Fletch
“What’ve we got?” Sully asks the moment he gets out of the truck.
“Missing woman. Could be injured, we found blood on a ledge twenty feet below the cliff.”
I follow him around the vehicle where he lowers the gate to get his crazy-expensive drone. The thing is outfitted with rotating cameras for a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view and a night-vision setting. It’s the newest tracking tool we have in our arsenal and has already proved its worth a few times over.
I called the boss right after Sheriff Ewing announced a search party, and Jonas suggested he and Bo load up the horses and head this way to help.
“This the sister of that woman you’ve been dodging?” He wants to know as we lift the drone from the truck.
Fucking Ama and her big mouth. Love the woman, but she’s like the annoying little sister at times. Living in a cabin on the ranch comes with perks but the downside is zero privacy. Should’ve gotten a place somewhere else like Bo did. Of course then I wouldn’t have the convenience of walking to work, having a large pot of coffee or an occasional meal waiting in the big house, or always having family close by.
“It is. Found her license plates.”
The sheriff actually found the second one in the trees near the cliff earlier.
“No shit?” Sully says, looking up. “You think her vehicle’s stolen?”
“Wouldn’t be the first one. Ewing mentioned there were five more thefts in the county this past month.”
“Any violence?” He wants to know.
I know where his mind is going. Mine went there too.
“Not according to the sheriff, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have escalated to that. Who knows? She may have caught them in the act,” I suggest.
“Maybe, or she fell, hit her head and when these guys happened upon the abandoned motorhome they seized the opportunity,” Sully shares an alternate take.
“Possible, but that would mean she’s been somewhere at the bottom of the drop and I haven’t seen a single vulture around. In fact…” I remember the incident this morning I was told about earlier. “Nella had an encounter with a bear this morning who was after her sandwich.”
Bears are opportunistic eaters, especially in the late summer and fall when they start fattening up for the winter. If there was a dead body nearby, this bear wouldn’t have wasted his time on a piece of bread.
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine.”
He looks around. “Where is she?”
I follow his gaze. No sign of her by the van, where I watched her stomp off to earlier, or anywhere else on the site.
“She must’ve gone down to the cliff with Ewing.”
Even as I’m suggesting it, I realize the sheriff is sitting behind the wheel of his cruiser making phone calls. The forensics tech is taking pictures of some tire tracks not far from where I found the first license plate. There is no sign of Nella.
“Fuck.”
“What?” Sully wants to know as I rush to my truck to grab my pack and rifle.
“Damn woman took off,” I grumble. I hoist my pack on my back, clip my water flask to my hip, and sling the rifle over my shoulder. “She’s gonna get herself killed.”
Good thing I’m always prepared. I could wait for the rest of the team, but they won’t be able to get the big trailer up here so will be picking a staging area at a lower elevation and ride in. That could take a while and I hate to think the kind of trouble she could get herself into in the meantime.
“Here!” Sully calls out, tossing me a walkie-talkie as I walk to the sheriff’s cruiser. “I’ll get the bird up and see if I can spot her.”
With only my cell phone, which is useless out here, and the radio in my truck, I’m grateful for his foresight to bring these. We use the IC-SAT 100 when we’re out in the field. It runs over a global satellite network and has a long battery life, although I hope I won’t need it.
She can’t be that far ahead.
I knock on the driver’s side window.
“The sister, where did she go?”
Ewing startles, looking around the site.
“I thought she was with Cohen.” He sticks his head out of the window. “Hey! Cohen! Where’d the woman go?”
The tech waves his hand toward the cliff and I start walking in that direction.
“How long?” I call out to him.
“Fifteen. Maybe twenty?” he yells back.
Good, it won’t take me long to catch up.
The cliff is facing west, sloping up to the north, and down on the south side. She’s heading down, trying to get to the valley below so I head south.
It isn’t hard to follow her tracks, but the course she set is pretty steep and it looks like she slid in a few places. She’s taken the most direct way to the valley below instead of the safest, and my annoyance with her grows. The woman is likely to get hurt at this rate and then I’m gonna have to haul her back up.
I try to listen for sounds of movement but I can’t hear any. The trees get denser the farther down I go and I find myself holding onto the occasional tree trunk to stay on my feet.
“Pippa!”
I zoom in on the yell, which comes from below and to my right. Sounds like she managed to build up a lot more distance than I expected.
Following the direction of her voice, I make my way down the slope. Above me I can hear the high-pitched buzz of Sully’s drone, but I’m not sure how much he’ll be able to make out. The trees are dense and the canopy is pretty thick. Unless my team finds another way down, the horses will never be able to get down here.
Even if her sister is still miraculously alive somewhere, she’s been exposed to the elements for over a week and won’t be in good physical shape. We may have a hell of a time getting her out of here. Unless there’s a break in the trees somewhere a helicopter could drop a basket, we’ll likely have to carry her. The last thing we need is someone else hurt or incapacitated.
“Nella!” I holler. “Stay put, I’m coming to you.”
I don’t get a response at first and am about to yell again when I hear her call out, “Okay.”
She’s sitting on a rock at the bottom of the cliff, looking up through the trees. Her shoulders are slumped and her face pale.
“Are you trying to get killed?” I snap.
Then she turns her head to face me, and I catch the look of utter devastation in her eyes.
“She’s not here.”
My anger dissipates instantly, replaced by a wave of empathy for her. If the scenario played out as we suspect it may have, chances are slim her sister survived and I think Nella knows it. She’s determined to find her sister, dead or alive.
“Let me have a look,” I say, suddenly eager to give her even a small thread of hope.
Nella
After he radios someone to tell them he found me, he walks along the bottom of the cliff, alternately looking at the ground and up at the tree canopy.
I’m not sure what he’s hoping to find, but then again, neither was I when I went blundering down the mountainside. It’s only when I reached the bottom and couldn’t see any sign of Pippa that it occurs to me, I was half expecting to find her body.
Assuming she went missing not long after her final phone call to me, she’ll have been gone for two weeks tomorrow. Even if she simply wandered off, I highly doubt she’d have been able to survive two weeks out here on her own. Besides, she would’ve found a way to contact me.
Guilt overwhelms me. When she didn’t show up on Monday, I should’ve left for Montana right away instead of waiting a couple of days to report her missing, and another few before deciding to look for her myself. I should’ve gotten in my van right away and come looking.
“Don’t.”
I look up to find Fletch standing in front of me, a stern look on his face.
“I know what you’re thinking and it won’t do you, or her, any good to let guilt paralyze you.”
“How would you know?” I snap, irritated he seems to read me so easily.
He shrugs but his eyes get this faraway quality, like he’s here but his mind is focused on something only he can see.
“You’ll just have to trust I do.”
Yeah, I have a sneaky suspicion maybe Fletcher Boone carries some guilt of his own. He surprises me when he holds out his hand.
“Come on. I have something to show you.”
Reluctantly I allow him to pull me to my feet. He immediately releases me, and I follow him to the base of a large Pinus albicaulis, also called white bark or creeping pine. These pines don’t tend to get nearly as tall as the fir or spruce since they’re more frequently found at higher elevations, but this is a decent size.
The only reason I know a little about this is because one of the environmental science students at my college was doing a paper for her ecology course on the endangered tree and asked for help with research.
“What am I looking at?” I ask him.
He points up. “See those three branches?”
“I can see they’re snapped,” I comment.
“Yes. All on the side of the rock wall, and one below the other.”
Then he points at some scrapes on the bark on the trunk of the tree right below the lowest branch.
“See these marks? I think those branches may have broken someone’s fall, and they were able to climb down.”
“Couldn’t that have just been an animal? How would you know it’s a person?”
Despite my hope sparking, I’m purposely being cautious. Hope can be painful.
“Because of these.”
Now he crouches down and points at something on the ground. I’m not sure what he’s looking at so I lower myself beside him. When he traces it with his finger, I can see the outline of a footprint.
“It’s a hiking boot. My guess size seven men’s, or a women’s eight and a half.”
That spark turns into a flame.
“Pippa is an eight and a half.” If those are my sister’s footprints, it means she was alive and walking. “Are there others?”
I immediately start looking around to see if I can find more of them. Fletch points out a partial one a few feet away. Then a third set of footprints, made by the same boots. It looks like they head farther into the valley.
“Where are you going?” he asks me when I start walking in that direction.
“Looking.”
“Look, I know it looks like it might be her but we still can’t be sure. Can you give me a second to at least report what we found?”
But I don’t stop. Shaking my earlier doubts off, I feel resolve return.
I can hear him curse under his breath behind me before he calls someone named Sully on the walkie-talkie. His voice is clipped as he relays information, but I’m not really listening. My eyes are focused ahead.
I scan the ground in front of my feet for prints and the trees for any signs of disturbance. Broken branches, snapped twigs, a lock of hair, something—anything—to indicate my sister was here. I hear the crunch of boots behind me, telling me Fletch is catching up.
But by the time I feel a heavy hand fall on my shoulder, I have the proof in front of me.
“Hold up,” he says. “Let me do my job. You could be heading in a totally wrong direction.”
“I don’t think so,” I comment.
Then I turn around and point out the white piece of linen tied to a low pine branch.
“What’s this?”
“Handkerchief.”
“Didn’t realize people still carried those,” he observes.
I fish in my jeans pocket, pull an identical one out, and show him.
“I bet you you’ll find the initials CMS embroidered.”
I can see he’s not yet a believer but he will be. He takes a closer look at the handkerchief before eying me suspiciously. I hold up my own so he can see the matching letters.
“What does it stand for?”
“My mom. Every Christmas my dad ordered a bunch of handkerchiefs for her. She always had a clean one on hand. When she died she had close to fifty. My sister and I split them and now carry one of them every day.” I look at him and see that his lukewarm interest in my sister’s case has heated up a little. “Mom’s name was Carmella Maria Scavo.”
He drops his head, grabbing the back of his neck with his hand.
“Okay,” he starts. “Here’s the deal. I’ll look for your sister if you head back up. It can be dangerous out here, there’s no way to know what we’re going to run into, and frankly, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’ll just be another liability.”
Don’t ask me how, but I get the sense his grumpy attitude is a front. He’s hiding concern. Still, communication is clearly not part of his skill set. Not that any of it matters, because there’s no way I’m turning back now.
“My sister needs me,” I state firmly.
Then I turn on my heel and resume my search, hearing him mumble behind me. I only catch the last few words.
“…giant pain in my ass.”