Page 19 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

“A trap? Like, a bear trap?” Danny frowned.

“She says it’s a hole in the ground, with branches over it to hide it. He fell in and she thinks he broke his leg. I have GPS coordinates for you.”

“All right. Go ahead.” Danny nodded to Tony, who was standing next to him, and Tony took out his phone, prepared to enter the coordinates.

The dispatcher rattled off the numbers and Tony typed them in. “That’s pretty close to here,” Tony said. “Less than a mile away, down a different county road.” He frowned at his phone screen. “It’s not near any established trail.”

“What were they doing out there?” Danny asked the dispatcher.

“The woman says they were looking for that missing little girl.”

“Tell them we’re on our way.” He ended the call and turned his attention to the assembled volunteers. “Those of you who want or need to go home, do so,” he said. “You’ve been out here all day. We only need about six people to handle this.”

“I’ll come,” Willa said. Going home meant hours of sitting and worrying. Better to be active and help someone in need.

“I’ll go, too,” Ryan said. “I want to see this trap.”

Tony, Vince Shepherd and Ryan’s fiancée, Deni Traynor, made up the rest of the crew that set out toward the area where the couple was stranded.

“We’ll have to hike in from here,” Tony said, enlarging the area map on his phone.

Danny distributed first aid supplies, including a wheeled litter, splints, back, neck and leg braces, supplemental oxygen and fluids, as well as ropes and other gear for retrieving their patient from the pit he had fallen into.

“Some of this is probably overkill,” he said as he helped Willa stuff her pack with more bandages.

“But we don’t know the extent of his injuries and we have to be prepared for the worst.”

They set out with Tony in the lead, breaking trail where there was none.

The terrain looked like the country they had searched all day—pine and aspen forest pocked with boulders and gullies, choked with deadfall and impenetrable thickets of scrub oak.

Tony had a machete to cut a path where absolutely necessary, but mostly they tried to detour around smaller obstacles, alert for hazards and for any sign of Olivia.

It took an hour to reach the couple. They heard them before they saw them, the woman calling out, “Over here!” and a man’s very loud “Thank you!”

The group stopped at the edge of a small clearing and stared at the scene before them.

The woman stood beside a boulder and looked from the group to a hole in the ground.

The hole was approximately six feet across, with green pine branches piled around it on two sides.

Moving carefully, Danny led the way to the edge of the pit.

The man was approximately five feet down, on his back in the bowl-like depression on a bed of more green branches.

The scent of pine perfumed the air. “We were walking along, taking our time, searching for any sign of the little girl,” the woman, a forty-something blonde dressed in jeans, a pink T-shirt and a black day pack, said.

“Luke was ahead of me. I heard a scream and looked toward him and he wasn’t there. ”

“The ground gave way and I fell,” Luke called up. He wore camo pants and a black T-shirt, a green ball cap over his short, sandy hair.

“Someone spread all these branches over this hole in the ground,” the woman explained. “I pulled them away and piled them to the side. Who would do something like that? Were they trying to catch a deer or a bear or something?”

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Danny asked.

“Melissa Wagner.”

“I’m Danny Irwin. We’re going to take care of your husband. It will take a few minutes for us to get down there to him. Meanwhile, you can answer some questions.”

While the others helped Tony attach a rope to a sturdy tree nearby and assemble the needed equipment, Danny and Willa questioned Melissa about her husband’s medical history and general health. “He said he heard the bone pop when he landed,” she said.

“He’s pretty sure it’s broken, but there’s no bone sticking out.” She bit her lip, her eyes shiny. “I can’t believe someone would do this.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this, either,” Danny said. “But right now, let’s focus on Luke.”

He used the rope to steady himself as he walked down into the pit. Tony and Ryan followed, leaving Deni, Willa and Vince to stay with Melissa and lower supplies via another rope as needed.

“It’s like something aboriginal hunters might use,” Vince said. “I think I saw that in a book—they dug a pit, lined it with sharp sticks and drove game over it.”

“Thank goodness this one didn’t have any sharp sticks,” Willa said.

“This pit wasn’t really dug out,” Deni said. “It looks like a tree died a long time ago and the stump rotted away and left this depression. All anyone had to do was scoop out the debris.”

She walked a short distance away and stopped beside another downed tree. “The branches they used to cover the hole came from this tree. I can see where someone broke them off.”

“They look like they’re still green,” Vince said.

“The tree has been down a little while,” Deni said. “It takes a long time for pine to turn brown.”

“Send that oxygen tank down, will you?” Danny radioed.

They returned their attention to caring for their patient, who turned out to have a probable fracture of the fibula and some cracked ribs. They stabilized his injuries, then secured him in the litter and carefully raised him from the pit using a combination of ropes and man power.

At ground level once more, they attached a large wheel to the center of the litter and stationed people at the four corners to steady its occupant and help the contraption over rough places in the ground.

While they were packing up the last of their gear, Ryan took several photographs of the pit and the surrounding area. “We should tell the sheriff about all of this,” he said. “Someone will need to make sure there aren’t more of these out here, waiting to trap some person or animal.”

“This looks recent,” Tony said. “Do you think someone did this to deliberately trap one of the people searching for Olivia?”

“Who would do that?” Deni asked.

“If someone kidnapped Olivia and is holding her around here somewhere, they might be trying to keep other people away,” Ryan said.

“Or they could be someone who likes hurting other people for no good reason,” Willa said.

Deni put a hand on Ryan’s back. “It doesn’t matter to us who did this, or why. We need to get Mr. Wagner to the hospital.”

They took turns handling the litter. When Willa wasn’t involved with that, she sought out Melissa and fell into step alongside her. “Did you see any sign of Olivia before your husband fell?” Willa asked.

“No. We were talking about turning back and going home when Luke fell.”

“Why did you decide to search in this area?”

“We want to help, but when we showed up at the camp, they told us only trained search and rescue volunteers were needed there. So we decided to come here. It was close enough we could imagine the little girl might have wandered over.” She sighed.

“I guess there’s a reason they only wanted trained searchers.

We didn’t realize how rough the country would be.

I don’t see how a little girl could be okay out here. ”

“It’s hard to want to help and not be able to do anything,” Willa said.

“Only now we’ve made more trouble for everyone.”

“It’s what we’re here for,” Willa said. They never wanted to discourage people from calling for help when they needed it. It was why they didn’t charge for rescue missions.

An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot of Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp and they loaded Luke Wagner into it, and Ryan and Deni drove Melissa to her car so that she could meet her husband at the hospital in Junction.

Willa, adrenaline ebbing and exhaustion taking over, trudged to her own vehicle at the far edge of the parking lot.

She stiffened when she recognized the tall figure waiting for her. “What do you want?” she asked Aaron, the words coming out more brusquely than she had intended.

“I’m hoping you’ll do something to help with our search for Olivia,” he said.

She clicked the key fob to unlock her car, but didn’t open the door. “What can I do?”

“You could teach a first aid class to the girls in Olivia’s cabin. Talk to the kids and see if any of them know something about Olivia and her disappearance that they haven’t told authorities.”

“Why me?” she asked.

“You’re a nurse, so you’re qualified,” he said. “We think the girls would like you and confide in you.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Me and Jake.” He hurried on before she could ask why they had been discussing her in the first place. “The girl you saw in the clinic seemed willing to talk to you about Olivia.”

“It seems a sneaky way to get information.”

“We’ve already questioned every camper at least twice,” he said. “They’re suspicious of cops. They’ll be more relaxed with you.”

She could see the logic in that. Sort of. “What am I supposed to find out?”

“Why she ran away from camp,” he said. “Was someone there bullying her? Was she afraid of anyone? Is she trying to get someone else in trouble? Having those answers might help us figure out how to find her.”

She opened the car’s rear door and shoved her pack inside. “All right. What do I have to do?”

“You have to persuade Scott Sprague to take you up on the offer.”

She made a face. “So he doesn’t even know you’re planning this?”

“No one knows. Jake and I came up with the idea on our own. Well, with some help from Bethany. She’s the one who pointed out that the campers wouldn’t want to tell the truth to ‘old’ men like us.”

She almost smiled in spite of herself. “What if Scott says no?”

“Don’t take no for an answer.” He grinned. “Besides, I don’t think he’ll turn you down.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“He’s a single man. You’re a beautiful woman.”