There were a few benches at the trailhead, all taken by the time we arrived. I didn’t feel like sitting anyway, especially when a woman asked the man beside her to pass the bug spray. I hate bug spray—both the smell and how it feels on my coat—and always keep my distance. Lots of humans have a strange thing about bugs, are always spraying themselves or swatting at the air. What’s so bad about bugs? Some are even quite tasty.
Anya took a few steps onto the trail—nice smooth packed-down trail, the way trails usually were at the start—and gazed up a gentle rise. Not too far along, the path took a curve and vanished in the trees. I went over to Bernie. He was leaning against a split-rail fence, cell phone in hand.
“Suzie?” he said. “Hear me all right?” He listened for a moment, then spoke again. “Any chance you can get away on Monday? This job’s in primo hiking territory, but it’ll be all wrapped up by Sunday, and—”
And then came some more chitchat, but a light breeze had risen and it carried a very interesting scent, completely new to me, but the scent of a creature, for sure, and I lost track of the conversation. Who wouldn’t have, picking up a smell like that: strong, sharp, penetrating, musky. Once on a case—something do with the football coach at Valley College getting blackmailed, or maybe he was doing the blackmailing, hard to keep all the cases straight—Bernie and I were in the locker room after a game when the equipment dude was picking up the dirty uniforms and T-shirts and jockstraps and tossing them in a hamper. This new smell at the trailhead kind of reminded me of that hamper, but wilder, if that made any sense.
The breeze died down, taking the scent with it. Bernie was saying, “Great, see you then.” He clicked off, gave me a smile. “How’re you doin’?”
Me? Tip-top. I pressed against Bernie, not too hard.
“Easy, big guy.” He gave me a pat. Then we walked up the path and joined Anya. She was gazing at that curve where the trail disappeared.
“It’s so quiet here,” she said, turning to Bernie.
“Sure is,” said Bernie.
“Doesn’t it creep you out?” Anya said.
“Far from it,” Bernie said.
“I guess I’m a city girl,” Anya said. She checked the trail again. “Devin’s kind of like me in that respect. He didn’t want to come here at all. I had to bribe him.”
“With what?” Bernie said.
“Guy’s putting up the actual prize—some new video game player, I don’t even know the name.”
“Devin likes video games?”
“That’s pretty much his whole life these days. I’ve tried to get him to cut down, but he’s alone at home a lot and … well, you know the story.”
“Does he play any sports?” Bernie said.
Anya gave him a look. “You sound just like Guy.”
They were talking about sports? Sports: maybe the best idea humans ever came up with, in my opinion. Back when we were on the football case, I actually got into a real game! Bernie and I were right on the sideline, on account of we had to stay close to the blackmailer—it’s all coming back to me now, love when that happens—who turned out to be the assistant coach, yes, right on the sideline, close up to the action, when a punt happened, one of those punts down deep, whatever that means, but it’s the expression Bernie uses and he really knows football—played in high school, but dropped it when he went to West Point so he could concentrate on baseball—but forget that part, the point being that on the down deep punt the receiver stays away from the ball in the hope that it goes into the end zone, wherever that is, and meanwhile the other team tries to corral the ball, and footballs bounce in a crazy way, and when I see something crazy like that—
Whoa. I went still, ears up. Sounds came from behind the trees where the trail disappeared: snap of a twig, skittering of gravel, a human voice, either a woman’s or a child’s.
Meanwhile, Anya was looking at her watch. “How much longer do you think we’ll have to wait?” she said.
Bernie checked his watch, too. This was the cheapo watch. Bernie’s grandfather’s watch, our most precious possession, was back at Mr. Singh’s pawnshop. Great guy, Mr. Singh, and I can listen to him talk forever, almost like music, and there’s often lamb curry on the stove. Even goat, once or twice! A treat on top of a treat, if you see what I mean, although actually I don’t quite. Not important. The important thing was Bernie studying his watch and saying, “Six or seven miles, call it seven, likely on the move an hour after first light, averaging maybe …” He looked up. “Probably should have been here by now.” Anya got a worried expression on her face, and Bernie quickly added, “But the trail may be rougher than it looks from here, and they could have stopped for a snack—twelve-year-old boys, and all.”
“So I won’t worry,” Anya said.
“Nothing to worry about.”
Total agreement on my part. By this time I could feel approaching footsteps under my paws, and also heard a boy say, “This rise?” and a man answer, “The next one. Almost there.” I glanced at Bernie and Anya: no reaction. Then I looked back at the trailhead benches: no reaction there, either. The bug woman was spraying herself again. The rest of them seemed bored. The human ear is a funny little thing—sometimes not so little: one of the dudes at the trailhead had the real big stick-out kind—but what were they for, exactly? I lay down and waited. My ear to the ground, of course, hearing lots of thump thump thump, heavy-footed sounds of humans when they’re tired. I took a nice stretch, getting my front paws way out front. Hey! That thing where they start vibrating happened. So weird. I tried to make it keep happening, too late remembering that that always stops it, which is what went down. Sometimes not trying is the way to go, Bernie says. He calls that the Zen way, why I’m not sure. We took down an identity thief—no clue what that was about—name of Howard Zen sometime back, but he tried—tried real hard, in fact, all grunting and pouring sweat, especially when I had him by the pant leg, which was how we always knew the case was closed, me and Bernie.
Time passed. After a while, Anya cocked her head to one side. We do the same thing in the nation within, but much, much sooner, as I hope I’ve made clear. “Do you hear something?” she said.
Bernie cocked his head, too. A very nice sight, Bernie with his head cocked like that. Had to love Bernie. “Nope,” he said. “It’s just the wind.”
Wind? I raised my head. There wasn’t a breath. But while my head was up, I saw a kid come around the curve up the trail, a dusty sort of kid, baseball cap on sideways and carrying a backpack. I rose.
“Hey!” said Anya. “They’re here!”
She started walking toward the boy, but not fast, so it probably wasn’t her boy. Bernie trailed behind her; I got myself right beside Bernie. Now another kid rounded the curve, and another and another and another, me losing count, and then a man with a bandanna wrapped around his head, and after that nobody. None of them, not the kids or the man, seemed to be at all in a hurry: they were kind of dragging their feet, not so much the way people do when they’re wiped, more like when they don’t want to go where they’re going, Charlie for a haircut, say. So: they wanted to stay on the hike longer? That was my only thought.
Now, from behind, down at the trailhead, came voices: “There they are.” “Is that Tommy?” “I see Preston. Preston! Preston! Hi!” That sort of thing. The distance between us and the hikers kept shrinking. Now I could make out their faces. None of them looked happy.
“Which one’s Devin?” Bernie said.
“I don’t see him,” Anya said.
“How many are in his tent?”
“Five, I think.”
“One two three four,” said Bernie, counting with his finger; Bernie’s hands are beautifully shaped, the nails clean and shining. “He must be lagging behind.”
The first kid approached.
“How was the hike?” Bernie said.
The kid didn’t say anything, just kept going. The other kids passed by, all silent. Then came the man in the bandanna. By that time, there was plenty of distance between us and the top of the rise, but no one else had appeared.
The man reached us, slowed down. He was a small, muscular dude, carrying a heavy-looking pack like it weighed nothing.
“Where’s Devin?” Anya said.
He turned toward her, but not quite meeting her gaze. “I, um, better talk to Ranger Rob first.”
“Oh my God,” Anya said. “Has something happened to Devin?”
The muscular dude licked his lips; that’s something I always look for. Perps do it just before they’re about to screw up, but was this guy a perp? Wasn’t he a hiking guide? Maybe I’d missed something. “I don’t think I’m authorized to say anything,” he said, and turned to go.
Bernie stepped in front of him. “You’re the trip leader?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Brock something or other?”
The dude’s face turned red. “Turk Rendell,” he said.
“Well, Turk,” said Bernie, saying the name Turk real, real clear. “This is Devin’s mom. Where is her son?”
Turk’s eyes went to Anya, back to Bernie, then toward the ground. “He, uh, seems to have, like, wandered off.”
“Wandered off?” Anya said, her voice rising, high and sharp. “What are you saying?”
Turk licked his lips again.
“You lost him?” Bernie said.
Turk nodded.
Anya’s eyes opened wide. She covered her mouth with her hand: women do that sometimes, the reasons not clear in my mind. Then her face went white, just as white as corpses you see if you work a job like mine. Bernie took her arm. She would have screamed otherwise: you could feel it coming.
Ranger Rob had an office in the biggest cabin. Huge steer horns over the door and lots of wood smells: a real nice office. There was a big map on one wall and Bernie, Anya, Ranger Rob, and Turk Rendell stood in front of it.
“We were makin’ pretty good time,” Turk said. “Camped thereabouts Thursday, not long after six.” He jabbed a finger someplace on the map; he had stubby fingers, not at all like Bernie’s, and the nails were dirty.
Ranger Rob leaned closer to the map. “The clearing east of Stiller’s Creek?”
“Yeah,” Turk said. “Set up, got a fire goin’, chowed down, everyone sacked out by nine. Roused ’em at dawn”—he turned to Bernie—“boys in the tent, me in the open ’less it’s raining, and they filed out. No Devin. First, I thought he’d gone off to take a—you know, relieve himself, but after a few minutes we started callin’ and lookin’ around. Long story short, we spent the whole day searchin’ both sides of the creek, all the way down to the Slides and all the way up to the old mine, and, uh …” He shrugged.
“So Devin’s been missing for over a day and a half,” Bernie said.
Turk gazed at the floor. “See, what I figured was he’d gotten up sometime in the night—the relievin’ himself theory, just changed a little bit—and then lost his way back. So he couldn’t have gone far, which is why we kept lookin’, stead of hikin’ right out and raising a more general, you know … alarm. Plus we didn’t meet anyone the whole time, no one I could send back with a message. Can’t leave the kids, of course—that’s rule one.”
Turk, eyes down, missed the look Bernie was giving him, maybe a good thing. “Suppose you’re right,” Bernie said, “and Devin got lost in the night. Wouldn’t he have called out for help?”
“You’d think,” said Turk.
“You would,” Bernie said. “But no one heard anything?”
Turk shook his head.
Ranger Rob cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about your boy, sir. But I think Turk did fine in a difficult situation. Once he realized they weren’t finding him, he got back fast as he could. Those kids were dead on their feet.”
“Devin’s not my boy,” Bernie said. “I’m a friend.”
“Oh,” said Ranger Rob. “On the list it said parents.”
“Devin’s dad is coming,” Anya said. She glanced at her watch.
“I’m also a private detective,” Bernie said.
Ranger Rob took a step back, his eyes still on Bernie, but in a new way.
Bernie didn’t seem to pay attention to any of that. “Chet here is one of the best trackers in the West,” he said. Ranger Rob looked at me. I looked at him. “I assume you’re calling in the authorities,” Bernie said, “but I’d like to get started right away.”
“Started on a search?” Ranger Rob said.
“Correct,” said Bernie.
“Appreciate your willingness to help,” Ranger Rob said, “but our budget—”
“Right now you have bigger worries than your budget,” Bernie said.
There was a silence. Then Ranger Rob nodded, a tiny movement: any tinier wouldn’t have been noticeable at all.
Bernie said, “We need Turk, supplies for three days, and a satellite phone if cell service really doesn’t reach out there.”
“It doesn’t,” Ranger Rob said. “We’re right on the edge here in camp, as I mentioned. And I’m afraid we don’t have a satellite phone. It’s never been necessary, if you see what I mean.”
Bernie didn’t: I could tell from his face.