Page 1 of Distant Shores
PROLOGUE
ADAIR
By the third hour of searching, I hadn’t yet lost hope, but apparently the old four-wheeler had.
With a sputter and a crack, the machine died as I crested a hill, and all I could do was hold on as I coasted down the other side, cutting tracks through the sludgy snow until it eventually lumbered to a stop.
I knew these woods well, but the three-day-old snow made them treacherous. Now that the engine had died, I could hear the incessant dripping of water from the trees. It was so thick and consistent, it could almost be mistaken for rain.
Pushing my hair off my forehead, I stood up on the ATV’s foot pegs, then cupped my hands around my mouth, and yelled hoarsely, “Wilbur Smith!”
My calls died in the woods with eerie quickness, just like the hundreds I sent out before it.
And just like those times, no response came. Not even birdsong.
Terror truly seized me then, ripping through my fatigue.
Pops was a force of nature. He knew this land and was a far more capable human than anyone I’d ever known, no matter the memory slips he’d been having lately.
Or the faint tremor in his hands he’d been trying to hide from us since Christmas.
When he grabbed his jacket and said he’d be back in a while, waving off my offer to come with him, I thought nothing of it despite those things.
But that was almost six hours ago.
I grabbed my medical bag from the back of the four-wheeler and prayed that I didn’t need it as I entered the woods on foot.
Pops had taken to going on long walks by himself ever since Grandma Nell passed away, which was around….
Lordy.
The thought of just how long it’d been stopped me in my tracks. I lifted my gaze to the sky and was pelted by droplets of melting snow, but I didn’t have it in me to care. Even so, I took my glasses off and found a dry piece of shirt under my coat to clean them off.
Seven years.
It was hard to believe she’d been gone so long.
It’d been several years since I’d lived in North Georgia. Not since my sister Delly graduated high school. But no matter how long the hours got working as a paramedic for two different counties near Atlanta, I made sure to check in with Pops twice per week. During those calls, he always described his walks in painstaking detail, down to the exact trails he used and the species of birds he saw on the way there and on the way back.
The sun was getting lower in the sky, and I cursed the lack of signal here more than ever before, which was saying something considering how much time I’d spent here in the mountains as a surly teenager.
I worked my way through the woods with redoubled speed, thankful for the cardio my best friend Cole’d had me doing as part of my fitness routine for years. Most of the trees were bare, and I wasn’t as careful in the sludge as I should have been, slipping and sliding as I went.
Memories of the first time I’d walked through snow in these woods threatened me with each stumble, and it was hard not to merge flashes of that remembered panic with this fresh one.
My baby sister, Delly, desperately hot and crying.
Our parents too drunk to drive us to the hospital and my legs too short to reach the pedals of our beat-up old Saturn. The landline dead because they hadn’t paid the phone bill since Christmas. A long, scary walk through the woods all the way to the cabin. Pops and Grams rushing to the door when I finally made it to their cabin with my two-year-old sister, both of us delirious.
I also remembered the love and care Pops had always freely given me and Delly. Love that we’d desperately needed.
We couldn’t lose him.
I upped my pace, thinking hard about what to do next. I’d already checked all of his normal walking and riding trails, and I’d even tried to find some of those game trails I only vaguely remembered, but maybe it was time to approach this differently.
The unmistakable call of a red-shouldered hawk pierced my thoughts, and I automatically searched the winter sky for it. “Kee-ah”came the call again, the sound guiding my thoughts.
Summers with Pops and Grams, cooking and singing together—his gruff baritone to my developing teenaged one. Grams teaching me hymns on their old upright piano while he carved walking sticks for long walks to…
