Say That Again

by Sasson, Gemini

  “Why do you think, Hunter? Maybe those rumors Maura was talking about ... maybe there’s a grain of truth to them?”

  No, she was wrong. It couldn’t be. Not Heck. “I’m on my way home, Jenn.”

  After putting his phone away, Hunter turned to Beth. “If you could keep looking for Echo for me ...?”

  Nodding, Beth stepped closer. “Is everything all right at home?”

  “Family emergency. Sorry, I have to go.”

  “We’ll call you. I’m sure your dog just —”

  Hunter didn’t hear the rest of it. His mind was miles ahead of him already.

  Maybe by the time he got home, they’d have found Hannah asleep behind the straw bales in the horse barn. He had to hope.

  chapter 28: Echo

  Her arms around my neck. Her nose buried in my fur. The sweetest things I’ve ever known.

  A dog without his person is only half a dog. If that.

  When I fled from the Grunwalds and was on my own, those endless days and weeks when I sat at the shelter, all that time at Carol and Ed’s when I was small, after my siblings left — I had felt nothing then but alone and empty, even as I tried to convince myself of how independent I was. It embittered me to people. Made me reluctant to trust them.

  The day Mario hit me with the skillet and left me for dead on a country road, that was the worst day of my life. And the luckiest. Because it brought Hannah into my life and opened my world to love. I belonged to the McHugh family. I was a piece of their whole. Without me, they were incomplete.

  How could I make Hannah understand that it was also true for her? I knew she was trying to run away because she saw herself as the cause of recent problems, but she had to have faith that things would work out. Hannah’s parents loved her. Not more or less than Maura, but differently. Like you can love cookies just as much as you love bacon.

  Hannah’s challenges were also her gifts. Her parents were smart enough to know that. Heck had also recognized that gift and taught her how to capture it, shape it, and share it with others. Which was probably why Hannah didn’t want to go home. Because they had taken away her friend. A friend she could see just down the road. A friend who had shown her more purpose and opened her eyes to more wonders than anyone else in her whole life.

  I could relate.

  Yet there was a lot that I still didn’t understand, like why they had forbidden her from going to Heck’s in the first place. We dogs may not always comprehend the complexities of human relationships, but we see what is so plain to us, like the way someone hangs their head in shame; a quiver of fear in their hands; the bitter drawl of loathing in their voices; the way their eyes light up when a loved one walks in the room; the sad longing when they leave. When it came to how the McHughs perceived Heck, I saw a spectrum, a disparity so grave that it left me bewildered.

  Hannah, of course, loved him. It was a love stemming from admiration, from a connection of like souls, and from gratitude. Hunter desperately wanted to trust him, but his wife and oldest daughter’s contrasting sentiments left him confused in loyalty and doubting his own intuition.

  If there’s one thing we dogs know, it’s always trust your gut. Always. Objective analysis is highly overrated. Reasoning is better left to lawyers and scientists. And sometimes Border Collies, but don’t get me started on that.

  Anyway, I digress. Jenn was acting out of fear. Guilt, too, although she didn’t realize it. She wanted to be there for Hannah, but she also wanted to have a life of her own. Maura, on the other hand, was boiling with jealousy. Ever since Hannah had been born, much of her parents’ attention had revolved around her little sister. Lately, it was even worse. And most recently, Hannah was developing a talent far beyond anyone’s expectations. Heck showered her with attention through his patient instruction. Her parents praised every creation. At first they pinned the crayon drawings to the refrigerator with magnets, then they taped them to the kitchen wall, and now they were framing her watercolors and hanging them in the hallway. Meanwhile, Maura — hardworking, athletic, almost-never-been-in-trouble Maura — was brushed aside unwittingly.

  What was she to do but turn the tables on Heck and rob her attention-mongering little sister of all that was important and special to her? Everything but me, that is. Then again, Maura had tried to cast blame on me for Franklin’s disappearance.

  Right now, I was all that Hannah had. I couldn’t convince her to go home, but I could stand by her, make sure she was safe and loved, if only by me, a dog.

  A shiver rippled through Hannah’s tiny frame. Her shoes and socks were wet from jumping in the creek. Her pants all the way up to her knees were soaked, too. In the time since she had climbed down from the tree and huddled next to me, the sun had vanished, its shining face replaced by low, brooding clouds. A damp wind gained force, plying frigid fingers beneath my thick fur. I curled up in Hannah’s lap as she sat cross-legged, doing my best to keep her warm. But it wasn’t enough. Her shivers grew more violent. We needed to get moving. Find shelter.

  I escaped the comforting circle of her arms and whirled around. Her cheeks were ruddy and her eyes red from cold. Pulling her knees in tight, she rested her chin on them, lip quivering.

  She looked so ... lost. Probably because she was.

  Hopping backward a few steps, I bowed low and barked. Anything to entice her to move about, get the blood flowing through her body. She turned her head sideways to lay her cheek on her arm. Head low, butt high, I growled playfully, my nub wagging.

  She laughed. Not a belly-deep, unfettered laugh, but a small one. Her cheeks bunched in a weak smile as she slowly got to her feet. I bounced farther away, leading her on. She moved stiffly the first few strides, but soon she was loping alongside me.

  For miles we walked in silence, our only objective to keep going. Often, I looked around me and inhaled deeply, trying to memorize the landscape by sight and smell. But one tree looks much like another, even to a male dog. Which gave me the idea eventually — hey, better late than never — to mark as many as I could. A habit which annoyed Hannah greatly.

  “Stop it,” she said. “How can you pee that much?”

  She didn’t understand. It was better than leaving a trail of bread crumbs that birds could swoop down and eat. So I lagged behind on occasion, peeing at more random intervals, spraying only a few drops on the trunks so I could make my urine last as long as possible. My tank was emptying. All this walking and peeing was making me thirsty.

  As for smells, the wind was making that hard. I couldn’t pick up any scents, save for those close to the ground. Other animals had passed here, but what kind I had no way of knowing. On the many calls I had gone with Hunter, I had seen plenty of cattle, goats, and sheep, as well as a few horses and llamas. But these smells were none of those.

  The lane dumped out into an overgrown pasture, crowded with scrub brush. We followed the tire tracks some more, until suddenly they weren’t tracks anymore. We stood on what was probably a deer path, the way ahead marked by barely bent stems of growth and an ever-thickening forest. When had we left the path?

  We circled right, crossed our own path, veered left, backtracked when we were confronted with a fallen tree too big for either of us to get over, then climbed a hill to go around it and rejoined the deer path.

  Chin raised, Hannah gazed at the hills ahead. Then she looked at the hills behind us. I was sure they had grown bigger. The trees were also more densely packed, and thicker, and taller.

  As sure as if she had been here before, Hannah tromped on.

  We had no idea where we were going, but it didn’t matter. We were together.

  —o00o—

  We were lost.

  As in, no sign of civilization, whatsoever. Just us two dummies, bumbling along through the wilderness. Pretending we knew what we were doing when we were just hoping to get lucky.

  Talk about stupid.

  But I wasn’t about to tell Hannah that. No matter what, from a dog’s perspective, the human is alway
s right — even when they aren’t. It’s some sort of pact that we’re sworn from birth to uphold. I don’t remember putting my paw print on the dotted line, but who am I to question the Code of Canine Loyalty?

  So I followed her. On and on. Uphill, downhill. Except I was pretty sure the hills were now mountains. Over stream, through trees and more trees, under an old railroad bridge spanning a dry creek bed.

  At some point, Hannah followed a trail that went up high and then along an overhang. Her steps were slow, because they were so small, but she plowed on with the determination of a soldier. At the lip of an outcropping, she stopped and sank to the ground to dangle her boots over the ledge.

  Less confident that the rocks beneath us would not crumble and fall away, I hung back, crouching behind her. Hannah unlooped the straps of her backpack and settled it in her lap. She pulled out a box of cheese crackers. Square, of course.

  Counting them out into her palm, she formed a stack. I couldn’t tell how many, but clearly it had to be something exact. She pinched three off the top and offered them to me. I turned my nose away in denial. Hannah needed her strength more than me.

  She shrugged — “Suit yourself.” — and stuffed all three in her mouth at once.

  The first snowflake that fell landed in her hair. I watched it sparkle as she tilted her head to look in the box, then melt from the heat of her body. More snow tumbled down as Hannah munched away. Flakes so big and fluffy that in the distance they looked like balls of cotton being tossed from above.

  The wind had stopped. It was so quiet now. Breathtakingly, powerfully quiet. Like there was no one else in the whole world but us two. Which could very well have been the case.

  There was not one road, one house, one building anywhere in sight. We could see only the deep greens of the pines and the blended dull grays and browns of the deciduous tree branches, layered one against another, stretching for miles and miles and miles. Snow piled thick upon limbs, etching their forms in webs of pearly white. Here and there, the side of a mountain cut away to reveal sheer walls of stone, some of them soaring high.

  Fingers pressed together as if she were holding a brush, Hannah dabbed at an imaginary piece of paper, painting in the sky the shapes and colors that formed in her mind. Her wrist flicked back and forth, occasionally dipping to wash out her ‘brush’ and then pick up more color.

  In the distance, a crescent of pale yellow shone just above the horizon through lightening clouds. The day was almost over. Night would come soon — and under cloak of darkness would also come the cold.

  Shivering, Hannah plunged her bare hand into the box. Her mouth dipped in a frown.

  “Gone,” she whispered hoarsely as she tossed the box over the ledge. I didn’t look, couldn’t hear it fall, but Hannah leaned forward so far, watching it, that my heart plummeted. I sat up, about to take the back of her coat in my teeth to keep her from falling. But before I could, she pulled her knees up, scooted back, and stood.

  “Let’s go. I’m thirsty.”

  So was I. And I’d long since run out of anything inside me to pee. Unfortunately, it was a long way down to any creek bed and we hadn’t seen one for hours. Not since Hannah had scrambled up that tree.

  But Hannah, being Hannah, marched on with a purpose all her own. Toward a vision that only she could see.

  My duty was to stay at her side. Protect her. Because who knew what dangers we might meet in this vast and rugged land?

  chapter 29: Hunter

  “What the hell is going on?” Hunter stormed at Brad. He’d driven to Heck’s house first. It seemed like the most logical place to get answers. Jenn wasn’t answering her phone.

  Brad motioned him over to the side of the driveway. Three Adair County sheriff’s deputy cars were parked in the driveway. Nathan Bowden, the new sheriff, had just gone inside Heck’s house, as deputies wearing latex gloves carried out objects in plastic bags and put them in the trunk of one of the cruisers.

  Hunter jabbed a finger in their direction. “They’re collecting evidence? Of what?!”

  Putting an arm over his stepson’s shoulder, Brad walked him farther away. Hunter went reluctantly, his head craned to watch the comings and goings in the house.

  “Hector Menendez told them to take anything they wanted,” Brad said, “that he didn’t have anything to hide. I agree the search is a bit overboard, especially since no warrant’s been issued, but Jenn —”

  “How could she point the finger at him, Brad? And why? What makes her think he did anything to Hannah?” As soon as the words were out, Hunter wanted them back. Did Jenn know something he didn’t? What if Heck —?

  “She saw him put a large trash bag into the trunk of his car sometime after you left this morning. Shortly after that, Heck drove off. When Jenn discovered Hannah was gone and went outside looking for her a little over an hour later, Heck pulled back into his driveway.”

  A shot of lead dropped through Hunter’s gut, tearing apart his insides. Maybe there was more to this than he thought. But there’d never been any indication, any proof that Heck was anything but a regular, decent guy. A widower restarting his life, wanting nothing but a peaceful existence. Things had gone so well between him and Hannah. No, as much as he loved Jenn, she’d assumed too much.

  “So the first thing she did was accuse Heck? Come on, Brad. You know Hannah. She could be anywhere — asleep in the hayloft, stuck in a tree somewhere ... The last time she ran off, it was because she thought she heard a bird talking to her.”

  “Yeah, I know. We’re on it. I explained it to Nate and told him their efforts would be better spent combing the area for Hannah. He already called out two canine units from adjacent counties. They’re on their way. The fire department is organizing volunteers as we speak. The community has pulled together in an incredibly short time. Pretty amazing, really, what folks will do for their neighbors.”

  “I appreciate it, Brad. I do. It’s just that ... this ...” He waved a hand at the sheriff’s cars lined up. “It’s not right. We need to find Hannah. Not initiate a witch hunt.”

  Curving a hand around the back of his neck, Brad nodded. “I agree. This should be about finding your little girl. And they’re going to do that, Hunter. They will. But right now, like I said, Heck’s cooperating fully.”

  “Tell me, Brad, not in your professional opinion, but based on your gut. Do you think they have any reason to suspect Heck? I mean, Hannah hasn’t been gone for more than a couple of hours. So Heck put something in his car, drove somewhere, and came back. So what? There could be a hundred explanations for that.”

  “There could be, but ...” Brad gave a telling half shrug. “It’s circumstantial, yes. But in cases like this, it’s best to explore all leads, no matter how much we don’t want to believe the worst possibilities.”

  Worst? Hunter was trying to let it all sink in. And yet he resisted. How could everything in his world change so damn fast?

  “Where’s Jenn?”

  Brad tipped his head toward Hunter’s house. “Home. With Lise and Maura. Nate told them it would be best if they stayed there, so if any news came we’d be able to find them.”

  Hunter started toward his car, but Brad hooked a hand around his elbow to stop him.

  “It’s been hard on her, Hunter. Don’t blame her for what’s happening to Heck. She’s beside herself with worry. No matter what, remember that this is about Hannah.” He clasped Hunter’s shoulder, squeezing. “Remember.”

  How could he forget? The entire ride here from the Appletons’ — normally a thirty-five-minute drive, but he’d done it in twenty-six, all the while hoping that the state patrol didn’t pull him over — all he could think was that there had to be some logical explanation for where Hannah was. Somehow, the pieces would snap together and they’d find her. Or clues about where she was, at least. Right under their noses, probably. But he’d been disappointed to arrive here and see that was obviously not the case.

  A commotion on the front steps drew Hunter�
�s attention. There, four deputies were escorting Heck out in handcuffs.

  Hunter bolted forward.

  “Hunter!” Brad called.

  But there was no way Hunter was going to let them do this to his friend. He got to the sheriff’s car just as Heck scooted into the backseat, his arms bent behind him.

  “Stop! Wait!” Hunter shouldered his way past the two deputies bringing up the rear. He wedged himself between Heck and the door before they could shut it. “Heck, what’s going on here?”

  A wry smile crossed Heck’s mouth. He spoke softly, calmly, but there was an underlying worry to his voice. “They’re just going to ask me some questions, Dr. McHugh. That’s all.”

  “Like this?”

  “Everything will be fine where I’m concerned. Trust me.”

  “Don’t talk to them without a lawyer, Heck. Don’t.”

  “I considered that. But they’ll see soon enough this is all a grave misunderstanding. The sooner I give them a statement and clear my name, the sooner they’ll move on.” He shifted his legs to face front, the seat creaking beneath him. “Don’t worry about me, Doc. Let Echo help you find Hannah. That dog’s your best bet.”

  Drawing back, Hunter nodded. He lifted a hand in a goodbye as they shut the door, but Heck kept his eyes forward, his face devoid of emotion. The car pulled away, followed by another cruiser.

  “Believe me,” Hunter muttered to himself, “if I knew where Echo was right now, I’d set that dog loose and let him lead us right to Hannah.”

  The two cars drove off into the distance, leaving behind more questions than answers. His mind numb, Hunter drove the short distance to his house. He parked next to the kitchen door, not bothering to put his truck up in the garage. If any news came about where his daughter was, he wanted to get there as quick as possible.

  The back door swung open and Jenn came to stand on the back steps, waiting for him. Her eye sockets were red, like someone had punched her in both eyes repeatedly. For a moment, she swayed, holding herself. Then, her shoulders crumpled forward and she collapsed to her knees, covering her face with her hands.