Summer Searcher

by M K Dymock

  The last few pages of the book were covered with random numbers, which would convince anyone who opened it of her father’s supposed madness.

  She turned each page as the story came back to her. Link and Zelda ran through the tunnels to escape the bad guy, Ganon. As they thought they were about to escape, Ganon found them and trapped Link in the crystal. It was up to Zelda to save him. The story had multiple endings depending on what Zelda chose to do. Every ending resulted in one or both characters’ deaths—except one.

  Jen had tried so many different ways to save Link, and all of them had failed.

  She turned back to a page filled with her father’s notes. The tiny writing with words running together made reading difficult, almost impossible. She pulled it up to her face.

  He wrote in circles around the page with the first sentence starting in the upper left. The first six words would contain the key to deciphering the rest—if he’d used the same pattern he taught them.

  He hadn’t.

  “How’s it going?” Jim stood at the doorway, and she about jumped out of her skin.

  “Some old memories here.” She slipped the book back into the box and pulled the flaps over. “Can I take them with me?”

  He hesitated. “You are dead, you know.” He came into the room and sat on a chair. She got up from the floor and sat across from him. “I had you declared legally dead after several years.” He tried to smile but failed. “Sela and her husband were going through a tough time when he lost his job in the recession. I thought freeing the money would help them out. In the end, it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t accept any of it.”

  “So, I am officially dead.” She wasn’t too bothered by this. She did die that day; it was only fitting it was legal. And it would mean the world had stopped looking for her, for them.

  His smile was now genuine but quickly turned serious. “Am I right to assume you’d rather stay that way or do you want to be Hylia again?”

  She was dumbstruck. She hadn’t actually considered resuming her old identity. Her only plan had been to get her father’s things and leave. Then again, she hadn’t considered what she would learn by coming here.

  What had happened that night?

  “I . . . don’t know.” Until she understood better her past, she couldn’t make a decision about the future.

  “Hylia, is your father still alive?”

  She tried to be calm even as her mind screamed at her, you idiot. They would comb the mountains for her family, driving them deeper in. All you had to do was stay dead. “No, it’s just me.”

  Maybe he sensed her lie. “I still represent the estate, and you’re the heir. Whatever is said here is attorney–client privilege. We don’t need to involve the police—unless you want to. ”

  “Thank you.” Her foot still touched the box. How well did he know its contents? “Can I bother you for a water?”

  “Of course.” He jumped up, leaving the room and her alone with the contents of the box.

  She opened it back up and grabbed the children’s book. A few others in the series lay in the box, and she took those for good measure. Jim walked back in as she zipped her backpack closed with the books inside.

  “Here you go.” He handed her the glass.

  “Can I ask you another favor? Not that you haven’t already done so much for me.”

  “Hylia, ask away. I’ve never forgiven myself for not helping your mother more.”

  Nor had she forgiven herself. “Can I use your internet? I need to look up the bus schedule.”

  He looked a bit surprised, as if he was expecting something heavier. “I’ll get you my laptop, but I can also give you a ride anywhere.”

  “No worries. I’m used to the bus.”

  She looked up the schedule back to the mountains. With her family’s belongings, she’d gotten all she would get from Seattle. With one glance to the hallway to make sure she still had privacy, she pulled up Lost Gorge City’s website. They didn’t have enough of a population to warrant a newspaper.

  The headline loaded first: “Have You Seen this Woman?” Jen swore, expecting to see her own face pop up. That annoying cop had taken her picture; she knew it.

  Instead, the girlfriend’s photo filled the page, only looking so much younger. They’d found her body. She now had a name to go with the face—Amy Ferguson. She skimmed the article looking for details. The body had been discovered during the search for another missing child. Jen’s name had been completely left out of it. She was dumbfounded; she’d left Chapa in the cave. He had to be hunting for her.

  A number at the end of the article asked anyone with information to call. She would not be calling that number, but it was time to go back to the mountains. This place held nothing for her anymore.

  28

  Sol sat at a desk he and the other part-time deputies shared, having relinquished Mina’s more comfortable chair, staring at his notes. How had David Hayes, an apparent ghost, managed to hide from the world for twenty years?

  “Because he is the ghost,” Sol said out loud.

  Mina looked up from her desk, where she was keying in her latest report. “Who is?” She’d been part of the investigation when the Ghost got shot.

  “I was just thinking out loud about who would be breaking into those cabins.”

  “Someone who doesn’t like people, that’s for sure. He never spends the night—restocks his supplies and gets out.” She stood and came over to his desk. “You know, some people have started to leave cookies out for him like he’s Santa Claus. They figure maybe he’ll leave the more valuable stuff if there’s easy access to food.”

  Sol stared at her incredulously. “You’re not serious.”

  “Completely.” She laughed. “Ryan is starting to equate ghost sightings right up there with Bigfoot.” Mina’s fiancé hunted Bigfoot for fun like other people bird watched.

  “What does he do in the summer when there’s no one to leave out cookies?”

  “Honestly? I think he moves on to other thefts, like livestock. After you left for the fire, I looked into some of the calls. We never gave them much attention because the animals would always show up a week or so later. I got bored with only handing out speeding tickets.”

  “Can you show me what you found?”

  An hour later, Sol had downloaded onto his iPad a ten-year list of all cabin break-ins and stock thefts in the county.

  Back at home in his “dining room,” he had several maps thumbtacked to his wall—road maps, trail maps, topographical maps. A few camp chairs around a card table littered the open space.

  After a few aborted attempts to organize the files and his thoughts, he settled on color-coded thumbtacks marking each theft. Each year got a different color, showing some pattern but not a strong one. But then he realized years didn’t matter as much as the seasons did.

  For the most part, the stock thefts took place in the spring and fall, the break-ins in the winter. The fall and winter crimes usually fell in the same region with the spring one being higher up in the mountains. He circled the cave and drew lines to the closest crimes.

  If the ghost had been on foot, there had been five crimes within a two-days’ walk of the cave. And only two of those had happened in the last few years.

  One had been a year and a half ago during the winter, making that one an outlier. A horse had been stolen in January, a full two months after and before any other stock crime.

  Unlike the other thefts, this wasn’t an animal in a field no one would notice for a while, but from a barn. While Sol had been sheriff back then, he hadn’t done the actual investigation. They were in the middle of investigating two murders, and he’d sent one of his on-call deputies to handle it.

  He slapped his forehead when he saw the name and remembered how desperate Sol had been for police help. The boy—he was far too immature to be called a man, though he was probably close to thirty—had come to him with actual police experience. Charlie had lasted a month before Sol caught him dru
nk in a patrol car and fired him.

  He read through Charlie’s paperwork from that crime. Surprisingly, the former employee’s notes were detailed, if a bit sarcastic. “Victim disappeared between 11 pm and 7 am from his residence.” That would be the horse.

  A blizzard had blown in the morning of, dumping about 18 inches before it cleared out in late afternoon. The owner had fed the horses at about 4:30 as the storm eased up and before night stole the day entirely. Once the skies cleared and darkened, the temperatures plummeted below zero. He returned to the barn before bed to add some straw to the stalls as added warmth.

  By morning chores, one gelding—the most docile one—had disappeared into the snow along with a saddle.

  Unlike the other thefts, where few tracks remained, that one left a clean set into the woods through the fresh powder. Charlie had taken several pictures. Sol pulled them up and zoomed in. The thief wore snowshoes and walked beside the horse. They’d stolen a saddle; why walk? With snowshoes on, the foot size had been impossible to determine.

  Sol reached for his phone, cringing at having to reach out to the man he’d fired during their last conversation.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Charlie, it’s Sol.”

  A moment’s pause before a stilted response. “How are you?”

  Sol, always awkward with small talk even when he didn’t have bad blood, plunged ahead. “You worked a horse theft. Do you remember it?”

  “Yes, I was quite sober during it.”

  “Good.” Ignoring the underlying current in a conversation had always served him well. “You made fairly detailed reports. I’m curious how long you followed the tracks for? Was there ever a time the thief mounted the horse?”

  “I followed it until it got dark. Not sure distance-wise how long that was, and, no, he never got on.”

  “Why steal a horse and a saddle and not ride it away?”

  “Because that horse carried a load.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The tracks to the barn were one person carrying something heavy. Something he, at one time, set down in the snow, creating an indentation.”

  “That wasn’t in the picture.”

  “No, I focused on the trail after the crime. Apologies if I don’t have your tracking skills. It was my first horse theft.”

  “Any idea what he carried?”

  “Not a box or anything with sharp edges. The indent was about the size of a duffle bag.”

  “Not a person?”

  “Not one that still moved, if it was.”

  “Did you return the next day? I see in your notes the gelding wandered back on its own?”

  “If I recall, the next day I was called out on a pile-up traffic accident down at the Junction. The following day, the owner called and said he’d found the horse in a protected grove—alone. A small storm had dumped enough to cover any other tracks.”

  “Thanks.” He went to hit End.

  “Sheriff.” Sol put the phone back to his ear. “I don’t drink anymore—just thought you should know that.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “By the way, there was one odd thing I don’t recall that I put in the report.

  “What?”

  “I found a toy in the snow—like those plastic ducks kids play with in the tub.”

  Where was the horse thief going in the middle of winter on foot? Sol stared at the maps tacked to his wall, willing them to tell him. They usually did—eventually.

  The snows had formed deep drifts that season, keeping everyone without a snowmobile homebound for a week. Which, in this country, meant no one stayed home for more than a day.

  But a person on foot would be hobbled and soon dead without somewhere close to go. The horse and rider had to have chosen the path of least resistance, staying off the slopes for protection and out of the thick forest.

  He drew a bright red line, marking the trail Charlie had tracked more than a year ago. With his knowledge of the area and the topographical map, Sol made an educated guess of where the thief would’ve gone next. He poked a finger at a small ravine that grew into a larger canyon.

  That canyon led up to the Triumph mine. Teenagers frequented it as a hang out to get drunk and make out every weekend. Would the Ghost be so careless as to go there? But this would’ve been winter, he reminded himself. No one ventured up there after November. The rocky conditions kept snowmobilers and skiers out of the area.

  He cussed out loud when he remembered the other thing that would keep people out of the mine’s depths. He picked up his phone to call the one person who might know a solution.

  “Catherine,” he said before she could offer a hello. “Are you willing to go up again?”

  It took less than thirty minutes to get her on board with the plan and him on the road. Sol signaled to turn left off the highway and up a four-wheel road when his phone rang. Another two minutes and he would’ve been out of service. Clint’s name flashed up on the screen, and he hit Ignore. The call was followed by a text, Call me. We need to talk now.

  Sol sighed like a five-year-old being told to clean up his toys. He put the truck in park. Five more minutes and he would’ve been out of service with a built-in excuse. Clint picked up on the first ring. “Is the woman back?”

  When Sol had called in the body, he’d conveniently left out the part about Hylia being in the cave and the kid’s toy. “I’m on my way in. Try not to fire me before I get there.”

  Catherine and the cave would have to wait for another day.

  29

  Jen grabbed the box of mementos and threw her bag over her shoulder, scanning Jim’s office to make sure she’d left nothing behind. She had an hour to get to the Greyhound station. As she pulled the door closed, she glanced down the hallway that led to the bedrooms—in the exact same place as at her old house. The light around her seemed to darken as she remembered that rain-soaked day.

  “Just leave,” she whispered. The closed door of the master bedroom beckoned her on as it had that day almost twenty years ago. Both the hallway now and then stood in shadow with no outside light coming in. But that day had been even dimmer. They were on day three of a fog the sun had given up on beating.

  Excited to be in charge, she’d left Link in the living room so she could make dinner like a responsible grownup who didn’t need a sitter. That was when she’d heard a loud thump, like something dropping from up high. The noise had come from her parents’ bedroom.

  The number one rule in their family was to never, ever wake Mom. Her nights at the hospital ran long, and her evenings with her kids took priority. The few hours she slept had to last.

  Jen took a few hesitant steps down the hallway as she had as a child. “Mom,” she called out in a hesitant whisper. Enough to be heard but not enough to wake a sleeper.

  Another collision; something slammed against the wall. Her hand trembled at the doorknob, her mind a jumble of thoughts. Behind her Link turned up the volume on Zelda. She turned the knob.

  Jen stared into the empty master bedroom but saw the past. Her mother lay face down on the bed, one red slipper still on her foot. A man straddled her waist, facing away. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated in a sob.

  The last words her mother’s murderer said were, “I’m sorry. I loved you.”

  She fled the lawyer’s house with a promise—or a lie—to stay in contact. He followed her down the sidewalk. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m going to miss my bus.” She didn’t turn around.

  “Please call me if you need anything.”

  The bus carried her toward the mountains, where she would breathe a little easier. She didn’t realize how much those high peaks gave her a sense of protection, but protection from whom?

  Had she been living with the one man who proved more of a threat than anyone else?

  My dad didn’t kill my mom. The words kept repeating in her head. But like a word repeated too many times, it didn’t sound right a
nymore. He couldn’t have, right? Jen was there . . . but the man whispering to her mother had said he loved her. She and Link weren’t supposed to be home—not for another two hours.

  The bus’s diesel engine revved as it hit the first incline. She pulled open her bag and yanked out the first book. Each coded sentence required a key to unlock its true meaning. She searched through the book for two hours before she deciphered the key. The Welsh repeated several phrases from the book itself; once she found a phrase, she counted the lines from the top of the page down to the repeated phrase. That number equaled A in the alphabet.

  After that it was a simple code. Each letter equaled a number, starting with the number from the phrase. If A was nine then B was ten and so forth. The numbers became letters, then words, then sentences. To keep things more fun, her father vacillated between English and Welsh in the final translation.

  The first half of the messages only showcased her father’s increasing paranoia. He listed the dates and times the “spy” satellites moved over their house.

  One entry made Jen grateful for the dim lights and drowsing bus. Charlotte must not know.

  The pages threatened to rip under her clenched grip. She forced herself to keep reading. Her eyes started blinking more and she dropped the pen as she read the last word she deciphered—ogof—Welsh for “cave.”

  She sat straight up, jerking her seatmate awake. The woman gave her a dirty look and settled into the other side of her seat.

  Jen kept reading.

  Cave Three: Where rivers flow uphill and the snows deepen in the summer, across the bridge that disappears.

  Most of the other notes were equally vague until she got to Cave Five—now, that one she could recognize from having lived there for a season or two. She knew her father wouldn’t dare return to a place she knew about. Of the ten mines he described, she only recognized six. How could she find the other four?