Page 20 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

She ignored the flutter in her stomach at his words. “You’re suggesting I what— seduce him into saying yes?”

“No! Nothing like that. Just, you know, smile and make him think you want to do the class as a favor to him—and the campers.”

She didn’t want to agree to the idea, but she couldn’t think of a better one, and she wanted to help find Olivia. “All right, I’ll try,” she said.

“At least you’ll know you tried.” He held the driver’s door open for her. She gave him what she hoped was a look that told him she didn’t need his help, and slid past him, into the seat.

“How did the call go?” he asked. “I heard it was a hiker with a broken leg.”

“Fine. We had to pull him out of a hole in the ground he’d fallen into.

” She was about to start the car, but hesitated, wanting to tell someone about what had happened, and who better than a sheriff’s deputy?

“Someone had set a trap out there in the woods—a hole in the ground with a bunch of branches over it. This man—he and his wife were out searching for Olivia—stepped on the branches and fell into the hole.”

“No pointed sticks at the bottom?” he asked.

She frowned. “No. Vince said something about that, too. I never heard of that.”

“It’s called a punji trap. They used them in the Vietnam War.” At her questioning look, he added, “When I was a teenager I went through a phase where I was really interested in stuff like that. Anyway, someone dug a hole and set up a trap like that—without the sticks?”

“It didn’t look like they dug the hole, exactly,” she said.

“A tree had died and most of it had rotted away. Whoever did this scraped out the rest of the dead tree, then pulled some branches off a pine that had fallen and scattered them around. There’s a lot of branches and stuff on the ground around there anyway, so it was good camouflage. ”

“Was someone trying to trap Olivia?”

“I don’t know. It was just…strange.” She started the car. “I think Danny is going to contact the sheriff about it. Someone needs to make sure there aren’t other traps out there. With so many searchers out in the woods, someone else could get hurt.”

He stepped away from the car. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to the kids,” he said.

She nodded, and put the car in gear. She didn’t like how circumstances kept throwing her and Aaron together.

Most of all, she didn’t like how seeing him made her feel—not like she was facing someone who had betrayed her. When she was with Aaron these days, she was reminded of how much she missed him.

Gage asked Aaron to come with him to check out the trap that had injured Luke Wagner.

They said little as they hiked toward the location search and rescue had provided.

Aaron was tired of tramping through the woods, or at least these woods, with their tangled deadfall and uneven terrain.

He was constantly slipping on the thick carpet of pine needles or being slapped in the face by low-hanging branches.

“This isn’t good,” Gage said when they stopped briefly to rest and drink water. He pointed at something on the ground.

Aaron leaned over to look. “Bear scat,” he said. There were plenty of black bears in Vermont, though most of his dealings with them had involved chasing them out of people’s fruit trees or garbage cans. “Black or grizzly?”

“No grizzlies in Colorado,” Gage said. “And the black bears around here usually shy away from people.”

“Even if one ran away, it would probably terrify a little girl,” Aaron said. The thought made his stomach ache. Forget his own troubles; they needed to find Olivia.

They reached the GPS coordinates they had been given and gathered around the hole in the ground.

“I see what Willa meant when she said this wasn’t dug by hand.” Aaron indicated the remains of a rotted tree nearby. “Someone used what was already here.”

“It looks like they moved some rocks to sort of funnel traffic this way.” Gage pointed at several piles of rocks on either side of a path that led toward the hole.

“They couldn’t have known who would end up in it,” Aaron said. “Even an animal might have been hurt.”

Gage nodded and walked the perimeter of the hole, studying it.

“It looks to me like something a kid would do,” he said after a while.

“My daughter and her friends are always coming up with schemes like this—you know, ‘Let’s dig a hole in the backyard, fill it with water and make our own swimming pool.’ Or ‘Let’s build a fort by the back fence.

’ If they came across a big hole in the ground in the middle of the woods, they might remember a scene from a movie or book and decide to re-create it. ”

“The only kid we think is out here is Olivia,” Ryan said. “Why would she do something like this?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Gage said.

Which again begged the question why. Olivia’s parents seemed like decent people who were truly concerned about their daughter.

No one had reported Olivia having a bad relationship with her parents.

Everyone they had interviewed said she enjoyed camp, though there was Stella’s report that Olivia had been sad about something for the past couple of weeks.

What would have driven her away from the comforts of the camp to live alone in a rugged wilderness, through a rainstorm, cold nights and the possibility of encountering a bear? It didn’t make sense to Aaron.

They took a lot of photos, then marked the spot with orange flags and moved rocks and branches to guide people away from the area.

“That should keep someone else, or any animals, from accidentally falling in,” Gage said.

They searched for several hundred yards in all directions around the trap and didn’t find anything else suspicious. “I think someone saw that hole and decided to turn it into a trap on the spur of the moment,” Aaron said.

“More kid behavior,” Gage said. “Olivia’s parents said she was really into outdoor adventure and surviving in the wilderness stories. Maybe this is part of it. Maybe she isn’t running away from anything or anyone—she’s just out here having fun.”

“She has to know people are looking for her. And her parents are worried sick. That’s a cruel game. Nothing I’ve heard about her makes her sound like a cruel kid.”

“We won’t stop searching for her,” Gage said. “It’s just something to keep in mind. Our first idea about a situation isn’t always right.”

Aaron knew that. His former department’s first idea about Rachel’s killing had been wrong, and look what a mess that had turned into.