Page 8 of Forever Finds Us
Brand nodded, and suddenly ol’ Tabby Cat appeared next to him. Their arms were almost touching, and then Stu laid his head on his uncle’s shoulder. The three of them looked like the perfect family.
“Everything okay?” Tabitha asked.
How many times in a day could she ask the question? I’d just answered it not a minute ago. What, did she have some kind of quota to fill?
Roxi, your inner monologue is a bitch.
“There’s a lost hiker,” Brand told her as he looked down into her sultry eyes, which I now noticed had been perfectly lined with kohl liner. “Abey and Roxanne have to leave to help find them.”
Ughhh. Why do my nipples turn to steel buttons when he says my name like that?
Brand’s eyes slid from Tabitha’s to mine, and then they slipped down my dress and followed the long lengths of my legs to my bare feet. Shit. My shoes!
“Um, right, well guess I should go find my shoes. Nice to see y’all.”
Giving an awkward wave as I turned, I caught Lee Lake in my peripheral and hoped a tsunami would erupt from its depths and swallow me up. Or maybe a Kraken.
One-two-three.
“You look real nice,” Dan said, taking in a sweeping eyeful of my dress, when Abey and I barreled into the station.
On the drive over from the wedding, Abey and I had learned that the missing hiker was a sixteen-year-old girl, but that was all we knew so far.
Still dressed in black tuxedo-style pants, with a white, satin stripe down each leg, and a silky, white button-down tucked in, Abey tossed her bag on the front desk, and our receptionist scoffed at her, then grabbed the bag and hung it on the hook behind her.
Abey winced. “Sorry.”
Shelley was the kind of woman you didn’t want to find yourself on the bad side of. She was harmless, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if she was the reason “passive-aggressive” appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Deputy Frank Sims was all business though, as usual. He’d already pulled out the maps and had scribbled all pertinent information onto the rolling whiteboard he’d set up in front of the shaded Main Street-facing windows.
“Thanks,” I said to Dan, but I wasn’t paying attention to him. My brain was already following trails in the Grand Teton National Park, which was where the hiker had gotten lost.
The girl had been picnicking with her family between Jenny Lake and Lake Solitude. The trails around Jenny Lake were moderate difficulty at most, but the same couldn’t be said of the trail leading up to Lake Solitude, especially if the hiker had been injured somehow or was freaking out. In that case, moderate could escalate to difficult in a heartbeat. And if she’d veered off the trails, well then… Yikes.
Autumn was a beautiful time to explore the Tetons, but the temperature dropped quickly in the evenings, and nights could go well below freezing, depending on the altitude. The area could be blanketed in snow, even in September if conditions were right. And that was to say nothing about the wildlife.
I’d grown up outdoors. Although, Oklahoma wasn’t exactly known for its mountains, and I’d lived in a pretty flat area east of Oklahoma City in Choctaw, but when I took the Yellowstone job, I’d spent months hiking Wyoming on my days off. I wanted to get to know my new home, and I wanted to be able to help people on the job. Plus, being in the mountains, smelling the earth and communing with the trees and lakes and rivers had become a kind of religion for me. My mind and all the ways I’d never measured up went quiet out there.
I’d been alone a long time, but out there in the wilderness, somehow it didn’t feel so lonely.
“How’d she get separated from her family?” I asked.
Frank sighed, probably putting himself in the missing girl’s father’s shoes. Frank had two kids and a wife, and they spent plenty of time hiking and camping.
“The mom and dad went chasing after the two younger kids,” he said. “The older daughter got stuck packin’ up the food, and they thought she was right behind them, but when they stopped, she’d disappeared.”
“But had she been right behind them?” I asked. “Or did she disappear from the picnic site?”
A teenager could have all kinds of reasons for disobeying her parents. Maybe she was pissed they’d left her with the lunch mess, and she’d wandered off to try to find a cell signal to call her boyfriend or post her annoyance on TikTok.
“They reported she’d been behind them. The mom, Angie, said she spoke to her daughter ten minutes before they realized she wasn’t behind them anymore. She said her daughter has a habit of wanderin’.”
“Are they experienced hikers?” Abey asked as she studied a map of the area someone years ago had permanently tacked to the wall.
Frank shook his head. “The dad says yes, the mom says not so much.”
“So no, then,” I confirmed. “Who’s workin’ this so far?”
