Page 55 of The Lovely and the Lost

Of all the things—and people—I’d thought Saskia might have scented, this option hadn’t occurred to me. Saskia took up position at Cady’s side, then turned back to me, her tail wagging.

“Mom,” Jude said awkwardly, keeping one hand on NATO to keep him from bolting to bestow doggie kisses upon her. “Fancy meeting you here!”

Cady spent exactly two seconds narrowing her eyes first at Jude and then at Free before turning 100 percent of her attention to me.

Walking toward her, I was fairly certain that this was about to get ugly, but before she could say anything, beforeIcould say anything—about the rocks, the hash marks, the tree—a loud, sharp bark broke through the summer air.

At first, I thought it was Pad, thought that she’d found something, but then I realized that the golden retriever was standing just behind Cady.NATO, Duchess, Saskia, Silver…they were allhere.

The barking came from farther down.

I pushed past Cady, pushed toward the clearing. I told myself that the rangers might have brought in another team, that the feds might have had an SAR expert of their own, but the deep tenor of the bark suggested that the K9 in question was large.

As large for its species as Mackinnon Wade was for his.

I broke through the tree line, and the world fell into slow motion. Mac’s dog was barking, nose to the ground.

“Cadaver dog.” I heard myself say the words. “Mac’s dog is trained to find bodies.”

Human remains.

I thought of Bella, of rocks laid in a perfect circle and hash marks scratched into the bark of a tree. Someone had come back to this place, again and again. It held meaning—for someone.

“Kira.” Cady came up behind me, wrapping an arm around me and coaxing my head onto her shoulder. “It’s okay. I promise you—you’re going to be okay.”

I wanted to really hear those words. I wanted to believe them. But I couldn’t, because as Mac bent down to mark the spot his dog had indicated, the animal lumbered through the clearing, nose in air, then started pawing at another spot, a few feet away.

The cadaver dog barked.More remains.When Mac came to mark that spot, the K9 repeated the process.

Again.

And again.

I’d thought that the worst-case scenario was that the search for Bella ended with a body. Instead, it ended with five. Five unmarked graves, one visibly more recent than the others.

I tried not to think about Bella’s blanket, about her mother.

Soon, the place was crawling with feds. The sheriff’s men ushered us to the side. At some point, someone draped a rough brown blanket over my shoulders. Like I was capable of feeling the chill that came with nightfall.

Or like I was in shock.

The sheriff arrived not long after they removed the first body. When I looked for Gabriel, I realized, through a thick fog in my brain, that he was gone.

“Come on.” Cady squatted beside me. “You don’t need to see this.”

See this.

See this.

There were so many people on the scene that I could make out very little. So why could I almostseea woman, lying prone on the floor? Why could Ismellblood? My mind was a mess oftrapsandgunsandteeth. It hurts—

“Hey. Look at me.” That wasn’t Cady’s voice. It was deep and gentle. Somehow, I focused on Mac’s eyes, focused on the fact that he was kneeling in front of me, steady and real.

He glanced at Cady. “You round up the other kids,” he told her. “Kira and I will be just fine.”

After a long moment, Cady went to find Free and Jude. Mac and I sat side by side on the ground in silence.

“When you do what I do, you see things.” Mackinnon Wade was nothing if not soft-spoken. “Natural disasters. Mass graves. The worst tragedies humanity has to offer.” He stretched his right hand out, looking at the back of his knuckles, like the story of those atrocities was inked into his very skin. “And then you come back to civilization, and you bring it with you. Sometimes, you keep those memories under lock and key. And sometimes, they get out. Sometimes, they drag you under, and you’re there,right there, all over again.”