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“What’s happening?” he asks immediately.
She shakes her head. “We don’t know for sure yet. Team Eight insists a K9 dog is alerting to something, but they’re waiting on the specialty team.”
“K9? Cadaver or scent?” Danny’s voice still sounds odd. Not like himself.
“Cadaver,” she’s forced to say. She feels something akin to a tide rising, energy pulsing off Danny like the swell of a wave. She glances in the direction of the lodge and the trail. “They’re already in the field.”
He follows her gaze. “Then they’ll know soon.”
Something about the fatalistic acceptance in his tone sends a trill of something—warning, maybe?—down Meg’s spine. In the com van, she almost welcomed the honesty she sensed between them all, but it’s terrifying, too. She and Danny have been pretending for so long. “Listen,” she tells him, “there are a lot of emotions at play right now.” He says nothing, so she forges ahead. “But I think we should agree to put ancient history aside, at least for today.”
“Ancient history?”Danny spins away from her with an almost primal moan as that wave she felt between them breaks. “Him back here ... you two ... it’s like I’m being forced to relive it all over again.”
“Relive what?” Meg presses, even as a sense of foreboding floods her, limb by limb.Say it.Because it’s time.
But he won’t give her this. “‘Nothing,’ I guess!” he says roughly, raking air quotes through the rain. His face is crimson now, spittle flying out of his mouth as he shouts into the storm. “Just like it’s been ‘nothing’ since the start of this god-awful search.” He turns to go but then spins back, his fury not yet spent.
“I saw you at the mine, you know! You and him.”
“What?” The mine? Meg tries to follow the path of Danny’s accusations, but the line of logic runs too jagged.
“That Fourth of July? I blew off the firefighter booth to be a good sport and come join you, and what did I get? I got to overhear a conversation aboutyounot wanting to be with me.”
What had Silas said? What had she said? God, it was so long ago. But her confusion and dismay only seem to incense Danny further, insult piled upon injury.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about! She saw you, too, you know! She told me, and you know what? I didn’t want to believe her, but she was right all along!”
Meg’s eardrums ring with a weird, tinny sound. “Who was, Danny?”
“Forget it.” His voice has gone flat again as quickly as it rose: a sudden, jarring drop.
Meg’s stomach lurches, her gut absorbing something her brain refuses to process. In the rising mist between them, Danny suddenly looks a thousand miles away. The rain is soaking her hair and her face, and she hopes that the sound of it prevents him from hearing the hitch in her voice. “Tell me what you’re talking about.” Because her gut is insisting. She has to know.
But they’re still standing in place, letting the rain run down their search jackets in rivulets when the Lemon door partially opens again and Santos’s face appears around the frame. He squints into the gloom, his expression pinched with stress and fatigue. “You two need to come in.” When Meg hesitates, still staring at Danny, he adds, “Now.”
Inside, Walters has joined Darcy at the radio station. Silas is once again sitting but glances up quickly as they enter. His eyes look almost glassy, like he’s been exposed too long to the elements.
“Silas should wait outside, in the command center,” she says. He needs shelter from the raw dread of this search.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he answers, and she doesn’t bother pushing it. Good news or bad, he’s right where he always is: in the center of the storm.
“The specialty team is mobile,” Walters says. “We’re in direct communication with them.” He fiddles with the volume on the base radio, and as if on cue, it comes to life. “Sacramento County Team Two to Base,” it squawks, pairing a voice to whoever plans to rappel down the ravine. Meg presses back against the wall again, the only space left available.
“Go ahead, Team Two,” Santos responds.
The rappeller begins transmitting. “We’ve reached targeted area,” the voice reports, and then gives his coordinates. “The underbrush is thick; we’re going to grid search the best we can in this rain.”
Grid search?Meg clenches her jaw to keep from protesting. How much longer can they bear to stand by like this, stuck in this endless holding pattern?
They wait as the rain pounds on the metal roof, and Meg forces herself to think of anything but the update that awaits them at the press of a radio button, on the tip of the tongue of some unknown rappelling expert. She watches the clock on the wall and focuses on the accusations Danny has just flung at her, accusations she cannot deny,does not evenwantto deny anymore, as an untried terror churns in her stomach like acid.
“Team Two to Base.”
Oh God.
“Go ahead, Team Two.”
“Base, we have a subject in sight.”
