Page 16 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

“Uh-huh. But I don’t know what happened to her.

” Juliet licked the lollipop. “The adults keep asking everyone over and over, but we don’t know anything.

” The girl’s voice rose, and Willa looked nervously toward the office.

She could see the counselor’s back from here.

Could the woman hear how upset her charge was becoming?

Willa was liable to be reprimanded for meddling in something that wasn’t her concern.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, and applied the last of the wet plaster. “How does that feel?”

“Funny. Is it going to itch?”

“It shouldn’t itch too much. Is it too tight?”

“I don’t think so.” She met Willa’s gaze, her expression serious.

“I don’t know Olivia that well,” she said.

“But her best friend at camp, Stella, is really upset. I heard her crying in her bunk last night, and I think it was because of Olivia. Or maybe it’s because she sprained her ankle.

But I don’t think that’s it. The ankle is all wrapped up and Stella told me it hardly hurts at all anymore.

And she gets to skip all the hikes and stuff.

But she also has to miss out on swimming, so maybe she’s just sad about that.

” Juliet shrugged. “Some kids cry all the time, especially the little ones who get homesick, but Stella isn’t like that, so I figure she just misses Olivia. ”

“I imagine she does.”

“How are we doing?” The counselor returned to the room. She frowned at Willa. Had she overheard part of the conversation?

“Would you like pink, orange, purple or green for the final layer?” Willa asked, and showed the box of colored wraps.

“Purple,” Juliet said.

Ten minutes later, the counselor and the girl left, the child showing off her purple cast.

The door opened and Aaron entered. Willa stiffened. “How can I help you, Deputy?”

“Would you be willing to go to lunch with me? Just to talk.”

This wasn’t the first time she had been asked out in front of a waiting room full of patients.

She had even heard a rumor that there was a secret betting pool on how long it would be before the new nurse agreed to go out with someone.

She was used to turning men down with a minimum of fuss, but Aaron’s invitation caught her off guard.

What made him think she would even consider going out with him?

But she remembered those moments of connection the other night at his house. She had wanted to believe those feelings were all one-sided. Apparently not, and he had gotten the wrong message. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said, keeping her voice low.

He nodded, showing no disappointment or surprise at her rejection. “Could you answer a medical question for me?”

Almost everyone in the waiting room was watching the two of them, not even pretending interest in anything else.

“Come back here,” she said, and led the way to an empty exam room.

She closed the door behind them, then thought perhaps she shouldn’t have.

The room was small, and suddenly intimate, with the two of them so close together.

“What kind of medical question? Are you sick?” The idea alarmed her.

He looked healthy. Better than healthy—he looked perfect. But you couldn’t always tell…

“I’m trying to figure out how you could give sleeping pills to someone against their will,” he said.

Not what she expected. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“It’s a hypothetical. It’s related to a case I’m working on.”

“All right. Well, there are lots of ways. You could crush them up and put them in food or a drink. How many pills are we talking about?”

“Two or three.”

“Depending on what you put them in, the person you’re giving them to might not even notice.”

“This person didn’t have any food in their stomach.”

“Then I’m not sure how you would do it.”

“Could you force the pills down their throat? The way you’d pill a dog or cat?”

“I suppose so. If they were restrained.”

“Could you do that with alcohol, too? Pour booze down their throat?”

“Not without choking them.” She knew better than to ask him for details.

She had learned very early in their relationship that he took privacy concerns very seriously.

As did she. She didn’t talk about her patients, and he didn’t talk about his cases.

It hadn’t mattered, because they had so much else to talk about—books, music, news and life itself.

She had been a little smug at times. One thing she and Aaron did well was communicate, and that was supposed to be the key to a good relationship, wasn’t it?

“I suppose you could make someone drink anything if you threatened them with a weapon,” she said. “Or threatened someone they loved.” The idea made her queasy. “Who is doing these horrible things?”

“I’m not sure anyone is doing anything. At this point, I’m just speculating.”

“Does this have anything to do with Olivia?” she asked.

“No. This is something else. And don’t tell anyone we had this conversation. It’s so far-fetched they’d probably laugh me off the force if they knew. I was just curious.” He moved a little closer, his tone confiding. “To tell the truth, it gave me an excuse to talk to you. I’ve missed that.”

She had missed it, too. But that didn’t mean it was a good idea to spend too much time talking with him. “I have to get back to work,” she said.

“Me, too.” But he lingered, his gaze like the brush of his fingers across her skin.

A knock on the door made them both jump. “Willa, is everything all right? You have a patient ready.”

She glanced up at him, a desperate look, and he stepped aside and opened the door. She rushed past him and hurried toward the examining room, fleeing her own worst impulses.

Jake radioed as Aaron was leaving the clinic. “What’s your twenty?” Jake asked.

“I’m headed back to the sheriff’s department. I’m about a block away.”

“Do you have time to run back out to Mount Wilson Lodge with me? Dwight has something he wants to show us.”

“Sure. What’s he got?”

“He didn’t say. He wants us to take a look and arrive at our own conclusions.”

They met at Jake’s sheriff’s department SUV.

He looked as exhausted as they all did, worn out but determined to keep going, desperately hoping for some sign of that missing little girl.

Every day that passed made it less likely they would find her alive.

Gradually the case was moving from a rescue mission to a search for a body to give the family closure and, they hoped, provide more clues to what had happened.

Aaron might have dozed on the drive out to the fishing and hunting lodge. He snapped to as they turned in at the gate. Dwight met them in front of the lodge with two quad-runners. “This is the best way to get to where we need to go,” he said.

Jake got behind the wheel of one vehicle, while Aaron rode with Dwight in the other. They headed down a trail, past a large lake where two men stood, fly-fishing.

“The wife of one of those guys went hiking this morning,” Dwight said. “When she came back she asked me about this place. I couldn’t really figure out what she was talking about, so after she went back to her cabin, I rode out here to take a look. That’s when I decided to call this in.”

“Call what in?” Aaron asked.

“It’s hard to describe. You’ll have to see and decide for yourself.” Past the lake, he turned off on another trail that led up an incline to the east. “We’re headed toward Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp now,” Dwight said.

“How far is the camp from here?” Aaron asked.

“About a mile as the crow flies. A little farther on foot. It’s pretty rough country—a lot of blow-down trees and big boulders scattered around.

Some of the search and rescue people came through there the day Olivia was reported missing.

They didn’t find anything, but it would have been easy to miss someone in that kind of terrain. ”

They threaded their way through dense forest, then across a high meadow, until they reached a three-strand barbed wire fence. Dwight stopped and shut off the machine. Jake parked beside him.

“We have to walk from here,” Dwight said. “We’ll be on national forest property.”

“How did your hiker end up out here?” Jake asked as he ducked between the strands of barbed wire.

“She said she was following a trail that just stopped,” Dwight said.

“I think she must have gotten off on a deer trail. Fortunately, she has a good sense of direction and was able to find her way back to the fence and the main trail from there.” He pulled out his phone.

“I marked the GPS coordinates after I found what she was talking about.”

They walked for another hundred yards, Dwight frequently consulting the screen on his phone. They detoured around a thick stand of aspen, then came to a stop.

“What are we looking for?” Aaron asked.

“Over there.” Dwight pointed to what at first looked like a clump of brush. But as Aaron moved closer he could see it was actually branches that had been bent over, the ends weighted down with rocks to form a tunnel.

He crouched down and looked inside. “Did you go in?” he asked.

“No. Look there, just inside. Do you see it?”

Jake moved in to peer over Aaron’s shoulder. “It’s a shoe print,” he said. “A small shoe print.”

Aaron studied the faint outline, as if from the sole of an athletic shoe. “About the size a thirteen-year-old girl might wear,” he said.

“My guest didn’t notice that,” Dwight said. “She was asking me what kind of animal made the tunnel.”

Jake and Aaron looked at each other. “One of us has to go in there,” Jake said. “In case she’s in there.”

“I’ll do it,” Aaron said.

“Let’s photograph that shoe impression first.” Jake took out his phone. “And the structure, too, in case you tear it up.”

Photographs taken, Aaron prepared to crawl on his hands and knees down the narrow tunnel.

It was a tight fit, and branches scraped his back in several places, but after approximately four feet he emerged into a larger space.

“It’s like an igloo made of branches,” he said.

He could hear Dwight and Jake just outside.

An igloo just big enough for one half-grown person to shelter.

“Is anyone in there?” Jake called.

“No. But the grass is all pressed down, like someone was sleeping here.” He studied the ground closely and spotted a blue label. He placed this in an evidence envelope, then retraced his path down the tunnel.

He was grateful to stand upright once more, his back protesting as he straightened. He handed the evidence bag to Jake. “I found this. It’s the same brand of water as the ones taken from the Mountain Kingdom storage shed.”

Jake looked back at the tunnel. “Do you think Olivia was hiding out here? Why?”

“Maybe she wanted to prove she could?” he guessed.

“When I was a kid I read a series of books about a kid who lived alone in the wilderness after a plane wreck,” Dwight said. “I used to daydream about doing something like that, but I never would have really tried it.”

“I read those books, too,” Aaron said. “Maybe Olivia did, too.”

“That doesn’t explain the bloody shirt,” Jake said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Aaron said. “Unless that shirt is the reason she’s hiding. She’s afraid whoever did that to her is still after her.” He looked around then. “You would have to be right up on this place to ever see it.”

“Smart kid, to figure all this out,” Jake said. He pulled a coin from his pocket. “You want heads or tails?”

“What for?” Aaron asked.

“The loser waits here while the other one goes back to Dwight’s house and calls it in. We’ll have to get forensics, see if we can find any definitive evidence that Olivia was here.”

“She was here,” Aaron said. “No adult made this. Everything about it is kid sized.”

“Heads or tails?” Jake repeated.

“Heads.”

The coin came up tails. Aaron settled in to wait while Jake and Dwight returned to the lodge.

After a while he sat, his back against a tree, warm sun on his face.

For the first time in days, he felt at peace.

This wasn’t a place where someone had been held captive.

This was a hideout. A safe place. Olivia had been here recently; he was sure. And she was alive.

The only questions were why had she hidden out here, and where was she now?