My lack of a backpack is bothering me more and more. I stick the remaining pair of Pop-Tarts into the front pouch of my hoody, then add an apple. I look like a kangaroo, but I tell myself fashion has never been my crutch.
Keith disappears, reappearing with a lightweight runners pack, with strings spooling over his shoulders. He adds fruit, two bottles of water.
Then that’s it. We have a runner, a thug, and a detective. The dream team indeed.
D.D. heads for the car, and Keith and I follow.
* * *
—
THE DRIVE TO THE TRAILHEAD is short enough. The volunteers are already pouring in, and D.D. has to work for parking. We follow the flow of humans—a mix of male and female, young and old, all more appropriately dressed than we are—to the check-in table, where SSA Quincy, in an FBI windbreaker, is clearly in charge, along with some older woman who is wearing a sheriff’s department fleece with the same aplomb other women wear cashmere.
D.D. checks us in. She doesn’t make small talk with Quincy. Given the long line and level of activity, now is not the time. On the table, Quincy has spread a huge map that is broken into brightly marked squares: the search grid. To the side, I see the key. Neon pink belongs to Nate Marles, bright green to Mary Rose Zeilan. Team leaders, I figure.
Quincy hands us a small map with notations. Our first assignment. I check it out on the larger map. We’re about a quarter mile up from where the body was first found. This disappoints me till I remember what the forensic anthropologist said—many predators like to retreat with their treasure to higher ground. So maybe this will be a good place to find a raccoon’s den or an abandoned squirrel’s nest. I need us to find something. Make some kind of difference.
At the next table there are cases of water and piles of bananas, then boxes of mesh gear bags filled with tiny surveyor’s flags.
“One bag per search team,” Quincy is saying now, voice brisk as the line builds behind us. “Should you see anything you think might be relevant, you stop and take out a flag. Write your grid coordinates in Sharpie beneath the flag number. Then mark the flag on your map and call it in to your team leader. Got it?”
“Got it.” D.D. almost sounds chipper.
“Run out of flags, send one of your teammates down for more.” Quincy glances up, takes in Keith’s outfit, pauses slightly. “Send him. He looks fast.”
Keith doesn’t bat an eye. “Like the wind,” he assures her.
Now D.D. is smiling, too.
“Pace yourself,” Kimberly warns. “Eyes open. Step steady. Good luck.”
Quincy looks behind us to the next guy. We move down the line of tables and finish picking up gear. The older woman from the sheriff’s department takes our names a second time, checks us off a list, and that’s that.
Up into the woods we go.
* * *
—
I DON’T MIND THE HIKING. I jog almost daily, though not in fancy clothes like Keith’s. But a woman who lives in my constant state of hypervigilance has to run endlessly just to burn off steam. Plus lift weights and scamper along buildings and swing my way around abandoned structures. I can’t reason my anxiety away by admonishing myself that the worst will never happen. Because the worst thing did happen to me, making all fears real, all terrors genuine. So I role-play my way through it. I find an old warehouse, I get myself untrapped. Samuel, my FBI victim advocate, first told me about the technique—easing anxiety by building strength—but I don’t think he expected me to take it this far.
Now, looking at the towering trees all around us, with a thick undergrowth of leafy green bushes—I think someone mentioned mountain laurel—it occurs to me all the new escape models I could be prepping for.
I keep moving. D.D. and Keith have no problem with the pace. Apparently, we’re all crazy.
No one speaks. We hit the one-mile mark. Shortly afterward we come to a small clearing, where another law enforcement type is standing with a clipboard. He checks us off as having survived this far, and gets serious about how to find our particular section of the grid.
He and D.D. talk for a few more moments. Keith, I notice, keeps looking behind the guy, as if there’s something he’s trying to see deeper in the woods. Then I get it. This is ground zero, so to speak. Where the hiker went in search of a stick and found a bone instead.
I look down the hill where we just came. And for the first time, I feel uneasy.
That climb was nothing for me. But Jacob? Jacob who sat behind the wheel all day and lived on fried food and was famous for his week-long drug- and alcohol-fueled benders . . .
I can’t picture Jacob here at all. Does that mean he never came to these mountains? That he lied to me about the Georgia cabin? Or does that mean I don’t know him as well as I thought I did? That he kept secrets even as I surrendered every last bit of me?
“It’s okay,” Keith says.
I realize I’m standing with my hands fisted.
“He didn’t win. You’re the one who’s about to help a murdered girl go home again. You got this.”
“Stop looking inside my head,” I mutter.
“Then stop being so easy to read.”
I scowl, but being pissed at him has made me feel better. Which is probably what he intended. Keith always seems to know me too well. Which is the reason I don’t trust him at all.
D.D. has our coordinates. We resume climbing.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME WE REACH our assigned area, we’ve shed our outer layers. We can hear things from time to time, other searchers in the woods, but we don’t see them. Each area is that large, given how much ground we have to cover.
“The body searches I’ve done,” D.D. says, “we stand in a line, walk forward at the same pace and prod the ground with a stick. You’re looking for softness, signs of recently disturbed earth. This is totally different from that. I’m not even sure of the best approach. It’s going to be hard to look beneath every leaf for small, random bones, so I’m liking Dr. Jackson’s advice: Let’s look for animal activity. Knock against some hollow trees, investigate fallen logs. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She pauses. “This is where we leave the trail. It’s important that we stay together. Keith, time for your magic compass app. We don’t want to become the next thing the search party has to find.”
Keith pulls out his phone. We’re all sweating. It’s cooler in the shade of the woods, but I now eye those same shadows skeptically. The trail had been easy to follow. Wide, nicely carpeted with fall leaves. Now we face clumps of giant mountain laurel clogging up the sides. There are gaps here and there.