Page 78 of South of Nowhere

Exactly Colter Shaw’s idea.

Millwood continued, “Sure, another car might’ve blocked the camera or she turned into another entrance to stop for coffee or food. And maybe he didn’t even look, just said he did. But then there’s her phone…And you know, I have a sixth sense she’s in trouble.”

With a nod toward Shaw, Starr added, “This man here’s a tracker.”

Tolifson filled in, “Like with bloodhounds. Only he didn’t bring any.”

Shaw would have to correct his job description at some point.

Shaw asked, “Is Fiona a good driver?”

“Good enough. Careless sometimes.” Millwood sized Shaw up. “What kind of tracker are you, police?”

“No, I go after rewards offered to find suspects and missing family members, friends.”

“Hm. Never heard of that. But I’ll pay you five thousand to find her.”

“I—”

“Seven five.”

Shaw was thinking about the situation. There were other tasks that needed attending to. The evacuation, helping Eduardo Gutiérrez dig the kids out of the caverns in the hills above town, and following up on the criminal investigation to determine if the miner Gerard Redding and Bear were behind the sabotage.

But he simply could not turn away from Millwood.

Finding people who had disappeared and were possibly in danger was Colter Shaw’s essence.

Now that he’d made the decision to look into her vanishing, he moved into a different place. Mentally, emotionally. Time became the enemy. And the possibilities of a dire fate expanded exponentially. Car crash, snakebite, a spill into the Never Summer for whatever reason…

There were human threats too.

Bear, for instance.

If Fiona had skidded off the road, and he came up to “help”?

Shaw could easily imagine what might be on the man’s agenda.

“I’m not here professionally. I’ll help you out if I can. No reward necessary. But I can’t do it full-time. I’m helping Mayor Tolifson and Ms. Shaw. Disaster response…Let me look into a few things.”

“Oh, sir, I can’t thank you enough! Anything you can do! Anything!” His eyes were wide. Anger morphed into pure, powerful gratitude.

Shaw withdrew his notebook and unscrewed his expensive Italian fountain pen. Everyone except Dorion looked at it with varying degrees of curiosity. She was familiar with the tool. For one thing, Ashton had used one in his correspondence, when the children were growing up. For another, it was his sister who’d given him this particular model; it was to replace one that got incinerated in the same inferno that destroyed his most recent Winnebago.

The pen was not an ego thing, as it was for some. For every job Colter took voluminous notes—supplemented with maps and, occasionally, sketches, and a fountain pen was much easier on the hand than ballpoints.

He opened a notebook, but before jotting any notes, he pulled out a chair beside Millwood’s and swung around the laptop on which the map of the area was displayed. Together they looked at the highway from Hinowah to Hadleyville Road, assuming that Fiona had not slipped past the gas station and was lost somewhere beyond that point. The stretch of highway was about fifteen miles long. To the east of Route 13 and running roughly parallel to it wasthe Never Summer. To the west of the highway were forest and rocky hills and towering Copper Peak, which rose about five or six hundred feet above the landscape.

Shaw eyed the dark brown line of 13 south, noting a half dozen side roads.

He asked Tolifson, “Mining trails?” Tapping them on the monitor.

“Yessir. And lumber.”

“Do they lead anywhere but back to Thirteen?”

“No. And those that don’t, they just end at abandoned mines. Or lumber mills. Old ones. All closed up decades ago. Some a hundred years or more.”

He began to ask Millwood questions, as if this were any other reward job, and recorded the results in his small handwriting, perfectly straight, though the paper was not ruled.

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