Page 12 of The Lovely and the Lost

Gabriel took it upon himself to answer the question. “Exactly where you should be,” he said. “At the rangers’ station, joining the search for that girl.”

By the time we arrived, there were easily sixty people at the rangers’ station, awaiting instructions. Jude, Free, and I weren’t the only ones under the age of eighteen. With this much area to cover and a child’s life at stake, the authorities needed every warm body they could get.

Beside me, Saskia strained slightly on her lead. She didn’t like crowds. Neither did I, but search and rescue was a cooperative effort.

I forced my attention from the mass of people to my training. If I settled down, Saskia would follow suit.A first-response team would have been deployed as soon as the child’s family reported her missing,I thought, willing the muscles in my neck to relax.This will be the second wave, or the third—civilians, useful primarily for their numbers.

I didn’t need to get a good look at the local authorities to know that they would keep volunteers on a short leash. The last thing anyone needed was another missing person, and though I suspected most people in Hunter’s Point knew a little something about wilderness survival, that wasn’t a risk any reasonable leader would take.

Not even for a child.

“Thank you all for coming.”

Those words were meant to silence the crowd, and they did. The lack of noise put my senses on high alert.The sound of the man behind me breathing. The snap of a twig beneath a woman’s feet, up and to the right—I forced myself to look at Saskia, who was sitting as close to me as she could get without touching.

“Good girl,” I said softly. The muscles in my chest loosened slightly, and I focused on the man whose voice had sent a hush through the crowd. Based on his uniform, he wasn’t a park ranger.

He was the local sheriff.

“Bella Anthony disappeared from her family’s campsite at the base of Bear Mountain sometime between ten p.m. on Thursday and six a.m. Friday morning.” The sheriff had a visible sidearm and a voice that carried. “Bella is nine years old, four foot two inches tall, and has shoulder-length medium-brown hair. When last seen, she was wearing pale pink pajamas and a red windbreaker.”

The sheriff nodded to one of his men, who began passing out flyers with the child’s picture on them. When the stack came to me, my fingers locked around it with surprising force. I stared at the picture. There was nothing remarkable about the little girl in the black-and-white photo. She could have been any other child.

But she wasn’t.

I knew better than anyone that if Bella Anthony was out there much longer, she wouldn’t ever beany other childagain.

A hand brushed the edge of mine. My head whipped up. A man—the heavy breather who’d been standing behind me—gestured to the flyers I was holding. “Take one and pass it on.”

Breathe in. Breathe out.I managed not to recoil from the man’s touch. I took a flyer and passed the stack on. No claws, no fangs, no fight, no flight. I was in control—and I was here for a reason.

“The park rangers are already out there, looking for Bella.” The sheriff picked back up where he had left off, once the flyers had made the rounds. “Our job is to help comb the forest within the radius that Bella could have traveled. You will work in teams of two, walking straight lines no more than thirty feet apart. Call Bella’s name. Look for any evidence of her presence—tracks, food wrappers, disturbed foliage. Once we’ve covered one section of the grid, we’ll move to the next.”

The strategy made sense—for civilians. But Bales Bennett hadn’t brought Cady here to walk the woods.

As the sheriff dismissed us and the crowd began to disperse, snatches of conversation hit me like shrapnel. The quiet had sent my senses into overdrive, and now that quiet was gone.

Jude leaned toward me. “On a scale of yea to nay, how are we doing?”

I fixed my gaze at a point in the crowd—a child, maybe two or three years old. He had dark hair and chubby, sun-kissed cheeks, and he was staring, wide-eyed, at Saskia.

“Sass and I are fine,” I said, keeping my eyes focused on the child and tuning everything else out. As if to prove my point, Saskia docilely observed a butterfly flutter by. The child watched, delighted.

And then Saskia snapped her teeth and swallowed the butterfly in a single gulp.

The toddler threw back his head and howled.

Jude glanced at Free, then cleared his throat. “We shall speak of this no more.”

Quite pleased with herself, Saskia cast triumphant looks at Duchess and NATO and settled back by my side. I watched as a woman about Cady’s age bent to pick up the screaming toddler. Her arms curved around his sturdy little body, and he laid his chubby cheek against her chest. I ached, watching them. Not because I couldn’t remember my own mother. Not even for little Bella, lost in the woods.

I ached because I didn’twantto be held. Most of the time, I didn’t want to be touched at all.

It was a minute or more before Bales Bennett made his way through the crowd toward us, a youngish woman I didn’t recognize by his side. He introduced her as Angela Anthony, Bella’s mother. Dark smudges marred the skin under her gray eyes. She looked like a breeze could have blown her away, but the animal part of my brain said that Bella’s mother could kill every person here—every single one—if it meant bringing Bella home.

“Mrs. Anthony.” The sheriff intervened before she could say anything to us. “What are you doing here? You should be at the hotel. You need sleep.”

The reply was immediate and guttural. “I need my baby.”