Page 5 of Wilderness Search (Eagle Mountain: Unsolved Mysteries #2)

When Willa arrived home from running errands Sunday afternoon, Gary was just coming out of the shower.

Neither of them could afford rent on their own, so sharing a place had made the most sense.

Plus, it allowed Willa to keep an eye on her little brother.

He would have protested that, at twenty-three, he didn’t need her to look after him, but she needed to reassure herself that he was all right.

“How was your day?” she asked as she put away groceries.

“Okay.” He rubbed his shoulder. “I had to dig, like, a mile of ditch for a water line.”

“By yourself? That sounds horrible.”

“I was supposed to have help, but the guy didn’t show up. And it had to be done today. Supposedly there’s a big storm coming in tonight.”

“Maybe you should look for another job.”

He had a degree in physical education but all he had been able to find here was a job doing maintenance at a local ranch.

“Nah. I like this one. Working outside, nobody to hassle me. And it keeps me in shape.” He moved to the refrigerator and took out a can of flavored seltzer. “You want anything?”

“No, thanks.” She closed the cabinet, then stood by the counter, unable to think what to do next.

“Is something wrong?” Gary asked.

“What makes you ask that?”

“You look upset.” He took a drink of seltzer, gaze fixed on her. “Did something happen at the clinic yesterday?”

“We had a bad search and rescue call this morning. A guy drove his car off Dixon Pass. They think he did it deliberately.”

“Wow. That’s rough. Was he really messed up?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do this search and rescue stuff if it’s going to upset you so much.”

“It’s not the call that upset me.”

He frowned. Before he could ask any more questions, she added, “I saw Aaron today. He was at the scene. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.

Here, in Eagle Mountain.” There. She had told him.

She hated to upset him, but he needed to know.

Better to hear the news from her than to run into Aaron somewhere in town.

But Gary didn’t look upset. “Yeah, I know.”

“You knew?” Her vision grayed at the edges for a moment, she was so shocked. “And you didn’t tell me?”

He shrugged. “Because I knew it would upset you. And see, it has.” He gestured to her with the seltzer can.

“When did you see him? Did he say anything to you?”

“I was at the hardware store, and I saw him outside, talking to someone. He didn’t see me. Then I saw him one other time, at Mo’s Pub. We never spoke. It was no big deal. Did he say anything to you?”

“He said he was sorry.”

“Maybe he really is.”

She hugged her arms across her stomach. “I don’t care if he’s sorry or not. I can’t forgive him for believing you would ever do something so horrible.”

“What did you expect? He’s a cop. That’s how they’re trained to think.” He drained the rest of the can of seltzer and tossed it into the recycling bin.

“But there wasn’t any evidence against you.”

“There wasn’t any evidence against anyone else, either. And two people saw me talking to Rachel that night.”

“How can you be so calm about something so horrible?”

He had spent time in jail because of police insistence on focusing on him as their only suspect in Rachel Sherman’s murder. The two of them had had to leave everything behind and start over because of that terrible mistake.

Gary shrugged. “I don’t see any sense in brooding over something that happened in the past that was completely out of my control. I’d rather get on with my life.”

It was a sensible attitude. A healthy one. But one she couldn’t adopt. “Aaron should have given you the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s how these things ever work.

And it’s not like he was the only cop pointing the finger at me.

He wasn’t even a detective or an investigator.

The important thing is that the DA didn’t file charges and I’m a free man now.

” He opened the refrigerator again. “Spaghetti sound good for dinner? I’ll make it. ”

“Sure. Thanks.”

But he didn’t start dinner right away. He continued to study her.

“Don’t let Aaron get to you,” he said. “He made a mistake and he paid for it. He lost you. Someone else will step up to the plate and realize how great you are. In case you haven’t noticed, this place is crawling with single men.

Seriously, I can’t believe you don’t have guys standing in line to ask you out. ”

She laughed, more from frustration than mirth.

“I’m not interested in going out with anyone right now.

” She had turned down half a dozen men who had shown up at the clinic, asking to see “the new nurse” with their mystery ailments.

They had all been polite, ranging from slick and charming to bashful and sweet.

“That’s cool, too.” He pulled a package of ground beef from the refrigerator and shut the door. “But the next time you see Aaron, look right past him. Let him know you don’t care what he thinks.”

“I’ll do that.” She didn’t need Aaron. She didn’t need any man.

But she did need for Gary to be all right.

He said he was free now, but was he, really?

The two of them had given up so much to escape the cloud that hung over him because of those charges.

They had told themselves taking new names and moving was a chance to reinvent themselves.

They could do whatever they wanted, and be whoever they wanted to be.

But seeing Aaron had made her feel the past would always be hanging on to their heels, pulling them backward whether she wanted it or not.

Their shifts had ended by the time Jake and Aaron left Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp, but they still needed to return to the station and file reports. Aaron was used to the long hours. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to devote himself to, though he knew Jake was anxious to get home to his wife.

“I wonder why Trevor left the bonfire without speaking to his brother?” Jake asked as he and Aaron drove away from the camp. “And how he ended up smelling of alcohol if he wasn’t a drinker?”

“Maybe he wasn’t drinking at all. Maybe a bottle broke in the car or something.”

“Yeah. We need to wait until we hear from the coroner.” He slowed as a quartet of turkeys crossed the road in front of them, sun angling through the trees glinting off their bronzed feathers. “Did you ever go to summer camp as a kid? Someplace like Mountain Kingdom?”

“I spent a couple of weeks at Boy Scout camp one summer,” Aaron said. “But not places like this, where kids stay for a month at a time, or the whole summer. There were a lot of those in Vermont, where I’m from. When I was on the force in Waterbury, we would occasionally get calls.”

“What kind of calls?”

“Usually petty things—theft or vandalism. But we had a murder case once. A little girl was killed.” Rachel Sherman.

“Did they find the killer?”

“We never did.”

“That’s rough.”

“Yeah.” Aaron and another officer had interviewed the girls in Rachel’s cabin.

They had said they had seen Rachel talking to Gareth Delaney.

Aaron remembered the shock of hearing Kat’s brother’s name in connection with a crime.

He hadn’t known Gareth well, but he had seemed like such an ordinary, likable guy.

But the more Aaron and his fellow officers talked to Gareth, the more nervous and suspicious Gareth acted.

At first he denied knowing Rachel. When confronted with her cabin mates’ statements, he admitted talking to her, but said he hadn’t even known her name.

Another lie. And though everyone was supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, you didn’t have to be a cop long to learn that guilty people often lied.

Aaron realized Jake had been talking to him. He shook his head. “Sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked how you’re settling in. New town, new job, all that?”

“It’s good. I like it here.”

“Small towns aren’t for everyone, but I guess it helps that you have family here.”

“Yeah. It’s great.” Not that he couldn’t have moved away from his parents and siblings, but when they had decided to follow his sister, Bethany, to Eagle Mountain, it seemed like a good opportunity for him to make a fresh start. Get away from bad memories.

Except this morning the biggest memory had confronted him on the side of the highway. As beautiful as he remembered.

And just as unforgiving.

Willa slept little that night, her mind too full of worries about Aaron and Gary.

Would Aaron spill their secret to others in the community?

Would the media—or some true-crime enthusiast online—track them down and make their lives miserable, as had happened back in Waterbury?

The murder of Rachel Sherman remained unsolved and the internet was full of amateur sleuths who were sure they could find the real killer.

A good number of those people started with the assumption that Gary was guilty.

All they had to do was find the right proof to convict him, or persuade him to confess.

She dozed off after 4:00 a.m. and woke at six to crashing thunder and pounding rain.

She gave up trying to sleep and rose, showered and made coffee.

By seven, she was sipping her second cup, scrolling through her phone, searching for any distraction, when it vibrated in her hand with an alert from the first responders’ app.

For a moment she thought she must have dreamed the last hour as she read the message:

Volunteers needed to search for missing girl, Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp. Muster at SAR Headquarters.

She was still staring at the message when Gary shuffled into the kitchen. He must have said something, but she didn’t hear him. Her head buzzed with the dizzying sensation of having been here before.

“Sis? Is something wrong? You look like you’re going to be sick.”

She looked up and focused on her brother’s face: He was blond like her, with a boyish face that had many people still mistaking him for a teenager. Despite everything that had happened to him, he maintained his open, optimistic attitude about life. People liked Gary. They trusted him.

Most people did. The cops hadn’t. Aaron hadn’t.

She wet her dry lips, and struggled to speak. “It’s a search and rescue call,” she said. “There’s a girl missing from a kids camp.”

Alarm flashed in his eyes. “What camp?”

“Some place called Mountain Kingdom Kids Camp.”

He groped for a chair and sank into it, so pale even the blond hairs of his unshaven chin stood out against his pasty skin. “Who? Did they say who?”

“They don’t say.” She leaned forward and covered his hand with hers. “What’s wrong? Why are you acting like this?”

He wiped his hand across his face, and wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Mountain Kingdom is where I work.”

He wasn’t making any sense. “You work at a ranch.”

“That’s what I told you, but I actually work at the camp.” He grimaced. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d lose it.”

Her stomach clenched. “Gary, how could you do that? How could you risk that?”

“It was the only job I could find, okay? And it’s a good one. I didn’t have anything to do with Rachel’s death, so what does it matter if I work at this camp instead of that one? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Of course you didn’t. But what if someone finds out about what happened in Vermont—what you were accused of? They could jump to the wrong conclusion.”

They could think he had sought out another job working with kids on purpose. That he was some kind of predator.

“Whatever they think, it’s not true. We have to live in the present, sis. Not stay stuck in the past.”

She wanted to argue with him that their present was shaped by the past, but her phone buzzed again, reminding her she didn’t have time for this. “I have to go,” she said, and stood.

“I should go, too,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”

“No. I don’t want you anywhere near the camp or this girl. Not until she’s safe. I won’t risk anyone thinking you had anything to do with her going missing.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know. But it will be better if you stay away.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at her, jaw set in a stubborn line. She turned away, her heart pounding and a voice in her head chanting over and over, This can’t be happening again.