Page 74 of The Lovely and the Lost

Ash was my son.The words Ness had said to Cady the day before echoed in my mind.I’d say that gives me a stake in this.

“No,” Cady said. “I know what you’re thinking, Mac—

but no.”

“She taught us every bit as much about survival as your father did,” Mac countered. “And she’s been down with the flu for days.”

Ness had been at the house when we’d arrived, but by that point, Bella had already been missing for more than a day.Enough time for Ness to get her settled in the cave. Enough time for her to come home and convince Bales to bring Cady in on the search.

“Bales is dying.” I knew, somehow, that Cady couldn’t ignore the words if I was the one who said them. “Ness said that he’d been trying to get in touch with you, but you wouldn’t reply.”

Cady weathered that statement like a blow. “My father wouldn’t have asked me to come back for himself. I wouldn’t have come backfor him.”

Mac wove a hand through Cady’s, as if he could somehow channel strength from his body into hers. “Ness knows you. She knows Bales. She knows me. It makes sense, Cady. If she wanted to bring us back here…”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Cady took a step away from him, releasing his hand. “There were five bodies in that clearing, Mac.Five.”

Some things cut all the way to the bone.

“The autopsies came back.” The male FBI agent took that moment to remind us of his presence. “We’re still waiting on DNA and some other higher-level tests, but the ME has tentative rulings on cause of death.” He paused. “At least two died of exposure, one appears to have been attacked by some kind of animal, a fourth has the kind of blunt-force trauma we would associate with a fall.”

“And the fifth?” Cady asked, her voice hoarse.

“Drowned,” the female agent replied. “Most likely in the river.” She stopped dancing around the point and laid it out for us. “We’ve found no evidence of foul play. In at least two cases, we believe the bodies were buried a month or moreafterthe victims died.”

It was hard for me to imagine Ness killing someone, but it was strikingly easy to imagine her laying a stranger to rest.

The day before, Mac had told me that he didn’t find bodies.I find lost ones, he’d said,and I bring them home.

Ness Ashby was nowhere to be found. The FBI searched the Bennett property. They went through her cabin with a fine-tooth comb, and they didn’t find a trace of the old woman.

Not so old that she can’t still take to the mountain,I thought.Not too old to pull Bella out of the river or take advantage of the kind of search that people will mount for a missing little girl.

“I’m mad at you.” Free came to stand right beside me. “But for the next ten seconds, I’m going to pretend that I’m not.”

I felt like I’d swallowed a tennis ball, but I managed to respond. “You want me to tell you what’s going on?”

“Eight seconds.”

Luckily, I was an expert at keeping things short. “I found Bella. The person who took her wanted us to find her.”

“Three seconds,” Free said lazily.

“The person who took her was Ness.”

“Ness?” Free repeated, forgetting all about her countdown. “Older woman about yea tall? Tough as nails and makes corn bread even better than Cady’s?”

When I’d gone out to search, I should have taken her with me. FreeandJude should have been there when we’d found out the truth. Gabriel, too.

“Ness did it for Cady,” I told Free. “And for Bales.”

Free was quiet for long enough that I wondered if she was trying to make sense of what I’d said or if my temporary pardon had run out.

“Finding Bella was supposed to fix me.” I didn’t know what else to say or how to explain what I was talking about or why it mattered.

Fortunately, Free didn’t believe in segues between one subject and the next. “We’re unconventional,” she told me. “Not broken.”

We.I took a hesitant step toward her. “New part of the Creed?”