Chapter 1 Above
Above
We forget how eager the world is to swallow us up, how deep and hungry the wilderness remains. It’s surprisingly, hauntingly easy to vanish.
It’s been thirty--seven hours since then, and the weather is turning.
I pull off the road, angling for the canopies, emblazoned with the local Search and Rescue logo, that are serving as the command center for the search efforts. I haven’t made it far up the gravel drive before I have to park on the grassy lip between road and trees.
Vehicles jam up the rest of the strip—-everything from rusted pickup trucks to a shiny new Tesla getting its wheels baptized with their first splash of real dirt.
Some of them I recognize as belonging to other volunteers with Search and Rescue.
Others go with the locals who keep wandering up to the incident command post looking for a way to help or to gawk, neither of which is particularly useful.
The last thing we need is dozens of untrained locals flooding the area, trampling evidence or getting lost themselves. Even less useful: the TV vans.
If all Bryson Lee needed was manpower and enthusiasm, his survival would be a done deal. But it takes more than that.
In the US, it’s easy to get the impression that the wild has been overrun, hemmed in, tamed with trails and GPS and an omnipresent thrum of human activity.
True isolation is nearly impossible to find, with a road only a few miles off no matter where you drop yourself, but a few miles is more than enough for a grown adult to vanish into.
Much less a four--year--old boy in dinosaur pajamas.
The area he headed into is hundreds of acres of wilderness bordered by privately owned land that’s only a notch less dangerous for a kid his size.
We’ll find him, I tell myself, as I have several times an hour for more than a day.
Like every other time, I believe it. Whenever a search ends in tragedy, I wonder if it’ll cure my hopeless optimism or break me entirely.
But after ten years of weekends and evenings and every sick day I get devoted to SAR, I’m still a hopeful fool.
I scan the crowd as I grab my gear from the back seat.
The biggest cluster of bodies is off to the left, centered around a man and a woman.
The man has paired an expensive haircut with department store flannel, radiating the sort of engineered man--of--the--people look that suggests political ambitions—-though Andrew Hill has steadfastly denied those rumors.
His sister Melinda, on the other hand—-crisp white blouse and navy blazer, her eyeliner immaculate and her dark hair offering not a wisp out of place—-has never wanted anything else.
What the hell are they doing here?
“Back already?”
I offer a weary smile to Len as he approaches—-whip--thin, soulful brown eyes, eyebrow split with a silvered scar.
His deputy’s uniform is decidedly rumpled; yesterday’s five o’clock shadow is turning full scraggle.
My instinct is to put my arms out, to hold on to him like I have so many times before, with his heartbeat thumping right in my ear, his knobby spine under my flattened palm. But he’s working, and so am I.
“You know me,” I say instead. I nod at the stack of flyers in his hands, each one featuring a picture of a beaming Bryson. “Flyer duty?”
“I’ve been handing them out all day,” he says. I nod. Posting flyers is the standard task for untrained volunteers. Half of Franklin is probably papered with the things by now. “You look like crap, by the way. What are you running on?”
“About two hours of sleep and two gallons of coffee,” I say, stifling a yawn.
We’re walking together now, heading for Tamara, a woman with the shape of a wine cork and the no--nonsense attitude of a union boss.
She’s heading up Operations, which means handing out assignments.
Right now she’s got her hands in her pockets, scowling at nothing in particular.
“Where’s your boss?” I ask Len. “Parked in front of the nearest news camera?”
“Nah, he’s busy telling the county sheriff how well he runs this town.
” Franklin’s so small Len is one of only two full--time deputies.
Our police chief is exactly as competent as the job requires, and refusing to retire so his ex--wife doesn’t get a cut of his pension, which leaves Len to do most of the heavy lifting.
“The Hills are the ones getting the screen time.”
“What are they even doing here?” I ask.
He raises an eyebrow. “It’s their land.”
“Seriously?” I’d missed that detail.
“They’ve been hovering all day,” he says. “Making noise about getting us anything we need, all the resources in the world, et cetera. Trying to out--soundbite each other.”
“Think she’s going to run again?” I ask idly.
Two stints in the House of Representatives ended abruptly when Melinda resigned to undergo treatment for breast cancer—-prompting speculation about Andrew taking her place—-but the cancer is gone, and Melinda has never once let her brother take something she views as hers.
“The answer to that question is on a long list of things I don’t care even a little bit about,” Len informs me. He gives me a sidelong look. “But you know them better than I do.”
“I don’t know them at all,” I murmur, and at that moment, Andrew Hill looks straight at me.
His head comes up; his shoulders stiffen.
I wonder if he, too, is remembering the rumble of a truck engine.
His hand tangled in copper hair. But, no—-he would be thinking of a different encounter altogether.
One that didn’t reflect well on either of us.
But Andrew Hill doesn’t matter. Bryson Lee does, and he’s out there now, scared and alone and alive.
Tamara’s voice brings my attention back to the present.
“Good, there you are, Lucky,” she says, using a nickname I’ve mostly grown not to hate.
Len gives me a wave and fades back, returning to his task.
Tamara turns her perpetual scowl on me. “I’m putting you with Rick’s team.
He’s got the maps. You’ll be bordering private land we don’t have permission to enter, so stay in your area.
” Frustration is evident in her voice. We can only go on private property with the owner’s permission, and it’s shocking how often that isn’t forthcoming.
“Got it,” I say, nodding, and swivel my head until I catch sight of Rick. He’s standing with two other volunteers. There are dozens of us crawling these woods right now.
“You sure you’re good to go?” she asks me, gaze probing.
“One hundred percent,” I assure her, though my limbs feel like lead and my eyes are gummy. She just grunts. If she hadn’t forced me to go home for a few hours, I’d have been here straight through and she knows it.
I extract myself from her attention and hustle over to Rick.
Rick’s a slender guy, hair gone gray, eyes sharp.
He’s soft--spoken but a steady leader, which means Tamara sticks him with the newbies more often than he’d like.
The other two volunteers with him are an older woman I’ve met a couple of times and a new guy who’s probably twenty but looks about twelve and whose name exits my mind immediately.
Rick hands out assignments. The role of medic goes to the other woman; I’m unsurprised to be tasked with navigation.
Sometimes I joke that the reason I’m so obsessed with the missing is my own seeming inability to get lost. It’s nonsense, of course.
It doesn’t take a therapist to pinpoint what started me down this road.
One girl. Not missing, not really, because to be missing you have to be missed.
She’s just gone.
My eyes sweep left and right as we head to our assigned area, my gait steady but unhurried as we make our way down narrow footpaths through the underbrush.
This close to the commotion, it’s hard to imagine a kid wouldn’t know which way to head for rescue, but you never know.
Could be hurt. Could be scared out of his mind and not able to process what he’s hearing.
Kids this age tend to find a spot to sleep—-I found a girl curled up in a sunbeam once, a couple of hours after she got separated from her family on a hike.
New Guy keeps pace with me. “Those parents must be losing their minds,” he says. “I can’t imagine.”
“I don’t think anyone can, really,” I say.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the families—-not until the search is over.
That pain and fear, even borrowed, is too overwhelming.
I have to stay focused, keep myself in this honed--knife state, my belief untarnished. We will find them. I will find them.
And so often I do. To the point that it’s a joke, a superstition. Tamara called me her lucky rabbit’s foot, and it stuck around like a nickname. Almost turned into Bunny, but I managed to nip that in the bud.
“You don’t think there was any foul play, do you?” he asks.
“As far as I know, there’s no indication of that,” I say. I don’t point out that if there were, we’d be following very different procedures. A manhunt is for law enforcement, not SAR.
“But there was that other kid. Disappeared a few months ago, right? Could be a pattern,” he continues, his eyes all shiny like this would be particularly exciting. A bird swoops overhead, chattering about its day.
“What other kid?” I ask, frowning.
“That girl. From Franklin? Mackenzie or Mindy or—-”
“Meghan Vale,” I say flatly. Of course I know about Meghan.
Seventeen, a senior at Franklin High School, where I work as a counselor.
I’ve seen her in the halls, though I don’t have any particular memories of her—-she’s assigned to one of the other counselors.
She’s been gone for three months now. We were never called out to look for her.
Last I heard, the assumption was she’d run away.
“I don’t see how that could be related.”