Page 10 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

Willa was exhausted, but she had little hope of sleep. Gary had said very little after she picked him up at the sheriff’s department, but they needed to talk. She put water on to boil for tea, and took two cups from the cabinet. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked.

Gary slumped at the kitchen table. He looked as bad as she felt. Worse, maybe, pale and heavy-eyed. “No. Though if you’ve got anything stronger to go into that tea, I’ll take it.”

She looked in the cabinet until she found a bottle of rum left over from some long-ago recipe, and set it on the table beside him. “Do we need to hire a lawyer?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. We can’t afford one anyway. Not a good one.”

“I could borrow money.” She hated the thought, but she would do it for him.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“How can you say that? You know what happened last time.” Those three days when he had been in jail had been among the worst in her life.

“This wasn’t like last time.” He unscrewed the cap from the rum. “This was different.”

The kettle whistled and she poured water over the tea bags in the two mugs. “What do you mean, different?”

“This sheriff is different. I mean, he didn’t say much. He listened more than he talked.”

She set a mug in front of him. “What did they ask you?”

“The usual. Did I know Olivia? Where was I last night?” He added rum to his mug. “Aaron was there.”

Of course he was. “He’s probably the one who told the sheriff to question you.”

“Probably. He didn’t have much to say, though he did tell the sheriff that you verified that I was here all last night.”

“That was big of him.”

“I always felt bad about busting you guys up. You seemed really happy with him.”

“You didn’t bust us up. And it’s just as well. I got to see his true colors.”

“I guess you wouldn’t have made a good cop’s wife.”

But she could have been a good wife to Aaron. If he had been a good man.

“I’ll never forgive him for putting you in this position a second time,” she said. “When Scott Sprague told me they had arrested you—”

“They didn’t arrest me. They questioned me.

And not just about Olivia. They asked other stuff, too.

They wanted to know if I had seen anyone else with Olivia.

And they asked about Trevor.” He picked up the mug and eyed her over the rim.

“Why didn’t you tell me he died? I found out when I showed up this morning that he drove his car into a canyon. They think it was suicide.”

“The search and rescue call yesterday morning.” She sat across from him and cradled her own mug. “That was a friend of yours?”

“Yeah.” He sipped the tea.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Why were they asking about him? They don’t think you had anything to do with his death, do you?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. They were asking when I saw him last, did he seem upset or depressed, stuff like that.”

She sipped the tea, not even caring that it scalded her tongue. “I can’t believe this is happening again,” she said.

“It’s going to be okay. No one can say I was with Olivia because I never even knew her.”

“Did they say anything else about Olivia? Did they say what they found that had everyone so agitated? Was it something that belonged to her, or some other kind of evidence?”

“They didn’t say anything about that. Someone at camp said it was a shirt or something. And that it had blood on it.”

“What do the people at camp think happened to her?”

“No one knows. At first, people said she must have run away. Kids do that, sometimes, I guess. But if they found blood…” He shook his head. “There are some bad people out there.”

She couldn’t do anything to stop those people. All she could do was try to protect the people she loved. The only family she had left.

Daniel and Sylvia Pryor had the shattered look of people everywhere dealing with loss and uncertainty. They sat in two chairs in the sheriff’s office Tuesday morning, untouched coffee cups in front of them.

“Olivia was happy at the camp,” Sylvia said. “Every time we talked to her, she was excited about everything she was doing. All the fun she was having.” She glanced at her husband. “We hadn’t heard her that happy about anything in a long time.”

“Her counselor told us she was sent to the camp to get her away from an older boy she was seeing,” Travis said.

“Yes,” Daniel Pryor said. “He was sixteen. Olivia was barely thirteen. We felt she was too young to be that serious about anyone. We caught her sneaking out to see him and felt we had to do something.”

“Olivia was very upset with us at first,” Sylvia said. “But she came around. After her first week at camp, I could tell she was really happy. It was like…like we had our little girl back.” Her voice broke and she looked away.

“Who is this boy she was seeing?”

“Jared French,” Daniel said. “As soon as the camp called to tell us Olivia was missing, I called Jared to find out if he knew anything. He swears he hasn’t been in touch with Olivia. His parents believe he’s telling the truth.”

“And Jared is at his home now?” Travis asked.

“Actually, he and his family are in Michigan, visiting family,” Daniel said. “So we know he and Olivia didn’t run away together.”

“Did she mention any special friends at camp? Other campers?” Travis asked.

“She talked about the girls in her cabin,” Sylvia said. “But never any boys.”

“She wouldn’t have mentioned boys to us,” Daniel said. “Not after what happened with Jared.” At his wife’s wounded look, he added, “She’s a teenager. It’s what teenagers do. They don’t tell their parents everything.”

“We questioned her cabin mates.” Travis looked to Aaron. “They didn’t mention any boys Olivia was particularly friends with.”

“Her friend Stella said Olivia never paid attention to any of the boys,” Aaron said. “They tried to tease and flirt with the other girls, but Olivia ignored them.”

Sylvia nodded, but said nothing.

“Stella also said that starting about two weeks ago, Olivia had been quieter,” Aaron said. “As if she was upset about something. And about then is when she began sneaking out of the cabin at night.”

“How can that happen?” Sylvia asked. “I thought a counselor slept in each cabin with the girls. Isn’t she supposed to prevent that kind of thing?”

No one had an answer for this. Aaron remembered his own teenage years—how devious he and his friends had been in getting around restrictions and rules. They weren’t bad kids, causing mischief and getting into trouble. But they had craved independence and tested their limits at every opportunity.

“I talked to Scott Sprague on the phone yesterday afternoon,” Daniel said. “He said he keeps a close eye on the campers and he doesn’t think Olivia was seeing anyone associated with the camp. He suggested someone from outside might have been coming onto the property.”

“We’ve questioning everyone in and around the camp,” Travis said.

“We haven’t identified any suspects at this point.

We’re sending out a couple of search dogs again today, and hope to get a drone up to do an aerial search now that the weather is better.

” He cleared his throat. “There’s something else you should know.

A search dog yesterday located a slashed T-shirt near the foundation of a storage building.

There was blood on the shirt. It’s the same blood type as your daughter’s.

We need a blood sample from one or both of you for DNA comparison. ”

“Blood?” Sylvia look as if she might faint.

Her husband gripped her hand. “You say the shirt was slashed?”

“With a knife or razor. But there was no blood on the ground in the area, and no blood trail leading away from the shirt. It’s possible the rain washed away any trail. At this point, we don’t know.”

“But Olivia is hurt. She’s out there alone somewhere. And hurt.” Sylvia began to weep, head bowed, sobbing quietly.

Daniel rubbed her back. “I want to be a part of the search,” he said. “If Olivia hears me, maybe she’ll come.”

“It’s better if you and your wife stay together, so that we can notify you as soon as she’s found,” Travis said.

He didn’t say the last thing they wanted was for the girl’s father to stumble upon her lifeless body, but Aaron knew that’s what he was thinking.

“Someone can take you to the lodge at camp. You can wait there, nearby. We’d also like you to go through Olivia’s things at the camp.

You might spot something unusual or out of place that we would miss.

” This task would give them something else to focus on, and a way to feel useful.

“Of course,” Daniel said.

“Deputy Ames will drive you to the camp,” Travis said.

“We have our own car,” Daniel said.

“Then he’ll follow you there,” Travis said.

Aaron nodded. Neither he nor the sheriff believed the Pryors had anything to do with their daughter’s disappearance, but it was good police procedure to keep an eye on them and gauge their initial reactions to the scene.

And deputies were going to question everyone at the camp again, in the hope that this time someone would have something useful to say.

Something that would lead them to Olivia.

A casual visitor to the camp would have had no clue to the previous day’s chaos.

The sound of cheerful children’s voices echoed among the pines and groups of campers gathered on the shore of the lake or around the cabins.

Despite Olivia’s disappearance, everything appeared to be operating as usual at Mountain Kingdom.

Aaron escorted the Pryors to Olivia’s cabin, and the bottom bunk where she had slept.

At the end of the bed was a metal trunk that held her belongings.

Her mother sat on the bed and sorted through the contents of the trunk, tears streaming down her face as she smoothed her hand over pajamas and swimsuits, and a stack of green Mountain Kingdom T-shirts, like the one the search dog had located.

“There’s nothing unusual here,” she said when the trunk was empty, its contents stacked on the bed beside her.