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She grips Silas’s hand. She can’t not.
“Status, Team Two?”
Silas is drawing air into his lungs in deep gulps, like in an instant, he’s going to be submerged. Meg squeezes his hand harder. If she doesn’t, he’s going to sink like a rock to the bottom of this nightmare, and she cannot allow him to drown.You have Spencer to think of,she wants to tell him fiercely.You cannot go under.
A short pause while the static crackles, and then: “Black.”
Beside her, Silas plummets. His knees give way, and then he’s collapsing like all the oxygen in the world couldn’t save him. Meg tries to brace his fall, but it’s Darcy who catches his forearm, guiding him into a chair. Meg knows it hardly matters to Silas where he lands ... that single word, uttered for the second time in just a few short hours, must be screaming in his ears on repeat.
At the radio, Santos closes his eyes briefly and then reopens them. His voice is laced with genuine sorrow as he transmits back into the receiver. “Can you confirm that the subject is a five-year-old Caucasian male?”
There’s another pause. Meg is pretty sure she’s not breathing, either, but somehow, she’s still here, in this misery. “Negative,” the rappeller responds. He sounds shaken. “I’m sorry ... Sir, I think I jumped the gun.”
What?The question is on every face in the room. “Team Two, please repeat. We may have misheard.”
“Base, the subject is not Cameron Matheson.”
Meg watches Silas spiral downward again, head sinking into his hands, but this time it’s with an abject relief that leaves him shaking withsobs. The rappeller is asked to repeat his transmission for a third time, but Meg has stopped listening. It’s not Cameron, it’s not Cameron, it’s not Cameron, and nothing, nothing else matters, until—
“We’re looking at skeletal remains,” the rappeller explains. “An adult, not a child.” His distress transmits over the airwaves like a spiky pulse on an EKG. It’s clear that this discovery is more than the man bargained for. “A young adult, we think.”
Young adult?Meg feels something vital shift within her ... her sense of purpose for so many years finally coming to fruition. If this is finally happening, if this is Jessica, Meg’s efforts all these years, even her efforts with Danny, all she’s given up and all she’s settled for, won’t have been in vain.
“Do youthinkor do you know?” Sheriff Walters bellows. He picks up the satellite phone, calling in to his department headquarters. “I need our forensic pathologist up here.” He pauses for confirmation, then adds, “Yes, in the field.Now.”
On the radio, Santos has taken over, and his careful, measured questions are slowly calming the rappeller, drawing out more information. “Partially obscured,” Meg hears him say.
“Are there any identifying marks at all?” Santos asks, and on the other end of the radio, the rappeller becomes upset again.
“It’s just ...bones!” he insists, appalled. “It must have—hemust have?She?—been here for years, hidden from view in the underbrush.”
She must have been here for years.Meg’s entire body clenches as certainty cements her in place. She looks sharply to Silas, who’s staring back at her with wide, horrified eyes. He’s thinking it, too, and across the room, so is Danny, his face ashen. They’re triangulating again, as they have for so long. Surely they’re not jumping to conclusions, their nerves and their reason shredded to pieces in the course of this entire ordeal.
“Wait,” the rappeller says, and Walters frowns.
“No more speculation!”
But Santos has already spoken into the radio. “Go ahead, Team Two.”
“There’s something here. In the dirt.”
In the dirt? By this body?
“It’s a necklace,” the rappeller reports, and Meg’s mind locks with exacting precision on the image of Jessica sunning herself by the river. Of her leaning out into the glare of the sunlight, the flat silver disk glinting as it swung, back and forth, just above the low-slung neckline of her bikini. She draws the memory to the forefront of her consciousness with a swiftness that startles her: through every interrogation following Jessica’s disappearance, and then throughout her painstaking attempt at selective memory during all the years since, Meg has never thought of that necklace again. All this time, it has seemed utterly insignificant.
And yet here they are, right back to where they started.
26
MEG
August 28, 2003
10:00 p.m.
Marble Lake Lodge
Meg, Danny, and Silas all scrambled to their feet at the sight of the sheriff’s-department 4x4’s headlight beams bouncing down the drive and flicking off as the vehicle came to a stop in front of the lodge. Another vehicle followed in its wake. Meg coughed on the dust while thinking,How weird, that you can’t see dust when it’s dark,and then the deputy sheriff, or whoever he was, stepped out of his truck. Meg noted his boots first, shiny black in the glow of the vehicle’s dome light, and then the crisp cuffs of his trousers. Who would go to the trouble of pressing a uniform to respond to a call at this hour up here in the middle of nowhere?
