“She’s got a scent.” Elsie’s voice was almost sparkling with excitement. She picked up her pace and Wyatt followed, hurrying into the dark woods, despite his misgivings about Elsie putting herself at risk. It seemed reckless for her to walk back into the woods that had proved so dangerous yesterday, but he understood her reasoning. Still, he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight today on a search, and he’d brought his revolver today as an extra precaution.
So far it had been a morning of ups and downs. It almost felt as if they’d shared something like a moment at her cabin, when he’d found her doing yoga and they’d had that brief conversation about faith. Wyatt had been surprised to hear that Elsie didn’t share his and Lindsay’s faith, but it didn’t change his view of her, really. He wished for her sake that she knew God, since he knew how much his own life had been made better by a genuine relationship with Him.
Then they’d flown to the island and met up with the state troopers, who had spent the night on the island in a makeshift command center they’d set up on the beach. The two officers from yesterday had been joined by several more, and one of them had met Elsie at the beach when they’d arrived with a manila envelope and a plastic bag with some kind of cloth in it, presumably something that had belonged to the victim. She’d spent a few minutes looking at the pages and mumbling to herself. Wyatt had figured it was best not to interrupt her, and then they’d taken off into the woods.
“How do you know she’s got a scent?” he asked now.
“’Cause she told me.”
Well. Obviously. He should have known. Wyatt grinned. “No, I mean—” he exhaled as they ran “—how did she tell you? I didn’t see her do anything.”
“She barked and took off. That’s her alert.”
“And she’s searching specifically for the missing person today?”
“Right. The troopers were able to get me more search data, including information on who she is and even something with her scent on it to smell.”
It seemed like it had paid off somehow because Willow was alert, clearly on the trail, and Elsie all but sparkled as she followed her.
They wound up toward the higher elevations of the island, crossing a small stream and stepping over countless roots. The woods and brush were thinner up here. He wondered if the missing person had tried to find a cell signal or something. That would be a pretty reasonable explanation for the scent going uphill.
Or trying to escape from someone.
They followed Willow for at least half an hour until the dog’s pace slowed, and she turned back to Elsie with a look that must have been something, because Elsie suggested they take a break.
“So what did you learn about the missing person?” Wyatt asked when they’d been sitting for a minute. He didn’t even have a name to mentally call the person, which seemed strange.
Elsie took a bite of her granola bar, chewed for a minute, seeming lost in thought, which made sense to Wyatt. While he knew the information packet had helped Elsie, it still must be odd to distill a person down into a few notes and bullet points here and there. Maybe she was mentally sorting through what she knew, finding which high points to hit for him.
“Noelle Mason. She’s from Anchorage. Pretty young, only twenty-three.”
“That is young. What does she do?”
“Works at a homeless resource center in Anchorage, actually.”
“Was she hiking alone?”
Elsie frowned. “No, with a friend. But the friend returned—Rebecca Reyes, according to the packet I got—and she left without Noelle, which seems odd. The friend reported her missing.” She finished the granola bar.
“You’d think the friend would have stayed on the island, maybe, and waited for Noelle? And how had they been separated in the first place?”
“Assuming they hired a water taxi to drop them off here like a lot of hikers do, it’s possible they got separated and Rebecca didn’t want to miss the water taxi... Still, it seems odd.”
“What are you thinking happened?” Wyatt asked.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know... It doesn’t make a lot of sense.” She shook her head, but the tension in her face and slight wrinkle in her forehead remained.
Wyatt reached for the trash, handed her a water bottle, which she took with a surprised look. “Thank you.” She took a long drink.
“She has no family. She was reported missing by the friend who had been hiking with her the day before...”
“At least no one is looking for her. Family-wise, I mean.”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Wyatt felt like a cold breeze had separated him and Elsie. She narrowed her eyes at him.
“What do you mean?”
“Just that if she doesn’t have a family, it’s good there’s not a whole family out there worried...” Yeah, he wasn’t making this better. It was a hollow reassurance, one of those ridiculous things people said to make other people feel better when something awful had happened. Even if she didn’t have a family missing her, it was terrible that she was missing. There were other people in her life whom her loss would impact. Coworkers. Maybe clients at the homeless shelter.
He’d messed up.
“Elsie, listen.”
She did not seem eager to listen.
He couldn’t blame her.
He hadn’t meant the words to sound callous. Of course he believed every life had value and that what Elsie was doing was worth it, though it was hard for him to see her risking her life for anyone. But he didn’t expect her to understand that and, well, he’d messed up. Badly.
Beside him, Willow lay on the ground, seeming to give him a look that conveyed her displeasure with him. Elsie was poring over the manila envelope, apparently not feeling like she’d had enough time to look at the profile before they’d jumped into searching.
He needed to apologize but didn’t know how to convince her that he meant it. He’d been good with words once upon a time, but it was like when he’d turned his life around God had taken away a bit of his ability to talk himself out of any trouble. Or into trouble. Which was good, but it definitely made moments like this harder, when he felt like he was fumbling for words.
“Elsie, I need you to hear me. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
This time, she looked up at him, maybe hearing in his voice the fact that he was genuine. He waited for her to speak, holding his breath, realizing how much her friendship, if that was what you could call it, was starting to mean to him, even after such a short time.
“So you didn’t mean it wasn’t worth looking for her or anything like that?” Elsie didn’t like how doubtful she sounded, but at the same time, she wasn’t sure she liked her willingness to hear Wyatt out. The words had obviously been careless, and Wyatt had done nothing to make her think that some people had more value than others. But his words hit close to home.
Was she worth finding? After all, no one was looking for her. No one except someone who apparently wanted her dead. Of course Wyatt didn’t know that, couldn’t, since she’d kept that information from him.
Without thinking, she turned to him. “I told you I was in foster care.”
“Yeah.”
“Because they never could figure out who I belonged to. Who I was.” She swallowed hard. “The OCS caseworker liked the name Elsie. She was from Montgomery. Through a series of what I’m sure were annoying legal hoops, that became my name.” Elsie made herself not look away, kept his gaze. Saw his eyes...
Shine with tears?
“Elsie, I had no idea. I’m sorry that happened to you.” He blinked, and the shine was gone. Maybe she’d been imagining it. But his voice sounded sincere. “I had no idea. Wow, no wonder you want people found.”
She hated how easily he understood her.
Yes, she was still waiting to be found herself. Not by this would-be killer. But by someone. Had someone cared about her, ever? The holes in her past weren’t an absence; they were a presence all their own, haunting her life.
“Anyway.” Elsie cleared her throat, stacking up the papers she’d been looking at. “I’m almost ready to keep going. I think if Willow could find the scent again, we might make more progress today.”
“Why did she lose it, do you know?”
“Could be any number of things.” Elsie looked around. “The trees are a little thinner this high up, the vegetation, too. That makes the scent less likely to be trapped.” She frowned. “That’s my best guess. A shift in the wind? Scent is a fascinating thing.”
“I’m amazed you can do all this.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Not that I’m surprised you specifically can do this, just that it’s a thing at all. It’s like you can read the dog’s mind and she can read the wind, the air itself. That’s pretty amazing, that’s all. Your dog’s amazing. You’re...” Wyatt trailed off.
The silence stretched between them and Elsie heard every noise. The wind in the spruce trees below them, the sound of Willow’s breathing, her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.
The thing that scared her most was that Wyatt didn’t sound like he was feeding her lines. He sounded awfully sincere. Surely she was intelligent enough that she could tell if someone was genuine.
But she didn’t trust herself right now, not with her old high school crush coming back to life. Even when he’d not been her type, when he’d been living life at way too fast a pace, she’d been intrigued by Wyatt. It had been so easy as a teenager to write that off to a stereotypical attraction to the bad boy, heightened by the fact that he was her friend’s very much off-limits brother.
But she wasn’t a high school kid anymore, and Wyatt wasn’t the man he’d been. And she liked who he seemed to be now. Not just a high school bad-boy stereotype, but a man who wanted to keep her safe even if it meant stepping into danger. A man who liked her dog. Someone who would follow instructions on a search without trying to pretend like he was the one in charge.
She...liked him. A lot. More than she had meant to?
That was almost as scary as anything that could be waiting for them in this wilderness. Even Elsie’s past.
“We should go. Start the search again,” she said quietly, but the words still felt so loud to her own ears as she broke the silence and whatever might have been between them.
Wyatt started to stand as soon as she said the words. “Sounds good.”
If only Elsie felt like anything was normal between them. She put Willow’s vest back on, told her to continue the search and then followed, aware of Wyatt’s presence close behind or even beside her. He was quiet. More so than he’d been on the way this morning, but maybe he was getting tired.
Or maybe she wasn’t the only one aware of...whatever it was. The fact that he’d almost called her amazing, then cut himself off. It wasn’t like he’d confessed his undying love. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her, like those moments characters in a movie had where they moved close and their lips parted and all of that ridiculousness.
Somehow it was more than that, though. The catch in his voice, the genuine admiration, even if he hadn’t finished his thought... It meant more to Elsie than all those things.
She hurried through the woods, eyes on Willow, willing herself to see something that could help them in their search for the missing woman. Noelle Mason, twenty-three. Orphan, no family. Worked in Anchorage at a community homelessness resource center, volunteered at elections, snowboarder, hiker.
The details made her more vivid in Elsie’s mind, less ethereal. This was a real human they were searching for, which was why it was so important not to let the search slack off at all, even if one’s search partner had dark eyes and a too-appealing five-o’clock shadow.
Willow sniffed at the air at their next decision point, where the trail split in two directions. Elsie waited as Willow considered her options, then seemed to catch just a hint of scent with her nose and took off toward the right.
“Is this a fast search or a slow one?” Wyatt asked as they kept following her.
“Most searches are over pretty quickly, statistically speaking. But here in Alaska it seems like we often get the searches that last for multiple days.”
“Just the terrain difference, you think?”
“That and maybe we have different categories of people getting lost? It’s really difficult to say.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, really.”
“Do you think...?” His voice trailed off. “I mean, she could still be alive.”
“Yes, definitely. It’s a good time of year to survive in some ways, dangerous in others. If she’s gotten rain-soaked or wet somehow, then hypothermia is a legitimate worry, even though it’s not necessarily cold outside. But if she’s managed to stay dry, this is definitely not too long.”
“And we don’t know if the shooter is still here. Do you think...? Is she connected to that?”
Elsie hadn’t managed to work that out.
How was the missing person connected to the people who appeared to be after Elsie? She had to admit that this seemed too big a coincidence for there not to be a connection.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know where to start coming up with ideas about something like that...” He trailed off. “It really might be time to talk to the police.”
“No.”
“The troopers, then.”
“Still no.”
“Elsie...”
“I told you, Wyatt, they’ll take me off the case and there’s no one else around here. She needs to be found.”
“She’s not the only one. You need to be able to find out what’s going on and move on without this shadow hanging over you and some kind of mysterious past hunting you down.”
“Hey, leave my past out of it.” Her voice was firm. Resolute. “This is my life and I don’t want them digging deeper into it.”
“Because you’re afraid of what they’ll find?”
“Absolutely yes.” She met his stare, looked back firmly, then directed her attention to the dog. “I don’t need someone else digging into a past I don’t know enough about myself.”
She read his hesitation and doubt in her plan, but so far he wasn’t convinced enough that she was wrong to go against her wishes, which she appreciated.
“How about we go over it tonight? When we’re back in town, when it’s too late to search for the day, let’s see if we can come up with some ideas.”
“That’ll mean me digging into your past, won’t it?”
That was different. Or was it? She could trust Wyatt, Elsie knew that.
She took a breath. “I think that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Hopefully it was a smart one, one that would lead to removing the threat against her and not one that would result in getting her heart broken.
With every step, she felt her sense of unease grow, but she didn’t think it had to do with Wyatt. Elsie mentally ran through lists of possibilities, finally realizing it was something about the way Willow was holding herself. She was still searching, very much at work, but something in the tilt of her ears said she was listening, too, and not just for any commands Elsie might give her.
What did she hear? Not their missing person, or she’d have alerted by now. A dog’s hearing was incredible, and so was their sense of smell.
“I don’t think we’re alone,” she whispered to Wyatt, wanting him to be prepared. She stopped, and he hesitated alongside her, close enough she could have reached out and touched him. She could feel him tensing, could feel it in herself as well.