Page 55 of Sniper's Pride

This had to end. She had to go.

The sun had peeked out in the morning, then thought better of it. The day was overcast and chilly, too much like winter, as if spring had been nothing more than a fairy tale they’d all been telling themselves lately.

Rory wasn’t outside when Griffin got to the inn, so he went inside, assuming when he didn’t see the GreenBeret in the lobby that he’d secreted himself somewhere nearby, the way he liked. If Rory followed procedure, he’d either show himself or call in, and either way, he’d get the same message: Their surveillance of Mariah was terminated.

Griffin nodded at Madeleine. “Is she here?”

Madeleine took her sweet time looking up from her paperback, then shrugged enough to make her beehive shudder. “I haven’t seen her all day.”

That was weird.

Griffin felt a prickle deep in his gut, the one that too often operated as its own kind of alarm system, cluing him in when something wasn’t right.

He jogged up the stairs, rapping on Mariah’s door when he reached it. There was no answer. He figured that meant it was unlikely she was curled up in a ball in there, brooding about last night.

But he was sure there was an explanation. Just because Madeleine usually saw Mariah at some point during the course of the morning, that didn’t mean her failure to do so today meant anything. And it didn’t mean he could justify using his key. Not yet.

Not when she could be choosing to ignore him.

He tried to call Rory, on the phone and on his comm unit, but there was no reply. That was weirder still—but they could be eating. Talking. Hanging out the way people did with Mariah because no one had ever been chasing her.

Griffin walked down the road to Caradine’s café, but Mariah wasn’t there, sitting at the table he now considered hers with her laptop and a bottomless mug of Caradine’s high-octane coffee. Rory wasn’t there, either. And Caradine said she hadn’t seen either one of them all day.

“But no one actually clears their schedules with me,” Caradine said, all attitude behind her counter.

“A simple yes or no is really all I’m looking for.”

Caradine smirked. “Did I give you the impression that I’ve ever cared all that much what you’re looking for?”

Griffin walked out without responding to her. He did a circuit around Grizzly Harbor, up and down the streets, poking his head into all the shops—many just opening up now that winter was over and summer seemed almost possible again. He even ran along her favorite trail, taking it all the way out to the point, where the dirt track started to double back on itself and climb.

But Mariah was nowhere to be found. Neither was Rory.

And it was when he got back from the trail, dug out his key no matter what Madeleine might think about it, and found himself standing in the middle of Mariah’s room that he accepted the fact that there was a problem.

All her things were there. Her suitcase was right where she kept it. That stupid, ridiculous cape was where he’d put it on her chair in the dark. Her boots and hiking shoes were lined up neatly in the closet. Her laptop was open at the foot of her bed, its screen dark.

He called in and reported, and while he waited for his brothers to show, he went downstairs and asked Madeleine what her morning had looked like.

“What does my morning ever look like?” She scoffed at him. “Not a song and dance, I can tell you. Today was like every other day that ends iny.I checked in a couple from the Lower 48 after the ferry got in. They went out again about fifteen minutes later. That’s it. That was the big excitement.”

“Where’s the couple now?”

“I forgot to put a GPS tracker on them,” Madeleine said, unhelpfully. “Sorry.”

The married couple from California walked in not long after Blue and Jonas turned up. Which meant the tourists got to nervously tell all three of them that they hadn’t, in fact, left their room fifteen minutes after checking into it.

“We were tired,” the man said defensively. “We have some big hikes planned, so we decided to take the rest of the morning to relax. We went out around noon to explore.”

Griffin’s first thought was the ferry. He went down to what passed for a ferry terminal at the docks to see if he could look through the security camera footage, while Jonas went upstairs to take a closer look at Mariah’s room. Blue took to the phone, calling their contacts in Juneau to see if they could get a handle on a woman of Mariah’s description possibly boarding a plane.

But there was no sign of her getting on the ferry no matter how many times Griffin watched the footage. And Blue reported that there was no sign of her at the airport in Juneau, either.

“I found something weird,” Jonas said when Griffin went back to the inn.

He showed them a video he had found when he opened up her laptop. It was a series of disjointed silent images around a farmhouse, and a woman at the end who looked a whole lot like Mariah might if she’d lived a whole lot harder.

Griffin didn’t need to consult his files to know it was Mariah’s mother.

---