Page 103 of Silent Bones

The convoy crunchedto a stop in the gravel lot near the Wallface floodplain trailhead, nothing more than a rotted forest sign and a faded metal gate pulled halfway open. Flashlights snapped on. Radios hissed with chatter. Someone shouted orders toward the back.

Noah stepped out into the dark, cold air. The woods ahead swallowed sound, thick with undergrowth and the scent of wet pine. His boots hit the trail as Callie moved beside him, scanning a GPS.

“It says she was here,” she said.

“How long ago?” McKenzie asked behind them, breath pluming.

“Twenty minutes,” Rishi crackled over the comms. “Then nothing. Just… stopped moving. Tower lost her.”

They fanned out, voices low but urgent.

“Avery!”

“Avery, honey, can you hear us?”

Dogs barked; handlers grappling with leashes. The woods offered nothing back but the shuffle of boots and distant wind.

Then a voice called out ahead. “Over here!”

Noah and Callie sprinted forward, ducking under low branches, slipping on wet moss. A young deputy stood in a shallow clearing near a broken boulder, the beam of his flashlight fixed on a small, dark shape resting on the rock’s surface.

Callie stepped forward slowly. Her light joined his.

It was a phone.

Face down. Screen cracked. Casing scraped like it had been dragged. A few inches away, a braided leather bracelet, frayed at the edges, lay coiled in the dirt.

Callie knelt beside it, lifting the phone with a gloved hand. Her voice dropped. “It’s hers.”

McKenzie turned in a slow circle. “No footprints?”

“One set,” the deputy muttered. “It’s like it was… planted.”

Noah stared at the boulder. Its jagged edge loomed like a gravestone, silhouetted against the trees. Just beyond, the ground sloped down toward the floodplain, the same path the landslide had carved a year earlier.

He looked up at the trees, then back to the stone.

“This is where it started,” he murmured. “He brought it full circle.”

Callie stood, clutching the phone. “Why leave it here if she’s not?—?”

“To make us look,” Noah said. “To make us remember.”

A silence fell over the group. The trees swayed slightly in the wind, leaves whispering like secrets.

Callie exhaled. “So where is she?”

No one answered. No one knew.

Behind them, the radios hissed to life again, voices calling in more units, more dogs, more lights. But deep in the woods, Avery was already gone. And the message was clear: this was never about now. This was always about then.

27

It was cold inside the State Police Department’s washroom. Noah gripped the edge of the sink, arms locked, head down, watching water drip from his fingers into the basin. The mirror above him was cracked in the corner, spidering out.

Behind him, the door creaked open. McKenzie's voice came low and steady. “You okay, laddie?”

Noah didn’t answer right away. He reached for a paper towel, wiped his hands slowly, then finally lifted his gaze to the mirror. The man staring back looked older than yesterday, eyes rimmed red, stubble growing wild along his jaw, and something harder behind the eyes. Guilt? Maybe. Determination, definitely.