him forward.
“They must have been together,” he tells Santos. He grips the man’s shirt. “We have to continue looking right by that pond.”
Santos calmly peels Silas’s fingers from his sleeve. “The search area will be narrowed,” he agrees, explaining that ground teams have already been dispatched back to the ridgeline and Long Lake as well as the pond. “The best thing you can do right now is trust us.”
So when the dust clears from the rotors of the large helo, Silas allows himself to be led back to the com van. Once inside he sits heavily, eyeing the base station radio as if he can will it to crackle to life, bringing him news of Cameron.
What he hears instead is almost as welcome: the now familiar whir of helicopter blades again threading the air.Helo One is back.
“Cameron?” he asks immediately, looking swiftly to Susan Darcy, standing near the door, holding her own radio in front of her face. That lump in his throat has returned. It may be irrational to hope for such immediate resolution, but he doesn’t care.
She shakes her head. “The pilot needs to refuel,” she explains, not unkindly. “The spotter needs to be switched out.”
Spotter. Meg.No,Silas thinks stubbornly. He doesn’t want a new spotter. Meg can pick Cameron straight out of the sky, just as she did Spencer. Not anyone else but Meg.
A minute later, however, the com-van door opens, and he’s forced to take this back. Meg stands before him looking exhausted to her core, from the circles under her eyes to her windblown hair, disheveled from the helo. Still, she smiles at him—tentatively at first—and then the jubilation of finding Spencer returns on a tide. Reaching for her hand seems like the most natural thing in the world. He squeezes it in gratitude, and when her grip tightens around his fingers, he’s filled with the simple comfort of gaining an ally.
24
SILAS
August 28, 2003
8:45 p.m.
Marble Lake Wilderness
The scream had come from somewhere along the ridge. Silas scrambled up the slope, circumventing pine trees and crashing through sagebrush and manzanita. Twice on his ascent the zipper of his hoodie became ensnared on exposed branches, choking him at the neck and upsetting his footing.
“Jessica!” he yelled at intervals.“Jess?”
Somewhere above him Danny conducted his own search, and below him Meg traversed cross-country after splitting off from him to follow a natural vein of granite on a diagonal down the mountain.
“Jess!” she, too, shouted. “Jess-i-ca!”
For a brief second, Silas’s mind snagged on the sound of her voice, and his focus splintered.
“Hey!” she called. “Any sign of her?”
The question drew Silas’s attention back to where it belonged. “No sign!” He squared his shoulders and forged onward. He couldn’t allow himself to think about him and Meg. Not now. “You?” he called back.
“Nothing!”
By the time Silas reached the trail, any remaining words had been squeezed from his lungs; he bent at the waist, hands on his knees, gasping for breath, fervently hoping he wouldn’t be sick. He pictured Jessica, somewhere out here, maybe also panting this hard, maybe still running.
From him.
He scrubbed at his eyes with his fists, wiping away sweat and tears. Why had she worn such flimsy sandals tonight? Why that inadequate crop top? Just so she could show off the necklace she was so proud of? Silas remembered the hurt on her face as she’d worried the pendant between her fingers and had to fight the urge not to sob.
Danny called out to him from above, something about heading downhill, but Silas could only gasp, “Keep looking,” before taking off anew, following the trail as it made its countless familiar switchbacks toward Marble Lake Lodge. He had to strain to see in the gathering darkness, his feet tripping over rocks and roots. Had Jessica tripped, in those sandals? All he could do was continue to yell, Meg’s and Danny’s muffled echoes bouncing off the walls of the mountains.
He reached the lodge in record time, but Jessica wasn’t waiting. Not by the ring of guest cabins. Not on the lighted porch of the cavernous recreation building. She wasn’t at Silas’s Jeep, either. He hadn’t realized how much he’d hoped to see her there, arms crossed, pissed off beyond belief, until he saw it sitting there, as abandoned as when they’d left it as they’d all set out, just what? Two hours ago? Maybe an hour and a half?
