Inside the Echo

by Jen Blood

  He agreed with a silent nod. He still seemed out of place, and I wondered suddenly if Jack had ever felt like he was part of a team before. Or had he always been the one sitting on the sidelines, locked in a world where he never quite belonged?

  At the back of the van, all three dogs were harnessed and ready to go, so we headed toward an area at the back of the motel where Hogan had said we’d be able to let the dogs run. Only about ten feet behind the building was a thick stand of trees, a path cleared out among them. The dogs were all squirrelly by now, anxious to move, so we released the hounds as soon as it was safe. While the younger dogs immediately dove for one another, Minion and Casper practically colliding in midair, Phantom was more sedate. She left me and headed for the trees, tail waving slowly.

  Phantom is more a fan of people than other dogs as a general rule. Casper in particular has always rubbed her the wrong way, so she tends to either ignore him outright or lean toward overt hostility with the dog. His enthusiasm just isn’t her style. Of course, as soon as he saw a window Casper raced to the older dog, trying in vain to get her to join in on the play.

  He bounded toward the shepherd, play bowed, and raced away. He got no response, so tried again a second later. And again. Finally, Phantom rushed him, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and wrestled him to the ground. Casper either didn’t realize or chose to ignore the fact that she wasn’t playing. As soon as she let him go, he was at it again – though with more care the second time around. He’d still rush the shepherd and bow, but he was a little more serious about running away if she showed any interest.

  “Looks like that dog’s playing with fire,” a voice behind me said. Bear and Ren were at the other side of the clearing, Jack and I on our own, but I saw Bear look up when he heard the words. Jack and I both turned, startled. At sight of the man who emerged from the darkened woods, I steeled myself for the meeting I’d known was coming.

  “Sorry,” Nate Hogan said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I saw you pull up, though, and figured I should come say hello.”

  The dogs had of course taken notice of the stranger, and raced toward him. He was a solid, good-looking man in his forties, his dark hair now tinged with silver. It had been jet black when I’d seen him last.

  “Hello, Hogan,” I said. We stood there awkwardly for a second, trying to decide whether or not a hug was appropriate. He moved in at the same time that I extended my hand, unfortunately jabbing him in the gut when I’d only meant to shake his hand. He winced. “Sorry. This is a little…”

  “Unexpected?” he said helpfully. Not the word I was thinking of, but I didn’t correct him. “I know. I thought I’d had enough of Maine when I left the PD. I got a call when the job in the forest service opened up last year, though. It turns out I missed it here more than I thought I would.”

  The others on the team converged at that point, calling their dogs to heel before Hogan was completely overwhelmed. I introduced him to Jack and Ren, then paused when I came to Bear. That sick sense I’d felt from the second I got Hogan’s call returned. The last time we’d seen Hogan had been shortly after Bear’s father died, under what the police had deemed suspicious circumstances. Despite the fact that Hogan and I were friends, and I was a chief suspect in Brock’s death, Hogan had insisted on remaining part of the investigation at the time. It was shortly after that investigation closed that Hogan told me he was leaving the force, and the area. Though he hadn’t been a huge part of Bear’s life before that time, his absence after Brock’s death had not gone unnoticed.

  “I guess you know who this is,” I said.

  Hogan nodded. “I can’t quite believe it, but yes.” He extended a hand, which Bear shook reluctantly. He looked as nervous as I felt. “Hard to believe how much can change in a few years. You look good. All grown up.”

  Bear shrugged. “It’s been eight years. It’d be a little sad if I hadn’t changed since then.”

  “True,” Hogan conceded. “Still. Nothing makes you feel quite so old as meeting a man when you remember a boy.” He shifted gears, sensing the tension radiating from Bear. “What about the rest of your crew? The four-leggeds, I mean.”

  I relaxed. When in doubt, talk about the dogs. “The white dervish over there is Casper – Bear’s dog. The shepherd is Phantom. And Minion is Ren’s dog.” The little lab/pit bull was glued to Ren’s side, clearly uneasy at the stranger’s presence.

  Silence fell over the group, and I looked at Hogan expectantly. “Do you have our room info, or do I need to check in with the IC first?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” He produced a yellow envelope from his pocket. “There are actually a couple of ski lodges next door – your team will stay in one of those with some of the wardens, and MESARD’s in the other one. We figured it would be easiest if we could keep the K-9s together.”

  “Nice,” Bear said, with genuine enthusiasm. “It’s about time we start getting the royal treatment.”

  “I wouldn’t get too excited before you see the place,” Hogan said.

  With the stranger in our midst no longer quite so strange, Phantom loped back into the woods to stretch her legs and take a much-needed break from Casper, who was still pushing his luck. I wished I could follow her. Casper, on the other hand, happily rolled onto his back and let Hogan rub his pink belly while we continued with our conversation.

  “A pit bull search dog?” Hogan asked. Casper bicycled his legs and wriggled his body in the snow, making puppy snow angels. “I know this isn’t my field, but that isn’t usual, is it?”

  “We train all different types of dogs,” Bear said. If he was bothered by the question, he didn’t show it. “That’s part of the Flint K-9 mission: save dogs from high-kill shelters, move them to our place, and train them for service. We do a lot with search and rescue, but we also train for therapy, visually or hearing impaired owners, wounded veterans or those suffering from PTSD.”

  Hogan looked at me. “Wow. Quite a difference from the days when Brock was running the show, huh?”

  I could feel Jack watching the interaction, studying my reactions to Hogan’s words. I struggled to seem unaffected at mention of Brock’s name, more concerned with how Bear might react. Brock Campbell had been my mentor in the world of dog handling when I first got started as a teenager; ours was hardly a romance for the ages. The fact that Brock was Bear’s father had been a poorly kept secret for years – one I still hadn’t shared with Jack. The relationship between Brock and me was, at its very best, complicated. Apart from Bear, no one knew that better than Hogan.

  “How do things stand with the search?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. “Any luck yet?”

  A shadow darkened Hogan’s blue eyes. He shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t know what the hell happened out there. We’ve got planes in the air and snowmobiles on the ground, but after the wind and snow we had overnight we can’t tell a damned thing about what happened in that camp. And forget trying to find a trail up there.”

  “What about the people in charge of the dog sledding operation at WildFire?” Bear asked. “They’re usually on top of things out here. Haven’t they been able to give you any information?”

  “Your mom said you had some background with WildFire,” Hogan said. “That could come in handy. So far, we haven’t gotten much from them.”

  “I’ve done some courses there. They run the dog sledding stuff for teens, but they also teach K-9 wilderness first aid. It’s good stuff to know if you’re out in the field with dogs.”

  “As far as we knew,” I added, “they worked primarily with high school students. These are adults though, right?”

  “That’s right,” Hogan said. He looked uncomfortable. “It’s a little complicated.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked. “Adults should be easier to deal with – at the very least, they’re more likely to be able to take care of themselves until they’re found.”

  “That much is true,” Hogan agreed. “But not everything is so cut and dr
ied. This is a women’s course.” He looked at me, his gaze strangely calculating. “Battered women, actually. Which means we have to be careful what information the press gets hold of.”

  The way he said ‘battered’ pierced me. I felt a flush of embarrassment, shame, that Hogan might consider me part of those ranks, even in the distant past.

  “You’re trying to make sure their partners don’t figure out where they are,” Jack guessed. “Things could get ugly if a bunch of abusive husbands show up here.” If he sensed anything in the exchange between Hogan and me, he didn’t mention it. Bear, however, had gone conspicuously quiet.

  “Very ugly,” Hogan agreed. “And as if that weren’t enough to deal with, Senator Price’s daughter is also on the course—”

  “Robert Price?” I interrupted. Robert Price had been elected to the U.S. Senate six years ago, after a distinguished career in law enforcement with the Portland Police Department. I knew nothing of his daughter, but I couldn’t imagine him taking it lightly if someone had abused her.

  “She’s working on her dissertation,” Hogan said, reading my mind. “She and Megan Hunter were undergrads together at Georgetown. She’s apparently a social worker in D.C. right now, working with one of the women going on the course. They arranged this whole thing together.”

  “The press must be going nuts,” I said.

  “They haven’t caught wind of any of it yet. We’re trying to keep them in the dark as long as possible.”

  “Any chance one of the husbands or boyfriends of the other women on the expedition could be involved in this?” I asked.

  “There’s always a chance,” Hogan said. I noted the darkness in his eyes again, and for the first time it occurred to me that he didn’t look nearly as good as I’d imagined he would when I’d pictured this reunion. Obviously I didn’t have all the information about the women missing, but I wondered if there was something Hogan wasn’t telling me.

  “Right now, the IC’s not running things like there’s a third party we need to worry about,” Hogan continued, his tone brusque now. “We’ll change course if we need to, but for now we’re just working on the assumption that something went wrong on the trail and they got separated from their dogs.”

  “No way,” Bear said definitively. “Have you met Megan and Heather? They wouldn’t just leave their dogs without a fight. Not unless something went seriously wrong.”

  Hogan frowned, but I spoke up before he could argue the point. “How’s Heather’s husband taking this? He must be going nuts.”

  “He is,” Hogan agreed. “He spoke to them at check-in last night at nineteen hundred, and at that point he says everything was fine. Then he gets word that the whole camp is missing.”

  “Where was the camp set up?” I asked. “They usually stick pretty close to Grafton Park, don’t they?”

  “That’s right,” Hogan said. “This trip was no exception. They were camped out at the Step Falls Preserve for the night, then were supposed to make their way to Old Speck – that mountain over there.” Hogan pointed into the distance, at a high peak barely visible between the clouds and snow. “Abe – Heather’s husband – has been going crazy from the moment he heard about this. Seems bent on taking all of us with him.”

  I didn’t blame him. The more I learned about this search, the less I liked it. Generally when you lose a large group, there’s a rational explanation and everyone shows up just fine a few hours later. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. Not only had the dogs been found half-buried in the snow with no humans in sight, but those humans were still MIA hours later. I was getting the feeling more and more that this wouldn’t be the simple search and rescue I’d hoped for.

  “So I assume you’ve set the camp as the PLS, then?” I said. In search and rescue, PLS stands for Place Last Seen, and it serves as the center point for most searches.

  “That’s right,” Hogan agreed. “We’re gridding out from there. We’ve got an air team covering waterways and roadways, since we figure Megan and Heather will know enough to head for open land so we can find them. There are a couple of snowmobile clubs that are helping out, too. They’re out combing the trails now, and checking any hunting lodges or shacks in case people got separated or needed to find shelter.”

  Casper had tired of belly rubs by this time and was back on his feet in search of Phantom. I could see my shepherd off about fifty yards to our right, and kept one eye trained on her while we continued our impromptu briefing.

  “This shouldn’t be that tough, then,” I said. “Especially if you have a lot of scent dogs on the job. If everyone was traveling on foot, they couldn’t have gotten that far from the camp in the time between their check-in and the snowmobiler finding the camp.”

  “We’ve set a radius of ten miles,” Hogan said, with a nod. “We thought they might have gone out on skis, but we found their equipment still stowed in one of the tents.” That shadow returned to his face, his expression darkening. He shook his head. “To be honest, I don’t know what in hell could have happened up there. I’m trying not to think the worst, but it’s not easy with this one.”

  He said the words quietly, almost reluctantly, and I knew this at least was the truth. Before I could reply, Phantom chose that moment to explain to Casper in no uncertain terms that she was not interested in his games, filling the silence with snarls and Casper’s answering yelp.

  “Phantom!” I called. “Leave him be.”

  Casper was on the ground with Phantom on top of him, her jaws at his throat. She looked up at my voice, gave the pit bull one final snarl, and trotted off. It took Casper all of thirty seconds to gather his courage and trail after her. This time, he kept a respectful distance between himself and the female. Maybe there was hope for the boy after all.

  “If your dogs are set, we should probably head in so you can report to the sergeant and get your assignment,” Hogan said. “You can stop at the lodge and dump your gear, get the dogs settled. I’ll meet you at the trailer.”

  He turned back toward the path. Just as he did, I heard something on the air – a voice, distant but distinct, that grabbed hold like a human hand at the back of my neck.

  I told you not to run, baby girl.

  My head jerked up. Jack was saying something, Hogan already on his way down the trail, but I could do nothing but listen to that voice.

  Running won’t get you anywhere. Don’t you know that by now?

  I knew that voice all too well.

  Brock Campbell.

  I’m what’s known as ‘sensitive’ to things others can’t see or hear, but for all my interactions with ghosts of my past and others’, I had never seen Brock, never heard him, never sensed him, after he took his last breath. A blessing I’ve thanked God for every day.

  So why would I suddenly hear him now?

  “Did you hear something?” I asked Jack. Bear trailed behind with Ren and their dogs, but I wondered immediately if my son – himself an even stronger empath than me – had heard the same thing.

  Jack looked at me. “No. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just…” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  I fell silent, waiting for the voice again. It didn’t come.

  “Jamie?” Jack pressed. “What’s going on? Did you see something, like in Glastenbury?”

  “No, it’s nothing,” I tried to reassure him. I’ve been able to pick up on subtleties that others can’t from the time I was a kid, occasionally able to catch glimpses into the future that I’ve never been able to explain; sometimes hearing the voices of the dead. Bear’s gifts go far beyond that. He sees the dead, speaks with them, experiences things the rest of us can’t even imagine. I only came close to that once, during the search in Glastenbury.

  While there, I saw the spirit of a young girl who had been murdered in 1945; she became something like a guide for me during that search. She appeared to Bear, too. Nothing like that had happened in the five months since that search, though, and I’d never experienced
anything like it before that time.

  This wasn’t a spirit, though. At least I hoped to God it wasn’t.

  “What’s up?” Bear asked, catching up to us. “Is something wrong?”

  I forced myself to return to the present. Whatever – or whoever – I’d heard, it was gone now. “I’m fine. We should get going, though.”

  We called the dogs to us. Phantom and Minion came willingly, while Casper continued racing around us in a game of tag in which only one of us was a willing participant. Eventually, though, he settled down.

  The snow had stopped for the moment, and the parking lot continued to fill with searchers, both volunteer and paid, along with the inevitable influx of news vans. Meanwhile, we headed in to get the dogs settled.

  #

  The ski lodge Hogan had arranged was definitely not the kind of accommodations we were used to. I knocked at the front door since Hogan had said we’d be staying with others, and was met with a deep-throated bark that set our own dogs off beside us.

  “Can it, Whippet,” I heard on the other side of the door before a woman opened up. She was petite and curly-haired, dressed in a warden’s uniform sans the boots. Corporal Michelle Wassel – a K-9 trainer and handler I’d worked with before, and had always liked.

  “Hey!” she said at sight of us. “Hogan said we’d have roomies – you never know how that’s gonna go. Glad to see it’s you guys. Welcome to the Copa.”

  She stepped aside, giving us our first look inside the lodge. Bear whistled softly.

  “Wow,” he said. “Definitely a step up from the crap hotels they usually put us up in.”

  “Right?” Michelle said. “We lucked out this time.”

  Michelle’s dog, Whippet, was a Dutch shepherd – an athletic breed whose high energy and drive to work make it ideal for search and rescue. Now, the little brindle shepherd decided that she’d had enough of the niceties, and bolted toward the door to get in on the action. The dogs had all met before, so I wasn’t as concerned as I might have been otherwise. Still, it gave us an excuse to skip the greetings and just get through the door already. As soon as we’d crossed the threshold, we let our own dogs loose. Michelle already knew Bear and Ren, but I made a quick requisite introduction to Jack since the two had never met.