Fall Hunter

by M K Dymock

  She stumbled forward, ten yards from the camp, but before she could take another step, a crack of thunder shook the ground. A waterfall gushed over the cliffs above and water poured around the sides of the tent, pushing it from behind. The cooler sat by the tent door, still unaffected by the flood behind it.

  The sand of the wash slipped from under her feet. She fell backward as the stream morphed into a raging river. After finding her feet, she stumbled back to the sleeping bag, abandoning the tent and cooler. She grabbed the sleeping bag and tugged it farther up a rocky hill, high above the wash to a short stand of juniper. Other than scaling the cliff, this spot offered the highest ground in the area.

  She stripped off her mud-encrusted jersey and shorts and wiped herself down as best she could. The interior of the sleeping bag remained mostly dry and she unzipped it to wrap around her like a blanket, trying to control the shivering as the world around her washed away.

  Hope may float, but despair is the anchor that holds it down.

  Somebody stole Elizabeth’s child. It never made sense that Keen, her too-careful daughter, had been in an accident and couldn’t be found. She would never have gone far enough off the trail to disappear alone.

  Elizabeth had taken Keen to a playground when she was seven, and wouldn’t allow her to climb on the monkey bars for fear she’d fall. Another mother, whose several children ran around in chaos, had said, “It’s okay for her to fall. She fell the first time she walked.” Elizabeth didn’t reply, simply scooped Keen into her arms and went elsewhere in the park. What she wanted to say was that, no, her baby had not fallen the first time she walked because her mother caught her. That day and every day since.

  Even Daniel, lover of risk, wouldn’t take a chance on their breakable girl. He carried her in a pack on every hike until she turned five and wriggled so much on a boulder scramble, she almost fell out.

  Elizabeth would never admit it, but when Daniel, who was the only person she truly trusted with Keen, would take her on weekend excursions, she experienced actual relief. Being entirely responsible for this one delicate life exhausted her. She took Keen into the outdoors as much as possible, wanting her daughter to feel that same sense of freedom that she did. But each trip left her frazzled at the trouble a small child could get into. When Daniel took her, she could sleep easy knowing he carried the responsibility.

  But all that care and precaution didn’t matter. The demons simply waited until Keen grew too old to be under her parents’ protection to steal her.

  Keen hadn’t talked much to her mother Labor Day weekend, and Elizabeth had attributed it to sadness at returning to school. She’d found Keen in the garage packing up a few boxes. The purple mountain bike, purchased at Jake’s encouragement, leaned against the wall, already covered in a layer of dust. “You taking that with you?”

  “No, I’ll have my road bike.” Keen didn’t look up from the box she rummaged through.

  “That was a waste of a grand. You should sell it and get some money back.”

  Keen didn’t respond as she folded the box up.

  “Why hold on to it if you’re not going to use it?” Like a lot of mothers, Elizabeth mastered making a point by circling around it. What she wanted to say was Jake wouldn’t come back and there’s no sense in holding on to a bike she would only ride with him.

  Keen straightened and looked Elizabeth in the eye. “Stop, just stop.” A plethora of emotions worked their way across Keen’s face, but the ones that struck Elizabeth the hardest were ones she had rarely seen her daughter’s face—anger and fear.

  “Keen, you’re young; there’ll be other guys.”

  “This isn’t about … I’ve got packing to do.”

  Elizabeth had to head back to the store. She wanted to get everything closed up by seven so they could enjoy their evening, and she didn’t want an argument.

  Why hadn’t Elizabeth put her arms around her daughter and asked about the tears? Why hadn’t she told her she was so much better than Jake? Or more importantly, why hadn’t she just shut up and listened for once?

  All the protectiveness hadn’t been for Keen after all; it was to quiet Elizabeth’s own anxieties. The worst had happened, and guilt filled her as she wondered if she’d done anything to prepare Keen for it.

  Elizabeth paced until she reached a corner in the house, trapped. She turned, but the situation repeated itself. She had no place to go, no place left to search. Her child hadn’t gotten lost up some trail waiting to be rescued; Keen was …

  “No,” she said out loud. “Don’t stop; you can’t stop.”

  Daniel had left to walk the river, a place he knew better than his own home. He knew every spot to put rafts in, to camp in, and every treacherous rapid. Floods would not halt him. He figured if Keen had run into trouble on the river, she would know places to escape. Elizabeth hadn’t stopped him; at least he did something. What could she do?

  Blake had the list of people Keen had seen over the weekend. What about the days and months before that? Once again, she would call everyone she knew, who was everyone Keen knew. She scrolled through her contacts on her phone as her fingers shook. She pushed Grace’s number first.

  “What do you need?” Grace dispensed with the hello. With anyone else, it would’ve come off as harsh; with Grace it was efficiency. “I’m getting into my car now. Where do you want me?”

  Grace knew everyone Elizabeth didn’t. What’s more, she knew what everyone tried to keep hidden.

  24

  A man in a crisply ironed gray suit opened the door of the office and glanced around, surprised. Blake, who sat at a makeshift card table covered in receipts from Dawson’s, understood his confusion. This man operated in a world of assistants, waiting rooms, and elevators.

  Blake remained silent and still, not wanting to alleviate the lawyer’s obvious discomfort. Charlie glanced up from his computer and blinked away the words he’d stared at. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Lucas Welby. I’m the—”

  Blake stood. “You’re the lawyer for those idiot boys I have back in the jail cell, and you want them released immediately.”

  Welby opened and closed his mouth in a vain attempt to recover the words stolen from him. “Well … yes. Possession of pot is a misdemeanor offense. It won’t be long until your state legalizes it. I’m sure I can get the charges dropped. If not, it’s going to be very difficult, not to mention costly, to charge them in Connecticut. Once I post bail, they’ll be on a plane ride home.”

  Blake hated lawyers; they always complicated what should be easy. He gestured to the man to follow him into his office, where he shut the door behind them. “Look, you and I both know I don’t give a crap about a weed charge. Most of the town’s transitional residents and a few permanent ones light up each night. But those boys of yours know something about a missing girl. They tell me what they know, and they’ll be on a plane a lot sooner.”

  “I don’t imagine them getting wrapped up in a murder investigation is worth the minor hassle of a pot misdemeanor.”

  “Do you know these boys personally?”

  “I know Sebastian, as I work for his parents. Camden Gregerson’s parents asked me to help out.”

  “Oh, good. My guess is you’ve had the pleasure to get Sebastian out of some minor scrapes prior to this, and you know how smart he is about talking when he shouldn’t.”

  Welby flinched. “He’s a good boy.”

  “Yep, but not a smart one. He’s already admitted Camden spoke to the girl and that she rejected him—even made fun of his friend for being mad about it. He said he didn’t see her.” Blake smiled. “Pot charges won’t cling to him, but this sure will, even if he’s completely innocent. Let Sebastian talk about his friend; we both know where your priorities lie.”

  Welby leaned forward in the chair. “It sounds like your problem is with Camden, not Sebastian.”

  Blake now understood the man’s loyalties. “Yes. However, the media loves to portray young rich boys
as predators of innocent young women. This will follow Sebastian as much as Camden. Every time someone Googles his name, suspicions will come up. All I have to do is talk to one reporter.” He crossed his arms and eyed the lawyer. “Get them both to talk and both go home.”

  “I want to talk to Sebastian in private.”

  Blake put on his best small-town drawl. “Sure enough. You can even use my office.”

  After depositing Sebastian, he shut his office door on them. He and Charlie stared at the closed door, both quietly wishing they’d thought to put in recording devices. Illegal, yes, but also informative.

  “Can’t imagine how much this’ll cost their parents,” Charlie said.

  “When you got money, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “Would you do that for your kids?”

  Blake thought of his daughter, so much like his wife. Five years old and already asking her teacher if she could run for class president of kindergarten. “They’re not this stupid.”

  “But would you them bail out?”

  He tried to take a swig of coffee only to discover an empty cup. “Hell yeah. I’ve seen too many cops bust someone just so they can have an arrest. I’ll get my kid out and decide later whether or not I need to bust them. You protect your own. Always.”

  After about 30 minutes, the lawyer came out; Sebastian and Camden were ready to talk.

  An hour later, Blake and Clint, who’d returned, sat down with the lawyer and his clients. The county attorney, a friend of William’s and a grandmother who spent most days gardening, had worked up the papers, and all parties signed.

  “If I think you’re lying,” Blake started out, “then there is no deal.”

  “My clients have no reason to lie, and you have no call to distrust them. Camden will explain what happened.” Welby was too smart to let Sebastian start blabbing.

  Camden crossed his legs and smiled. “He can’t charge us with anything we say?”

  “No.”

  “I saw the pissy little nothing on the trail. She’d pitched over, and I stopped to make sure she was okay because that’s the kind of man I am.”

  “Where?” Blake asked.

  “A mile or so from the bottom, maybe. But we saw her again later, on the highway.”

  Blake leaned forward and folded his arms on the table between them. Nobody had seen Keen returning home on the highway.

  “She had a flat tire and was walking it up the side of the road, and again I stopped to render aid.”

  Sebastian snickered in the chair beside him like a twelve-year-old. “She didn’t let you render much.”

  “Shut up.” He kicked Sebastian’s chair before turning back to Blake. “She refused my help, and we drove off. It was about halfway up the Gorge.” Halfway up was approximately where they found the bike.

  “When you left her, she was still walking up the highway?”

  “Yeah,” he scoffed. “I guess the stupid bitch should’ve taken me up on my offer. Serves her right.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Clint said, pounding a fist on the table.

  Blake touched his arm to call him back. “Is that it?”

  Camden met his gaze. “Yep, that’s it.”

  Blake pushed up from the table, but Clint’s voice halted him. “That’s not it. What are you holding back?”

  The boy looked to Blake and his lawyer. “That’s it.”

  “Bull. If that was it, you would’ve told us that yesterday and been done with it,” Clint continued. “You only have immunity for what you say in this room. That doesn’t hold if we find out something later.”

  Camden once again checked his lawyer’s gaze, and with barely a nod in agreement, he started talking. “We were only going up the canyon to grab some beers at the gas station before heading down. The Junction doesn’t have Guinness.” He paused. “Look, I didn’t hit her. I threw the bottle but it missed. That’s it.”

  “You did what?” Clint asked.

  “I didn’t hit her.”

  “And you wonder why she didn’t take you up on your offer.”

  Camden came half out of his chair. “She had it—”

  “Where?” Blake interrupted before the boy got too sidetracked.

  He sat back down. “I don’t know; it was getting dark. In the flats somewhere, but not in the canyon.”

  Much to his frustration, Blake had to sign out the two boys. Welby wasted no time in escorting his charges out and onto a plane to be some other town’s problem, leaving Clint and Blake alone in his office.

  “She made it out of the canyon alive.”

  Blake didn’t respond to the painfully obvious statement.

  “That means someone grabbed her and then drove her bike out to hide it. She didn’t fall, didn’t get lost, didn’t run off.”

  Blake never made it past patrolman in Chicago, and Clint had never lived anywhere but Lost Gorge. Neither of them had dealt with anything like this. What they knew, they learned through training, not experience.

  “Should we call in the FBI?” Clint asked.

  The rain pounded against the roof, a tin one designed to allow feet of snow to slide off. “No. People in this town won’t cooperate with a stranger and all the Feds do is trample over everything.”

  “We could still call them to advise.”

  “Not yet. Somebody in this town knows something, saw something. Taking Keen broke someone’s established pattern and that wouldn’t go unnoticed. We need to find the break in the pattern.”

  Blake stood, pulling his green rain jacket off his chair. “I’m going to track down everyone Keen spoke to in the few days before her disappearance. I want you to keep after Gauge Ferguson. Have him in questioning by morning.”

  25

  Friday Morning

  The rain stopped. Still, Keen bunkered down with the sleeping bag pulled over her head. A few times during the night, she’d dry-heaved into the mud. Her gut had long since vacated any food and water. Each heave felt like her stomach wanted to force itself inside out.

  Her head weighed too much for her neck and her legs refused any command to move. While the skies were dry, they were still filled with clouds, though not as thick and menacing. She didn’t know how long she lay there drifting between awake and asleep. She unzipped the bag, letting in the cold as an added incentive to force movement.

  When she was a kid, her mom always seemed to know when Keen was sick and would be there with a bowl and cold washcloth. It happened quite a bit when she was young, before they realized she was allergic to shellfish. How many nights had her mom slept within a few feet?

  The last day they’d been together, they’d fought. Not so much fought, because Keen couldn’t say what she needed to, but their tones were terse. All her life she’d heard how tight money was, how the store never made enough, but Keen found a file that showed they had more cash coming in than Keen could account for. It was a mistake, had to be. She saved the file on her laptop, waiting for the right time to question her mother, but she never did. Didn’t want to upset her last day at home.

  Truth be told, her parents coddled and protected her from everything, and Keen half-heartedly pushed back. Not anymore.

  Her mom wasn’t there to hold her hair back as she threw up. Her dad couldn’t carry her pack for her. And Jake wasn’t going to save her; he couldn’t even be bothered to call her when she was in trouble.

  Keen threw off the sleeping bag, letting in the frozen morning air. Her damp clothes didn’t offer much protection from the temperatures. Her ears ached from cold and her fingers tingled as she made her way back to the campsite to ravage what she could. The raging flood of the night before had receded back into a small stream. The tent and cooler were washed away. No tracks surrounded the area. Had the campers tried to return the evening before but turned back from the water?

  She found the tent about 100 feet downstream, wrapped up with mud and branches that had pierced holes through the thin fabric. She yanked on it but only succeeded in tearing it more.
A week ago, she’d set up an identical one in the store for a Labor Day sale display. Threading her finger through one of the bigger holes, she ripped the slippery fabric to form a large tear. After a tug-of-war, she managed to pull out a two-foot chunk, reasoning that a waterproof, brightly colored piece of fabric could come in handy. The cooler lay about twenty feet away, tipped over and its contents washed away.

  She dug a water bottle out of the mud, surprisingly still filled to the brim, and stuffed it in the rolls of the sleeping bag. Despite the loss, she took inventory of her items quite joyfully as she made her way back to the site: a sleeping bag and one water bottle. Encompassed in those things were life.

  But behind her lay death.

  She circled the site itself, looking for a road in or any sign of tracks. The rains had washed out much of the top layer of dirt and the brush grew thick, meaning getting a vehicle in would be difficult. The only tracks she’d seen the previous day had been four-wheeler. Maybe this had been a cow camp—a place for the cowboys tending the cattle.

  Whatever it was, it was gone now. And the floods could prevent the campers from returning any time soon. She needed to find her way back to the trough, the last place she’d known where a trail was.

  She threw the sleeping bag around her shoulders, waded across the stream, and moved on.

  After about ten feet of walking in the mud, she considered her footprints. The stream ran at a few feet wide, but a whole lot slower than the rage of the previous night. She stepped into it, sliding down the bank into the crack it carved through the dirt. The speed of the water almost pushed her down, but she took a few halting steps upstream, toward the cliff.

  The water threatened to pull her under with each step and Keen fought to keep upright. To fall would carry her downstream. If she didn’t drown, being soaked through with a wet sleeping bag would eventually kill her. She listened for the roar of water that would signal another rush of flash flood. If she heard that, it would be running time. Only a few drops fell, but the clouds promised more.