Chapter Thirty-Four
“Why are we stopping?” Emma called from her raft after she’d paddled it into the shallows.
Beth and I rowed toward her.
“Courtney fell out,” I yelled.
Emma’s eyes bulged. “When? Is she okay?”
Emma shifted her gaze to Gigi, alone in her raft as Beth and I made it ashore.
“We haven’t seen her,” Beth said. “We have to go back.”
Emma dipped a leg over the side and into the water. “Where did Courtney fall out?”
I started to stand up, feeling the uneven river rocking beneath the raft. “At the beginning. Before that first drop.”
Emma’s jaw dropped. “What? Why didn’t you stop? That was miles back.”
I stepped into the frigid water, my foot slipping atop a rock. I leaned forward, catching myself on the raft, thinking of how cold it must’ve been when Courtney went in.
“We tried,” Beth said, getting out of our raft behind me. “We were shouting at you, but you were too far ahead to hear us over the river.”
“Shit.” Emma stepped ashore and pulled her raft onto the riverbed. “At least she’s a strong swimmer.”
Emma turned to Gigi, who was still in her raft. “So, you haven’t seen her since she fell?”
I looked to Gigi, who shook her head as she climbed out of her raft. “No.”
Emma helped Gigi pull her raft onto the bank. “Let’s leave the rafts here. We’ll move faster without them.”
The four of us walked along the uneven riverbed, slowing to step over the logs and boulders that blocked our path.
I turned to the others. “We need to move faster.” How long would Courtney last in that freezing river before getting hypothermia? I tried not to dwell on how long it had been since she’d fallen from the raft. Too long.
I blamed myself for not being more adamant—like Beth—about us needing to wear life jackets.
What if Courtney got stuck under a logjam or fallen tree?
What if she drowned? I pushed those thoughts from my mind.
Like Emma said, Courtney was a strong swimmer, and we were carried downstream fast in our rafts.
Courtney probably swam to shore before that first drop-off.
I imagined Courtney, soaking wet, making her way along the river’s edge. Pissed that it took us so long to come back for her.
“What if we can’t find her?” Gigi asked.
“We will,” Beth said. “We need to stay positive.”
Gigi was quiet for a few steps. When I glanced at her, her face was starkly pale. Her expression seemed to turn grimmer with each step.
“Do you think she could’ve . . .” Gigi’s voice wobbled. “You know. Drowned?” Gigi looked between the rest of us, appearing desperate for an answer.
While we were all worried about Courtney, the terror in Gigi’s brown eyes made me wonder.
Beth turned. “Courtney? No. It would take more than a river to take her down. She’s one of the strongest swimmers I know.”
“Me too,” I agreed. I thought of all the times we’d swum in the indoor pool at the Sequim rec center.
Courtney had been beating us at swim races and laps ever since we were kids.
Until last year, she had been on the swim team.
She’d quit, but not because she wasn’t good.
She’d held a state record in the fifty-yard freestyle.
But some of the meets had conflicted with volleyball.
And volleyball was what Courtney was passionate about.
“This is all my fault,” Gigi said as we came around a bend.
There was still no sign of Courtney.
“Hang on.” Emma started to climb a mossy boulder along the side of the river before I could ask Gigi what she’d meant.
“I’ll be able to see a ways upriver from the top of this thing.”
The rest of us waited for Emma to climb it. She was nearly to the top when her hiking boot slid on a wet patch of moss. She landed on the rock with her kneecap and cried out in pain.
“Emma!” Gigi yelled as Emma skidded down the side of the boulder, landing on a bed of river rocks.
Blood dripped from Emma’s knee as Gigi rushed toward her. Emma got up and grimaced, grabbing her knee as she fell to the rocky ground. She tilted her head toward the patchy sky, where a bald eagle soared overhead, and squinted her eyes shut as she wrapped both hands around her injured leg. “Ahh!”
Gigi crouched beside her as Beth and I exchanged a wary look.
“Can you stand if I help you?” Gigi grabbed Emma’s arm.
Emma nodded, wincing as Gigi helped pull her to her feet. Emma planted her injured leg on the ground before withdrawing it into the air. “It hurts to put weight on it.”
“I’ll help you back to our rafts,” Gigi said, then glanced over her shoulder at Beth and me. “You guys go. I’ll stay here with Emma. But be careful.” Her eyes seemed to send an additional warning: We can’t lose anyone else.
“Okay,” Beth called before she and I continued up the winding riverbank.
We stepped over logs and large rocks and climbed up the occasional boulder, searching the rushing river for a sign of Courtney.
I imagined her trapped beneath each logjam we came upon.
I suppressed a shudder as I scanned the moving water beneath a fallen tree.
How did this trip go so disastrously wrong?
I climbed over a fallen tree and envisioned the evil glint in Courtney’s eyes in the glow of my flashlight last night. And how her expression remained triumphant with blood dripping from her nose after I’d punched her.
No, I thought. Courtney’s alive, and she’s probably enjoying this, knowing we’re all looking for her, fearing the worst. Having a laugh at our expense.
Beth turned to me. “What do you think Gigi meant by ‘It’s all my fault’? Do you think she pushed Courtney out of the raft? They were pretty pissed at each other before we got onto the water.”
“I was wondering the same thing. Gigi looked really distraught, like she felt guilty.”
Beth’s gaze traveled over the river’s fast-flowing current. “Imagine how Gigi will feel if we never find her.”
I shot Beth a look, surprised by her morbid words. “Don’t you think we will?”
Beth looked away from the river and met my gaze. “Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s Courtney we’re talking about.”
I studied the river as we walked farther, trying to recall rafting through this part, but it didn’t look familiar.
“How long do you think we’ve been walking?” I asked Beth.
Beth checked her wristwatch. “Almost an hour.”
Walking along the river wasn’t a straight path. We’d had to move away from the shore several times to get around fallen trees and the occasional boulder. I scanned the thick forest to my right. Had we gone past the place where we’d gotten in our rafts?
I slowed my pace. “Doesn’t it feel like we’ve been walking farther than we rafted?”
Beth took a wide step over a large rock. “It does, but I think we were just moving really fast in our rafts. We haven’t come to the clearing yet where we put the rafts in the water. I’m sure of it.”
A bird chirped from somewhere in the trees. My gaze drifted toward the sound as dread sprouted in the pit of my stomach.
Beth motioned to her right. “Let’s cut through this way.”
Straight ahead, a cluster of large mossy rocks lined the river. Directly behind them, the foliage looked too thick to walk through. I followed Beth away from the water until the woods thinned out enough for us to make our own path.
When we emerged from the forest onto a river-rock shoreline, Beth pointed. “That’s the drop-off!”
I saw it, too; the same one we’d watched Gigi raft over alone.
My heart sank. Then why hadn’t we found Courtney?
As I scanned our surroundings, I was surprised to find that a part of me was relieved.
What if Courtney was gone forever? No longer able to wreak havoc on anyone’s lives, including my own.
I started to imagine my life without her, the four of us returning home in Beth’s van peacefully without Courtney, then stopped myself.
What kind of monster wishes for someone to be dead?
Beth hurried up the side of a large rock, and I followed. When we got to the top, I saw the spot beside the clearing where we’d put our rafts in the river.
“Courtney!” Beth shouted.
I called her name, too, ashamed of the hope that had surfaced inside me at the thought of Courtney being dead. Atop the rock, I pivoted 360 degrees, yelling her name along with Beth. The only response to our shouts was the echo of our own voices.
I looked to Beth, fearing for the first time that Courtney might never have made it out of the river. “She’s not here. What do we do now?”
Despite my disdain for Courtney, my veins constricted with panic. We had no way to call for help. We were at least a day’s hike from Beth’s van at the trailhead, and it was already midafternoon.
I stared at the glacier water rushing by, imagining Courtney trapped somewhere underneath the surface. “Oh, God.” I grabbed Beth’s hand. “Beth, this is bad.”
Beth appeared calm as she assessed the river. “We need to split up. I’ll go back along the river in case we somehow missed her. Maybe she grabbed onto a fallen tree or something.”
Or was held down underneath one, I thought as I surveyed the moving water.
Beth turned to face me. “Then you go back along the trail. It wasn’t easy to walk along the river, so maybe Courtney went that way. You might also find someone you can ask to call for help.”
“Okay.” I nodded and then slid down the edge of the rock, glad that Beth could think logically in a crisis. My thoughts felt like they were blurring together. “But wait. Shouldn’t we stick together? What about cougars?”
Beth shook her head. “If we’re going to find Courtney, this is our best chance. You’ll be fine. Just remember what I said about making yourself big and creating a lot of noise if you see one.”
I gulped over the lump that formed in my throat at Beth’s last words. If you see one.
“Meet me back where Emma and Gigi are waiting,” Beth added. “You can see the trail from where we beached the rafts, so you should be able to spot them. If you miss it, then follow the river back. Got it?”
I nodded, ignoring my racing pulse. It felt wrong to separate, but I agreed with Beth. It was our best chance of finding Courtney.
“I’ll meet you back at the rafts,” Beth called before turning down the river shore.
I started through the clearing, taking a deep breath. How the hell did this happen? I wondered again if Gigi was to blame.
“Courtney,” I called when I reached the end of the clearing and entered the patch of forest that led to the trail.
I searched the trees, not only for Courtney but for wild predators on the prowl for their next meal.
Stupid Beth. Why did she think splitting up was such a good idea?
There weren’t only cougars in the Olympic National Park but also bears.
I grazed my hand over the hard outline of the pocketknife in my shorts pocket, wishing I had something better.
A branch snapped to my right, and I stopped dead in my tracks. I studied the surrounding woods for movement.
“Courtney?” I swallowed and stepped softly toward the sound, keeping my hand over the knife in my pocket.
I pushed through a stand of blackberry bushes, making my way through a thicket, wondering what the likelihood was of Courtney’s still being alive.
The Sol Duc was freezing, with powerful currents.
We couldn’t even paddle to shore for over a mile downriver after Courtney had fallen in.
Did we overestimate Courtney’s swimming ability?
All my fears about the school board meeting now seemed trivial compared with what was happening to Courtney. But every time I thought of her never coming back, I felt relief, then guilt for being relieved. If she was dead . . .
What if she hit her head on a rock after falling in? What if she—
Another snap. My heart lurched into my throat as I spun in the direction of the sound, preparing to be face-to-face with a cougar. Instead, I spotted Courtney’s red hair as she moved between two trees, walking away from me. She was limping, and her hair and clothes were wet.
But she was alive.