Chapter Seven #3
The officer who took Kate’s story said he’d call the dispatcher.
Greensbury had a Search and Rescue Squad, and if they couldn’t find her, the state police had a helicopter with infrared cameras, though, given the storm, he didn’t think that they could fly it.
But he’d call. The team was made up of volunteers who lived across the county; usually, they could pull a group together within a couple of hours.
“A couple of hours?” asked Kate.
She was almost unrecognizable. Gone was the grace with which she moved and spoke. Only when she had given birth could Miles remember such a look, such a ferocity. And the officer must then have sensed it, too, for he said he’d see what he could do.
He went back to his car and got on the radio.
“I’m not waiting,” said Kate. “I’m calling friends.
” And she went back to the house, already dialing.
Miles followed her. He saw her wait and leave a message, then dial someone else.
Who? he wondered: Miranda, Paloma, her colleagues in English, those great woodsmen and woodswomen?
Bjorn? Bjorn knew the snow, Bjorn was capable of moving swiftly.
Might his wife’s lover be the one to find his daughter?
Ha! But he was long past irony, past jealousy, past anger, well on to bargaining; if Bjorn found Olive, Bjorn could sleep with Kate as often as he wanted.
Miles would sleep with Bjorn if Bjorn found Olive, if that was what the hero wished.
If only Hugh were here, thought Miles. Bjorn might know the snow, but Hugh knew Claymore, knew every inch of Claymore, above, below.
He dialed Andrei, but Andrei didn’t answer.
He dialed Snowflake, but Snowflake didn’t answer.
Who else might have Hugh’s number? Kayleigh? Candy? But he didn’t know how to reach them, except through school, through Instagram.
“Miles, do something.”
“I’m trying to find a number.”
“Whose number?”
“A guy I know. Hugh Lamoreaux.”
You’ve met him, he thought. Long ago. But none of this mattered.
“Tyler Lamoreaux?” asked Kate.
“Not Tyler—Hugh,” said Miles. He paused. “Who’s Tyler?”
“Hell if I know—isn’t that the name on Wesley’s jacket?”
For a second, Miles closed his eyes as if in prayer. “Where’s Wesley?”
“Up the road, I sent him up the road.”
Miles ran. Out of the dusk came Wesley. “Did you find her?” asked the son, as the father nearly tackled him, tore the jacket off his shoulders, and held the tag up to the fading light so he could read the number.
—
They convened in the dining room, around the table, the map laid out before them, the nine known caves in the Claymore sector marked with “X”s.
Hugh knew all of them, most no bigger than a fox den, but three—this, and this, and this one here—were big enough for someone Olive’s size.
The group would separate in fan formation; they needed to cover as much ground as possible.
He didn’t want to scare them, but they didn’t have much time.
By then, two members of the area Search and Rescue had arrived, but in Hugh they recognized authority, and took their marching orders dutifully from him.
Kate watched all of this, the gathered searchers, her eyes drifting from time to time to Miles, wonderingly.
How had he pulled this ragtag group together?
How did he know them? Candace of those ridiculous videos, and Olive’s teacher, and the Land Conservancy director, and wasn’t that the Rat Man, standing by the school custodian with the hernia straining pregnantly against his coat?
And Margie, the English Department administrator, who was let go during a recent downsizing?
And Andrei? And why was Snowflake Bentley sitting in the driveway in his old converted ambulance?
Who the hell were all these people?
But if she had questions, now was not the time to ask them. She also took her orders. She would continue going house to house, alerting neighbors. Snowflake, said Hugh, would patrol the road. Miles would join the others, following the search lines through the woods.
—
And then outside, into the night, into the chaos of cars, the radios sputtering, the beacons turning, the beams of flashlights wobbling.
It no longer seemed the woods he knew. They walked the forest, separating.
Clumps of snow sloughed off the weighted branches.
People were everywhere, from the road rose voices, and yet it seemed like he was pushing through a rising silence.
Stone, the trail, tree stump, unfamiliar.
Darkness visible. Too still, too quiet. He looked back down.
The cars now white, the trail, his steps, all fading.
Color long had vanished; what hope he had to see the pink announcement of her jacket hung on fading shades of gray.
In time he heard an engine, but it was only Bentley’s ambulance, circling.
An ambulance that once, before its current incarnation, must have known other roads, other forest thresholds, waited while other parents sought other children in the woods…
No. He fought the thought. He kept on walking. Snow growing deeper. Something writhing in his chest. He began to cough, and it was only then he realized that he’d been screaming for her since he’d left the house.