Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  My gaze moves past her to the kitchen’s plate glass window. After three days of rain and gloom, the sun is finally out. A ray hits on the vines looping up the trellis, and they explode into a sea of yellow and purple blooms like a Van Gogh painting, so bright it hurts my eyes. I close them against the color and picture Ethan, standing under the flowers. Same messy curls as Sammy, same scrawny build that barely makes it onto the doctor’s growth chart. I’m not the only one who says the two could be brothers.

  On the other side of the house, a door opens and a burst of voices tumbles into the hall. Sam and Brittany talking over each other, both of them on their phones. I spring off my chair and race through the dining room, heels clacking on the floor, hurrying to head them off in the foyer. I get there just in time. Brittany files past with a brisk nod, still talking, but Sam stops at the door. “Give me two minutes and I’ll call you right back,” he says into the phone, then hits End without waiting for a response.

  Sometime in the past hour, he’s gone upstairs to shower and change into his best navy suit. His shirt is crisp and white, hung with a red silk tie. He smells of coffee and aftershave, power and professionalism.

  “What’s the news?”

  Sam slips the phone into his pocket. “Looks like whoever’s responsible took him out of there in a car, which is basically the worst news possible.” He winces, reconsidering. “Make that second worst news. Police are taking a good, hard look at the father.”

  “That’s the first person I thought of, too. He has a history of violence.”

  “He’s also not answering his phone or his door.”

  “What about the kids?” I say. “Are they on their way back?”

  “Not until tonight, probably. The sheriff’s team is taking them through another round of questioning. The school’s working on a coherent message to the parents, and as soon as they have it, you’ll be getting a call from them with pickup instructions.” Sam glances out the open front door, to where Brittany is still on her phone, watching him from the circular driveway. She lifts a subtle brow, and he turns back to me. “I’ve got to go. Chief Phillips and I are making a joint statement as soon as I get down to the station.”

  “Go. Do what you need to do.” I press up onto my toes and give him a kiss.

  His steps are crisp and measured down the stone staircase to Brittany’s waiting Lexus. She’s already behind the wheel, the engine purring on the pavement, her face hidden behind the smoky glass. A man’s muffled voice blares on the car speakers.

  Sam stops halfway to the passenger’s door. “If Josh shows up here, point him my way, will you? I still haven’t gotten a hold of him.”

  I nod, then think of one more thing. “Oh, and Sam?”

  He stops walking, but he’s shifting on his feet, eager to get going.

  “Call me as soon as there’s news.”

  KAT

  7 hours, 7 minutes missing

  A bird’s distress call slices through the silence, hauling me upright with a full-body jolt. I blink into the room, trying to get my bearings. The cabin. The camp. Ethan. Reality in crisp, excruciating focus.

  I scramble for my phone and check the time. Nine-thirty-seven, which means I’ve been asleep for less than an hour. Shit. Almost the entire time Lucas has been in the woods. No calls or texts from him, and my heart leapfrogs into my throat, as much from terror as from hope. What does his silence mean? I try calling him, but the call won’t go through.

  I hit Redial and try again, looking around the cabin. Now that the sun is good and up, the place looks even worse. Run-down and grungy. Dirt creeps up the plain, unadorned walls. The mugs are chipped and stained with more than just tea. The chairs are ragged, the metal legs bloody with rust. Last night’s rain has seeped through the cabin’s cracks, cooling the air and making everything sticky and damp—my clothes and my hair and my lungs. I shiver and think of Ethan.

  I check my phone, and it’s then I notice that I have no bars, and my phone battery is at 5 percent. I think of the charger I left in my overnight bag in Detective Macintosh’s car. I haven’t seen him since I left the dining hall, hours ago. Is he still here?

  Watching the screen for a signal, I carry my phone outside and down the fern-lined dirt path that leads back to the clearing. Murky sunlight filters through the trees, marbling the path. The sky beyond them is poisonous—a deep slate gray with low, racing clouds of purple and black. The death throes of last night’s weather.

  And just as eerie is the empty clearing before me. There’s nobody here. No police officers barking orders, no searchers trampling in and out of the woods. I stop at the edge, my phone suddenly bleeping with an influx of work emails, and try not to throw up. What does this mean? Where did everybody go?

  The hill before me is a horror show, a churned-up mess of trampled grass and mud. At the bottom, rain-filled trenches and footprints are all that remain of the police cars—gone all but one, an Atlanta Police Department cruiser covered in dew. Relief warms some of the dread from my bones. The detective is still here, which means my charger is, too.

  I pull up the number for Lucas and try again.

  “Yo.” He answers, his voice a little out of breath and distracted. “Over here,” he says, and then to me, “how you holding up?”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “What do you mean?” His voice crackles, the words cutting in and out.

  “I fell asleep at the cabin after you left. When I woke up, everybody was gone. The cars. The people. Everything.” I gaze across the clearing to the dining hall. The inside lights beat out a golden glow, but the morning sunlight winks fire where it hits the glass, and I can’t see inside. I hurry along the edges of the clearing, following the driest path. “Did they call off the search or something?”

  “Hang on. Let me see what’s going on.” A muted conversation with at least two separate male voices comes in fits and starts, and I strain to hear it over the morning birdsong and the bad reception. A few seconds later, Lucas is back, but so is the static. “...just told me the sheriff sent the volunteers and dogs home. Forensics are still hanging around, but they’re moving...”

  His explanation sets my nerves on fire, and I stop halfway up the hill. “What does that mean, that they’re moving?”

  He says something indecipherable, then his voice cuts back in. “...left the area. And before you start freaking out, that doesn’t mean they’re giving up on the search. The—”

  The silence is so abrupt, I pull the phone from my ear and check the screen. One bar, but the call is still connected. “Lucas, start over. The what?”

  Silence.

  “Lucas, the what?”

  A beeping, then nothing. The call went dead, and then, so does my phone. The screen goes black, the battery depleted.

  I slip it into my back pocket and hurry as fast as I can across the dirt and slime to the detective’s car, which I’m relieved to find unlocked. I dig my charger out of the side pocket of my overnight bag, leave the rest on the floor and shut the door.

  I’m trying to decide the least treacherous path up the clearing to the dining hall, where I’m hoping to find the sheriff and Dawn, when a man bangs out the door. He sees me and stops at the edge of the porch, pausing in a shaft of sunlight that lights up his red hair like a fireball. “Oh. Hey. You looking for Dawn? Last I heard, she was still at the cabin.”

  I gesture across the mud to the cabin I just came from. “I was there, but Dawn wasn’t.”

  The man shakes his head, pointing in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. “Not that cabin. The kids’ cabin. Forensics is just finishing up.”

  My heart gives a hard kick. The last place Ethan was seen, the place where he was until he wasn’t. I desperately want to see it, if for no other reason than to breathe the same air.

  He clomps across the porch and down the steps, hooking a hand
through the air for me to follow. “Come on. I’ll take you. We wanted to get you over there anyway to confirm what’s his and what’s not.”

  I hurry up the hill. “But he took his backpack with him, right? His backpack and compass.”

  “We believe so. The kids left behind a mountain of stuff, and we’re pretty sure some of it’s his, though we’ve not yet identified the backpack. And then there’s his sleeping bag, which I’m sure you know we used as scent for the dogs. We’ve already got a positive ID on that from his teacher, so this is really just a formality. Still, best to hear it from the mom.” He sticks out a hand. “Bill Mabry, Lumpkin County Search and Rescue.”

  “Kat Jenkins.”

  I follow him deeper into the thicket of woods, where the shadows are inky and the air a good ten degrees cooler than in the sunshine of the clearing. I pull my sweater tighter around my chest and hustle after him. His legs aren’t that long but his stride is quick, and I take two steps to every one of his. The entire way, Bill doesn’t stop talking.

  “So I don’t know if you heard, but the sheriff’s moved HQ back to the station. It’s not all that far from here, only five miles or so, but it’s a real office, one with Wi-Fi and cell reception.”

  “Oh.” I realize this is the message Lucas was trying to tell me over the phone, and it hits me like a punch to the gut. Leaving the camp without Ethan feels like a bad thing. No, like a very bad thing. Like giving up, admitting defeat. I am not in any way prepared to leave him behind. “What about the search?”

  “Oh, the search is still very much on, it’s just the tactics that have changed. The choppers have moved farther out, which is why we can’t hear them. The police moved from the woods to the roads hours ago, setting up roadblocks and going door to door. The sheriff moving HQ is not a bad thing, I promise. Cops are better equipped to run an operation from an office, where it’s warm and there’s plenty of doughnuts.”

  I know he’s trying to lighten things up, but I can’t choke up a smile. A frantic swarm of hornets is eating away at my chest.

  He’s still chattering away as the path snakes us through the forest to another clearing, smaller this time. We stop at the edge of the tree line, and Bill points to a cabin, one of the six pressed against the woods, half tucked behind the brush. “That’s it. Well...obviously.”

  The cabin is roped off with police tape, just like Detective Macintosh said it would be, long strands of yellow streamers rippling in the wind. Bright, kid-sized shoes are neatly lined along the edge of the porch. My heart wrenches at Ethan’s navy Converse knockoffs at the far end, along with what looks like a filthy sock. A University of Georgia sweatshirt is tossed across the railing, bright red and adult-sized, and I wonder who it belongs to. One of the chaperones? One of the searchers? There are a good half dozen of them here, milling in and out of the cabin in mud-streaked jeans and matching navy jackets.

  Dawn stands just inside the door with a cell phone pressed to her ear, beside a balding man in cargo pants and a sweatshirt. Her gaze flicks to me, and her chin lifts. She holds up a finger.

  While she finishes up her call, I turn back to the stone fire pit in the center of the clearing, surrounded by Adirondack chairs. The wind shifts, and I catch a whiff of wet ash, spot a strip of charring on the wood that looks fresh. “Is this where the fire was?”

  “No. Well, yes and no. The chaperones had a campfire going here, first with the kids and then after the kids went to bed, just the two of them until close to midnight.” Bill points to two chairs, set closer to the fire than the rest. “Both had a clear view of the front door. Even if they weren’t looking directly at it, it’s what—fifteen feet at best? There’s no way they could have missed anyone going in or out.”

  I picture Miss Emma and the kids out here in the dark, roasting marshmallows and talking, watching the sparks dance into the nighttime sky like fireflies. Was the kidnapper already watching from the woods?

  Once again, my mind goes straight to Andrew. I think of the first weekend Ethan spent there after the divorce, when he came home looking like a kid after Christmas, full of stories about train sets and video games and a bed the shape of a race car—all those things Andrew labeled as too indulgent when we were married. As I listened to Ethan describe his new bedroom, I tried not to let on that I was simmering inside. Of course Andrew would try to buy his son’s love, just like he’d once tried to manipulate mine. And clearly, his strategy worked. Ethan soon stopped telling me things—he’s a sensitive child, and he saw how it upset me—but he still skipped out of the house every other weekend, eager to return to his shiny new toys.

  But even if Ethan went willingly with Andrew, one of the chaperones would have noticed.

  And then I realize something else: Bill said both chaperones had a good view of the door. Both as in two.

  “Where were the others?” Bill’s forehead rumples, and I add, “Miss Emma assured me there would be one adult for every five kids. How many children were sleeping in the cabin?”

  “Eighteen, including your son.”

  “So there should have been at least one more adult. Where was she?”

  Bill shakes his head. “I’ll double-check, but as far as I know, it was just those two.”

  My skin heats with a flash of fury that’s as much directed at Miss Emma as it is at myself.

  “But the other fire,” Bill says, gesturing for me to follow, “the one you were referring to, happened out back.”

  He leads me around the side of the cabin, pushing through weeds and underbrush that’s virtually impenetrable, handing me branches that would otherwise snap back and smack me in the face. There’s no path here, no easy way to move through the heavy growth tickling at my damp pants like great daddy longlegs. It creeps all the way up to the building, climbs with sticky vines up the wooden siding.

  He points to a charred piece of wall on the far corner, amid a wide swath of forest cordoned off with police tape. “There. Obviously.”

  The sheriff wasn’t kidding when he says it wasn’t big. Even before the rain started falling, the ground would have been too damp, the trees and ferns too fat with spring showers to have caught fire without some help. Accelerant, the sheriff said, and just enough to engulf a square yard of brush in flames. They cleared the ground and licked up the wall, blackening the wood but as far as I can tell, the cabin didn’t catch fire. But the point is, whoever set it created a fine distraction.

  Bill points to a warped, wooden door in the center of the wall, adorned with a rusty knob and a shiny sliding latch, the kind you see on public bathroom doors. The lock looks brand-new and sturdy enough, but I don’t know why anyone bothered. One good kick and the wood all around it would crumble.

  “The kids went out the front door,” Bill says, “moving away from the fire. Not that they could have done anything else, because as you can see, that door locks from the outside. And there were no prints, in case you were wondering. If someone touched that latch, they either wiped it clean or used a sleeve.”

  “Do we know for sure that Ethan ran out the front door with the other kids? Maybe he was taken out the back.”

  “At this point, it’s still unclear. What we do know for sure is that my guys tracked him that way.” Bill turns and points into the forest behind us, a sea of green with an occasional squiggle of red. I look closer, see that they’re strips of yarn tied to a bush, on a broken twig on the ground, dangling from a hanging branch. Markers. “Well, my guys and Lucas. The sheriff went ballistic when he heard a civilian was contaminating his crime scene, until I told him Lucas was faster and better. I suppose he learned his skills from the Marines.”

  I shake my head. “From the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park. The Marine Corps is just where he perfected them.”

  Lucas lives in woods just like these, a forest thick as a fairy tale stretching from the backyard of his house. He knows every hill and tree, can fo
llow their countless paths with his eyes closed, his fingers skimming the tree trunks like braille signposts. Whenever anybody loses their way, whenever a hiker or camper takes a wrong turn and can’t find their way out of the brush, the park rangers call Lucas. These woods may be different, but give him five minutes, and he’ll know every creature out there.

  Dawn is waiting on the front porch by the time we make our way back around. She points me inside the cabin, where a trio of rubber-gloved investigators are sorting through what looks to be the aftermath of a punch-drunk slumber party. The wooden floorboards are papered with clothing and shoes and dirty socks and tattered comic books. Colorful backpacks are piled in heaps among rumpled sleeping bags, arranged every which way, and I do a sweep of them for Ethan’s, just in case. I point out his sweatshirt, wadded and tossed in the corner, and his jacket hanging by the tag from a hook by the front door. I scan the room again, then one more time just in case. Nothing. The rest of his stuff must be with Ethan, in his backpack.

  “Did you find the compass?”

  Dawn shakes her head, but she doesn’t say anything. I know what she’s thinking—that there’s no logic behind my constant harping about the thing, and maybe she’s right. My desperation for Ethan to have the compass is more emotional than anything. Ethan knows its history, has watched me clean the hinges with a Q-tip and hold it to my chest while I cried. Even if he can’t use it to lead himself out of the woods, at the very least, maybe it will bring him some comfort.

  One of the men by the door steps closer. “Ms. Jenkins, would you mind confirming your son’s sleeping bag for me?”

  I turn, my gaze settling on a spot in the very center of the room, where the camouflage mummy bag I bought for Ethan is laid out, wedged in tight among a sea of black and navy nylon. I picture him there, whispering with the kids on either side long after he should have been asleep, and a tiny ray of joy lightens my heart.