Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Place Last Seen, Direction of Travel, Containment, Attraction: these terms can direct a missing-person rescue, allowing responders to choose the place to begin and the first direction for search, to prevent a moving victim from traveling outside the immediate area, and to provide attractors that can lead a missing person to safety. In a perfect scenario, the PLS is consistent among eyewitnesses, the direction of travel known. The missing person doesn't fear responders and is excited to see the flashing lights or hear the quick, light chirps of a siren. He is physically and cognitively able to head for help.

  We rarely get the perfect scenario—I cannot recall ever getting it—and on this search, our understanding of Braden wavers. Runaway, abduction—or something else? The PLS is in a constant state of revision. Witnesses disagree on his direction of travel. What seems to be a common theme is that Braden is deeply afraid of getting into trouble with adults, and there is a changeable story about this afternoon that describes a fight over a favorite toy—that may or may not have been dismembered by another child—a broken window at a friend's house, a pair of soiled pants, and then a hard run away from feared punishment. One version of the story leaves out the fight and concentrates on the toy that Braden may have tried to walk to a supermarket to replace. Other stories detail Braden's two previous runaway events. Once, because he was mad about a broken promise to go swimming. A second time when he was left behind with a new babysitter he didn't much like.

  The uncle says, "Braden doesn't make trouble, but he brings trouble on."

  In the smoke of conflicting stories, anything may be possible behind Braden's disappearance. His medical needs are a concern among us. The time gone even more so. When a young child has been missing for more than two hours, successful rescue probabilities drop. We know today's high temperatures. We all sense the time passed and quickly passing, and though we never think it's possible to move any faster, somehow in the search for a child, we do, pushing hard behind the dogs. They also seem to feel the extra urgency, so much so that even the quiet ones bark before they gear up to run.

  The earliest dogs out could not confirm either of the directions Braden was said to have traveled, but this isn't really surprising, considering the relatively small area, the passage of hours, and a great deal of foot traffic in every direction. Braden could have been here, or here, or here, his scent now lost in the blanket of other scents dropped more recently. The other possibility is that something else has happened to him, and he was never in any of these directions at all. We search as though either condition is true.

  I run behind a handler whose dark dog lopes easily down the narrow streets, threading his way between trailer pads. Missing Braden is public knowledge here. The police have already questioned local residents, and now we move house to house among watching bystanders. Some homes are dark at this late hour, others flicker blue and yellow with the glare of television screens, and others still are ablaze with light. Venetian blinds bend a little, exposing people looking out at us as we look back at them, their movement catching our attention. A couple of teenagers come forward to ask if they can help, clutching a photocopied picture of Braden police had given them earlier. They are the only ones to do so. Other residents watch silently from porches, their expressions withdrawn, some with arms folded, flicking cigarette ash onto cement. One man calls from a porch that his baby is sleeping and that we'd better not set the alarm off on his car. When our passing search canine causes a housebound Chihuahua to bark, we hear the bang of a screen and another man shout that he's "gonna fucking kill me a goddamn dog"—sharp words flung our direction that make my stomach knot until our pace jars it free.

  This community has not softened to Braden's trouble, and it strikes me that maybe it cannot. We have been on searches where local police offered us Kevlar vests, and though this isn't one of them, I feel our vulnerability here as well as his, a twitchy awareness as we jog behind the dog, calling for the child within a neighborhood that seems ... something. Hostile? Wary? Frightened?

  It seems a hard place for a little boy to get lost. I think of diabetic Braden, who is last known to have eaten a bologna sandwich at lunchtime. I have two energy bars, beef jerky, and a juice box in my backpack. With every step I hear the slosh of it, a little chug like I-think-I-can.

  I am childless, which is not to say I never had a child. In the decade of my marriage, I almost had five of them—pregnancies reflecting the fitful stages of our good years together and twice, our duress. Because I never knew them, I think of these children now by the placeholder names we briefly gave them then: Baby 1, Baby 2. We called them this not for want of better names, but because we learned to hold our collective breath and carefully round the corner on each trimester. My sensible, hard-working husband with a wild streak was a closet conservative. He valued an even keel. When our first loss came six months into our marriage, an early surprise and a devastating blow, we would not be jinxed again. So we didn't get too hopeful, too excited about another pregnancy, ever. We didn't actively try, and we instinctively knew it was harder to lose a baby already named than one affectionately known by the order of conception.

  After the first miscarriage, we conceived again a year later, then a third time after I graduated with my master's. Again two years later, in a moment of feeling flush enough to send a baby to college (Baby 4). And finally, after three years of job losses, financial struggle, and temptation in various forms, again. Baby 5 was the child I carried into a car accident and out of it, the pregnancy that held the longest, and the baby whose miscarriage began while I was piloting an airplane. Physically stunned by the sudden, catastrophic labor and the loss fully formed enough to see, to hold, we fell to earth—my husband and I—within the year, and that would be the end of us.

  He took the cat, I took the dog. We separated nightstands and divided dishtowels. We argued over bills, taxes, apartment deposits. And then it was done. We moved to separate cities and licked our wounds in private.

  Those babies return to me as yearning when I least expect it. Sometimes, all these years later, Baby becomes an individual, and I see the cut of my ex-husband in a boy at the supermarket. Or a girl on the street stops to ask directions, and the flash of her form in the glass of a moving door is something like me.

  I've been asked if these losses are why I work search—some Freudian byproduct or act of reparation, of denial. I don't think so, of course, but friends say I might be denying that too. It's a well-worn concept and a repeated one. A few kind souls suggest a nobler motive: on searches involving children, perhaps I'm saving some other mother the grief I've known myself. That sounds very good, but I don't think about motive much. I work search the way I plodded through the muddy aftermath of miscarriage and divorce: one foot before another, hoping for good but prepared for grief, and following the dog ahead anyhow.

  ***

  There are a hundred or more mobile homes here, but the community sits tight enough that occasionally I see the flicker of other canine units on their neighborhood sweeps. We call out to the little boy, telling him he's not in trouble, that it's time to go home. Our flashlights silver the underbellies of trailers, the interiors of cars. After a time, the bystanders retreat to their houses, and we're left with only the glittering eyes of crouched housecats, their gazes hard on the dog as we pass.

  Near the farthest reaches of our sector, the dog we follow rushes suddenly forward to the door of one mobile home. He thumps so hard against it that the door pops open, revealing a half-dressed man bent down to the bins of his fridge, fishing for something in the crisper. The man yelps with surprise at the sight of the dark, powerful dog, almost falling as he rights himself. Lights come on in the neighboring home, shouts back and forth. The handler apologizes and pulls his dog from the doorway. We step cautiously back as the man slams his door onto its latch and then locks it.

  "No radio," says the handler quietly, aware that anything we say broadcasts widely across team radios and could be audible to bystanders near other dog tea
ms. "I think we'd better walk this one back in."

  That strong indication in a doorway, two other dogs responding markedly on the trunk area of a car. This is what the dogs have given us. It can be a strange moment describing tangible responses to trace evidence that humans cannot smell—you always hope the authorities understand what the dogs are truly doing. This time, when handlers relay their separate information to police, investigators confer together and tell us the indications make sense. The doorway marks an area where the boy often visited, where in fact he may have played today. The car, owned by a friend of the family, was one Braden had ridden in a lot. That the dogs indicated strongly here, in a neighborhood where the child has also been in other houses, other cars, and on the playground swing set seems significant to us. Why so much fresh scent here? Perhaps it's significant to investigators too, though we are not included in their deliberations. We stand by at a distance as they bend over the hood of a police car, pooling the known information from interviews and the interest of the dogs.

  A mutter in the distance, then loud and louder still: a police helicopter passes low over the mobile home park and outward to the fields beyond it, pilot and spotter flying an airborne version of the tight sweeps we have made on the ground. The intensity of the helicopter searchlight and the heavy whup of rotor blades have likely wakened every living creature in the area. And for the time it is with us, the helicopter now makes dog work virtually impossible, the downwash from the blades creating a scatter of scent worthy of a small tornado.

  Now we stand with the dogs that lie flat in the cool grass along the street. They are less interested than we are. They have seen and heard helicopters before, and this rest with their water bowls is welcome to them. We humans watch trees whip and objects blaze in the bright circle of light that slips easily from the helicopter across the neighborhood, and though I have no reason to fear that scrutiny, something in the nearness and approach of it makes me want to run.

  I wonder what sense Braden makes of all this, if he is alive and conscious, if he knows the helicopter's there for his sake. I say as much to a young officer standing nearby, who shakes his head. He says over the noise that the residents of this mobile home park are pretty familiar with that helicopter. There's a lot of crime here: bad drug deals, abuse cases, robberies that turn to assault and, occasionally, to murder. Many of the longtime residents are too poor to move away. The officer's voice is matter-of-fact, but he says with some compassion, "They never know anything about anything when we show up, because they've got to live here after we've gone."

  We count twenty-two passes before the helicopter rises easily away, slides winking into the darkness. When it's gone, I feel my knees begin to shake. I'm tired and more than tired—heartsick with certainty that Braden isn't here. I don't say anything. None of us says anything. With a gesture, an officer stands the dog team down. He tells us that tomorrow we'll search more widely: the surrounding fields, the farther places where bodies have been found before.

  Seven hours later, I'm rested and well-juiced with coffee, in the left seat of a Cessna 152 a thousand feet above the ground, while a spotter gazes down from the right seat. I'd expected to run with the dogs again today, but at check-in, the Incident Commander said, "We'd like to send you up, if you're willing. It would be good to have you overfly areas that might be tough for the dogs, so that we can sector and prep the teams appropriately before they go out." Twenty minutes later, I was at the airport renting the Cessna. Twenty minutes after that, we were aloft.

  This morning's heat is already surly, and the little plane is battered by thermals as we circle potential points of interest and fly gridlines over empty fields. I'm grateful the spotter is a fellow pilot from the flight school, unlikely to get airsick from the heat, the maneuvers, or the turbulence. He is a calm young man with sharp eyes, and he calls what he sees to me: the arrival of additional resources for today's sectors: horseback riders, ATV drivers, and a large crowd in a supermarket parking lot that could well be intended to walk certain areas a few feet apart, scanning the ground for any physical evidence that might be tied to the missing boy. At least a hundred more volunteers will join the search today, and it won't be an easy one.

  We see unmowed fields. Plenty of creek beds surrounded by heavy brush. Several construction sites and a junkyard. A ribbon of road that was once a main thoroughfare from country to town. As we fly, the spotter jots terrain details on our photocopied map. We take turns flying, alternating who spots, our eyes straining for some sign of Braden on the move below. Now at five hundred feet above the ground, we should be able to see the missing boy in open areas, but there is nothing of him in the tall grass or flat spaces. Nothing in grass verges beside the road. What we do see is terrain it could take days to thoroughly cover.

  We land, call in the information, and take off again. By the time we are airborne, ground searchers are on the move. We overfly their sectors for the rest of the day, hoping the presence of searchers will provoke some kind of movement from the missing child. And if they can't see him, we might be able to.

  It's the call we understand but never like to hear. Whether out of ideas or having information they have not shared with any of us, investigators stand down the search in the late afternoon. Every sector has been covered—some by separate resources—and no trace of the boy has been found. "Abduction" is the rumor floating among the assembled company, always a possibility, now widely believed if not confirmed. Many of the searchers offer to remain here on standby, despite the 105-degree heat and the injuries already among some of the volunteers: heat exhaustion for several, a sprained wrist, a horse that took a bad fall crossing a ravine. The authorities decline. They too are pulling out. The case isn't over, but the ground search is.

  The exhausted dogs load quietly into their cars and their crates, drooping over their water bowls, some of them dozing before they take the time to lie down. We're a subdued group, leaving with a few pats on the shoulder between us and little to say.

  On my way home, I drive through the mobile home park a last time. Not much adult movement there in the heat of the day, but on one of the empty trailer pads, four shirtless boys play Keep Away with a deflated basketball. They stop and point a little as I pass, a who's-that? gesture and a brief stare before they turn away. A few streets over, an elderly woman sits with a small child in a kiddie pool. She nods as I drive by; the little girl waves wildly. In the unapologetic light of this summer afternoon, in a mobile home park half a century old, last night's search for Braden seems unreal. There are no cars in front of the house where he lives. It is quiet, cloth awnings collapsed against the windows to better block the sun.

  A few hours after the search stands down, a park resident walking her dog smells smoke, peers into a ditch not far from the community, and finds a roll of smoldering carpet wedged into a drainage pipe, carpet from which a child's foot protrudes. He is found just feet away from the verge where investigators had parked, in a pipe that had been searched several times, penetrated by flashlight the night before. Days pass before we learn what is thought to have happened. There's word of a playmate's accident with a gun, the collaboration of adults to hide the matter, a transport somewhere else—and the return of Braden's body only after the search had terminated. The dogs' indications were relevant. The recovery raises questions we will never know the answer to. What was the message behind his return—a desire for discovery? A belief he would not be found in a place already searched? Or a more pointed message to authorities?

  When we debrief the search a week later, several of us acknowledge the nightmares and insomnia that have followed it. Some of us are angry, some so sad we can barely speak. Rescues that become recoveries are never easy. Recoveries involving children—whether we are there at the moment of find or not—may be the hardest of all. In time, we go on to other searches and other sectors behind the dogs. But I am never far away from Braden. For months, he remains a figure in the corner of my dreams, with a wound to the head and a woun
d to the palm, as though he saw what was coming and put up his hand in the moment of flash.

  16. FEAR STAGES

  I FEEL THE THUNDER before I hear it. Five-pound Pomeranian Sprits'l is on the bed, tap-dancing on my chest. He senses a line of storms approaching from the south. Early morning storms in Texas are often the worst, especially during shifts of season, and I never know if Sprits hears them, smells them, senses the drop in pressure, or hears the change of wind, but for the last two years he has become increasingly storm phobic. He isn't hysterical or destructive during storms, but deeply anxious, panting rapidly and kneading his paws on any available human who will hold him. Now he is squeaking and gibbering in my arms. Four A.M., and if I squinch my eyes shut and block the ticking of the alarm clock, I think I can hear thunder miles and miles away. He always knows long before I do.

  Sprits is the only dog that's nervous. I have three others on the bed—I can make out Fo'c'sle Jack and Sophie at the foot, their heads pressed together as they sleep, and Puzzle, whose snores I hear and whose dead weight I feel against my back. She is sleeping hard. I lie in the dark and idly scratch Sprits'l's chest, which seems to help him a little. He stops the tap-dancing but stares out the window toward the southwest, rigid and expectant. He is not my first storm-phobic dog, and I wonder if he learned to fear storms from our late English Setter who was afraid of them in a big way—an eighty-five-pound dog circling, pacing, and wedging himself under chairs, digging frantically in the bathtub, his head down as though he were receiving blows. Sprits as a puppy was never nervous about bad weather, but I have to wonder if he watched old Chevy and learned what it is to be anxious, or whether he evolved to this on his own.

  And I wonder too about Puzzle, who has never yet been disturbed by storms. Will she in time come to dread them? The condition is apparently common in Golden Retrievers—so common that acquaintances who find out about Puzzle often say Oh-you-have-a-Golden-Retriever-and-is-she-scared-of-storms? in one breath.