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“And where was that?” Halloway asked her. “In which direction?”
Meg began to sweat. “I ... we ran so much, looking, I got turned around.” And yet she could picture that grove, where she’d run right into Silas, so clearly. Could feel the rough bark of the tree where it had collided with her back. She felt a single bead of moisture building at the nape of her neck, poised to drop in one smooth motion down the length of her spine. When it fell, she shivered.
“Aren’t they going to go look?” she said, pointing at the searchers waiting in the wings. “Can’t you tell them to get started?”
The lieutenant glanced calmly behind him at his team, then back at the three of them. “I need to figure out where to send them first, don’t I?”
“Now, John, I think they’ve told you what they know,” Les said.
Halloway didn’t appreciate the intervention. He looked like he had swallowed something sour. Meg had seen this look before, on the face of their history teacher when Les had driven all the way down the hill into Feather River to excuse Silas’s streak of tardies last spring. His nephew had straight As, so who cared if he preferred to spend fifth period back up at Marble Lake, trekking all over the woods?
The reminder buoyed Meg. Everything always seemed to go Silas’s way. This would, too.Be patient,she told herself.Jessica will turn up. Silas will talk to her. We’ll tell Danny the truth. No one will be in trouble.
But in the intermittent flare of the nearby headlamps, Silas’s eyes glowed with a pale panic Meg had never seen. Her confidence in his ability to always land on his feet waned, just briefly, like a lantern flickering, low on propane.
The three of them sat vigil all night, isolated by way of a uniformed deputy from the few lodge guests who wandered into the dining room, and by morning they’d danced around the truth—the whole truth, anyway—for so long Meg felt numb. They went over the timeline again with Sheriff Walters, until the individual words began to lose meaning, each one polished as smooth as a stone in a current as it rolled off Meg’s tongue.And then, and then, and then. Trail, trail, trail.They all just kept talking in circles,the corpse of the truth dashing upon the rocks of this redacted version of events until it became so thin and ragged, she feared it would disappear altogether. What if she forgot what hadreallyhappened, her brain had been bleached so? The thought both comforted and dismayed.
Every time they reached the end of their story—the part with the lodge and the Jeep and the alerting of the Albrights—they began anew, returning always to the hike and the gathering darkness and the scare. By the time the sun had warmed the eastern window bank, Meg had doubled over in her chair in fatigue, unable to withstand another pass through the gauntlet of the lieutenant’s steady line of questioning or the sheriff’s stern stare. It was like a furnace in here; she was burning up, slowly, from the inside out.
Guests from the few occupied cabins were questioned next, ushered one by one into the rec room, only to come back out looking as helpless as Meg felt. They took a break midmorning, Aunt Mary plying them all with sandwiches that tasted like lead in her mouth. She sat mutely on the lodge deck, taking in the sight of search teams in orange unloadingtheir dogs and packs. At least half a dozen sheriff’s-department vehicles now sat in the lodge parking lot. Even a Reno news van was here, a young woman with a microphone interviewing a smattering of lodge guests.
Silas kept trying to get Meg to talk to him, but she deflected his looks, shook free of his hand when he offered it in support. Because this was precisely what had gotten them here, wasn’t it? She wished she could go back to being the Meg she’d been at the start of senior year, before she’d met Silas.ThatMeg had hovered somewhere off-center, unsure and unseen. She hadn’t been at the eye of the storm. She didn’t know precisely when she’d become illuminated the way the black light at the Cosmos Bowl made her white T-shirt glow when she stood in its beam. But she had glowed last night, in the wilderness by the trail, with the certainty of a woman who finally dared to reach for what she wanted. And now everything had gone horribly wrong. Now the glow was gone.
SILAS
By midday on Day 2, Meg had taken to standing in the doorway of the main lodge instead of sitting in her customary chair next to Silas and Danny. Had she gotten any rest yet? They all still wore the same clothes as the night before, and Meg’s pants were smudged with dirt. Her tee had ripped along one sleeve, where a spindly branch of sage had probably cut through to her skin, and dark shadows below her eyes stood out like pillowy bruises on her pale face.This is all my fault,he silently promised her, trying to catch her eye across the lodge.Not yours. Hisstupid prank gone wrong.Hisstupid decisions. She might have been theone to suggest they edit their story, but only to helphim. He couldn’t let his choices ruin her by association.
Sheriff Walters set up what he called a command center in the musty lodge dining room, where people fielded phone calls and conducted press conferences via satellite around the clock. Around 7:00 p.m., a surge of radio chatter lifted the reporters’ faces from their notes and sent the few searchers grabbing a bite in the lodge kitchen scurrying toward their posts. Silas was still trying to figure out what had happened when Walters strode straight across the room toward them and sat down in Meg’s empty chair.
“So,” he demanded of the three of them, “which one of you isn’t telling me the truth?”
From the periphery of his vision, Silas saw Meg’s head snap around, but she stayed in place between the lobby and the porch, her lips a tight line. He didn’t dare look at Danny. Instead, he turned his focus back to the sheriff, his pulse accelerating as he took in the sight of his large, calloused hands laying two photographs on the table in front of them. At first glance, they looked like pictures of dirt.
“Our trackers have detected what they call ‘sign’ in an area within the radius of our search,” the sheriff said. “Do you all know what ‘sign’ is?”
Of course they did. Danny was a freaking Eagle Scout, and Silas ... well, Silas was instantly transported to the Marble Lake boathouse, stomping around in the mud, trying to throw Uncle Les off his trail.
“Tracks,” he said dully.
Danny didn’t say anything, which wasn’t like him, usually so eager around uniformed types. When he glanced at him, he looked ... wrong somehow. Amped up and unnerved, his cheeks splotched pink. He couldn’t stand it, not being able to help.
“Tracks, yes,” Walters was saying. “As well as other detection of recent passage. Here,” he explained, pointing at the first photo, “iswhere someone—two someones, actually—left the Lakes Loop trail, approximately a mile from the Long Lake access trail.”
Danny pulled the print closer to look.
“You can see the crushed stems of the sagebrush where it was trampled,” Walters pointed out. “And then in this photo”—he drew the other print to the forefront—“a series of footprints are discernible, all within the confines of this grove, approximately ten feet from the trail.”
“Where?” Silas asked, staring down at the second photograph. “I don’t see footprints.” And he really didn’t, though that didn’t stop the sudden surge of bile that rose at the back of his throat. Because hedidrecognize the area the photo conveyed. He’d remember it forever.
“This is thick forest,” Walters said evenly. “The ground here is dense with undergrowth, covered with too many pine needles, twigs, and moss to record exact imprints.” His eyes shifted from Silas to Danny and back again. “A shame.”
Walters dug into his front pocket and a second later used the tip of a pencil to carefully trace a fine line across the print. He told them it marked a depression, of shoe size approximately ten to twelve, in the earth. Person number one. Silas could only make out the slightest gradient of a shadow, a contrast of depth so subtle he could scarcely believe the trackers caught it at all.
“This is a shoe print of a man,” Walters explained. “Or, of course, a teen.” He looked at them. “Roughly the size of either of your feet.”
Danny stiffened, like he was about to interject, but before Silas could lose his lunch, the sheriff pinpointed another depression slightly overlapping the first. “This one is smaller,” he said. “Maybe size seven? Eight?” He tapped the tip of his pencil on the photo, and Silas stared down at it, watching one tiny fleck of lead crumple onto the glossy print. “This one is a woman’s.”
Danny sat ramrod straight now, the dots of pink on his cheeks crimson. But couldn’t Cairns see? The sheriff was trying to turn themagainst one another. But then the irony of this backfired right in Silas’s face. Because they had, of course. At least, Silas had turned on Danny.
