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For a long second, remorse gripped him. “Mr.Matheson.” Walters stared at him. “Do you have something to say?”
Silas shook his head.
Walters shifted in his chair with a little grunt of frustration, then consulted a report, presumably the one they’d made for Halloway.
“You all split up to look for Jessica?”
Silas forced a breath into his lungs. It took a supreme effort, shame encircling to clutch him from all sides.All my fault.“Yes,” he managed. “But we all started out together.”Tell the truth as far as is possible.Isn’t that what they said, in the movies and stuff? He described running back down the trail to the fork.
Walters set the report down with deliberate care. “Unfortunately, there’s a problem with that explanation. My trackers tell me that the evidence within these prints”—he pointed again, two sharp jabs at the photo; Silas wished he’d stop pointing with that stupid pencil—“do not lend themselves to the people in question running and searching. Or even stopping briefly to share information. For that to be the case, you see, the footprints would be more widely spaced. There would be bigger scuffs. These images suggest, instead, that the subjects were standing still. Rather close together, in fact, for rather a long time.”
Silas chanced a glance at Meg and immediately regretted it. That guilt was back, pressing in from all sides, but he fought against it. For preservation. For Meg. She was looking back at him like his next words were a carton of eggs she just knew he was about to drop. “We were looking the whole time.”
What was one more lie? It escaped from Silas’s mouth the same as all the rest. And he was empty now. Hollow-boned as a bird. He’d rise above instead of holding fast.
“Maybe they’re the tracks of some searchers,” he added.
Walters shook his head. “Today was our team’s first pass through these particular coordinates.” He frowned as his expression chilled even further. “What we have here should amount to simple mathematics, boys, and yet, it does not.”
Danny kind of flinched at this, though he didn’t answer.
“Are you nervous, son?” Walters added, not entirely unkindly, which kind of threw Silas off. He had to think Walters did this, tying them all in such knots, on purpose.
But Silas knew Danny. He wasn’t nervous as much as quietly fuming.What are you getting yourself so riled up for?Uncle Les always said to Cairns with a chuckle, mussing his hair whenever Danny’s carefully plotted world went off course, bringing him to the lodge with a scowl. Was Danny just resentful that an authority figure was daring to question his shiny scout’s-honor reputation?
Walters continued to stare them down, the room in silent stalemate, and then:
“Maybe it does.”
Meg spoke so quietly from her vigil in the doorway that Silas wondered for a moment if he’d imagined it. But both Walters and Danny also stared in her direction, shifting in their chairs to face her.
“The math,” she clarified. “Maybe itdoesadd up.”
Silas’s heart began to pound. She looked right at him for the first time in days, which he took for a terrible sign. He closed his eyes, waiting for it. Deserving it. Almost wishing for it.
“Maybe those footprints are someone else’s entirely,” she said.
Silas’s eyes snapped open as Walters leaned forward. “Excuse me?”
Danny chose this moment to jump back into the conversation. “She means maybe somebody else was out there! Some creepo who could have gotten Jessica!” His enthusiasm for this theory carried him to his feet. His metal folding chair clattered to the ground behind him. “Not all hikers are guests at the lodge. Did anyone check the parking lot for other cars?”
For the first time the sheriff looked unsettled, his gaze darting to the door. “Of course we checked.”
“Are you sure, because—”
“I said of course we checked.”
Walters gathered up his footprint photos and resecured them under the metal clasp of his clipboard with an angry jab. When he spoke again, his voice boomed from one wood-paneled wall to the other. “I did not come out here to share the details of our investigation with you, Mr.Cairns. Not with any of you.” A fine spray of spit flew from his mouth as he spoke. “So I’ll ask one last time: Does anyone want to change their story?”
Silence prevailed while they all stared at one another. It reminded Silas of a standoff in a movie, when everyone pointed a gun at everyone else, rendering everyone frozen in place. And then Walters rose in frustration, his own chair scraping across the wooden floorboards like nails down a chalkboard.
“In that case,” he told them, his expression dark, “I’m afraid we’ve gotten precisely nowhere.”
27
SILAS
Matheson search
