She's Got a Way

by Maggie McGinnis

  “She said nothing? To anybody?” Gabi scanned their faces, desperate for an eye twitch or a nervous gesture that would tell her somebody knew something … anything. But not one of them moved a muscle.

  “Can any of you think of anything that might have set her off yesterday? Did something happen? Did one of you say something? Anything?” Gabi put up her hands. “Free pass here, guys. I don’t care what it was, or who said what. We need to know. If there’s something that’ll help us figure out where she went, we have to know.”

  All three girls shook their heads, and as much as she was grasping for a glimmer of hope that one of them was holding on to a little nugget of information that would help, none of them spoke.

  Dammit.

  Just then, Luke hustled down the path, clipping a radio to the strap of his backpack. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  The girls froze for a moment, not sure what “let’s do this” was going to entail. Then Luke pointed to Eve.

  “What do we look for first?”

  “Clues at the departure spot.” She rattled off the answer automatically, and he smiled.

  “Exactly. So what do we know?” He pointed at Madison.

  “She packed her survival pack. Food and water. The spare sleeping bag.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “Waverly? Any other observations?”

  Waverly scanned the clearing, then looked like she’d just realized something. “She took the dogs.” She smiled. “Luke, she took the dogs!”

  Gabi looked at Luke, who nodded thoughtfully as he slid his own water bottle into its slot. How had she not noticed the dogs were missing?

  “Well,” he finally said, “that’s actually good news.”

  “Because?”

  “Because the dogs will actually slow her down. When they get tired, they’ll just sit their little butts down and refuse to keep going. She’ll have to wait.”

  “So that’s good, then.” Gabi took a deep breath. “She won’t have gone as far, maybe.”

  “Maybe. Unless she’s carrying them, which she might totally do. But that’ll add almost twenty pounds to her load, so that’ll slow her down, too.” Luke looked at each of the girls. “Last call for any information anyone’s holding out on us. No repercussions, no blame. But if there’s anything at all, we need to know. And we need to know it now.”

  He waited. And waited. He pinned his eyes on Eve, then Waverly, then Madison, and back again. None of them offered up anything, and Gabi was ready to push them all up the trail to get moving, but he just stood there, hands on his hips, the picture of I-can-wait-all-day-here.

  What was he doing? They were wasting valuable time! Every minute they stood here in this clearing was another minute of Sam moving farther away from them. If they wanted to find her before the search-and-rescue team got involved, they needed to move. Now.

  She widened her eyes at him, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly, then kept staring at the girls.

  Gabi stared as well. What was he seeing that she wasn’t? What energy was he picking up on that made him stand stock-still and try to draw them out? Was he just bluffing?

  He totally had to be bluffing.

  And then Eve took a quick, catchy breath, and before she could turn around to catch them, two tears streamed down her cheeks. Gabi’s eyes widened as she looked at her, but Luke put a hand out toward Gabi, subtle and low—don’t push—so she stood still, waiting.

  Madison and Waverly turned toward Eve, their mouths open. Madison was the one to finally speak. “What the hell, Eve? What’s going on?”

  Eve swallowed and wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath. She looked at Gabi, then at Luke, biting her lip, then blowing out the breath slowly. Finally, when Gabi was just about at her breaking point, Eve spoke.

  “She doesn’t want to go back to Briarwood.” She took a shaky breath. “Said she’d rather take her chances with the bears than go back.”

  Gabi felt her jaw drop at the same second her knees turned to melted wax. What?

  “What are you talking about? I’ve never seen her so happy as she’s been the past couple of weeks. I don’t underst—” Gabi shook her head, her eyes wide. “Why would she do this?”

  Eve crossed her arms. “Because this is about to end. That’s why. In two weeks, we’ll be back on campus as the resident scholarship girls.” She put up a hand. “And don’t go all wide-eyed like you think you kept that a big secret. Seriously, Gabi. Everybody knew it the minute we arrived.”

  “They did not.” Gabi wished her voice sounded stronger as she argued.

  Madison blew out a breath. “Yeah, we did.” Waverly nodded in agreement, looking worriedly from Gabi to Luke.

  “Okay.” Gabi’s mind spun. “Right now, that’s neither here nor there. Which way was she heading?”

  “We don’t know,” Eve replied. “And that’s the truth. I caught her packing the other night, but I didn’t know if she’d actually do it.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “I think the answer to that’s kind of obvious right now.” She pulled her arms closer to her body. “I mean, given the situation.”

  “Nobody saw her leave?”

  All three of them shook their heads.

  Luke shifted his backpack. “All right. Then we need to assume she’s got at least five hours on us. We need to move. Now.” He headed for the trail they’d always used for their hikes, walking at a fast clip.

  “How do you know she went this way?” Gabi struggled to keep pace.

  “I don’t. But if she was in a hurry to put some distance between herself and camp, she’d take the route she knew.”

  “But wouldn’t she assume we’d assume that?”

  “Depends how desperate she was when she left. And I’m figuring she was pretty desperate, if she took off at that hour into these woods.” He turned to see if the girls were keeping up. “What are we looking for, girls?”

  “Tracks,” Madison offered. “Hers and the dogs’.”

  “Good. Waverly? What else?”

  “Broken bushes, trampled grass, maybe a piece of her hair caught on something?”

  “Yup. Eve? Anything else?”

  “Dog poo.”

  The other girls let out tension giggles, and Luke laughed. “Perfect. Use your eyes, use your ears, and—now that she’s suggested it—use your noses.”

  When they were twenty minutes away from camp, the trail forked, so Luke stopped short to look for evidence of which way Sam had gone. He leaned down to check for tracks, but didn’t immediately indicate one route or the other. Gabi and the girls took sips of their water, waiting for direction. Finally, he pointed to the right, so they started walking that way. Two minutes later, he put a hand out to stop them.

  He shook his head, looking down at the hard-packed path. “Little imp. I thought so.”

  “What?” Gabi followed his gaze, but couldn’t see anything helpful.

  “Look right here.” He bent his knees and pointed at a faint imprint in the dirt. “There’s her track.” Then he pointed at the edge of the trail. “And there’s one of the dogs.”

  “Okay?”

  “Well, Sam’s feet are aiming this way.” He pointed down the trail. “And the dog’s feet are heading back toward camp.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He shook his head. “It means that she came this way to trick us, then backed up on her own tracks and headed down the other fork. But apparently she wasn’t thinking about the dog tracks giving her away.” He made a spinning motion with his index finger. “Turn around. Back to the fork, and we’ll take the other trail this time.”

  They all turned around and walk-jogged back to the spot where the trail split. This time they headed down the left fork, but it was five minutes before Eve spotted any evidence of Sam traveling that way.

  Gabi shivered. “I can’t believe she was out here in the dark. She must have been terrified.”

  Her chest hurt as she thought about Sam trucking along
this trail in the pitch-black night, with only the pups for company. What had she been thinking? What was she planning on doing, for God’s sake? Gabi prayed that she was safe, and as the sun rose higher in the sky, baking the dew from the leaves and grass, she felt physically ill that this had happened on her watch.

  On her watch. Right. All she’d been paying attention to last night was Luke.

  His radio clicked, and he pulled it from his chest as Oliver checked in.

  “Any luck out there?”

  “Negative,” Luke replied. “but we’re on her trail. Tracks are a couple of hours old, so she’s got a good jump on us.”

  “Okay. Team’s gathering here in the parking lot. You think we should send somebody in from Webster Road? See if we can intercept?”

  Gabi watched as Luke checked a map and nodded, giving Oliver GPS coordinates and a bunch of other numbers and directions Gabi didn’t understand. Then he clicked off and started walking again. The girls were still oddly silent behind them.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Gabi asked.

  “Yep.”

  Luke turned and headed up the trail at an even faster clip, the girls right on his heels, and she realized she needed to catch up or be bear bait. She tightened her straps and took a deep breath, scanning both sides of the trail before she started. Something caught her eye through a tangle of bushes—a path of trampled grass that angled out of sight into the woods.

  She looked up the trail, but Luke and the girls were already out of sight. Should she just check it out quickly and then catch up to them? She’d hate to call them back if what she was looking at was just a deer path, because they’d lose valuable time getting to Sam.

  “Gabriela?” Luke’s voice startled her from the top of the rise.

  “I found something,” she called. “Maybe.”

  He motioned to the girls, who appeared over the rise, one by one, and they all came back down the hill toward her. When he reached where Gabi was standing, she pointed at the grass.

  “I don’t know if it’s a person path or something else, but it looks like something came through here not long ago, right?”

  He squinted, then squatted down and separated blades of grass, but after doing that for a few seconds, he shook his head.

  “I don’t see any animal tracks, and that ground’s soft enough that I’d see prints. It’s possible she veered off and came this way.”

  “On purpose?”

  He looked mystified. “I don’t think so. The trail gets harder to see right about here. She definitely could have gotten confused and thought she was headed in the right direction by going this way.” He nodded. “Let’s check it out.”

  He slapped a reflective arrow on the tall pine right next to them, then motioned for them all to follow him. For the next half hour, they did just that, starting and stopping and changing direction until they’d ended up doing what felt like a complete circle. They were no longer on the trail, so all five of them fanned out, looking for any sign that Sam or the dogs had come through here.

  Just as Gabi was about to suggest she’d been wrong about the path through the grass, Luke put up a hand, and they all stopped moving at once.

  “Listen.”

  Gabi froze in place, desperate to hear whatever he was hearing. They stayed still for an entire minute, but she didn’t dare move, as his hand was still in the air, waiting.

  Then she heard it.

  A yip. A tiny, faraway yip.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at the girls, who were suddenly smiling. “Is that them?” she whispered. “Do you recognize the bark?”

  Luke tipped his head, but frowned. “I don’t know. Could be the search dogs are out by now.”

  “Would they be this far out already?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Valley makes it impossible to tell where the sound’s coming from. Bounces off the rock walls like a damn pinball machine.”

  The girls waited in silence as he spun slowly on one heel, trying to pinpoint where the yips were originating, and after a few seconds, he finally seemed to decide. He stuck another reflective arrow to a tree, pointing due north, and then called in their coordinates to Oliver.

  After they’d done the requisite check-in, he clipped the radio back on his pack, and looked at the girls.

  “How’s everybody doing?” They all nodded. “We okay to keep going? Because if not, one half of us can rest here for a bit while the others keep going.”

  “No way,” Eve said. “Nobody’s resting till we find Sam.”

  Luke looked at the other two. “You guys agree? You’re good?”

  “We’re good,” Madison said. “Let’s roll.”

  Ten minutes later, after clambering over a series of rock walls that had demarcated a long-ago property line, they paused to catch their breath and listen for the barking. For a long moment, they heard nothing but the birds, but then, just as Gabi feared they’d headed in the completely wrong direction, they heard another yip. This time, it was louder. Oh, thank God. They were getting closer.

  The faint bark spurred them all forward, and they moved in silence broken only by their labored breaths as they half walked, half slid down the side of a deep gully and up the other side. When they got to the top and paused to listen again, Gabi looked at her watch. They’d been out here for a long time already, and she couldn’t tell if they really were any closer to Sam than they’d been when they started. Was she moving just as fast as they were?

  “I don’t hear anything,” she whispered to Luke as the girls uncapped their water bottles.

  He sighed, staring intently in the direction of where they thought the last yips had come from. Then he spun slowly in place, and she could see his eyes darting left to right, left to right, looking for any evidence that Sam had come through here.

  Madison wiped her forehead. “Is it weird that we haven’t seen any prints or anything? How do we know we’re really on the right track?”

  Luke shook his head. “Not weird. She could have walked a path ten feet to the left or right of us, heading the same direction, and we wouldn’t necessarily pick up on her trail. That’s why search teams fan out the way they do. But we have a target sound, which is better than I expected we’d have. We just need to figure out where the damn thing is coming from.”

  He looked around one more time, and Gabi felt her stomach clench as she noticed the tightness in his jaw. He was conveying a confidence he didn’t feel—she could tell—so he didn’t freak the girls out.

  He motioned them forward. “Come on. Let’s stay on our heading, and eventually we’ll meet up with the team coming in from the west.”

  Madison shook her head. “We’ll find her first. We have to.”

  Half an hour later, they’d traversed another wide gully, scrambling up the far side by holding on to trees and each other. Gabi couldn’t imagine Sam managing the climb by herself, especially without leaving evidence. The five of them had churned up leaves, pine needles, and rocks on their way up the hill. If they somehow ended up lost, the search team would have no problem figuring out which way they’d gone.

  Of course, the fact that Luke kept slapping those arrows on trees every fifty feet would probably help, too. She caught up to him as they jogged down a steep grade toward a stream. “What’s with the arrows? Are you afraid we might get lost, too?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Just trying to help Sam find us if she’s decided to start looking.”

  “Oh.” Gabi swallowed. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Shh.” He put a finger to his lips.

  “But—”

  He put his hand lightly against her mouth. “Listen. Shh.” He pointed a little to the left of where they were heading. “They’re barking again.”

  Gabi felt her face break into a wide smile as she realized what he was hearing. It was definitely the dogs, and oh God, they were so close now.

  The girls stood up straighter, new energy pouring into the
ir exhausted legs, as they heard it, too.

  Waverly’s eyes widened. “They sound like they’re just over that hill.”

  “They might be,” Luke answered. “I hope to God they are. But remember—sound does funny things in these woods. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll walk a hundred steps, and then we’ll stop and listen. We’re close, and I don’t want to get stupid at this point and walk right by her.”

  He pointed in the direction it seemed like the yips were coming from, sending the girls ahead to count their steps, while he hung back with Gabi.

  When they were out of hearing range, he turned to her, and this time, his face was registering a completely different emotion that made her chest jump.

  “What’s wrong?” Her voice shook.

  “I don’t know”—he blew out a careful breath—“but I think we’d better be prepared. Those dogs don’t bark.”

  “You’re scaring me, Luke.”

  “Not trying to. Just trying to prepare you. They wouldn’t be barking unless there was something wrong. They’re just not barkers.”

  “So why are we standing here?” Gabi clutched her stomach. “Oh, God, Luke. What if—”

  He shook his head, putting up a hand. “Don’t play the what if game. There are way too many of them out here. You’ll make yourself crazy. But here’s the plan—when I think we’re close enough to finding her, I’m going to send you and the girls in another direction and I’m going to go check things out.”

  “No! You can’t send us off. She’s my kid.”

  “Gabi.” He put both hands on her shoulders. “Listen to me. If something bad has happened, then you don’t want the other girls to come across her first. Believe me.”

  “Luke—” Gabi felt tears threaten.

  He squeezed her shoulders. “Let’s pray for the best, okay? Something big enough to hurt her probably would have done in the dogs first.”

  Gabi’s eyes widened. “So it’s actually a good sign that they’re barking.”

  “Let’s go with that.” He turned around. “Come on.”