Page 77 of The Lovely and the Lost
“You would have insisted on coming with me,” Bales said. “I couldn’t let that happen. So I went alone. And when I came back, when I told Ness that there was no trace of her boy—not a body, not rumors,nothing—she accepted it. She let go. She moved on.” Bales swallowed. “And she started spending more and more time in the park.”
Ash had been gone for eighteen years. I thought of the hash marks on the tree.Days since he went missing?I wondered.Weeks?
I tried to make this—any of it—make sense. “She didn’t start burying people who died in the park until recently,” I said. “Four years ago—or five.”
“What changed?” Free asked.
“Five years ago,” Bales Bennett said finally, “I broke down and hired a private detective to find my daughter.”
“Five years ago”—Mac laid a hand on Cady’s shoulder—“she realized that you had a son. She would have thought Jude was Ash’s. She always thought that someday, for you, it was going to be Ash.”
I couldn’t tell how Mac felt about that—anyof it.
“I told her the truth yesterday,” Cady uttered desperately. “I told her that Ash and I weren’t…that Jude wasn’t…” She shuddered. “What if she takes that out on him?”
“Jude is yours, Cady.” Mac drew in closer to her. “And he’s mine.” That acknowledgment sucked the air from the room. “Whatever she’s gone through—whatever she’s going through—Ness wouldn’t hurt him.”
“She won’t hurt the boy.” Bales sounded infinitely surer of that than I felt. “But if we don’t find her before the authorities do, she might hurt herself.”
The deafening sound of a chopper drowned out Cady’s reply. Bales strode toward the door.
“Let me guess,” Mac called as we followed Bales out and saw a massive military-grade helicopter landing on the lawn. “You called in another favor.”
Saskia pressed to my side the moment my foot hit dirt. Up ahead of us, Cady didn’t tell her father that she was coming with him. She just climbed onto the chopper, calling Pad to her as she did. Mac followed but ordered his K9 to stay.
“Come on,” Free told me, grabbing hold of my arm and pulling me toward the chopper. I signaled for Saskia. Duchess hesitated, reluctant to leave NATO to come to Free.
“You two stay here,” Cady yelled over the sound of the blades.
“It’s Jude,” I said. When my words were lost to the din, I repeated them, yelled them.“It’s Jude.”
“I’ll stay.” Free pulled back. Nothing she could have said or done would have surprised me more. “I’ll take care of NATO.” She had to shout to be heard, but the look on her face was far fiercer than her tone. “Duchess and I will stay here, but Kira goes. Gabriel, too.”
Free hated being left behind. She hated being left out. She was fearless—but she would stay if it meant that I didn’t have to. She would take care of Jude’s dog the same casual and no-nonsense way she took care of Jude and me.
One for all, and all for trouble.
Cady shook her head. “Kira, I can’t let you—”
Free folded her arms over her chest and offered Cady a dangerous, glittering smile. “If you think I’m not resourceful enough to somehow rustle up an airlift of my own for Kira and Gabriel,” she commented pointedly, “you’d be wrong.”
Stepping foot into a grove of giant sequoias was like walking back into the Jurassic age. All around me, trees that had stood for thousands of years stretched skyward, as tall as twenty-story buildings and thicker through the base than some apartments. In my entire life, I’d never seen something so majestic, so primal.
“There are dozens of groves in the Sierra Glades,” Bales said, his voice echoing through the silent forest. “Ness marked one of the smaller ones on her map.” He paused. “This one’s the largest.”
“And you think we’re in the right place why?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t think,” Bales replied evenly. “I know, because I know her.” He lingered on that statement for a fraction of a second before returning to military strategist mode. “We’ve got a thousand acres to cover and depending on how competent the official search teams are, we could have less than an hour’s head start.”
None of us asked what Bales thought might happen if the FBI got to Ness and Jude first.
“There’s upward of twenty thousand trees in this grove,” Bales continued, his enunciation crisp. “Ness and Jude could be anywhere. The rest of you will take the dogs and search in pairs. Stay aware. With the drought, we’ve had more than our fair share of dying branches, and from that height…” He angled his head toward the breathtaking treetops. “Any falling item could be lethal.”
“What about you?” Cady asked, staring at her father with an expression on her face that I couldn’t quite parse.
“I’ll head west,” Bales replied. “I know a thing or two about hiding, and I might not need a K9 to pick up her trail.”
That was the only good-bye the four of us got. Within seconds, Bales had disappeared into the forest. I turned toward Gabriel, but Cady stepped between us. “You’ll go with Saskia and Kira?” she asked Mac. He nodded, and Cady spared a single glance at Gabriel. “You’re with me.”