by Jeff Shelby
She folded her arms across her chest. “So that's what you'd do? If it were me?”
Her hair was rumpled from sleep, her face scrubbed clean, and she looked almost like the Elizabeth of yesteryear. The one I’d lost that day in December while decorating the lawn. My heart seized up and I had to look away.
“Come on. That's not fair.”
“What's not fair about it?” she asked. “His parents are gone. His friend is worried.” She paused. “And so is his girlfriend.”
“And the police can do a lot more than I can,” I said. “Or the park services or the forestry service.”
She frowned and stared down at me with Lauren's eyes, unblinking and unrelenting, and it was like an entire decade washed away and I was left staring at the little girl I’d let down, the child I’d lost and had taken too many years to find. The clues had all been there, right there in front of me, and I’d missed them all.
I looked away.
“Please, Dad,” she finally whispered. Her voice was thick with tears. “Please. Tim said it took them like two hours to get there. We can go right now.” She paused. “I'm just worried.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I knew better. I knew I needed to say no to her and just let it all play out. Aaron would be fine. He'd come home. They could go back to being a couple or whatever they were, and I could go back to being an anxious, overprotective dad.
But she wouldn't stop looking at me. And I couldn’t stop the waves of guilt and remorse that washed over me, forceful and unrelenting.
I grunted and rubbed at the back of my neck, stalling for time, hoping logic and reason would kick in and squash the emotions coursing through me.
Elizabeth just stared at me, waiting, her eyes glistening with tears, her mouth set in a firm line. But I could see it trembling. She was fighting for control. And she was losing.
I took a deep breath. She needed me.
And I wasn’t going to let her down. Not now. Not ever.
“We can probably get there in ninety minutes,” I told her. “Let me get dressed.”
SIX
When I was a kid, my father took us to Palm Springs once a year for the weekend. Inevitably, it was during the summer when the rates were cheaper and the temperatures were at their highest. We'd stay in a bare bones motel and I'd swim all day and get too much sun and pass out in the room on an old bed, then get up early to do it again the next day. He always insisted on taking the back road to the desert, a curving highway that cut through the mountains and looked not much like the rest of Southern California. But at the very top, we'd come around a curve and the lights of the desert cities would sparkle in the night like some sort of distant planet down below and it would always take my breath away.
I remembered the route, and it was the same one Elizabeth and I took to go look for Aaron. We stopped at a gas station in Escondido to fill up and to grab breakfast: coffee for me, orange juice for her. We bypassed the display case of donuts and bought a few granola bars instead before getting back on the road. The climb over Interstate 15 wasn't bad going north in the morning hours. We passed through Fallbrook and then made our way to the northeast. The surrounding areas before hitting the mountains had changed—Temecula and Murrieta were actual cities now, as opposed to places we had just stopped for gas in the past—but the mountains themselves looked the same to me as we started the climb up the twisting highway. They weren’t snow-capped—they almost never were—but that didn’t make them any less magnificent looking against the powder blue sky.
“Do you know where they are?” I asked.
Elizabeth nodded. “Yeah, he sent me the location.” She read off the mile marker number and a general description of the area. “He says you can see it pretty easily from the road. His truck is parked in a small lot just off the highway.”
I nodded. “Alright. With any luck, Aaron will be standing there when we get there.”
She looked out the window. Her hair was down, brushed out, and she’d added a little make-up. She had on black running shorts and a light blue V-neck T-shirt. She looked like the Elizabeth I knew now, not the one from the past. “Maybe. I don't know. And it's probably going to be super hot today.”
“Probably.” There was no escaping the heat of the desert in August.
Her mouth twisted as she glanced at her phone. “I hope he has water.”
“Did you tell Tim to do what I said?”
She nodded. “He was going to call the forestry service and report him missing.”
I knew it was a good place to start. I didn't know the protocol for reporting missing campers, but getting it on the record with any authority was never a bad thing. If Aaron showed back up, they might have a few questions, but ultimately, it wouldn't be any big deal if they were called and he was found without incident.
“How did Aaron ask you out the first time?” I asked.
“What?”
“How did he ask you out on a date?”
“Why? What does that matter?”
“Because you're sitting there about to crush your phone to death and I'm trying to take your mind off of things,” I said. “And I don't know how he asked you out.”
She looked down at her hand and unclenched her fingers from around her phone. She laid it in her lap and stretched her fingers, flexing each individual one. “I don't know. We were in history together. I'd let him look at my notes because he couldn't get them all down in time before class was over. He just asked if I wanted to go out some time and I said sure. So we did.”
“Anyone else ever ask you out?”
“No.”
“Have you asked anyone out?”
“Dad.” Her voice was full of exasperation, tinged with embarrassment.
“I'm just asking,” I said. I stole a quick glance at her before returning my gaze to the stretch of asphalt in front of us. There was a semi a hundred yards ahead of us, but otherwise the road was empty. “These are things I don't know. We don't talk about them.”
“No,” she said. “I didn't want to ask anyone else out. Aaron's nice. He's funny. We have a good time together. It's fine.”
I wanted to tell her that “fine” was a strange word to use to describe a relationship, and I also wanted to tell her that guys could be assholes and that she should set her standards high and if a guy didn’t call her or communicate with her the way it sounded liked Aaron did then he wasn’t worth her time. But I also didn't want her thinking that she needed to be in a relationship in the first place. She was still figuring out her relationship as a daughter to me. As a friend to the new kids she’d met at school and the kids who remembered her from before. And she was still figuring out her relationship with the Corzines.
As a teenager, she needed to date, to figure out how to navigate that kind of relationship. I just didn't want her settling for the first kid that came around and showed interest, and I wondered if that's what Aaron was. Because a part of me could see Elizabeth grabbing on to the first person who showed interest and holding tight because she’d lost so much over the years. I didn’t want her to settle, to let her fears steal a future she deserved. She’d already been robbed of too much in her short life.
“Your friends like him?” I asked. I thought of Natalie and Sierra, the two girls who were as close to best friends she had here. Natalie had been a friend from before, a classmate of hers in elementary school who had welcomed Elizabeth back into the fold, but Sierra was new to town. She and her family had moved from Connecticut last year. If I had to pick, I’d say Elizabeth was closer to her. They both sort of felt like fish out of water as newcomers in a high school with kids who’d pretty much spent their entire academic careers together.
“Sure.”
“Sure?”
“What exactly are you looking for here?” she said, exasperated. “We're not having sex. Is that what you're talking about?”
Heat burned in my cheeks. “No, that's not what I meant.” But I was glad to hear it.
She rolle
d her eyes and looked out the window. “I hate when you give me the third degree. When you interrogate me. Feels like I’m one of your clients.”
Shit. I sighed. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I intended.” My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I just…I’m terrible at this. At asking questions like these. Your mom was better at it.”
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them and I felt my throat close up a little.
“What do you mean?”
“She would see that I'm just being overprotective of you,” I said. “She wouldn't criticize me for that, but she would...redirect it. Make me understand things I don't understand about boys and dating and crap like that. And then she'd tell me to shut up and knock it off.”
She leaned back in her seat. “Yeah. I could see that. Then she'd come up to my room and tell me that you weren't trying to be a jerk and that you just weren't sure what to say and that it came out all wrong and I should be thankful that you care as much as you do.”
“That sounds about right. And then she'd figure out how to ask you those same questions without them being so awkward and invasive. I’m sorry.”
The wheels hummed against the pavement as the highway snaked back and forth, taking us higher into the mountain range.
“I miss her,” Elizabeth said, breaking the silence. “Every day. I feel like I barely got any time with her.”
My knuckles were almost white, and I forced my hands to relax on the steering wheel. “Me, too.”
“And I know you hate it when I say this, but I feel like it's my fault.”
I shook my head. It was the last thing I wanted her to believe. “It's not. It's not.”
She shrugged and leaned her head against the window.
She battled guilt the same way I had ever since Lauren's death. No matter what kind of rational argument I made, telling her that she was in no way responsible, she still couldn't shake the idea that she could have somehow prevented what happened. I reassured her repeatedly, that her being abducted was not her fault and that the chain of events in the ensuing years couldn't have been predicted and she wasn't responsible for them. She would nod in agreement, but I could see in her expression that she didn't believe it.
I recognized the expression because I felt the same way.
It was my fault that Lauren was gone. My missteps that had caused John Anchor to retaliate. And my fault that I hadn’t gotten to her in time.
We rounded a long, slow curve, nearly at the top of the range now. The hills split, and off in the distance I could just make out the flat expanse of Palm Desert and Indio beyond it. I was grateful for the visual distraction. It had been a bit of a secret enclave when my parents had taken me there, undiscovered territory. But the land below displayed exponential growth, the desert floor cluttered with civilization: a quilt of homes with artificially green lots and streets zigzagging the desert, perfectly slicing through the vast expanse of sand.
Elizabeth leaned forward in her seat. “That's Tim's truck up there. On the right.”
A beat-up blue Chevy pickup was parked in the middle stall of a four-stall lot off to the side of the highway. It was an official entrance to the area, with a large wooden sign welcoming visitors to the San Jacinto Mountains. On the back bumper of the truck, a kid in basketball shorts and a black T-shirt was looking at his phone. He looked up and stiffened when I pulled into the lot.
Elizabeth held up a hand. “That's Tim.”
SEVEN
Tim looked more like a surfer than a camper.
His hair was bleached blond from the sun, probably from the ocean, too, his bangs long and swept across his forehead. The skin on his nose was cracked and peeling and a hint of golden stubble dusted his chin, glinting in the morning sun. His shoulders were square, almost like he had football pads on beneath the T-shirt. He stood from the bumper when we got out of the car.
He lifted his chin in Elizabeth's direction. “Hey.”
“Hi,” she said, stopping just short of him, a bit awkward. She half turned to me. “This is my dad.”
He stood a little straighter and nodded at me.
I held out my hand. “I'm Joe.”
We shook, his palm calloused and dry. “I'm Tim.”
We all stood there for a moment.
“So,” I said, glancing around. “What's the deal?”
He tugged at the hem of his T-shirt. It was from a local surf shop, one down in Mission Beach. “Did Elizabeth tell you everything?”
“I think so, but I want you to tell me again.”
He glanced at Elizabeth and she nodded.
He tugged at the shirt some more. “So, okay. We came up here just to camp for the weekend. I've never been here, but Aaron has. He said a couple times. Maybe around five or so last night, he told me he was going to go on a short hike. I didn't feel like going, so I just stayed behind.”
“Why didn't you want to go?” I asked.
“I just didn't feel like it,” he said, shrugging. “It was hot and we’d been out in the canyons most of the day. And I rolled my ankle while we were hiking in to our campsite—nothing bad, but it was a little sore. And…I don’t know. I'm not really a hiker or anything like that.”
“So why did you come? Camping?”
“I didn't really want to, but he sort of guilted me into it. Said he didn’t want to go by himself. I knew the waves were gonna suck this weekend and I’d never been up here so I thought I’d come and see what’s up.”
“Okay,” I said. His answers and reasoning were logical enough. “So he left and went for the hike by himself?”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and scratched at his forehead. “I fell asleep for maybe an hour.”
“At your campsite?”
He nodded. “I woke up and he wasn't back, which I thought was kinda weird. I tried to text him, but the texts weren't going through.”
“Mine, either,” Elizabeth said.
“I checked the tent and his phone was actually in his bag,” Tim said. “So, I got up and hiked around a bit, just sort of keeping an eye out for him. I thought maybe he was collecting wood or something for the fire. But I didn’t see him.”
“Where did you look?”
“I stayed on the one main trail.” He pushed his hair off his forehead again. “I didn’t want to get lost. I yelled for him a little, but I just figured he was out of earshot. So I went back to the campsite where our stuff is and waited.”
“And he never showed.”
He shook his head. “I have no idea why he'd be gone this long. He specifically said he was going on a short hike and that he'd be right back. It wasn't like he was planning on bailing for the whole night.”
“Did he take anything with him?” I asked.
“A water bottle,” he said. “That was it.”
“Did he eat lunch? Breakfast?”
Tim nodded. “Both. We brought some food with us—granola bars and cheese sticks and stuff for sandwiches. We both had some of those. We didn't eat dinner or anything before he left. We were gonna do that when he got back.”
“Alright,” I said. “So he ate beforehand and he's got some water with him. That's good. Elizabeth said she told you to call it in to law enforcement. Did you?”
“After she told me that's what you said to do, I did. I found a number for the sheriff's department. I told them what I just told you.” He paused. “I don't think they thought much of it because he hasn't really been gone that long, even though it was overnight. They asked a few questions. When I told them he was 18, they kind of didn't care anymore. Or maybe not like that. I just mean, the guy said it wasn't unusual for people to wander off for longer than they planned, and if he didn't show back up after 24 hours, I should call them back.” He glanced at Elizabeth with a worried look. “I don't think he took me too seriously.”
That all sounded right, unfortunately. They probably got multiple calls on a daily basis of hikers that hadn't returned when promised, and nearly all of them probabl
y showed up before they could even dispatch a team. Since Aaron was considered an adult, I had no doubt that they'd wait at least 24 hours before taking the claim seriously. I'd hoped the fact that he'd been gone overnight might move them into action, but it hadn't. It wasn't incompetency as much it was just cold reason.
“How far is the campsite?” I asked. “You're in tents or what?”
“One tent, yeah,” he said. “Aaron knew a spot off the main trail, so that's where we went. Maybe a mile in. About a fifteen minute walk.”
“You have the food and water down there?”
“A cooler with stuff, yeah. More sandwiches. Water and soda. I think there are some crackers and granola bars left, too.” He listed it off like he was reciting a menu, as if he thought we might need to eat.
I looked just past him, into the high morning sun rising in the east. I shaded my eyes with my hand. I'd checked the weather before we'd left. Late afternoon storms were predicted but at that moment, the skies were fine. Not a single cloud dotted the sky, but I knew it could change in a hurry if anything came blowing in from the west.
I took my hand away from my eyes and looked at both Tim and Elizabeth. I needed to stay calm, provide some reassurance to both of them. But I also knew what our limitations were. “Okay. We can start looking, but we aren't going to cover the entire canyon. We don't know the area and I don't want to get caught in unfamiliar territory when it gets dark later tonight or if weather moves in.”
Elizabeth frowned. “But what if—?”
“No buts,” I interrupted. “We'll go until late this afternoon. At that point, he'll have been gone 24 hours and we can turn it over to people who can do better than we can if we haven't located him. We don't have the tools or the know-how. We're done when I say we're done.”
She toed the pavement. “So then what happens if we haven't found him?”
It was a question I knew she would ask, and a question I didn’t want to answer.
