Chapter 11
Ethan pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen.
No text. No missed call. Only a blank screen. And it was getting late.
Dammit.
He shoved it back into his pocket. He’d texted Maggie a few times in the last week to check in after the bar incident with her aunt but had barely received anything back. Short texts here and there that told him absolutely nothing.
He was losing his mind. He wanted to hear her voice. Talk to her. Touch her.
He stopped beside a tree, where a tattered piece of fabric poked up from the dirt. It was navy colored. A bit of clothing? A jacket or the strap of a backpack?
He lowered beside it and pulled on a glove before tugging it out. That’s when he realized what it was—a piece from an old tent canvas. Nothing important.
“Anyone find anything?” Ryan’s voice crackled over the radio.
“I’ve covered a lot of ground and found nothing,” Connor said, the first to respond.
Ethan pulled out his radio. “Unless some material from an old tent counts, I’ve got nothing either.”
The other guys piped in. No one had anything.
They’d created a search grid and everyone had a section to cover. They’d been combing through it for days, searching for anything—scraps of clothing, a shoe, a phone. The smallest thing could give them a clue about what had happened, but they needed to find that thing.
Ethan wasn’t so naive to think he’d find the tourists alive.
He wouldn’t. Months had passed, and if they were still in this forest, they were more than likely dead.
But they needed to figure out what the hell had happened to them so it didn’t happen to anyone else.
Had they gotten lost and succumbed to the elements?
Died of dehydration? Been attacked by animals? Or was this something more sinister?
He moved down to the river. It was vast and cut all the way through town, this particular section bordered by rocks.
“All right, we’re losing light. Let’s call it and head back,” Ryan said.
Ethan’s jaw clenched as he headed back to base. It was frustrating. And every day they found nothing of the missing women made him that much more suspicious that this was more than lost hikers.
He was halfway back when he spotted something on the underside of a big rock. It was several feet away and barely visible, but he saw it. He closed the small distance and crouched.
Blood. A smear of it on the rock.
He lifted his radio. “I found blood on a rock beside the river. It’s smeared. Could be human.”
“Is it fresh?” Connor asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Send us your coordinates.”
Ethan texted them through, and when his team arrived, they gathered around.
“I agree, it’s old,” Joel said. “Could be from one of the missing women.”
“So do we let Ward know?” Zac asked. “Doubt he’ll do much.”
“He’ll sit on it until the last of the blood washes away in the rain.” Ethan snorted, even though there was nothing remotely funny about it.
Ryan crouched and took photos of the blood from multiple angles. “Zac, can you swab it?”
Zac pulled on gloves, took a sterile Q-tip from his kit, and swabbed the blood before dropping it into a plastic bag.
“We’ll send it to an independent lab,” Ryan said. “We notify Ward about the blood, but not our own investigation.”
The guys nodded.
“We all know that technically, we’re tampering with a potential crime scene,” Ryan said.
Connor crossed his arms. “But the alternative is no one doing anything at all.”
“I don’t know about you guys, but I came here to keep people safe,” Joel said.
They all nodded, a silent agreement that they were here because local law enforcement was letting innocent people die. And they were willing to do what they had to do to stop any more lives from being lost, even if that meant bending some rules.
“I’ll call Ward when we get back,” Ryan said.
As they headed to the firehouse, Joel came to walk beside him, holding out a granola bar. “Want one?”
Ethan shook his head. “I’m good.”
Rather than put it away, he unwrapped it and took a bite. “How’s Maggie after the bar shit with Cruella?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not sure. I haven’t really spoken to her since that night.”
“Why not?”
“The hell if I know.”
“It’ll happen.”
“What will happen?”
Joel grinned at him before taking another bite.
“What’s going on with you and Polly?” Ethan asked.
Joel’s smile widened. “I’m not sure. She seems to take offense to everything I say, and I kind of love it.”
Ethan scoffed. “Must be a shock to your system that a woman isn’t falling at your feet.”
Out of every man on the team, Joel dated the most frequently. Actually, dating wasn’t even the right term. He hooked up with women. Usually for a couple of weeks, then they were done.
“She keeps me on my toes,” Joel agreed.
Ethan’s phone rang as they reached base. He frowned at Polly’s name on the screen. Was it about Maggie? Was she okay?
He answered the call. “Polly, what’s wrong?”
“Have you seen Maggie?”
“No. Why? Is she missing?”
“I’m not sure. I went to her apartment, but she wasn’t there, and she’s not answering my calls. And today’s…”
When Polly went quiet, it hit Ethan like a ton of bricks.
Fuck. It was the tenth. It was the anniversary of her mother’s death.
Goddammit, how had he forgotten?
“I know where she is.” The same place she’d gone every year as a kid on the anniversary of her mother’s death.
Polly gasped like she just remembered too. “Of course. Want me to go also?”
“I’ve got it. I’ll bring her home. She’s safe with me.”
“I know she is.”
He stepped inside the fire station.
Connor frowned at him. “Everything okay?”
“I’m heading out now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He jogged to his car. He wasn’t going straight to Maggie, though. First, he had to grab a few things.
The bottoms of Maggie’s jeans were damp, making her body shiver from the cold. But she barely registered it. She was too focused on the sky as she waited for the stars to creep in. She wanted thousands of them. She wanted them to scatter around the sky like a map no one knew how to read.
She hadn’t been back here since she was a teenager, but God, the spot felt familiar. Her mother had called this island their magic place. Where the world quieted and it was only them and the stars.
It was a little oxbow. A pocket curved away from the main river that was almost horseshoe shaped.
In the center was this mossy island, like a sliver of land the river forgot to wash away.
From the bank, it kind of looked like a bump in the current etched with willows and river grass, about the size of a parking space.
And yeah, she’d had to wade through the water to get here. It had gone to her knees, and the cold had stung her skin. She’d never done this alone before.
Her lips curved into a smile at the memory of coming here with Ethan. Of climbing onto his back as he’d walked through the water. Then they’d lain for hours, remembering the monarch that was her mother.
Because this, right here, was her favorite place in the world.
The moss and sand were damp and cold, but she didn’t care.
She closed her eyes, remembering her mother’s voice. The softness of it. The way it used to hum through the air. God, she missed that voice.
When she opened her eyes again and looked at the stars, she could almost feel her mother beside her.
A rustling sound from the bank had her shooting up to a sitting position. The outline of a man made her heart race.
Fear pricked at her skin.
Who was that? She hadn’t brought a weapon. She hadn’t even thought about bringing a weapon.
Stupid. So stupid. Two people had gone missing in the last few months. Two. And she’d come out here to the middle of the forest, near the water, and hadn’t brought anything to protect herself.
She was a millisecond away from searching for a rock or a sharp stick, something to defend herself with, when the man stepped out of the tree line.
Air rushed back into her lungs. “Ethan! What the hell? I thought you were some ax murderer.”
He crossed the water and stopped beside her, bag in hand. “You shouldn’t be out here alone, Mags.”
“I know. I didn’t really give much thought to what I was doing. One second I was at home, the next I was here.”
A small growl rippled from his chest. He pulled a towel from the bag and handed it to her. “For your legs.”
“Thanks.” She’d just grabbed it when she noticed his sweater. One that was almost identical to her own. “You’re wearing your Christmas sweater.”
“So are you.”
Yep. A red knitted reindeer sweater.
“You remembered,” she whispered, as she looked back at him, emotion clogging her throat.
“I remember every year. It was your mother’s favorite holiday.” He took out a bag of huckleberry taffy, and she could have cried. Because that had been their tradition. Christmas sweaters and taffy—not only because it had been her mother’s favorite, it was hers too. “Thank you.”
He dipped his head.
Once Ethan had slotted another towel beneath them, they lay down, and he pulled a blanket over them. There was something about sharing a blanket with a man that felt so intimate.
“When did you become so organized?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.
“I’ve always been the organized one between the two of us.”
God, he was right. She was the one who lost to-do lists, bought new pens every month, and owned six phone chargers but could rarely find a single one.
For a while, they simply lay there in silence. It felt nice. Comfortable. She and Ethan never ran out of things to talk about, but they also knew how to sit in silence together.
Eventually, she turned her head. “Can I tell you something?”
His eyes were soft as they took her in. “Anything.”
“My mother’s death never made sense to me. Yes, she was young and liked to have a drink or two at Trap, but to get so intoxicated that she came out to the river and drowned? She wasn’t that stupid or reckless.”